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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Missourian, by Eugene P. (Eugene Percy)
+Lyle, Illustrated by Ernest Haskell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Missourian
+
+
+Author: Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 7, 2009  [eBook #30623]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MISSOURIAN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 30623-h.htm or 30623-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30623/30623-h/30623-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30623/30623-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MISSOURIAN
+
+[Illustration: "JACQUELINE"
+"She was the spirit of the enigma, the very personification of the
+Napoleonic sphinx"]
+
+THE MISSOURIAN
+
+by
+
+EUGENE P. LYLE, Jr.
+
+"In my predestin'd Plot of Dust and Soul."--Omar
+
+Illustrated by Ernest Haskell
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Doubleday, Page & Company
+1905
+
+Copyright, 1905, by
+Doubleday, Page & Company
+Published, August, 1905
+
+All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
+languages, including the Scandinavian
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+MY TWO BEST FRIENDS
+
+My Father and my Mother
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PART I.
+
+THE THORN IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+       I.  A Wilful Maid Arrives                      3
+      II.  A Fra Diavolo in the Land of Roses        11
+     III.  The Violent End of a Terrible Bandit      18
+      IV.  _La Luz_, Blockade Runner                 27
+       V.  The Storm Centre                          34
+      VI.  A Bruising of Arms for Jacqueline         45
+     VII.  Swordsmanship in the Dark                 55
+    VIII.  The Thoughts of Youth May Be
+           Prodigiously Long Thoughts                64
+      IX.  Toll-Taking in the Huasteca               69
+       X.  The Brigand Chief                         80
+      XI.  The Cossacks and Their Tiger Colonel      89
+     XII.  Pastime Passing Excellent                 98
+    XIII.  Unregistered in Any Studbook             108
+     XIV.  The Herald of the Fair God               114
+      XV.  The Ritual                               122
+     XVI.  He of the Debonair Sceptre               131
+    XVII.  Rather a Small Man                       140
+   XVIII.  Little Monarchs, Big Mistakes            149
+     XIX.  A Tartar, _and_ a Tartar                 156
+      XX.  In the Wake of Princely Cavalcades       164
+     XXI.  The Red Mongrel                          173
+    XXII.  "Equidad en la Justicia"                 182
+   XXIII.  A Curious Pagan Rite                     188
+    XXIV.  The Man Who Did Not Want to be Shot      193
+     XXV.  The Person on the Other Horse            200
+    XXVI.  The Strangest Avowal of Love             209
+   XXVII.  Berthe                                   219
+  XXVIII.  "Mike"                                   228
+    XXIX.  The Whisper of the Sphinx                238
+     XXX.  The Ambassador                           242
+    XXXI.  Carlota                                  253
+   XXXII.  The Woman Who Did Not Hesitate           258
+  XXXIII.  A Sponsor to the Fat Padre               266
+
+PART II.
+
+THE ROSE THAT WAS A THORN IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+       I.  Meagre Shanks                            273
+      II.  The Black Decree                         284
+     III.  As Between Women                         293
+      IV.  The Lacking Coincidence                  298
+       V.  The Missourians                          306
+      VI.  If a Kiss Were All                       315
+     VII.  A Crop of Colonels                       324
+    VIII.  Royal Resolution                         335
+      IX.  Interpreter to the Almighty              344
+       X.  Alone Among His Loving Subjects          351
+      XI.  Fatality and the Missourian              359
+     XII.  The Rendezvous of the Republic           369
+    XIII.  A Buccaneer and a Battle                 380
+     XIV.  Blood and Noise--What Else?              391
+      XV.  Of All News the Most Spiteful            406
+     XVI.  Vendetta's Half Sister, Better Born      422
+    XVII.  Under a Spanish Cloak                    434
+   XVIII.  El Chaparrito                            443
+     XIX.  In Articulo Mortis                       459
+      XX.  Knighthood's Belated Flower              465
+     XXI.  The Title of Nobility                    475
+    XXII.  The Abbey of Mount Regret                484
+   XXIII.  The Contrariness of Jacqueline           496
+    XXIV.  The Journalistic Sagacity of a Daniel    506
+
+
+
+
+THE PEOPLE OF THE STORY
+
+THE MISSOURIAN, known in every fight as the Storm Centre. His
+real name is John D. Driscoll, familiarly shortened to Din Driscoll. At
+the close of the Civil War he finds himself a lieutenant-colonel in
+General Joe Shelby's brigade of Confederate daredevils, sent by his
+comrades as emissary to the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.
+
+JACQUELINE, who is the Marquise Jeanne d'Aumerle, on a mission
+of high politics from Napoleon III. to the Court of Mexico.
+
+BERTHE, her maid.
+
+MAXIMILÍAN, archduke of Austria, occupant of the New World
+throne created for him.
+
+CHARLOTTE OF ORLEANS, the Empress.
+
+ANASTASIO MURGUÍA, a Mexican hacendado, who acquires riches by
+running Federal blockades into Southern ports. He is both a coward and a
+miser.
+
+MARÍA DE LA LUZ, his daughter.
+
+RODRIGO GALÁN, brigand and guerrilla.
+
+TIBURCIO, blackmailer of the highway, scout, and "loyal
+Imperialist."
+
+AUGUSTIN FISCHER, "the Fat Padre," a renegade priest of subtle
+parts.
+
+MICHEL NEY, grandson of the "Bravest of the Brave."
+
+THE MARSHAL BAZAINE, commander-in-chief of the French Army of
+Occupation in Mexico.
+
+MADAME LA MARECHALE, his bride.
+
+COLONEL DUPIN, the "Tiger of the Tropics," chief of the Contra
+Guerrillas.
+
+MIGUEL LOPEZ, colonel of Dragoons, a favorite of the Emperor.
+
+MONSIEUR ÉLOIN, the Emperor's secretary.
+
+MARQUEZ, MIRAMON, MEJÍA, MENDEZ,
+Imperialist officers.
+
+RÉGULES, ESCOBEDO, Republican officers.
+
+DANIEL BOONE, first scout among the Missourians, one-time
+editor and editor yet to be.
+
+"OLD BROTHERS AND SISTERS," "TALL MOSE" BLEDSOE,
+OF THE COUNTY OF PIKE, and yet more of the Missouri colonels.
+
+BENITO JUAREZ, president of the Mexican Republic.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+ "JACQUELINE" "She was the spirit of the enigma, the
+ very personification of the Napoleonic sphinx"     _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                      Facing page
+
+ "MURGUÍA" "He had evidently passed through salty spray, had
+ braved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black"      16
+
+"RODRIGO GALÁN" "The fierce stranger, however, seemed
+ undecided. His brow furrowed, and for the moment he only
+ stared"                                                       18
+
+ "JOHN DINWIDDIE DRISCOLL, THE MISSOURIAN" "His cheeks were
+ smooth, but they were tight and hard and brown from the
+ weathering of sun and blizzard"                               38
+
+ "COLONEL DUPIN" "The Tiger of the Tropics ... the chief of
+ Contra Guerrillas"                                            94
+
+ THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN                                       134
+
+ "MARÍA DE LA LUZ" "The tapestry behind them parted and fell"
+                                                              146
+
+ "BERTHE" "... brought down the ponderous knocker so
+ terrifically that it abashed her, for all her present
+ agitation"                                                   220
+
+
+
+
+PART FIRST
+
+THE THORN IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+  "Array you, lordyngs, one and all,
+  For here begins no peace."
+            --_The Ballad of the Battle of Otterburn_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A WILFUL MAID ARRIVES FROM FRANCE
+
+
+  "I'll tell thee, it is the stubbornest young fellow of France,
+  full of ambition."--_As You Like It._
+
+
+Jacqueline was a gentlewoman of France. But there was usually mischief
+in her handsome head, for all its queenly poise. Just now, she was
+running away from the ship. Captain and officers of the _Impératrice
+Eugénie_, Imperial red pantaloons, gilt Imperial eagles, such tokens
+of awe were yet not awful enough to hold Jacqueline. So, with the
+humility of limp things in that sticky air, the sailors shoved closer in
+the small boat and made place for the adjustment of crisp skirts. With
+the lady went her gentle little Breton maid, who trembled with the
+trembling of every plank in those norther-rocked waters. The high sun,
+just showing himself after the late gale, was sucking a gummy moisture
+out upon all surfaces, and the perspiring men felt mean and base before
+the starchy freshness of the two girls.
+
+No one was pleased that Jacqueline was going, except Jacqueline herself.
+But she was keen for it. She had been impervious to their flustered
+anxiety, also to the tributes to her importance betrayed therein. In
+vain they argued no fewer than two emperors to dissuade her. She meant
+to have a walk on the shore and--a demure Parisian shrug settled it.
+
+Jacqueline rested a high-heeled boot on a coil of rope and blithely
+hummed an old song--"Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!" Oh, how she had
+wearied of bumping, heaving, bumping! At first she had enjoyed the
+storm. It was a new kind of play, and the mise-en-scène was quite
+adequate. But ennui had surged in again long before danger had surged
+out. And now she considered that some later sensation was due her, just
+as supper after an evening of fasting. In such a way, her life long,
+Jacqueline had sustained existence. Her nourishment was ever the latest
+"frisson," to use her own word. She craved thrills of emotion, ecstatic
+thrills. Naturally, then, three weeks of ocean had fretted the restless
+lass as intolerable, tyrannical.
+
+During the norther's blinding fury, the liner of the Compagnie
+Trans-Atlantique had groped widely out of her course, to find herself
+off Tampico when the storm abated. But the skipper saw in his ill-luck a
+chance for fresh meat, and he decided to communicate with the port
+before going on to Vera Cruz. And when Jacqueline found that out, she
+decided to communicate with the port too.
+
+Little enough harm in that, truly; if only it were any one else but
+Jacqueline. In her case, though, all concerned would have felt easier to
+keep her on board. Then, when the ship sailed, they were sure to have
+her there. Otherwise, they assuredly were not. For they knew well her
+startling capacity for whims. But never, never, could they know the
+startling next way a whim of hers might jump. Yet did she give herself
+the small pains of wheedling? Not she. The mystery of her august
+guardianship, of no less than two emperors, and the responsibility
+falling on captain, crew, red trousers, and gilt eagles--Hé bien, what
+then? Neither were they cunning with their dark warnings of outlawry and
+violence. Dreadfulest horrors might lurk in the motley Gulf town held by
+force against bloodthirsty Mexicans. But croaking like that only gave
+brighter promise of the ecstatic shiver. So, parbleu, she went!
+
+The brunt of anxiety fell on poor Sergeant Ney. Here was a young soldier
+whom a month before Louis Napoleon had summoned to the Tuileries, to
+charge him with the lady's safe return to Maximilian's court in the City
+of Mexico, where she was First Dame of Honor about the Empress
+Charlotte. The order was not a military one, else it must have fallen to
+an officer of rank. It was not even official. But no doubt it enfolded
+more of weight for that very reason. Napoleon III. believed that in the
+unofficial, in littleness and dark gliding, lay the way to govern a
+state. Michel Ney regarded his task as a complete enigma. He had only to
+see a girl to the end of her journey. He was a slow-thinking, even a
+non-thinking agent, but in a contingency he could fight, still without
+thinking.
+
+The girl under his escort, however, was another sort of agent entirely.
+She was the spirit of the enigma, the very personification of the
+Napoleonic sphinx. She was the Imperial Secret flung a thousand leagues,
+there to work itself out alone in a new land of empire. Two months ago
+Louis Napoleon had recalled her from the Mexican court to her old
+circle, to the Tuileries, to St. Cloud, to Compiègne, and almost at once
+he had sent her back again. This time she came with the sphinx's
+purpose.
+
+Getting himself into the small boat, Ney stole a glance at the gray eyes
+opposite him--for the moment they were gray, as well as treacherously
+innocent and pensive--and he reflected woefully that she had quite too
+much spirit altogether for an Egyptian dame of stone. She was making it
+very hard for him. What caprice might not possess her while on shore,
+and the ship to sail within a few hours? It was not a predicament for
+sabre play. And he made the mistake of trying to wield his wits a
+little.
+
+"I should take it as an honor, mademoiselle," he faltered, "I should,
+truly, if you'd only believe that I would impose my escort for the
+pleasure it gives me, as well as--as well as----"
+
+But she did not seem to notice that he stumbled. Her eyes were intent on
+the green water, which the oars transmuted into eddying crystals. He
+would go on, she knew, and lay more exposed the place where she meant to
+strike. She had coquetted with him, old play fellow that he was, for
+just a little during the voyage, as with others too, for that matter.
+But she had tired of it, as she had also of the chagrin of wives and
+sweethearts on board, or as she had of Hugo's "Napoleon le Petit," which
+she read purely out of contrariness to the censorship laid on the exiled
+poet. Michel Ney, however, and this she noted carefully, now kept close
+within his soldier's shell. He had that unofficial duty to think on,
+which was enough and over.
+
+"----as well as," he finished desperately, "as a duty to an authority
+over us both. If you would believe that, mademoiselle?"
+
+Then she struck. A word sufficed. "Oh, Monsieur the Sergeant!" she
+exclaimed. Her tone was deprecating, but she lingered wickedly on the
+title. The young Frenchman looked down on his natty uniform. No other
+cut or cloth in the whole imperial army of France was more dashing than
+the sky-blue of a Chasseur d'Afrique, but none of that filled Michel's
+eyes. For him there were only the worsted stripes. He colored and
+winced.
+
+"Forgive me," she said meekly, "I should have said, 'Monsieur the
+Duke.'"
+
+The Chasseur flushed like a boy. "Why _will_ you harp on what a
+grandfather made me?" he blurted out. "And what's a duke----?"
+
+"And a prince?--the Prince of Moskowa!" She courtesied from her slender
+waist.
+
+"Alas for my blunders," she sighed, "for it _was_ more delicate
+after all to call you sergeant. In that I congratulate you yourself,
+Michel, and never a grandfather."
+
+Ney frowned unhappily. "The first prince of Moskowa was once a
+sergeant," he murmured, "and why shouldn't I, in this new country----"
+
+"Mironton, mironton, mirontaine," she sang, and smiled on him.
+
+His eyes flashed, and because of the voice his heart quickened. He had
+heard of "this new country." It was "a gold mine in a bed of roses," but
+with a thorn, to say nothing of a bayonet, for every bud, and like many
+another young Frenchman he hoped to win renown in the romantic Mexican
+Empire, sprung like Minerva from the brain of his own emperor. And now
+here was a girl humming the war song of his fathers and of his race, and
+flaunting his warrior's ambition in it.
+
+    "My Sergeant has gone to the wars,
+    Far off to war in Flanders.
+    He's a bold prince of commanders,
+    With a fame like Alexander's--
+    Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!
+
+    "Mon Sergot s'en va t-en guerre--
+    Ne sais quand reviendra.
+    Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!"
+
+Having thus ousted the crusading hero of the song, and put the slang for
+"sergeant" in his stead, Jacqueline leaned back on the gunwale quite
+contented. She fell to gazing on the transparent emerald of the inshore,
+and plunged in her hand. The soft, plump wrist turned baby pink under
+the riffles. Of a sudden Berthe her maid half screamed, whereat with a
+delighted little gasp of fright, she jerked out the hand. But she put it
+back again, to tempt the watchful shark out there.
+
+"_My_ grandfather was only a duke," she mused aloud, very humbly.
+But she peeped up at Ney in the most exasperating manner. He could just
+see the gray eyes behind the edge of lace that fell from the slanting
+brim of her hat. He would not, though, meet the challenge. He kept to
+sincerity as the safer ground.
+
+"Like mine, mademoiselle, yours made himself one, under Napoleon."
+
+"The _great_ Napoleon," she corrected him gently.
+
+Michel assented with a sad little nod. Then he raised his head bravely.
+"And why not do things _without_ a _great_ Napoleon, and,
+after all, isn't he _a_ Napoleon, and one who----"
+
+"Is lucky enough to bear a name that means seven million votes. _I_
+should rather be a 'sergeant' and congratulate none but myself on it,
+Monsieur the--Duke."
+
+Again, with the wisdom of a slow intelligence, the Chasseur held back
+from her subtleties. If only he might betray her into frankness--a
+compliment she paid to few men and to a woman never--then, just
+possibly, he might make her tractable as to their prompt return to the
+ship.
+
+"Still, it _is_ a name to rally to," he persisted, acknowledging in
+spite of himself the magic that had swayed the Old Guard.
+
+For once she left the poor shark in peace.
+
+"A name, a name?" she repeated.
+
+"Isn't 'France' enough of a name for your rallying, monsieur?"
+
+But the honest mood could not last. In the same breath she hastened on,
+"Yes, yes, France, the beloved of us proud grandchildren of original
+dukes. Of myself, sir, with a château in the Bourbonnais, whose floors
+are as well watered as the vineyards outside. And your France too,
+Michel, giving you only your clean linen to disguise the sergeant and
+remind us of the marshal of the First Empire. Of course," she added
+kindly, "there is the bravery. I had forgotten that, O grandson of the
+'brave des braves.' But then?--Bonté divine, there's no rank in courage,
+mon ami! It's not the epaulette of a French uniform--it's the merest
+lining."
+
+"And that," the youth cried doggedly, "is still enough to----"
+
+"To do things for France, eh petit piou-piou?"
+
+"Hélas! our France can't expect much from me. But you, mademoiselle, you
+will do things for her!" It was a spontaneous tribute, just that,
+without thought of prying into the secret of her mission, "While I," he
+ended dismally, "can only fight."
+
+"But you forget," she answered gravely, "that after all a woman can only
+give."
+
+That cynicism of life which had become a part of the young girl was yet
+gaiety itself. Youth and health and beauty would not have even cynicism
+otherwise. But now, as she spoke, the irony was bitter, and worn, as of
+age. And behind it was a woman's reluctance before some abhorred
+sacrifice, a sacrifice which would entail the woman's power to give.
+
+Ney stared at her uncomprehendingly. Here lay a clue to her mysterious
+errand in Mexico. But he was not thinking of her as the Napoleonic
+enigma personified. It was of herself he thought, an enigma apart. She
+was a flower of France. Yet many, many flowers blossom there. She might
+be a grande dame, of nobility of womanhood as well as of family. Or
+again, she might be only an alluring, heartless witch, that helped to
+make tempting, and damnable, the brilliant Second Empire. But in any
+case, Jacqueline was truly as dainty as a flower.
+
+"It has already cost us enough to gain this New World," ventured the
+Chasseur, waving a hand toward the desolate shore, "and we made
+Maximilian emperor, but now they say that, that he would--they say so in
+Paris, mademoiselle--that he would rob us of it."
+
+"Indeed, monsieur?" There was warning in the look she gave him.
+
+"But," he plunged on boldly, "our soldiers still hold it, that is,
+until, until someone shall win it for us for our very own, absolutely.
+Ducal grandfathers never did more than that for France."
+
+"Where _are_ you leading, Michel? Please take me with you."
+
+"To a question. Don't you think 'someone' is risking a great deal for a
+little walk on shore?"
+
+Before she answered he knew that she had seen through all his blundering
+wiles.
+
+"Are there guerrillas there?" she asked pensively.
+
+"_You_ should know. But they say, that out of Tampico
+especially----"
+
+She was gazing toward the land, sandy and flat. Once she looked back
+with lively distaste at the rocking ship. Now she interrupted.
+
+"It would be fun traveling overland--and _such_ excitement!"
+
+Ney's shoulders went up in despair.
+
+"Oh, my poor guardian!" she exclaimed contritely. "But why aren't you a
+reader of the poets? Then you would find something to say to make me
+feel--sorry."
+
+"_You_ say it then."
+
+"Why, for example, you might call all the stored vengeance of heaven
+right down on my ungrateful top."
+
+The soldier gazed at the ungrateful top. It was of burnished copper. A
+rebellious lock was then blowing in the wind, and there was a wide,
+rakish crown of rice-white straw. There was also a soft skin of creamy
+satin, lips blood red, a velvet patch near a dimple, and two gray eyes
+that danced behind the hat's filmy curtain. An ungrateful top, out of
+all mercy!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A FRA DIAVOLO IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+
+  "A haunter of marshes, a holder of moors."--_Beowulf._
+
+
+The torpid, sordid and sun-baked port of Tampico gave little promise of
+aught so romantic and rare and exotic as the young French woman's
+coveted thrill of ecstasy. There was first the sand bar, which kept
+ships from coming up the deep Pánuco to the town. Beyond there were
+lagoons and swamps mottling the flat, dreary, moisture-sodden,
+fever-scourged land. There were solemn pelicans, and such kind of
+grotesque bird as use only one leg, it being long enough for two, and
+never that to walk upon, so far as anybody had ever noticed. Such an old
+fellow would outline himself against the yellow loneliness, like a lump
+of pessimistic philosopher impaled on the end of his own hobbling
+crutch. Tarpons and sharks and sword-fish, monstrous, sinister, moved
+slothfully in the viscid waters. From scrubby growth on the banks a
+hundred or a hundred thousand crows had much ado with rebuking the
+invaders of their solitude.
+
+Next, clusters of thatch roofs appeared, and in an hour the party from
+the _Impératrice Eugénie_ gained the wharf of the port. The sailors
+managed to steer through a tangle of shipping and dugout scows, the
+latter heaped high with fruits and flowers of many colors, or hides or
+fish of many aromas. Before the small boat could touch the worm-eaten
+quay, Jacqueline had poised herself on its edge, caught her skirts, and
+hopped lightly over the stretch of water yet remaining. Then she gazed
+curiously around on Mexico.
+
+And Mexico was there in various forms to greet her, though in no form
+animated. Sluggish creatures under peaked sombreros of muddied straw
+seemed to be growing against the foreground of wharf and dingy
+warehouses, and fastened to the background of sallow blazing streets and
+sallow reflecting walls there were still the same human barnacles. But
+no creature seemed ever to move. They all looked a part of the decay, of
+putrefying vegetable and flesh and fish everywhere, which grew so rank
+in life that in death their rotting could never keep pace.
+
+A lazy town stretched up a lazy street. On a hill farther up the river a
+fortress basked in peace, and had no desire to be disturbed. In the town
+the buildings were of warped timber, and a few of stone. Parasitic
+tumors, like loathsome black ulcers, swelled abundantly on the roofs.
+They were the buzzards, the only form of life held sacred. To clean up
+nature's and man's spendthrift killing was a blessed service in Tampico.
+It saved exertion.
+
+A strange region, by all odds! But at least one could walk thereon, and
+Jacqueline thought it droll. An outlandish corner of the earth such as
+this was something never experienced before. But as to that, the
+outlandish corner might have said the same about Jacqueline. Men stared
+like dazed sheep on the astounding apparition of a lady. Some among them
+were entirely clothed, in sun-yellowed white. There was a merchant or
+so, a coffee exporter or so, a ranchero or so, and hacendados from the
+interior. But they were all hard, typical, and often darkly scowling,
+which seemed an habitual expression inspired by the thought of a foreign
+Hapsburg emperor so mighty and proud, far off in their capital. There
+was not an officer among them; nor, quite likely, a gentleman. Never a
+bit of red was to be seen from the garrison on the hill. The French
+invaders up there, with pardonable taste, kept to themselves. Their
+policing ended with the smothering of revolt. So against the stain of
+tainted mankind, the vision of delicate femininity contrasted as a fleck
+of spotless white on a besmeared palette. But crows, scavengers, men,
+they were all so many "creatures" to Jacqueline--the setting of a very
+novel scene, and she would not have had it otherwise.
+
+She turned to her maid, who shrank hesitating in the boat. "Berthe, you
+pitiful little ninny, are you coming? Then do, and do not forget the
+satchel." For a promenade of an hour the inhabitants of two imperial
+courts must needs have a satchel, filled of course with mysteries of the
+toilet. The maid obeyed, and followed her mistress up the lazy ascending
+street. They passed through the Alameda of dense cypresses, an inky blot
+as on glaring manila paper, while the shade overhead was profane with
+jackdaws. The lady tripped on, and into the street again. Ney and a
+sailor hurried to overtake her. The other sailors meantime went on their
+errand for fresh meat, but Michel had said to the steward in charge, "If
+there should be any need, I'll send this man to you. Then you come, all
+of you, quick!"
+
+Jacqueline pushed on her voyage of discovery, and her retinue trooped
+behind, single file, over the narrow, burning sidewalks of patched
+flagstone. The word "Café" on a corner building caught her eye. It was a
+native fonda, overflowing with straw-bottomed chairs and rusty iron
+tables half-way across the street, making carts and burros find their
+way round. Mexico's outward signs at least were being done over into
+French. Hence the dignity of "Café."
+
+"Here is Paris," the explorer announced. "And this is the Boulevard."
+She seated herself before one of the iron tables that rocked on the
+egg-like cobblestones. She made Ney sit down also, and included Berthe
+and the sailor. An olive barefoot boy took their order for black coffee.
+Jacqueline's elbows were on the table and her chin on two finger tips,
+and she disposed herself placidly, as though this were the Maison Dorée
+and Tout Paris sauntering by. The town was beginning to stretch after
+its siesta. That is to say, divers natives manifested symptoms of going
+to move in the course of time.
+
+"Look!" exclaimed Jacqueline. "Only give yourself the trouble to look!"
+
+She was pointing to a man, of course. The Chasseur stirred uneasily. One
+could never see to the end of Jacqueline's slender finger. "There,
+Berthe," she cried, "it's Fra Diavolo, just strayed from the Opéra."
+
+The stranger she meant was talking darkly to another man in the door of
+the Café. If a Fra Diavolo, he was at least not disguised in his monk's
+cowl, either because the April day was too hot or because he had never
+owned one. But he stood appareled in his banditti rôle, very picturesque
+and barbaric and malevolent. And though he posed heavily, he yet had
+that Satanic fascination which the beautiful of the masculine and the
+sinister of the devil cannot help having. His battered magnificence of a
+charro garb fitted well the diabolic character which Jacqueline assigned
+him. Spurs as bright as dollars jangled on high russet heels. His
+breeches closed to the flesh like a glove, so that his limbs were as
+sleek as some glossy forest animal's. The cloth was of Robin-Hood green,
+foxed over in bright yellow leather. From hip to ankle undulated a seam
+of silver clasps. More silver, in braided scrolls, adorned his jacket,
+and wrapped twice around the waist was a red banda. Jacqueline would
+have preferred the ends dangling, like a Neapolitan's. The ranchero, for
+such he appeared, wore two belts. One was a vibora, or serpent, for
+carrying money; the other held his weapons, a long hunting knife and a
+revolver, each in a scabbard of stamped leather embroidered with gold
+thread. His sombrero was high pointed and heavy, of chocolate-colored
+beaver encircled by a silver rope as thick as a garden hose.
+
+"Now there's realism in those properties," Jacqueline noted with an
+artist's critical eye. "See, there's dry mud on his shoes, and his
+bright colors are faded by weather. That man sleeps among the rocks,
+I'll wager, and he's in the saddle almost constantly too. My faith, our
+Fra Diavolo is exquisite!"
+
+The other of the two men was a withered, diminutive, gaunt and hollow
+old Mexican. He quailed like a frightened miser before Fra Diavolo.
+
+"The risk? Coming to this town a risk!" Fra Diavolo was echoing the
+ancient man. "Bah, Murguía, you would haggle over a little risk as
+though it were some poor Confederate's last bale of cotton. But I--por
+Dios, I get tired of the mountains. And then I come to Tampico. Yet you
+ask why I come? Bien, señor mio, this is why." A gesture explained. Fra
+Diavolo unctuously rubbed his thumb over his fingers. The meaning of the
+gesture was, "Money!"
+
+The old man recognized the pantomime and shivered. He shrank into his
+long black coat as though right willingly he would shrink away
+altogether. His parsimony extended even to speech. He pursued his
+fugitive voice into the depths of the voluminous coat and there clutched
+it as a coin in a chest. Then he paid it out as though it were a coin
+indeed.
+
+"But----" he stammered.
+
+"No buts," the fierce ranchero growled thunderously. "Not one, Don
+Anastasio, not while our country bleeds under the Austrian tyrant's
+heel, not while there yet breathes a patriot to scorn peril and death,
+so only that he get the sinews of war."
+
+The curiously unctuous gesture grew menacing, brutal. Don Anastasio
+twitched and trembled before it. Under the towering and prismatic Fra
+Diavolo he cowered, an insignificant figure. The unrelieved black of his
+attire accorded with his meagre frame. It was secretive, miserly. A
+black stock covered a withered collar. A dingy silk tile was tightly
+packed over a rusted black wig. Boots hid their tops under the skirts of
+his coat, and the coat in turn was partly concealed under a black shawl.
+But there was one incongruous item. Boots, coat, hat and all were
+crusted with brine. He had evidently passed through salty spray, had
+braved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black. Just now his
+eyes, normally moist and avaricious, were parched dry by fear, as though
+a flame had passed over them. They might have rattled in their gaping
+sockets. Fear also helped him clutch his voice, which he paid out
+regardless of expense.
+
+"You know, Don----" But Fra Diavolo scowled, and the name died on his
+lips. "You know," he went on, "why you haven't seen me for so long. It's
+the blockade up there. It's closer than ever now. This time I waited
+many nights for a chance to run in, and as many more to run out again."
+
+"And you squeezed the poor devils all the harder for your weevily corn
+and shoddy boots?"
+
+Jacqueline, who could not hear a word, told her companions with a
+child's expectancy only to wait and they would see Fra Diavolo eat up
+the poor little crow.
+
+The crow, meantime, was trying to oust the notion that had alighted in
+the brain of Fra Diavolo. "Of course I ought to ask the Confederates
+higher prices as the risks increase," he said, then paused and shook his
+head and wig and hat like a mournful pendulum. "But how can I? The South
+hardly grows any more cotton. It cannot pay high, and----"
+
+"And that's not my affair, but----" Again the business of thumb and
+fingers--"but this is. Quick now!"
+
+"Señor, I--Your Mercy knows that I always pay at--at the usual
+place--near the forest."
+
+[Illustration: "MURGUÍA"
+"He had evidently passed through salty spray, had braved the deep,
+this shrinking old man in frayed black"]
+
+"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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE VIOLENT END OF A TERRIBLE BANDIT
+
+
+  "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 eat _us_!" 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!
+
+[Illustration: "RODRIGO GALÁN"
+"The fierce stranger, however, seemed undecided. His brow furrowed,
+and for the moment he only stared"]
+
+ Now 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. He 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.
+
+He 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.
+
+"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?"
+
+"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. But 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!"
+
+"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. "_I_ am 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 door of 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LA LUZ, BLOCKADE RUNNER
+
+
+  "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 and horses 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 made tyranny 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 why _don't_ we 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, _my_
+gracious!"
+
+"_You_ might 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. "But _I_ can'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, you _know_ I'm in a hurry!"
+
+That his haste could be any concern of Murguía's was preposterous, and
+Murguía would have liked nothing better than to 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
+the _Impératrice Eugénie_ off 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 passenger through 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 order again,
+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 he had 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 was _La 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE STORM CENTRE
+
+
+  "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; and _La
+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 Luz_ had full speed
+on. Then, knifing the higher and higher waves, she made a dash for it.
+
+For 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's course. Hurriedly the
+_Luz's_ quartermaster 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."
+
+As _La Luz_ had 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 into his 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
+the _Luz's_ two 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 out _what_ it 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. There was 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.
+
+[Illustration: "JOHN DINWIDDIE DRISCOLL--THE MISSOURIAN"
+"His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight and hard and brown from
+the weathering of sun and blizzard"]
+
+ Various items on the _Luz_ struck 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. "_Who_ said life was all beer and
+skittles?" he demanded defiantly, and glared at Driscoll as though
+_he_ had. But getting no answer, he seemed mollified, as though
+this proved that the man who _had_ said 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 save _my_ cargo, off Savannah, and didn't I lose 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, "_I_ don'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, say, 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. The _Luz_ swung 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'm_ a thinkin'. But I s'y, w'at if you and me go down
+to my cabin and have a _noggin_?"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus _La Luz_ ran her last blockade, and came safely into port. She
+reached Tampico some two days before the _Impératrice Eugénie_.
+Whereupon Din Driscoll, as he was called anywhere off the muster roll,
+informed Don Anastasio that he would 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, that _you_ happened 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?"
+
+The 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, and
+_those_ things 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.
+
+"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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A BRUISING OF ARMS FOR JACQUELINE
+
+
+  "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 safety he
+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 swirling round, 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.
+
+Jacqueline 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 not help 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.
+
+"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.
+
+Then 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 all the 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, "our _spirituelle_
+little 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 forgotten her 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 for Jacqueline.
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SWORDSMANSHIP IN THE DARK
+
+
+  "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 told me 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 worth while." 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 where _can_ it 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 out
+of 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 might _not_ go, 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.
+
+"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, why _should_ I 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 American _gentleman_--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 going (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, you _are_ considerate. 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 her words 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 short ribs 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 soon narrowed 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH MAY BE PRODIGIOUSLY LONG THOUGHTS
+
+
+  "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 rather enjoyed 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 reliable telling 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 were plumed 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 empire she 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TOLL-TAKING IN THE HUASTECA
+
+
+  "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 the other
+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," said he 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----"
+
+"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 his own 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."
+
+Murguía 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.
+
+"To be robbed while I'm along, now that makes me _mad_," 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 Driscoll
+and 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, _you_ have robbed
+_them_!"
+
+"What the devil----"
+
+"Si señor, robbed _them_! 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.
+
+Murguía 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 the highway 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." Murguía 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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE BRIGAND CHIEF
+
+
+  "Don Rodrigo de Vivar,
+  Rapaz, orgulloso, y vano."
+                 --_El Cid._
+
+
+Imagine an abnormally virtuous urchin and an abnormally kindly farmer.
+The urchin resolutely turns his back on the farmer's melon patch, though
+there is no end of opportunity. But the farmer catches him, brings him
+in by the ear, makes him choose a big one, and leaves him there, the
+sole judge of his own capacity. Driscoll had tried to dodge a fight, but
+Fate was his kindly farmer.
+
+"Better fall back a little, Murgie," he said. "You'd only scare 'em, you
+know."
+
+He himself passed on ahead. But it was mid-afternoon before anything
+happened. Jacqueline meantime had shown some pettish ill-humor. Those
+who had fought to be her escort were now singularly indifferent.
+Driscoll was idly curious and quietly contemptuous, but he detected no
+fright in her manner. "Fretting for her silver-braided Greaser," he said
+to himself. "A pretty scrape she's got herself into, too! Now I wonder
+why a girl can't have any sense." But as the answer was going to take
+too long to find, he swerved back to the simpler matter of a possible
+fracas.
+
+"Well, well," he exclaimed at last, rising in his stirrups, "if there
+isn't her nickel-plated hero now!"
+
+A quarter of a mile ahead, mounted, waiting stock-still across the
+trail, was Fra Diavolo. The American put away his pipe and barely moved
+his spurred boot, yet the good buckskin's ears pointed forward and he
+trotted ahead briskly. From old guerrilla habit, the cavalryman noted
+all things as he rode. To his left the blue of the mountain line, being
+nearer now, had deepened to black, and the Sierra seemed to hang over
+him, ominously. But the dark summits were still without detail, and
+midway down, where the solid color broke into deep green verdure and was
+mottled by patches of dry slabs of rock, there was yet that massive blur
+which told of distance. Foothills had rolled from the towering slide,
+and mounds had tumbled from the hills, and a tide of giant pebbles had
+swept down from the mounds. These rugged boulders had turned the trail,
+so that the American was riding beneath a kind of cliff. To his right,
+on the east of the trail, the boulders were smaller and scattered, like
+a handful of great marbles flung across the cactus plain. He may have
+glanced toward this side especially, at the clumps of spiny growth over
+the pradera, and caught glimpses behind the strewn rocks, but his look
+was casual, unstartled. He breathed deeply, though. The old familiar
+elation set him vaguely quivering and tingling, with nervous, subtle
+desire. The young animal's excess of life surged into a pain, almost.
+Even the buckskin, knowing him, took his mood, and held high his
+nostrils.
+
+Fra Diavolo's peaked beaver, his jacket, his breeches, his high pommeled
+saddle, his great box stirrups, the carabine case strapped behind, all
+be-scrolled with silver, danced hazily to the magic of rays slanting
+down from the lofty Sierra line. Like himself, his horse was a thing of
+spirited flesh, for glorious display. The glossy mane flowed
+luxuriantly. The tail curved to the ground. A mountain lion's skin
+covered his flanks. He was large and sleek and black, with the metal and
+pride of an English strain. He was a carved war-charger. The man astride
+was rigid, stately. Man and horse had a heroic statue's promise of
+instant, furious life.
+
+"Oh, la beauté d'un homme!" cried Jacqueline, perceiving the majestic
+outline silhouetted against the rocks. "Why, why--it's Fra Diavolo!"
+
+"It--it is!" confessed Murguía. There was dread, not surprise, in his
+exclamation. The waiting horseman, and a lonely hut there behind
+him--none other than a brigand "toll-station"--these were but too
+significant of an old and hated rendezvous. Don Anastasio got to his
+feet and nervously hurried his caravan back a short distance. Then he
+ran ahead again and overtook the two Frenchwomen. "Señoritas, wait!
+Neither of you need go. But I will--I must, but I can go alone, while
+you----"
+
+"Why, what ails the man?"
+
+"Back, señorita, back, before he sees you!"
+
+Jacqueline looked at the imploring eyes, at the palsied hand on her
+bridle. "Berthe," she said, "here's your little monsieur getting
+constitutional again."
+
+"You _will_ go, señorita?"
+
+"Parbleu!" said the girl, and lashed her mustang.
+
+"Dios, Dios," gasped the little monsieur, hurrying after them, "when
+Maximiliano hears of this----"
+
+"You should see Maximilian when he is angry," Jacqueline called over her
+shoulder. "It is very droll."
+
+Din Driscoll had vaulted to the ground in the instant of halting.
+Immediately he led his horse behind the solitary hut, which was a
+_jacal_ of bamboo and thatch built under the cliff, and left him
+there. Demijohn was a seasoned campaigner, and he would not move until
+his trooper came for him. When Driscoll emerged again, his coat was over
+his left arm, and the pockets were bulging. Fra Diavolo had already
+saluted him, but gazed down the trail at the two women approaching.
+
+"How are you, captain?" Driscoll began cordially.
+
+Fra Diavolo looked down from his mighty seat. "Ai, mi coronel, I was
+expecting Your Mercy."
+
+"Honest, now? Or weren't you worrying lest I'd got left back in
+Tampico?"
+
+One of the ranchero's hands rose, palm out, deprecatingly.
+
+"But someone might have told you I didn't get left at all," Driscoll
+pursued. "Segundino maybe? Or was it Juan?"
+
+"Or Don Tiburcio?" suggested the captain. He dismounted and doffed his
+big sombrero. "Good, I see you brought Her Ladyship safely."
+
+"Or I myself, rather," said Jacqueline, reining in her pony at the
+moment, "Ah, the Señor Capitan as an escort knows how to make himself
+prized by much anticipation."
+
+"Señorita!" The Mexican bent in heavy ceremony, the sombrero covering
+his breast. "I am honored, even in Your Mercy's censure. Those who
+deserve it could not appreciate it more."
+
+"Forward then, captain. On with the excuses, I promise to believe them."
+
+"Those sailors, my lady, who fight with kicks. Ugh!--they attacked some
+of my men this morning in Tampico. I had to call at the fort for aid."
+
+"Oh, but Maximilian shall hear of this!"
+
+"I think he will," and Fra Diavolo bowed again, hiding the gleam of a
+smile. "But I forget, your compatriot----"
+
+"Monsieur Ney?--Yes?"
+
+"He meant to help the sailors----"
+
+"But he was not hurt?"
+
+"Oh, no, no! But he had to be held in the fort."
+
+"That poor Michel!"
+
+"So," the syllable fell weightily, as if to crush Ney out of her
+thoughts, "here I am at last, to claim the distinguished pleasure of
+seeing Your Ladyship to the stage at Valles."
+
+Din Driscoll had been gazing far away at the mountains, his thumbs
+tucked in his belt. He stood so that the Mexican was between him and the
+scattered boulders on the right of the trail. Now he addressed the
+mountains. "The stage at Valles? There is no stage at Valles---- And,
+captain," he dropped Nature abruptly, and turned on the man, "who are
+you, hombre? Come, tell us!"
+
+If Fra Diavolo were a humbug, he was not nearly so dismayed as one might
+expect. For that matter, neither was Jacqueline. She inquired of
+Driscoll how he knew more about stage lines than the natives themselves.
+Because the natives themselves were not of one mind, he replied. For
+instance, Murgie's muleteers had assured him fervidly that there was
+such a stage, whereas passing wayfarers had told him quite simply that
+there was not, nor ever had been.
+
+Jacqueline's gray eyes, wide open and full lashed, turned on Fra
+Diavolo. "You are," she exclaimed, noiselessly clapping her hands as at
+a play, "then you are--Oh, _who_ are you?"
+
+The Mexican straightened pompously. "Who?" he repeated deep in his
+chest, "who, but one at Your Mercy's feet! Who, but--Rodrigo Galán
+himself!"
+
+"The _terrible_ Rodrigo?" She wanted complete identification.
+
+He looked at her quickly. The first darkening of a frown creased his
+brow. But still she was not alarmed. Berthe, however, proved more
+satisfying. "Oh, my dear lady!" she cried, reining in her horse closer
+to her mistress.
+
+"And who," drawled the American at a quizzical pitch of inquiry, "may
+Don Rodrigo be?"
+
+"What, señor," thundered the robber, "you don't----" He stopped,
+catching sight of the timorous Murguía hovering near. "Then, look at
+that old man, for he at least knows that he is in the presence of Don
+Rodrigo. He is trembling."
+
+But Jacqueline was--whistling. The bristling highwayman swung round full
+of anger. Driscoll stared at her amazed. Then he laughed outright.
+"Well, well, Honorable Mr. Buccaneer of the Sierras, now maybe---- Yes,
+that's what I mean," he added approvingly as Fra Diavolo leaped astride
+his charger and jerked forth two pistols from their holsters, "that's
+it, get the game started!"
+
+Jacqueline's red lips were again pursed to whistle, but she changed and
+hummed the refrain instead:
+
+"Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!"
+
+Driscoll stared at her harder. The words were strange and meant nothing.
+But there was a familiarity to the tune. That at least needed no
+interpreter. The old ballad of troubadours, the French war song of old,
+the song of raillery, the song of Revolution, this that had been a folk
+song of the Crusader, a Basque rhyme of fairy lore, the air known in the
+desert tents of Happy Arabia, known to the Jews coming out of Egypt,
+known to the tribes in the days without history or fifes--why, if this
+wasn't the rollicking, the defiant pæan of Americans! But how came she
+by it, and by what right?
+
+"'And we won't go home till morning,'" he joined in, inquisitively.
+
+The girl paused, as explorers singing it have paused when savages never
+before seen by white men joined in with barbarian words. But she went
+on, letting the miracle be as it might.
+
+  "'The news I bear, fair lady----'"
+
+she sang, and nodded at the bandit, to indicate that here was _his_
+line,
+
+  "'The news I bear, fair lady,   Will cause your eyes to weep.'"
+
+"'----Till daylight doth appear,'" Driscoll finished it with her. Then
+both looked up like two children, to the awful presence on horseback.
+
+Don Rodrigo was at some pains to recover himself. A helpless girl and
+one lone trooper were practising a duet under his very frown. Only a
+glance toward the boulders and cacti reassured him.
+
+"Well, what next?" Jacqueline demanded sweetly. "Is it to be the--the
+'game' at last?"
+
+"One word," said the Mexican solemnly. Straight in his saddle, he fixed
+them with keen eyes, keen, black eyes under shaggy brows. The syllables
+fell portentously. His voice deepened as far away thunder. "One word
+first," growled the awakening lion. "You know now that I am Don Rodrigo
+Galán. Yes, I am he, the capitan of guerrillas, the rebel, the brigand,
+the hunted fugitive. Such names of ignominy a true patriot must bear
+because he dares to defy his poor country's oppressors." Here Fra
+Diavolo scowled; he was getting into form. "But to His Majesty in our
+own Mexican capital, to His Glorious Resplendent Most Christian, Most
+Catholic, priest-ridden, bloodthirsty, foppish, imbecile decree-making
+fool of a canting majesty--to this Austrian archduke who drove forth the
+incarnation of popular sovereignty by the brutal hand of the foreign
+invader--to him I will yet make it known that the love of liberty, that
+the loyalty to Liberal Reforms, to the Constitution, to Law and Order,
+to--uh--are not yet dead in these swamps and mountains of our Patria.
+And he will know it when he--when he hears my demand for your ransom,
+Señorita Marquesa. He will know it, too, when he learns that Captain
+Maurel--a Frenchman, señorita, not a Mexican--now lies stark in death in
+the brush near Tampico, where he came to take and to hang the steadfast
+patriot, Rodrigo Galán. But his Tender-Hearted Majesty will grieve less
+for that than for the loss of you, Señorita--Jacqueline. For is it not
+known that you, the first lady of honor to the Empress, that you are
+also His Majesty's----"
+
+"My faith," said Jacqueline, "he speaks Spanish well!"
+
+Thus she stopped the insult. Also she stopped an unforeseen champion at
+her side. Driscoll, with pistol half drawn, was willing to be checked. A
+shot just then, placed as they were, would mean a bad ending to the
+game. That he knew. So he was thankful for Jacqueline's hand on his
+wrist.
+
+Forked eloquence was silenced by now. Yet the patriot had been in
+earnest, under the spell of his own ardor. Don Anastasio, with head
+bowed, had listened in sullen sympathy. But both Mexicans started as
+though stung at Jacqueline's applauding comment. Don Rodrigo purpled
+with rage. She only looked back at him, so provokingly demure, that
+something besides the ransom got into his veins. He wet his lips, baring
+the unpleasant gleam of teeth.
+
+"Come!" he said thickly. "You and your maid go with me."
+
+Driscoll's jaw dropped. "Diablos," he exclaimed, bewildered, "you don't
+mean---- Look, Don Roddy, you're crazy! Such things----"
+
+"Come!"
+
+"But I tell you it's foolish. Such things do not happen, unless in
+melodrama."
+
+For reply the guerrilla chief wheeled his charger and caught the bridles
+of the two horses that the girls rode. He pulled, so as to leave exposed
+the troublesome American behind them.
+
+"Grands dieux," exclaimed Jacqueline, "have the men in this country
+nothing to do except catch my bridle! But really, sir, this situation is
+forced. It is not artistic. As--as Monsieur the Chevalier says, it's
+quite impossible."
+
+She looked around for Monsieur the Chevalier to make it so, but to her
+dismay, to her disgust, he had taken to his heels. He was running away,
+as fast as he could go. Then her horse reared, for musket firing had
+suddenly, mysteriously begun on all sides of her. Many fierce pairs of
+eyes were bobbing up from behind the boulders on the right of the trail;
+yellow-brown faces, like a many-headed Hydra coiled in the cacti. They
+were shooting, not at her, but at the fleeing American. She felt an
+object in her hand, which Driscoll had thrust there, and she remembered
+that he had whispered something, though she had forgotten what.
+
+Her captor was straining at the bridle. In his frenzy he leaned over, to
+lift her from the saddle, and then she struck him across the face with
+her whip. And then, with what the American had put in her other hand,
+she struck again. The weapon was Driscoll's short hunting knife. The
+blade grazed Rodrigo's shoulder. He loosed his hold, and before he could
+prevent, both she and Berthe were in the shack under the cliff. The maid
+sank to the floor. The mistress stood in the doorway. There was a glint
+in the gray eyes not lovable in man or woman, but in her it was superb.
+
+Fifty feet back up the trail she saw Driscoll scaling the cliff. That
+demon yelling, which is the first spasm of Mexican warfare, had not
+ceased, and each demon was shooting as fast as he could reload. She saw
+the white dust spurt out from the bullet peppered rock. But either the
+sun slanting down from the mountain line was in their eyes, or they were
+disconcerted at the American's change in their plans; at any rate their
+laboriously ascending target did not drop. Up he climbed. Jacqueline
+wondered why he still clung to the jacket over his arm, as people will
+cling to absurd things in time of panic.
+
+"To go through that peril, and yet a coward!" she murmured. "It's a
+waste----"
+
+The runaway gained the top of the embankment, and fell behind a rock.
+And now a half dozen of the little demons were coming across the trail
+to the shack--to take her.
+
+"Oh, the frisson, the ecstasy!" she cried. There was a certain poignant
+sense of enjoyment in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE COSSACKS AND THEIR TIGER COLONEL
+
+
+  "Ah, Captain, here goes for a fine-drawn bead;
+  There's music around when my barrel's in tune."
+                      --_Song of the Fallen Dragoon._
+
+
+Din Driscoll tumbled himself over among the rocks. "There, I'm fixed,"
+he grunted, as he squatted down behind his earthworks. "Plenty of
+material here"--he meant the cartridges which he poured from his coat
+pockets into his hat--"and plenty out there too"--indicating the Hydra
+heads--"and my pipe--I'll have a nice time." He got to work busily.
+
+In the door of the shack Jacqueline saw the campaign for her possession
+begin. Don Rodrigo had fled to the corner of the shack, taking his horse
+with him. The hut of bamboo and thatch was no protection against
+Driscoll's fire, but the two girls, though inside the hut, were between
+and afforded a better screen. Jacqueline did not, however, hold that
+against her Fra Diavolo. To save himself behind a woman was quite in
+keeping with his sinister rôle. And she, as an artist, could not
+reproach him, and as a woman she did not care. But the American's
+running away--now that was out of character, and it disappointed her.
+
+She heard Rodrigo bellowing forth an order, and she saw five or six
+guerrillas rise out of the cacti and spring toward her. But the constant
+shadow of self-introspection haunted her even then. In her despair, and
+worse, in her disgust, feeling already those filthy hands upon her, she
+yet appraised this jewel among ecstatic shudders, and she knew in her
+heart that she would not have had it otherwise.
+
+"Oh, am I ever to _live_!" she moaned in startled wonderment at
+herself. "Always a spectator, always, even of myself!--God, dost thou
+know? It is a robbery of living!" And the vagabonds were twenty paces
+away!
+
+Something hurt her hand, she opened her clenched palm; it was the horn
+handle of Driscoll's knife. Had she really thought to defend herself
+with that inadequate thing? "Poof!" She tossed it from her, vexed at her
+own unconscious heroics. Then two dark arms reached out, nearer and
+nearer, and ten hooked fingers blurred her vision. But the arms shot
+upward, the fingers stiffened, and a body splashed across the doorway at
+her feet with the sound of a board dropped on water.
+
+"Ai, poor man!"
+
+She was on her knees, bending over him. But a second of the vermin
+lurched against her, and he too lay still. A pistol report from the
+cliff was simultaneous with each man's fall. Both were dead. A third
+sank in the trail with a shattered hip, and another behind knew the
+agony of a broken leg. The marksman's mercy was evidently tempered
+according to distance. For, having the matter now under control, he
+nonchalantly cracked only shin bones. Fra Diavolo from his shelter
+roared commands and curses, but not another imp would show himself.
+Crouched jealously, they chose rather to besiege their lone enemy on the
+cliff.
+
+"Must have howitzers," muttered Driscoll. The soft lead, bigger than
+marbles, went "Splut! Splut!" against the rock on all sides of him,
+flattening with the windy puff of mud on a wall. But he was well
+intrenched, and as the guerrillas were also, he lighted his pipe and
+smoked reflectively. But after awhile he perceived a slight movement,
+supplemented by a carabine. One of the besiegers was working from
+boulder to boulder, parallel with the trail. He did it with infinite
+craft. At first the fellow crawled; then, when out of pistol range, he
+got to his feet and ran. Still running, he crossed the trail at a safe
+distance beyond the hut, and began working back again, this time along
+the cliff, and toward Driscoll. When about a hundred yards away, he
+disappeared; which is to say, he lowered himself into a little ravine
+that thousands of rainy seasons had worn through from the foothills. But
+almost at once his head and shoulders rose from the nearer bank, and
+Driscoll promptly fired. The shot fell short. A pistol would not carry
+so far; which was a tremendously important little fact, since the other
+fellow was aiming a rifle. The bullet from that rifle neatly clipped a
+prickly pear over Driscoll's head. The strategist certainly knew his
+business. There was a familiar shimmer of silver about his high peaked
+hat. Yes surely, he was Don Tiburcio, the loyal Imperialist of the
+baleful eye. No doubt the malignant twinkle gleamed in that eye now,
+even as the blackmailer bit a cartridge for the next shot. A victim who
+had only pistols, and at rifle range, and with not a pebble for shelter
+from the flank bombardment--it was assuredly a situation to tickle Don
+Tiburcio.
+
+Now Driscoll's point of view was less amusing. To change his position,
+he must expose himself to a fusilade from across the way. And if he
+tried to rush his friend of the gully, the brigands meantime would carry
+off the two girls. A gentleman's part, therefore, was to stay where he
+was and be made a target of. But he varied it a little. At Don
+Tiburcio's second shot, he lunged partly to his feet and fell forward as
+though mortally wounded. He lay quite still, and soon Don Tiburcio came
+creeping toward him. Don Tiburcio was thinking of his lost toll-moneys
+that should be on the corpse. Driscoll waited, his nerves alert, his
+pistols ready. But just beyond range, the blackmailer paused.
+
+"Go for the women, you idiots," he yelled. "The Gringo's dead."
+
+The idiots verified the title straightway, for up they popped from
+behind their boulders and started for the shack.
+
+"'Possuming's no use," Driscoll muttered, then fired. The guerrillas got
+back to cover quickly enough, and so did Don Tiburcio, grinning over his
+stratagem. In his arroyo again, he proposed to make the Gringo as a
+sieve. Each bullet from his carabine twanged lower and lower. "Ouch!"
+ejaculated Driscoll. One had furrowed his leg, and it hurt. He looked
+anxiously, to see if the Mexican were lowering his aim yet more. An inch
+meant such a great deal just then. But a tremendous surprise met him.
+For Don Tiburcio had changed his mind. The rascal was firing in another
+direction entirely, firing rapturously, firing at his very allies, at
+the little imps themselves among the boulders and nettles. And the
+little imps were positively leaping up to be shot. They ran frantically,
+but straight toward the traitor, and on past him up the trail. The Storm
+Centre could not shoot lunatics any more than he could babies. He only
+stared at them open mouthed.
+
+"Los Cosacos!--El Tigre! Los Cosacos!" they yelled, scrambling out upon
+the road, bleeding, falling, praying, and kissing whatever greasy amulet
+or virgin's picture they owned.
+
+Then there beat into Driscoll's ears the furious clatter of hoofs. It
+deafened him, the familiar, glorious din of it. The blood raged in his
+veins like fiery needle points. To see them--the cavalry, the cavalry!
+Then they were gone--a flashing streak of centaurs, a streamer of red in
+a blur of dust, maniac oaths, and pistol shots, and sweeping sabres.
+Hacked bodies were sucked beneath the swarm as saplings under an
+avalanche. Driscoll sprang up and gazed. Through eddying swirls he still
+could see red sleeved arms reach out, and lightning rays of steel, and
+half-naked fleeting creatures go down, and never a jot of the curse's
+speed abate.
+
+"Lordy, but Old Joe should 'a seen it!" he fairly shouted. He was
+thinking of Shelby, of the Old Brigade back in Missouri; daredevils,
+every one of them.
+
+Don Tiburcio had sighted the vengeful horde from afar, and had
+recognized them, since he was, in fact, one of their scouts. They were
+the Contra Guerrillas, the Cossacks, the scourge wielded by the French
+Intervention and the Empire. And they were Don Tiburcio's cue to
+loyalty. For seeing them, he began firing on his late friends, the
+brigands. Yet he spared their Capitan. At the first alarm Fra Diavolo
+had vaulted astride his black horse, and Tiburcio darting out, had
+caught his bridle, and turned him into the dry bed of the arroyo. Others
+of the fugitives tried to escape by this same route, but Tiburcio fought
+them off with clubbed rifle, and in such occupation was observed by him
+who led the Cossacks, who was a terrible old man, and a horseman to give
+the eye joy. At the gully he swerved to one side, and let the hurricane
+pass on by.
+
+"Sacred name of thunder," he cursed roundly, "a minute later and----"
+
+"Si, mi coronel," the faithful Tiburcio acknowledged gratefully, "Your
+Excellency came just in time."
+
+The colonel of Contra Guerrillas frowned a grim approval for his scout's
+handiwork of battered skulls. He was a man of frosted visage, a grisly
+Woden. The hard features were more stern for being ruggedly venerable.
+His beard was wiry, hoary gray, through whose billowy depth a long black
+cigar struck from clenched teeth. If eyes are windows of the soul, his
+were narrow, menacing slits, loopholes spiked by bristling brows. Two
+deep creases between the eyes furrowed their way up and were lost under
+an enormously wide sombrero. This sombrero was low crowned, like those
+worn farther to the south, and ornately flowered in silver. His chest
+was crossed with braid, cords of gold hung from the right shoulder to
+the collar, and the sleeves were as glorious as a bugler's. His
+brick-red jacket fell open from the neck, exposing the whitest of linen.
+His boots were yellow, his spurs big Mexican discs. Altogether the blend
+in him of the precise military and the easy ranchero was curiously
+picturesque. But Colonel Dupin, the Tiger of the Tropics, was a curious
+and picturesque man. His medals were more than he could wear, and each
+was for splendid daring. But on a time they had been stripped from him.
+It happened in China. He had made a gallant assault on the Imperial
+Palace, but he had also satiated his barbarian soul in carnage and
+loaded his shoulders with buccaneering loot. And though he wondered at
+his own moderation, a court martial followed. However, Louis Napoleon
+gave him back his medals, and sent him to Mexico to stamp out savagery
+by counter savagery.
+
+"There were two accomplices in this business," the Tiger was saying,
+"one a trader, Murguía----"
+
+"Killed him my very first shot," lied Tiburcio. He would save his golden
+goose of the golden eggs.
+
+"And the other, an American?"
+
+"Got away with the others, señor." Again Tiburcio's reason was obvious.
+The American, if taken, might tell things.
+
+"And"--Dupin gripped his cigar hungrily--"and Rodrigo?"
+
+For answer the scout waved a hand vaguely up the trail.
+
+"None went that way?" and the Colonel jerked his head toward the ravine.
+
+"No, none. Your Mercy saw me driving them back."
+
+"Quick, then, on your horse! We're losing time."
+
+Don Tiburcio was reluctant. He had not yet recovered his money
+from the American. "But the women, mi coronel? They are there, in that
+shack. Hadn't I better stay----?"
+
+"Jacqueline, you mean? Of course the little minx is in trouble, the
+second she touches land. But you come with me. She shall have another
+protector."
+
+Tiburcio knew the Cossack chief. He obeyed, and both men galloped away
+after the chase.
+
+[Illustration: "COLONEL DUPIN"
+"The Tiger of the Tropics ... the chief of Contra Guerrillas"]
+
+ They had not gone far when they passed Michel Ney swiftly returning. He
+was the protector Dupin had in mind. He had seen Jacqueline in the
+doorway of the hut as he stormed past with the Contra Guerrillas, but he
+had been too enthusiastic to stop just then. He was a Chasseur
+d'Afrique, and to be a Chasseur d'Afrique was to ride in a halo of
+mighty sabre sweeps. And Michel had fought Arabs too--but the good
+simplicity of his countenance was woefully ruffled as he turned back
+from that charge of the Cossacks.
+
+"Michel!" cried Jacqueline, stepping over the forms of men before the
+hut, and forgetting them. The natty youth was torn, rumpled, grimy. The
+sky-blue of his uniform was gray with dust. But to see him at all proved
+that he had escaped Fra Diavolo's web in Tampico. And the relief! It
+made her almost gay. "Ah, Michel--le beau sabreur!--and did you enjoy
+it, mon ami?"
+
+He alighted at her feet, and raised her hand to his lips.
+
+"Monsieur," she demanded quick as thought, "my trunk?"
+
+"Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, I did well to bring myself."
+
+"You should have brought my trunk, sir, first of all. Deign to look at
+this frock! No, no, don't, please don't. But tell me everything. What
+could have happened to you last night? Why did you not meet me this
+morning?"
+
+His story was brief. Of his contemplated strategy at Tampico, there had
+been a most lugubrious botching. The night before, when he started to
+the fort for aid, Fra Diavolo's little Mexicans had waylaid him, bound
+him, and dragged him back to the café, where Jacqueline that very moment
+reposed in slumber. And there, in a back room without a window, he had
+gritted his teeth until morning. As for the sailors, who were to return
+to the ship for her trunk; well, more little Mexicans had fired on them
+from the river bank. The small boat, riddled with shot, had sunk, and
+the sailors, splashing frantically to keep off the sharks, had gained
+the shore opposite. But they could neither get word to the ship, nor
+cross back to Tampico.
+
+"Yet," demanded Jacqueline, "how could you know all this, there in your
+prison room?"
+
+"Am I saying I did, name of a name? Well, those poor sailors wandered
+about all night in the swamps across the river, and this morning they
+ran into Colonel Dupin and his Contras, and the colonel was frothing
+mad. He had only just stumbled on the bodies of Captain Maurel and some
+of his men, who had been ambushed and murdered. Poor Maurel was dangling
+from a tree among the vultures. Others were mutilated. Some had even
+been tortured. And all were stripped, and rotting naked. Mon Dieu, mon
+dieu, but it's an inferno, this country!"
+
+"Yes, yes, but how did they find you?"
+
+"Colonel Dupin simply brought the sailors back to Tampico and searched
+that café, and got me out. The proprietor wasn't thought to be any too
+good an Imperialist, anyway. They shot him, and then we came right along
+here."
+
+"Very nice of you, I am sure."
+
+"Not at all. Dupin isn't thinking of anybody but your Fra Diavolo, who
+must have killed Captain Maurel.--Was he here?"
+
+"Who? Don Rodrigo?"
+
+"Don Rodrigo?"
+
+"Of course. He's the same as Fra Diavolo."
+
+"You mean that bandit," cried Ney, "that terrible Rodrigue? But he is
+dead, don't you remember, Fra Diavolo said so?"
+
+"Stupid! Fra Diavolo is Don Rodrigo himself."
+
+"Not dead then? And I'll meet him yet! But," and his sudden hope as
+suddenly collapsed, "Dupin will get him first."
+
+"I think not, because Rodrigo did not take the trail."
+
+"Then which way did he go? Quick, please, mademoiselle, which way?"
+
+"He turned off into that arroyo."
+
+"Oh, what chance, what luck!" But the boy stopped with his foot in the
+stirrup. "No, mademoiselle, I can't leave you!"
+
+"Oh yes you can. I daresay there's another champion about." She glanced
+up at the cliff. "And besides, all danger is past. The donkey caravan is
+still here, and for company, I have Berthe, of course."
+
+"Really, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Yes, Michel, really."
+
+"Good, I'm off! But we will meet you at--Dupin just told me--at the next
+village on this same trail. Now I'm off!" He was indeed. "I say,
+mademoiselle," he called back, "I'm glad we left the ship, aren't you?"
+
+Jacqueline turned hastily her gaze from the cliff. He startled her,
+expressing her own secret thought.
+
+Chasseur and steed vanished in the ravine, and she smiled. "The God of
+pleasant fools go with him," she murmured.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+PASTIME PASSING EXCELLENT
+
+
+  "Il y a des offenses qui indignent les femmes sans les déplaire."
+                                                    --_Emile Augier._
+
+
+Like another Black Douglas, Din Driscoll rose among the crags, the dark
+tufts curling stubbornly on his bared head. He looked a sinewy,
+toughened Ajax. But he only spoiled it. For, raising his arms, he
+stretched himself, stretched long and luxuriously. His very animal
+revelling in the huge elongation of cramped limbs was exasperating. Next
+he clapped the slouch on his head, and clambered down.
+
+Jacqueline might have been surprised to see him. Her brows lifted. "Not
+killed?" she exclaimed. "But no, of course not. You gave yourself air,
+you ran away."
+
+Driscoll made no answer. He was thinking of what to do next. She knew
+that he had run because of her, and she was piqued because he would not
+admit it. "So," she went on tauntingly, "monsieur counts his enemy by
+numbers then?"
+
+"Didn't count them at all," he murmured absently.
+
+"But," and she tapped her foot, "a Frenchman, he would have done it--not
+that way."
+
+She was talking in English, and the quaintness of it began to create in
+him a desire for more. "Done what, miss?" he asked.
+
+"He would not have run--a Frenchman."
+
+"Prob'bly not, 'less he was pretty quick about it."
+
+She looked up angrily. Of course he must know that he had been splendid,
+up there behind the rocks. And now to be unconscious of it! But that was
+only a pose, she decided. Yet what made him so stupidly commonplace, and
+so dense? She hated to be robbed of her enthusiasm for an artistic
+bric-à-brac of emotion; and here he was, like some sordid mechanic who
+would not talk shop with a girl.
+
+"I wager one thing," she fretted, "and it is that when you bring men
+down to earth you have not even at all--how do you say?--the martial
+rage in your eyes?"
+
+"W'y, uh, not's I know of. It might spoil good shooting."
+
+"And your pipe"--her lip curled and smiled at the same time--"the pipe
+does not, neither?"
+
+His mouth twitched at the corners. "N-o," he decided soberly, "not in
+close range."
+
+She gave him up, he had no pose. Still, she was out of patience with
+him. "Hélas! monsieur, all may see you are Ameri-can. But there, you
+have not to feel sorry. I forgive you, yes, because--it wasn't dull."
+
+"Hadn't we better be----"
+
+"Now what," she persisted, "kept you so long up there, for example?"
+
+Driscoll reddened. He had lingered behind the screen of rock to bandage
+his furrowed leg. "S'pose you don't ask," he said abruptly, "there's
+plenty other things to be doing."
+
+He turned and invited the little Breton maid to come from the shack. She
+was white, and trembled a little yet. "I knew, I knew you would not
+leave us, monsieur," she was trying to tell him. "But if you had--oh,
+what would madame----"
+
+"Now then," the practical American interrupted, "where's Murgie?"
+
+Jacqueline pointed with the toe of her slipper. There were prostrate
+bodies around them, with teeth bared, insolent, silent, horrible. One
+couldn't be sorry they were dead, but one didn't like to see them.
+Jacqueline's boot pointed to a man lying on his face. A silk hat was
+near by in the dust. A rusty black wig was loosened from his head. The
+girl invoked him solemnly. "Arise, Ancient Black Crow, and live another
+thousand years."
+
+Driscoll lifted the shrunken bundle of a man, held him at arm's length,
+looked him over, and stood him on his feet. The withered face was more
+than ever like a death's head, and the eyes were glassy, senseless. But
+as to hurt or scratch, there was none. The beady orbs started slowly in
+their sockets, rolling from side to side. The lips opened, and formed
+words. "Killed? yes, I am killed. But I want--my cotton, my burros, my
+peons--I want them. I am dead, give them to me."
+
+"You're alive, you old maverick."
+
+The gaze focused slowly on Driscoll, and slowly wakened to a crafty
+leer. Believe this Gringo?--not he!
+
+With an arm behind his shoulders Driscoll forced him down the trail to
+his caravan. Most of the animals were lying down, dozing under their
+packs. Murguía's eyes grew watery when he saw them, but he was still
+dazed and his delusion was obstinate. The leer shot exultant gleams. "A
+rich man _can_ enter heaven," he chuckled with unholy glee.
+
+"Oh wake up, and give me two donkeys for the girls. Their horses got
+hit, you know."
+
+Then the stunned old miser began to perceive that he was not in heaven.
+His tyrant's voice! "You get my horses killed," he whined, "and now you
+take my burros."
+
+Driscoll said no more, but picked out two beasts and bound some
+cushioned sacking on their backs for saddles. Then with a brisk hearty
+word, he swept Berthe up on the first one.
+
+"Next," he said, turning to Jacqueline.
+
+But the marchioness drew back. Next--after her maid! It nettled her that
+this country boy, or any other, could not recognize in her that
+indefinable something which is supposed to distinguish quality.
+
+"What's the matter, now?" he asked. "Quick, please, I'm in a hurry."
+
+"It's too preposterous. I'll not!"
+
+"You will," he said quietly.
+
+Her gray eyes deepened to blue with amazement. She stood stock still,
+haughtily daring him. She even lifted her arms a little, leaving the
+girlish waist defenseless. Her slender figure was temptation, the pretty
+ducal fury was only added zest. Up among the rocks Driscoll had found
+himself whispering, "She's game, that little girl!" But at the same time
+he had remembered Rodrigo's innuendo, the linking of her name with
+Maximilian's. She was so brave, and so headstrong, so lovably
+headstrong, and her beauty was so fresh and soft! Yet he could not but
+think of that taint in what nature had made so pure. Of a sudden there
+was a something wrong, something ugly and hideously wrong in life. And
+the country boy, the trooper, the man of blood-letting, what you will,
+was filled with helpless rage against it; and next against himself,
+because the girlish waist could thrill him so. "A silly little
+butterfly," he argued inwardly. Before, he had been unaware of his own
+indifference. But now he angrily tried to summon it back. He set his
+mind on their situation, on what it exacted. It exacted haste, simple,
+impersonal haste. And keeping his mind on just that, he caught her up.
+
+"Oh, you boor!" she cried, pushing at him.
+
+His jaw hardened. His will was well nigh superhuman, for he battled
+against two furious little hands, against the dimple and the patch so
+near his lips, against the fragrance of her hair, against the subtle
+warmth of his burden.
+
+"No, no!" she panted. "Monsieur, do you hear me? I am not to be
+carried!"
+
+"Maybe not," said he, carrying her.
+
+A moment later she discovered herself planted squarely on the burro.
+
+"Bonté divine!" she gasped. But she took care not to fall off.
+
+He drew a long breath.
+
+"Now whip 'em up," he commanded.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first village beyond, where Dupin had promised to meet Jacqueline,
+was a squatting group of thatched cones in a dense forest of Cyprus and
+eucalyptus. Its denizens were Huasteca Indians, living as they had
+before the Conquest, among themselves still talking their native
+dialect. The name of the hamlet was Culebra.
+
+The coy twilight waned quickly, and the caravan was still pushing on
+through the thick darkness of the wood, when a high tensioned yelping
+made the vast silence insignificant, ugly. But as the travelers filed
+into the clearing where the village was, the curs slunk away with coyote
+humility, their yellow points of eyes glowing back on the intruders.
+
+With a forager's direct method, Driscoll roused the early slumbering
+village. He would not take alfafa, he declined rastrojo. It was human
+food, corn, that he bought for his horse. He housed his dumb friend
+under a human roof too. After which he prepared a habitation for the
+women. He swept the likeliest hut clean of ashes, brazier, and bits of
+pots and jars. He carpeted the earth floor in Spanish moss, as King
+Arthur's knights once strewed their halls with rushes. It was luxury for
+a coroneted lass, if one went back a dozen centuries. There were chinks
+between the sooty saplings that formed the wall, but over these he hung
+matting, and he drove a stake for a candle.
+
+Supper followed. The trooper chose to change Don Anastasio from host to
+guest, and he exacted what he needed from the Inditos. They, for their
+part, were alert before his commands. None of them had been overlooked
+in his preliminary largesse of copper tlacos and they made the teaming
+wilderness contribute to his spread. Kneeling, with sleeves rolled from
+his hard forearms, he broiled a steak over hickory forks. The torches of
+gum tree knots lighted his banquet, and the faces of the two girls, rosy
+in the blaze and mysterious in the shadow, were piquant inspiration.
+Even the sharp features of Don Anastasio stirred him into a phase of
+whimsical benevolence. He knocked two chickens from their perch in a
+tree and baked them in a mould of clay. There was an armadilla too,
+which a Culebra boy and the dogs had run down during the day. Its dark
+flesh was rich and luscious, and the Missourian fondly called it
+'possum. Crisply toasted tortillas, or corn cakes, served for bread, and
+for spoons as well. But to Driscoll's mind the real feast was
+coffee--actual coffee, which he made black, so very good and black, a
+riotous orgie of blackness and strength and fragrance. Here was a feast
+indeed for the poor trooper. He thought of the chickory, of the parched
+corn, of all those pitiful aggravations that Shelby's Brigade had tried
+so hard to imagine into coffee during the late months of privation along
+the Arkansas line.
+
+And the Marquise d'Aumerle? Learning to eat roasting ears, which somehow
+just would leave a grain on her cheek with every bite, the dainty
+Marquise thought how much finer was this than the tedious bumping ship.
+How much more tempting than the ultra-belabored viands on white china
+that had to be latticed down! Here was angel's bread in the wilderness.
+And the appetite that drove her to ask for more, that was the only
+sauce--an appetite that was a frisson. A new sensation, in itself!
+
+And later, sleep too became a passion, a passion new and sweet in its
+incantation out of the lost cravings of childhood. When the nearer
+freshness of the woods filled her nostrils, there from the live-oak moss
+in her night's abode, she smiled on the grave young fellow who had left
+her at the door. And both girls laughing together over the masculine
+notions for their comfort, knew a certain happy tenderness in their
+gaiety.
+
+"Éh, but it's deep, madame," said one.
+
+"It's the politeness of the heart," the other explained.
+
+Outside Driscoll spread his blanket across the doorway where his horse
+was sheltered, and wrapped in his great cape-coat, he stretched himself
+for a smoke. But Murguía came with cigars, of the Huasteca, gray and
+musty. Driscoll accepted one, waving aside the old man's apologies. He
+puffed and waited. Conviviality in Don Anastasio meant something.
+
+"Ah, amigo," the thin voice cracked in a spasm of forced heartiness,
+"ah, it was a banquet! Si, si, a banquet! Only, if there were but a
+liqueur, a liqueur to give the after-cigar that last added relish,
+verdad, señor?"
+
+Driscoll tapped his "after-cigar" till the ashes fell. "Well? he asked.
+
+"Ai de mi, caballero, but I am heavy with regrets. I can offer nothing.
+My poor cognac--no, not after such a feast. But whiskey--ah, whiskey is
+magnifico. It is American."
+
+He stopped, with a genial rubbing of his bony hands. But his sad
+good-fellowship was transparent enough, and in the darkness his eyes
+were beads of malice. Driscoll half grunted. A long way round for a
+drink, he thought. "Here," he said, getting out his flask, "have a pull
+at this."
+
+Murguía took it greedily. He had seen the flask before. The covering of
+leather was battered and peeled. "Perhaps a little--water?" he faltered.
+Driscoll nodded, and off the old Mexican ambled with the flask. When he
+returned, he had a glass, into which he had poured some of the liquor.
+The canteen he handed back to the trooper, who without a word replaced
+it in his pocket. Murguía lingered. He sipped his toddy absently.
+
+"I, I wonder why the friends of the señoritas do not come?" he ventured.
+
+"Want to get rid of them, eh, Murgie?"
+
+The old man shrugged his shoulders. "And why not? You may not believe
+me, señor, but should I not feel easier if they were--well, out of the
+reach of Don Rodrigo?"
+
+"Out of----Look here, where's the danger now?"
+
+"Ai, señor, don't be too sure. Colonel Dupin still does not come, and it
+might be--because the guerrillas have stopped him."
+
+"Man alive, he had 'em running!"
+
+"H'm, yes, but there's plenty more. This very village breeds them, feeds
+them, welcomes them home. Don Rodrigo can gather ten times what he had
+to-day. And if he does, and if, if he is looking for the señoritas
+again----"
+
+Driscoll shifted on his blanket. "I see," he drawled. "F'r instance, if
+the señoritas vanish before he gets here, he won't blame you? Oh no, you
+were asleep, you couldn't know that I had up and carried 'em off.
+Anyhow, you'd rather risk Rodrigo than Colonel Dupin----Yes, I see." He
+tucked his saddle under his head, and lay flat, blinking at the stars.
+"This trail go on to Valles?" he inquired drowsily.
+
+Murguía's small eyes brightened over him. "Yes," he said, eagerly.
+
+"Correct," yawned the American, "I've already made sure."
+
+"And if----" But a snore floated up from the blanket.
+
+When Murguía was gone, the sleeper awoke. He carefully poured out all
+the remaining whiskey. "It may be what they call 'fine Italian,'" he
+muttered, with a disgusted shake of the head, but he neglected to throw
+the flask away as well. Next he saddled Demijohn and two of the pack
+horses, then lay down and slept in earnest, as an old campaigner
+snatches at rest.
+
+The night was black, an hour before the dawn, when his eyes opened wide,
+and he sat up, listening. He heard it again, faint and far away, a
+feeble "pop-pop!" Then there were more, a sudden pigmy chorus of battle.
+He got to his feet, and ran to call the two women.
+
+"So," said Jacqueline, appearing under the stars, "monsieur does not
+wish to be relieved of us? He will not wait for his friends?"
+
+"Get on these horses! Here, I'll help you."
+
+Soon they three were riding through the forest, in the trail toward
+Valles. Behind them the fairy popping swelled louder, yet louder, and
+the man glanced resentfully at his two companions. He was missing the
+game.
+
+Back in the village of Culebra a demon uproar hounded Don Anastasio out
+of serape and slumber. All about him were fleeing feet. They were
+shadows, bounding like frightened deer from the wood, across the
+clearing, and into the wood again. Some turned and fired as they ran.
+Screaming women and children hurried out of the _jacales_, and
+darted here and there. Dogs howled everywhere. A storm of crashing brush
+and a wild troop of horsemen, each among them a free lance of butchery,
+burst on the village. A second crashing storm, and they were in the
+forest again. They left quivering blots in their wake, and a moaning
+gave a lower and dreadfuller note to the wailing of women. Only the
+leader of the pursuers, with a few others, drew rein.
+
+"Death of an ox!" the French oath rang out, "We're in their very nest.
+Quick, you loafers, the torch, the torch!"
+
+Flames began to crackle, and in the glare Murguía was seen frantically
+driving burros and peons to safety. The leader of the troop leaned over
+in his saddle and had him by the collar.
+
+"Who the name of a name are you?"
+
+Don Anastasio looked up. His captor was a great bearded man. "Colonel
+Dupin!" he groaned.
+
+"Who are you?--But I should know. It's the trader, the accomplice of
+Rodrigo. Sacré nom, tell me, where is she? We can't find her here. Where
+is she?"
+
+"How can I know, señor? She--perhaps she is gone."
+
+"With Rodrigo--ha! But he'll have no ransom--no, not if it breaks
+Maximilian's heart.--Now, Señor Trader----"
+
+He stopped and called to him his nearest men. Murguía sank limp.
+
+"But he hasn't got her! Rodrigo hasn't got her!"
+
+"Who has then?"
+
+"The other one, the American."
+
+"Which way did they go?"
+
+"If Your Mercy will not----"
+
+"Shoot him!" thundered the Tiger.
+
+"But if he will tell us?" someone interposed.
+
+It was Don Tiburcio, still the guardian angel of the golden goose.
+
+"Bien," growled the Tiger, "let him live then until we find the
+American."
+
+"Which way did they go?" Tiburcio whispered in Murguía's ear.
+
+"To, to Valles," came the reply.
+
+The blazing huts revealed a ghoulish joy on the miser's face. The
+Gringo, not he, would now have to explain to the Tiger.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+UNREGISTERED IN ANY STUDBOOK
+
+
+  "La belle chose que l'aristocratie quand on a le chance d'en être."
+                                                        --_Voltaire._
+
+
+That garish daub which was sopped up from the burning homes of men and
+bespattered over the forest's dark crest was already mellowing under the
+gentler touch of dawn, when the three travelers gained the open country.
+
+"Poor, dirty, little Inditos," Jacqueline mused aloud. Berthe struck her
+pony in a tremor of fright. The American was riding ahead. "Fire and
+sword," Jacqueline went on, and her voice lowered to intense scorn,
+"they make the final tableau, but--it's gaudy, it's cheap."
+
+The trail had broadened into a high road, and now it wound among the
+hills like a soiled white ribbon. Driscoll turned in his saddle. "I
+shouldn't wonder," he observed in the full-toned drawl that was peculiar
+to him, "but what we'd better be projecting a change of venue. This
+route is too public, and publicity around here strikes me as sort of
+prejudiced. S'pose we just stir up an alibi?"
+
+A certain stately old judge back in Missouri would have smiled thus to
+hear the scion of his house. But the marchioness, confident in her
+mastery of English, thought it was the veriest jargon. What was the boy
+trying to say? His next words grew fairly intelligible. "We are now
+headed for Valles. Well, we've decided not to go to Valles."
+
+Perhaps they had, but she at least had ceased deciding anything, since
+the overruling of her veto in the matter of precedence when one is
+hoisted upon a burro.
+
+A narrow pony path crossed the road. "First trail to the left, after
+leaving the wood," Driscoll said aloud, "and this must be it."
+Campaigner in an unfamiliar country, he had informed himself, and it was
+with confidence that he led his little party into the bridlepath. But he
+looked anxiously at the forest behind. He did not doubt but that
+Rodrigo, if it were he back there, would terrify Murguía into betraying
+their destination, or their supposed destination, which was Valles.
+
+"Can't you hurry 'em up a bit?" he called back.
+
+"We do try," protested Jacqueline, holding aloft a broken switch, "but
+they only smile at us."
+
+Driscoll got down and undid the spurs from his boots. One of the immense
+saw-like discs he adjusted to mademoiselle's high heel, passing the
+strap twice around the silk-clad ankle. Jacqueline gazed down on the
+short-cropped, curly head, and she saw that the back of his neck was
+suddenly red. But the discovery awakened nothing of the coquette in her.
+Quite the contrary, there was something grateful, even gravely maternal,
+in the smile hovering on her lips for the rough trooper who took fright
+like a girl over a revealed instep. Still, the interest was not
+altogether maternal as she watched him doing the same service for
+Berthe. Perhaps he was too far away, or perhaps practice brought
+indifference, but at any rate, his neck was no longer tinged in that
+fiery way.
+
+"Now dig 'em!" said he. "We want to make that clump of mesquite yonder,
+now pretty quick."
+
+The trees he pointed to were two or three miles away, but the travelers
+covered the distance at an easy lope. Driscoll kept an eye on the road
+they had just left, and once hidden by the mesquite he called a halt. As
+he expected, a number of horsemen appeared at a trot from the direction
+of the forest. They did not pause at the cross trail, however, but kept
+to the highway in the direction of Valles. The American and the two
+girls could now safely continue their journey along the bridlepath.
+
+"Monsieur," Jacqueline questioned demurely, and in her most treacherous
+way, "how much longer do we yet follow you up and down mountains?"
+
+"W'y, uh--_I'm_ going to the City of Mexico."
+
+"And we others, we may tag along, n'est-ce pas? But the city is far,
+far. And, to-night?"
+
+"Of course," said Driscoll, "if you should happen to know of a good
+hotel----" He paused and gazed inquiringly over hills covered with
+banana and coffee to the frost line. He would not have tried a frailer
+temper so, but to provoke hers was incense to his own.
+
+"You others, the Americans," she said tentatively, as though explaining
+him to herself, "you are so greedy of this New World! You won't give us
+of it, no, not even a poor little answer of information. Alas,
+Monseigneur the American, I apologize for being on this side the ocean
+at all--in a tattered frock."
+
+Driscoll looked, but he could see nothing wrong. She seemed as crisp and
+dainty as ever. If there were any disarray, it was a fetching sort, with
+a certain rakish effect.
+
+"Oh that's all right," he assured her heartily, "_you_ can stay."
+
+"Really, and after you've been writing us notes from Washington to--to
+'get out'? We French people do not think that was polite."
+
+"I never wrote you any notes, and," he added in a lowered tone, "the
+devil take Washington, since Lee didn't!"
+
+Jacqueline's lips pursed suddenly like a cherry. "Oh pardon me," she
+exclaimed. "I did not know. And so you are a--a Confederate? But," and
+the gray eyes fastened upon him. She rode, too, so that she could see
+his face, just ahead of her, "but your faction, the--yes, the South--she
+is already vanquis--no!--whipped? I--I heard."
+
+He did not reply, but his expression disturbed her unaccountably. She
+could almost note the whimsical daredeviltry fade from his face, as
+there came instead the grimmest and strangest locking of the jaws. She
+tried to imagine the French beaten and her feelings then, but it was
+difficult, for her countrymen were "the bravest of the world, the
+unconquered." They had borne victory over four continents, into two
+hemispheres. But this American, what must he feel? He was thinking, in
+truth, of many things. Of his leave taking with his regiment, with those
+lusty young savages of Missourians whom perhaps he was never to see
+again. He was thinking of his ride through the South to Mobile, of the
+misery in stubborn heroism, of the suffering everywhere, matching that
+in the dreary fever camp of the Old Brigade. He was thinking of all the
+beautiful Southland torn and ravaged and of the lowering cloud of
+finality. Of the Army of Northern Virginia so hard pressed; of the doom
+of Surrender, a knell already sounded, perhaps. Never had Jacqueline
+seen such bitterness on a human face. It was a man's bitterness. And
+almost a desperado's. At least there was the making of a desperado in
+the youth of a moment before. She caught herself shuddering. There was
+something so like a lurking death astride the yellow horse in front of
+her.
+
+But over her also there came a change, and it grew as she saw and
+appreciated the man in him. Her caprices fell from her, and she was the
+shrewd woman of the world, a deft creature of courts, a cunning weaver
+of the delicate skeins of intrigue and politics. A glint of craft and
+purpose struck from the gray eyes, as in preparation for battle. Her
+mischievous bantering had really been fraught with design, and by it she
+had revealed to herself this man. But the change in her came when he
+proved an antagonist, as she now supposed him to be. For in the
+uncloaking he stood forth a Confederate. His cause was lost. He was in
+Mexico. He was on a mission, no doubt. One question remained, what could
+the mission be?
+
+Abrupt frankness, with its guileful calculation to surprise one into
+betrayal, was the subtlest diplomacy. "Let us see," she mused aloud,
+"you, your comrades, monsieur, you have no country now? Bien, that
+accounts for your interest in Maximilian?"
+
+"And what is your interest, Miss--Jack-leen?"
+
+She staggered before the riposte. The "Jack-leen" was innocent
+blundering, she knew that. He had heard Rodrigo address her so, and he
+used it in all respect. But there was her own question turned on
+herself. By "her interest" he of course meant the interest she was
+showing in himself; he was not referring it to Maximilian. And yet the
+double meaning was there, just the same. He had struck back, that was
+certain, but because she could not tell where, nor even whether he had
+wounded, she was afraid to parry, much more to venture another thrust.
+Those who had sent the rustic evidently knew what they were about. He
+could shoot well, which was exhilarating. To redeem one's country's
+discredited bills, was quixotic. She rose to that, because she was
+French. But to fence with herself--well, that was quality. Instinctive,
+inbred, unconscious, and unregistered in any studbook of Burke or
+Gotha--but quality. And she recognized it, for there was deference in
+the silence which her baffled diplomacy now counseled.
+
+They passed many natives plodding on to Valles with market stuff, going
+at the Inditos' tireless foxtrot, now a man in loincloth stooped under a
+great bundle of straw or charcoal, or a family entire, including burro
+and dog. Of a gray-bearded patriarch with a chicken coop strapped to his
+back, Driscoll inquired the distance to an hacienda of the region which
+had the name of Moctezuma. "Probablemente, it will be ten leagues
+farther on, señor," the Huastecan replied.
+
+"We are going," Driscoll now informed his companions, "to drop in on
+Murgie--the hospitable old anaconda."
+
+They acquired a pineapple by purchase, and stopped for their morning
+coffee at a hut among numberless orange trees, and at another farther on
+for their midday lunch, where they learned that the Hacienda de
+Moctezuma was only just beyond the first hill, and only just beyond the
+first hill they learned that they had six leagues more to go. They
+covered three of these leagues, and were rewarded with the information
+that it was fully seven leagues yet. Geography in Mexico was clearly an
+elastic quantity. But towards three o'clock a young fellow on a towering
+stack of fagots waved his arm over the landscape, and said, "Why, señor,
+you are there now." Yes, it was the hacienda, but how far was it to the
+hacienda house? Oh, that was still a few little leagues.
+
+In the end, after nightfall, they rode into a very wide valley, where
+two broad, shallow rivers joined and flowed on as one through the
+lowland. Here, on the brow of a slope, they perceived the walls and the
+church tower of what seemed to be a small town. But after one last
+inquiry, they learned that it was the seat of Anastasio Murguía's
+baronial domain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE HERALD OF THE FAIR GOD
+
+
+  "Les grenouilles se lassant
+  De l'état démocratique,
+  Par leur clameurs firent tant
+  Que Jupin les soumit au pouvoir monarchique."
+                                --_La Fontaine._
+
+
+A wide country road swept up the slope of the hill, curved in toward the
+low outer wall of the little town on the brow, then swept down again.
+The portico of the hacienda house was set in the wall where the road
+almost touched, so that the traveler could alight at the very threshold
+of the venerable place. Mounting the half-dozen steps, Driscoll crossed
+a vast porch whose bare cement columns stood as sentinels the entire
+length of the high, one-storied façade, and on the heavy double doors he
+found a knocker. Visitors were infrequent there, but at last a surprised
+barefoot mozo answered the rapping, and in turn brought a short man of
+burly girth and charro tightness of breeches. This chubby person bowed
+many times and assured Their Mercies over and over again that here they
+had their house. Driscoll replied with thanks that in that case he
+thought that he and the other two Mercies would be taking possession,
+for the night at least.
+
+The man was Murguía's administrador, or overseer. He took it for granted
+that the French señor (in those days Mexico called all foreigners
+French) and the French señoras were friends of his employer, and
+Driscoll did not undeceive him. The trooper's habits were those of war,
+and war admitted quartering yourself on an enemy. He brought the news,
+too, that Murguía had come safely through his last blockade run, which
+alone insured him a welcome without the fact that ranchero hospitality
+may be almost Arabian and akin to a sacrament.
+
+Plunging into apologies for every conceivable thing that could or might
+be amiss, Don Anastasio's steward led them into the sala, a long front
+room, the hacendado's hall of state. To all appearances it had not been
+so used in many years, but the old furnishing of some former Spanish
+owner still told the tale of coaches before the colonnade outside and of
+hidalgo guests within the great house. There was the stately sofa of
+honor flanked by throne-like armchairs, with high-backed ones next in
+line, all once of bright crimson satin and now frazzled and stained. The
+inevitable mirror leaned from its inevitable place over the sofa, but it
+was cracked and the gilt of the heavy frame had tarnished to red. At the
+other end of the sala, a considerable journey, there hung a token of the
+later and Mexican family in possession. The token was of course the
+Virgin of Guadelupe in her flame of gold, as she had gaudily emblazoned
+herself on the blanket, or serape, of a poor Indian. Murguía's print was
+one of thousands of copies of that same revered serape.
+
+Urging them to be seated, clapping his hands for servants, giving
+orders, ever apologizing, the overseer finally got the travelers
+convinced that it was their house and that supper would be ready now
+directly. With a glance at his two companions, Driscoll inquired for the
+señoras of the family, whereupon a sudden embarrassment darkened the
+administrador's fat amiable features.
+
+"Doña Luz, Your Mercy means? Ai, caballero, you are most kind. And you
+tell me that her father will come to-morrow, that he will--surely come?"
+
+"Might we," Jacqueline interposed, "pay our respects to Señor Murguía's
+daughter?"
+
+The poor fellow begged Their Mercies' indulgence, but Doña Matilde, the
+señora aunt of Doña Luz, lay sick in the house. As for Doña Luz, yes,
+Doña Luz had gone to the chapel, as she often did of an evening lately,
+to pray for her aunt's recovery. Doña Luz had vowed to wear sackcloth
+for six months if her dear patron saint, María de la Luz, would but hear
+her petition. Out of compassion, Jacqueline said no more.
+
+Next morning Driscoll was astir early. He wandered through a
+thick-walled labyrinth of corridors and patios, and came at last into a
+rankly luxuriant tropical garden, where the soft perfume of china-tree
+blossoms filled his nostrils. Keeping on he passed many of the hacienda
+buildings, a sugar mill, a cotton factory, warehouses, stables with
+corrals, and entered a tortuous street between adobes, where he found
+the hacienda store. Here the administrador was watching the clerks who
+sold and the peons who bought. The latter were mostly women, barefooted
+and scantily clothed. Their main want was corn, weevil-eaten corn, which
+they carried away in their aprons. They made tortillas of it for their
+men laboring in the hacienda fields, or on the hacienda coffee hills.
+The store was a curious epitome of thrift and improvidence. One wench
+grumbled boldly of short measure. She dared, because she was comely and
+buxom, and her chemise fell low on her full, olive breast. She counted
+her purchase of frijoles to the last grain, using her fingers, and
+glaring at the clerk half coaxingly, half resentfully. But an intensely
+scarlet percale caught her barbarian eye, and she took enough of it for
+a skirt. A dozen cigarettes followed, and by so much she increased her
+man's debt to the hacienda.
+
+A shrunken and ancient laborer was expostulating earnestly with much
+gesturing of skeleton arms, while the administrador listened as one
+habituated and bored. The feeble peon protested that he could not work
+that day. He parted the yellow rags over one leg and revealed decaying
+flesh, sloughing away in the ravages of bone leprosy. He showed it
+without emotion, as some argument in the abstract. And he was arguing
+for a little corn, just a little, and he made his palm into a tiny cup
+to demonstrate. The administrador opened a limp account book, held his
+pudgy forefinger against a page for a second, then shut it decisively.
+"No, no, Pedro, not while you owe these twelve reales. Think, man, if
+you should die. You have no sons; we would lose."
+
+"But, mi patron, there's my nephew."
+
+"True, and he has his own father's debt waiting for him."
+
+"Just a wee little," begged the man.
+
+The overseer shook his head. "When you've worked to-day, yes. Then you
+may have six cents' worth, and the other six cents of the day's wages
+counted off your debt. There now, get along with you to the timber
+cutting."
+
+The administrador brightened on perceiving Driscoll. "How was His Mercy?
+How had His Mercy passed the night? How----"
+
+"Where," interposed Driscoll, "might one find the nearest stage to
+Mexico?"
+
+Almost nowhere, was the reply. What with the French intervention and
+guerrillas, the Compañia de Diligencias had about suspended its service
+altogether. "Then," said Driscoll, "could we hire some sort of a rig
+from you?" The administrador believed so, though he regretted
+continuously that Their Mercies must be leaving so soon.
+
+With a nod of thanks Driscoll turned curiously to the loaded shelves,
+and gazed at the bolts of manta, calico, and red flannel. "Jiminy
+crickets," he burst forth, "is there anybody on this ranch who can sew?"
+
+Yes, the wife of one of the clerks was a passable seamstress. She did
+such work for the Doñas at the House.
+
+"And can she do some to-day, and can you send it on to overtake me by
+to-morrow?"
+
+Most certainly.
+
+Then Driscoll invested in a number of varas of calico print. It was the
+best available. But the light blue flowering was modest enough, and
+there was even a cheery freshness about it that called up mellowing
+recollections of bright-eyed Missouri girls. Yet each time he thought of
+the costumes he had ordered, he blushed until his hair roots tingled.
+
+Intent once more on departure, Din Driscoll hastened back to the House.
+But he only learned that Jacqueline and Berthe were not up yet. He
+mumbled at such looseness in discipline, until he remembered that they
+were not troopers, but girls. And since girls are to be waited for, he
+did it in his own room. From his saddlebags he laid out shaving
+material. The Old Brigade had advised these things, while speculating
+with dry concern on what was correct among emperors. After much sharp
+snapping of eyes, for the razor pulled, the clean line of his jaw
+emerged from lather and stubble. "Just in case any emperor should happen
+in," he tried to explain it, taking a transparently jocose manner with
+himself.
+
+Eight o'clock! Even civilized people do not stay abed that late! Yet he
+found only Berthe in the dining room. She had come on a foraging
+expedition. He watched the little Bretonne's deft arranging of a
+battered tray, and offered droll suggestions until she began to suspect
+that he really did not mean them. Berthe was a nice girl with soft brown
+hair, and a serious, gentle way about her.
+
+The maid found mademoiselle not only still abed, but stretched on a rack
+of torture as well, her helpless gaze fixed on a Mexican woman with a
+hot iron. It was a flatiron, and it was being applied to Jacqueline's
+poor rumpled frock. The dress was spread over a cloth on the floor, and
+the woman strove tantalizingly, and Jacqueline was trying to direct her.
+
+"Madame is served," Berthe announced.
+
+Madame raised herself on an elbow and looked at the tray, at the sorry
+chinaware, at the earthen supplements. "Served?" she repeated. "Berthe,
+exaggeration is a very bad habit. But child, what are you about? This is
+not a petit déjeuner!"
+
+"I know, madame, but he told me to bring it. He said we'd be traveling,
+and there wouldn't be time for a second breakfast."
+
+"_He?_ Who in the world----"
+
+"Why, the, the American monsieur. He said just coffee wasn't enough, and
+for me to bring along the entire contest of marksmanship--the, the whole
+shooting match--and for madame to hurry."
+
+"Berthe! one would say you thought him a prince."
+
+"He--he is a kind of prince," said the little Bretonne doggedly.
+
+Madame whistled softly. Still, she ate a hearty breakfast.
+
+Meantime, outside two resplendent horsemen were galloping up the curving
+sweep of the wide road. Their haste smacked of vast importance, and the
+very dazzling flash of their brass helmets in the sunlight had a certain
+arrogance. The foremost jerked his horse's bit with a cruel petulance
+and drew up before the hacienda house. Several natives were basking on
+the steps, and he cut at them sharply with his whip.
+
+"Wake, you r-rats!" A Teutonic thickness of speech clogged his
+utterance, and he turned to his companion. "Tell this canaille," he
+snarled in Flemish, "to go fetch their master here at once."
+
+The administrador came hurrying, and was overcome. His hospitable flow
+gushed and choked at its source before the splendor of the two
+cavaliers. They were Belgians. The first wore a long blue coat bedecked
+with golden leaves and belted with a sash. Crosses and stars dangled on
+his breast. His breeches were white doe, and his high glossy boots had
+wrinkles like a mousquetaire's. Heavy tassels flapped from his sword
+hilt. A brass eagle was perched on his helmet. Altogether, here was a
+glittering bit of flotsam from the new Mexican Empire. But a narrowness
+between the man's eyes affected one unpleasantly. It was a mean and a
+sour scowl, of a fellow lately come into authority. The other man graced
+the ornate uniform of an aide in Maximilian's imperial household.
+
+"Your Mercy is--is the Emperor?" stammered the poor fat administrador.
+
+He had, indeed, heard rumors of Maximilian on one of his ostentatious
+voyages. The first Belgian, however, was in no way embarrassed at the
+question. It was a natural mistake, in his opinion.
+
+"Explain to this imbecile," he ordered, "since there's no better here to
+receive us."
+
+The aide explained. His Imperial Majesty, Maximiliano, was returning to
+his capital. Fascinated by the beauty of the tropics, as well as ill of
+a cough, he had lingered for a week past at the adjoining hacienda of
+Las Palmas. He had also been deep in studies for the welfare of his
+people. But now the business of the Empire demanded that he relieve the
+Empress of her regency. Accordingly, His Majesty and His Majesty's
+retinue had left Las Palmas that very morning, and would shortly pass by
+the hacienda of Moctezuma. His Majesty, when en voyage, always took a
+loving interest in his subjects, and a sincere ovation never failed to
+touch his heart. So Monsieur Éloin--here the aide glanced with some
+irony at the first Belgian--so Monsieur Éloin thought that the master of
+La Moctezuma would be grateful to know of His Majesty's approach, in
+order to gather the peons from the fields to welcome him. It would be as
+well, perhaps, to reveal nothing to the Emperor of this thoughtful hint.
+
+"To make it quite plain," concluded the speaker, "can you assemble
+enough men within an hour to do a seeming and convincing reverence to
+your ruler?"
+
+"And tell him," interrupted Monsieur Éloin, "not to forget the green
+boughs waving in their hands. Make him understand that there will be
+consequences if it's not spontaneous."
+
+As they galloped back to rejoin Maximilian, the imperial aide was
+thoughtful. "I can't help it," he said aloud, "I feel sorry for him. How
+his blue eyes glisten--there are actually tears in them--when he talks
+to these Indians of freedom and a higher life! He thinks they love him!
+And all this elegance--no wonder they believe that the Fair God is come
+at last to right their sorrows."
+
+"The loathsome beasts!"
+
+"But I do feel sorry. He really believes that he will verify the
+tradition and be their savior. It's his sincere goodness of heart. Man,
+how exalted he is!"
+
+"But where's the harm?"
+
+"Because, because the poor devils were fooled once before. And their new
+Messiah may deceive them as bitterly with unwise meddling as Cortez did
+with greed and cruelty."
+
+"Messiah for these pigs!" Éloin sneered. "What pleasure it gives him,
+_I_ can't see."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE RITUAL
+
+
+  "... a bearded man,
+  Pamper'd with rank luxuriousness and ease."
+                                      --_Dante._
+
+
+The Emperor was coming--elaborately, by august degrees.
+
+First, and far in advance, arrived a haughty pack liveried in the royal
+green of ancient Aztec dynasties. New tenants might have been moving on
+this bright May day, for the flunkies attended a small caravan of
+household stuff, which they crammed through the gaping doorway as nuts
+into a goose's maw. The stuff was all royal, of royalty's absolute
+necessities. There were soft rugs, and finely spun tapestries, and
+portiéres to smother a whisper. There was a high-backed chair, and a
+velvet-covered dais for the high-backed chair. There were brushes, whose
+stroke caressed gently and purringly the Hapsburg whisker. There was a
+Roman poet, fastidiously bound, and then--there was the Ritual.
+
+The Ritual was a massive tome, of glazed, gilt-edged paper, of print as
+big for the proclaiming of truth as the Family Bible, of weight to
+burden a strong man, of contents to stagger a giant brain, unless the
+giant brain had in it the convolution of a smile. Maximilian and
+Charlotte had reigned a year, and so far the Ritual was the supreme
+monument to the glory and usefulness of their Empire. It decreed, by
+Imperial dictation and signature, the etiquette that must and should be
+observed in the courtly circle. But alas, you can't codify
+genuflections, nor yet a handshake.
+
+The next degree in the imperial advent was the imperial courier, who
+proclaimed from a curveting steed what everybody suspected. "Our August
+Sovereign" was approaching.
+
+Several hundred peons stared with open mouths. Gathered before the
+house, they prattled to one another in childlike expectancy of the Señor
+Emperador. Most of them were learning for the first time that they had
+an emperor. Still, it sufficed to know this was an occasion for
+auto-inspiring vivas, like once when the Ilustrísimo Bishop came. They
+took new hold on the green boughs they were to wave. A handkerchief here
+and there fluttered from a bamboo pole. Down in an adobe village by the
+river junction, every gala scrap of calico print, whether shirt or
+skirt, pended from cords stretched across the street; and cotton
+curtains, some of crude drawn work, hung outside the windows. All the
+poor finery of the Indians was on exhibition to do honor to a gorgeous
+Old World court. But the fiesta air had already gotten into the
+susceptible native lungs, and that alone, with only a trumpet's blare,
+would make for a hurrah in genuine fervor.
+
+The roomy porch of the old mansion was crowded with the chief people of
+the hacienda, clerks, foremen, house servants, besides the administrador
+and the chaplain. Behind a remote column were the three wanderers in the
+wilderness; the Storm Centre, the Marchioness, and the Maid. They were
+to have been gone by now, and yet it was not the coming of the emperor
+that had stopped them. The cause was nearer at hand. Smoking a long
+black cigar, "grizzled and fierce, as ornate in braid and decorations as
+a bullfighter," Colonel Dupin had delayed them.
+
+His Cossacks thronged the colonnade. The brick-red of their raw leather
+jackets splotched every other color with rust. The Contra Guerrillas
+were many things. They were Frenchmen and Mexicans. They were Americans,
+Confederate deserters, Union deserters. They were Negroes and Arabs.
+They were the ruined of fortune, now soldiers of fortune. They were
+pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters, gamblers, swindlers.
+They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from the
+guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was
+not a softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity
+could lead them, could hold them.
+
+They surrounded the Missourian on the hacienda portico. If only for his
+debonnaire indifference, they knew him for a "bad man" such as none of
+them might ever hope to be. And they watched him like lynxes, though he
+was unarmed. Yet he did not look "bad." He merely looked bored. He was a
+prisoner, but not the only one. Anastasio Murguía fidgetted among the
+Cossacks on his own porch. His restless eyes roved incessantly over the
+crowd, seeking his daughter, but they were steadily baffled.
+
+Down in the valley, where the Rio Moctezuma joined its course with the
+Pánuco, a dusty mist moved nearer along the old Spanish highway, and
+faintly there came the sound of clarions. An eager murmuring arose from
+the throng on the hillside. It swelled more confidently to a buzz as the
+far-away dust lifted at the ford and revealed the beaded stringing of a
+numerous company. The distant bugles rang clearer on the pure air. "Yes,
+he comes," the people cried, "There! Seest thou, hombre?--_There!_
+Viva el Señor Emperador!"
+
+For Colonel Dupin the cloud of dust would shortly evolve into a staying
+hand of mercy, into the exasperating stupidity of mercy. He had captured
+the American not ten minutes before, and here was interference in a
+gauzy haze of dust. He signed to one of his men to follow with Murguía,
+and he himself placed a gauntleted hand on Driscoll's shoulder. "Now,"
+he said.
+
+But a white figure of Mexican rebosa and silken instep moved swiftly
+from behind a column and touched the Tiger's arm. Both Jacqueline and
+Berthe had been watching the Cossack chief rather than the spectacle in
+the valley. And as he turned on his prisoner, Berthe half screamed and
+clutched at the bosom of her dress. It was Jacqueline who gained his
+side. She addressed him sharply as one who hates to reopen a tedious
+argument.
+
+"Monsieur Dupin," she cried, "have I not already permitted myself to
+tell you--yes, I repeat, you are mistaken. He is in no sense whatever an
+accomplice of Rodrigo Galán."
+
+The Tiger heard, no doubt, but he did not stop. He kept on toward the
+door, Driscoll beside him, and his men around him. He meant to pass
+through the house. Some secluded corral in the back would do for the
+execution. Driscoll seemed as indifferent as ever, though there was a
+lithe, alert spring in his step. Behind him Murguía was moaning, praying
+to see his daughter. Berthe followed, bewildered, and silently wringing
+her hands. But the death march was so business-like, and every one else
+was so intent on the approach of a royally born person, that the crowds
+shoved aside by the little group never once suspected that they had just
+brushed elbows with tragedy in the making.
+
+Jacqueline caught her breath, sucked it in rather, in a pang of angry
+despair; and plucking up her skirts she ran ahead until she could oppose
+her slender figure squarely in front of the burly Frenchman. If he were
+to move on, he must trample her down. Her eyes, usually so big and round
+and shading to a depth of blue with their lively mischief, were all but
+closed, and through the narrowed lashes they gleamed like white steel.
+Her voice, though, was clear and even, of a studied courtesy.
+
+"Yes, I know, Monsieur le Coronel, suspicion with you is quite enough.
+But," she went on in contempt and feigned surprise at his dullness,
+"this rage of yours at being outwitted by Rodrigo Galán blinds you to
+something else.--Pardon, monsieur, a Frenchman does not jostle a
+woman.--Thank you."
+
+"But the jostling by a woman's tongue, mademoiselle.--Well, what is it?
+Have mercy, be brief, since I am not even to breathe while my lady
+talks."
+
+"I was thinking, dear monsieur, of the feelings of an artist, to which
+you are very, very blind."
+
+"Feelings, artist? Name of a name, mademoiselle!"
+
+"Precisely, Maximilian's feelings. You know how he abhors the sight of
+blood. Ma foi, and I agree with him."
+
+"Go it, Miss Jack-leen!" Driscoll abetted her. Never a word of their
+French did he understand, but he knew that she had a power of speech.
+Dupin evidently knew it better yet, for though he laughed, he did not
+laugh easily.
+
+"Never fear," he said, "His Majesty's delicate prejudices are safe. It
+will be all underground before he comes, and no muss at all."
+
+"But you forget," Jacqueline cried testily, "you forget the imagination
+of a poet."
+
+"And he will imagine----"
+
+"Yes, because I shall tell him."
+
+"Sacré----"
+
+"And possibly he would brace his feelings to a second æsthetic horror as
+a rebuke for the first. In a word, my colonel, there will be one more
+body to follow--underground. Now is this quite clear, or--do you require
+my promise on it?"
+
+The savage old brow manifested the desire to make her a victim as well,
+but in this extra blood-thirst she knew that Driscoll was safe. "I
+understand, Mademoiselle la Marquise," he said, laying on heavily the
+suave gallantry of a Frenchman. "Yes, I understand. Prince Max values
+Your Ladyship's good taste so highly---- Pardi, I believe he would
+certainly shoot me if you told him to."
+
+"Exactly," Jacqueline coldly assented.
+
+"And Monsieur l'Americain may congratulate himself on the influence of
+mademoiselle, the arbiter elegantiarum--with His Majesty."
+
+"As Monsieur le Tigre may congratulate himself that the American does
+not understand this insult, sir."
+
+Behind her rose a dry hysterical cackle of renewed hope. "The Little
+Black Crow!" she exclaimed. "See, my colonel, he is not worth an
+execution all to himself, so do we all go back to contemplate Prince
+Max's loving ovation."
+
+"The Emperor arrives!" she cried gayly, returning to the porch. With the
+others she was once more behind the remote column, an end of the rebosa
+hanging over her arm ready to be flung across her face. "But
+what--Hélas, I haven't my Ritual with me."--The Ritual classified every
+movement, every breath of the Court, as rigidly and with as little
+consciousness of humor as Linnæus did his flowers.--"It can't be a Minor
+Palace Luncheon of the Third Class," she mused, "and it isn't Grand
+Court Mourning of the First Degree. Ha, I have it, He--that 'H' is a
+capital, please, not as a sacrilege, but to be Ritualistic--He is out on
+a voyage of the Minor Class, Small Service of Honor, Lesser Cortège. Now
+then, all's comfortable; no room for plebeian misconceptions."
+
+On they came, each rigidly after his kind, a Noah's procession of
+Dignitaries with the August Sovereign first of all. To bring on the
+majestic climax so early was illogical, of course, but dust having
+happened to be created before precedence, the Cortège was changed the
+other way round for a voyage, so that the First Category people breathed
+what the August Sovereign kicked up and kicked up some additional for
+the Second Category, and the Second did the same for the Third, and so
+on down to the Ninth, or "And all others," who breathed the best they
+could and paid the bill.
+
+Nothing preceded the royal coach except the royal escort, and that by
+exactly two hundred paces, in which interval a canonical obligation was
+laid on the dust to settle. It was a particularly gallant royal escort.
+The Empress's Own, or the Dragoons, or Lancers, or Guardsmen, or
+Hussars, or whatever they were, were picked Mexicans; and they were
+frankly proud of their rich crimson tunics; also, perhaps, of their
+heavily fringed standard worked by Carlota herself. A cavalry detachment
+in fur caps with a feather completed the body guard. Mexico is a hot
+country, but that was no reason why an Austrian regiment should
+sacrifice its furry identity.
+
+"Belgians too!" exclaimed Jacqueline. "And the Mexican emigrés! They
+came back when we made it safe for them. But where, oh where, are the
+French?"
+
+"Everywhere," growled the Tiger, "in mountains and swamps, dying
+everywhere, fighting for this Austrian archduke. But he doesn't like to
+be seen with them."
+
+Behind eight white mules of Spain, four abreast, rolled the coach of the
+Emperor, solitary and marked as majesty itself. There were postilions
+and outriders and footmen arrayed in the Imperial livery with the
+Imperial crown. And on the coach door flashed Maximilian's escutcheon,
+his archducal arms grafted on the torso of his new imperial estate.
+There were the winged griffins with absurd scrolls for tails. They had
+voracious claws, had these droll beasts of prey, and they clutched at an
+oval frame ruthlessly, as though to shatter it and get at a certain bird
+within. Poor bird, his shelter looked very fragile, and he about to be
+smothered under an enormous diadem as under an extinguisher. He was none
+other than the Mexican eagle perched on his own native cactus, and he
+desired only peace and quiet while he throttled the snake of ignorance
+in his talons, which snake had been his worry ever since the Aztec
+hordes from the north had first caged him in. Beneath the Imperial arms
+was the motto, "Equidad en la Justicia," but it seemed an idle promise.
+
+In the huge traveling coach, with a greyhound at his feet, sat one lone
+man. He had a soft skin, rosy like a baby's, and blue eyes, and what
+some called a beautiful golden beard. The huzzas swelled and surged from
+all sides, and he smiled on the people. But he gazed beyond them, and
+into the blue eyes came the light of exaltation such as is inspired by
+music that starts a heartstring in vague trembling.
+
+The Cortège followed in carriages one hundred paces apart. The first
+held the First Grand Dignitary, the only Dignitary of Third Category
+rank, and hence the only one who could stand near the throne after
+Highnesses, Grand Collars, and Ambassadors. He was the Grand Marshal of
+the Court and Minister of the Imperial Household. His privileges
+consisted of seeing "His Majesty when called for," and of "communicating
+with Him in writing." But he could not see Him when not called for. In
+reality the Grand Marshal was a quiet old Mexican gentleman who seemed
+ill at ease. He was General Almonte, one of those conservatives who had
+sought their country's tranquillity in foreign intervention. But
+Maximilian had bespangled him into a Dignidad, and thus lost to himself
+an able politician's usefulness. The real man of affairs was an obscure
+Belgian who openly and insolently despised everything Mexican. He also
+sang chansonettes. He was the sour-browed Monsieur Éloin already
+mentioned.
+
+Dignidades enough to make up the Lesser Cortège were not lacking. Riding
+alone was the Chief of the Military Household, who could return no
+salutes when near His Majesty except from First and Second Category
+personages. Under the circumstances, recognition of his own father would
+have been rank heresy. Then there was the Grand Physician, the Grand
+Chaplain, and Honorary Physicians and Chaplains, who could wear Grand
+Uniforms and a Cordon and eat at the Grand Marshal's table; and there
+were Chamberlains and Secretaries of Ceremony and Aides. Many
+surreptitiously peeped into a monster volume as they rode. It was not a
+mass book nor a materia medica. It was the Ritual.
+
+The Sixth Grand Dignitary of Cabellerizo Mayor helped His Majesty to
+descend from His coach. He did it mid vociferous cheering and waving of
+boughs and agitation of handkerchiefs on bamboo poles. Aides and Deputy
+Dignitaries worked industriously driving back the simple Inditos.
+
+"'The General Aide de Camp,'" Jacqueline quoted reverently, "'will keep
+the people from the Imperial coach, but without maiming them.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+HE OF THE DEBONAIR SCEPTRE
+
+
+  "And let us make a name."--_Genesis._
+
+
+The flame of lofty resolve burned with a high, present heat in
+Maximilian's dreamy eyes. But the thing was not statesmanship. The
+danger dial pointed to some latest darling phantasy.
+
+When the young prince--he was but thirty-three--descended from his
+carriage, he signed that the Cortège should not form as yet. And instead
+of mounting the colonnade steps, he turned and mingled with his humble
+subjects. A pleased murmur arose among the Indians. "Que simpático!"
+they breathed in little gasps of admiring awe.
+
+The unusually tall and very fair young man, in the simplicity of black,
+with only the grand cross of St. Stephen about his neck, moved about
+among the ragged peons. Now and again he spoke to one and another,
+questioning earnestly. Anxious orderlies were quick to brush aside the
+touch of an elbow, but to those outside the circle, watching what he
+would do, he seemed alone with his people. And in thought, he really
+was. There was a great pity upon his face, and it was the more poignant
+because these timorous children could not comprehend the wretchedness
+which so appealed to him.
+
+"And thou?" he demanded of an aged man whose tatters hung heavy in
+filth.
+
+A look of poor simple craft came into the Indian's face. "I, señor?
+María purísima, I am cursed of heaven. But the rich señor wishes to
+know--see!" and ere Monsieur Éloin could prevent, he bared a limb of
+rotting flesh. "If it were not for my leg, Your Mercy----"
+
+"_Animal_," snarled Éloin in his ear, "can't you say 'Your
+Majesty'?"
+
+"Your--Majesty, or if I had children, I could make my debt--oh, grande,
+grande, twenty reales, maybe. And then, and then I should have a red and
+purple scrape, with a green eagle, like my nephew Felipe has.--He owes,"
+the man added in a kind of pride, "thirty reales, my nephew Felipe
+does."
+
+But his wiles failed. The rich señor turned toward the colonnade, his
+sailor's easy swing giving way to a tread of determination. Also, the
+pure flame burned consumingly.
+
+From the top of the steps, between files of dismounted Dragoons,
+Maximilian looked over the people, beyond, in some far away gaze of the
+spirit.
+
+Jacqueline hid the golden gleam of her hair under the rebosa.
+"Silencium!" she whispered, laying a finger across her lips. "For now
+we'll have the mountains to frisk, and the little hills to skip. In all
+the Orient there blooms no flower of eloquence like unto his."
+
+The monarch's inspired look promised as much. "Mexicans," he began. The
+peons huddled closer, their responsive natures quickened. His sonorous
+voice was electrical, despite an accent, despite the German over-gush of
+stammering when words could not keep pace with the vast idea. But the
+one word of address gave the peons a dignity they had never suspected.
+
+"Mexicans: you have desired me. Acceding to the spontaneous expression
+of your wishes, I have come to your noble country--our dear patria--to
+watch over and direct your destinies. And with me came one who feels for
+you all the tenderness of a mother, who is your Empress and my August
+Spouse."
+
+"But not," murmured the sententious lady of the rebosa, "august enough
+to appear before Him unless He sends for Her."
+
+Proceeding, the speaker solemnly told them of his divine right as a
+Hapsburg, as one of the Cæsars, and of his anointment by the Vicar of
+God at Rome, so that to God alone was he responsible. As a Mexican he
+gloried with them in their liberties, in the True Liberty he brought,
+for had not the Holy Father said to him, "Great are the rights of a
+people, but greater and more sacred are the rights of the Church?" Hence
+he burned with Heaven-given fire to lift them, his subjects, into the
+vanguard of Nineteenth Century Progress.
+
+Here Maximilian paused mid cheers, and thinking on his next words, his
+delicate hand of a gentleman clenched.
+
+"Mexicans," he began again, now in the vibrant tone of an overpowering
+emotion. "I pray to fulfil the mission for which God has placed me here.
+There are six millions of you, a sober and industrious race. Cortez
+found you so, and you astounded him with your civilization. But the
+conditions that followed have enslaved you. Enslaved, I repeat, for you
+are bound by debt. Your hacendado master contrives that you cannot pay
+even his usurious interest. The food you eat, you must buy from him, at
+his prices, of the quality he prescribes. And if your debt be not
+sufficient, that is, if there seems a chance of your paying it off, then
+you must increase it to obtain your daily bread. Your very children are
+slaves at birth, since with their first birth they inherit your chains.
+And if you or your children run away, you or they may be brought back as
+runaway slaves. It is thus that I find you, Mexicans. And I find you
+awaiting a liberator, waiting vainly through the centuries. But now, at
+last, the reward of your suffering and your faith has come. In a word,
+which shall be formally recorded in the Journal Official, We this day
+decree----"
+
+"I knew it," exclaimed Jacqueline, "he always coins his inspirations."
+
+"----We this day decree your debts extinguished, and each and every peon
+in all our beautiful country--a free man!"
+
+"Yet with not," said Jacqueline, "a foot of land to be free on. But you
+know, messieurs, that Utopia is an asylum for the blind."
+
+"It's a spider on his ceiling," muttered Colonel Dupin, touching his own
+head significantly.
+
+The emancipator's face was beatific. He heard the peons acclaim him, as
+gradually they began to understand that there was to be no more
+unhappiness. But it was curious how far, far away the sweet music
+sounded, even when some belated "Viva el Señor Emperador!" cracked in
+ludicrous falsetto. For the poet-prince these human chords might have
+been the strings of a harp, softly touched. And as far away as
+posterity.
+
+Jacqueline fell to clapping her hands noiselessly. "Oh, lá-lá," she
+cried, "if we are not to have an epic flight from Monsieur Éloin!"
+
+It was true in a degree. Five minutes of stupendous history making had
+just elapsed, and some graceful tribute was due. The royal favorite had
+foreseen the need, and he was prepared; but whether by borrowing or
+originating, it is impossible to say.
+
+  "'Vous l'avez relevé; votre main souveraine
+  L'a rendu d'un seul coup à la famille humaine.
+  De ce premier bienfait, Sire, soyez content:
+  L'Indien fera de vous MAXIMILIEN LE GRAND!'"
+
+"Parbleu, why not?" demanded Jacqueline. "If only he were as great as
+his decrees, poor man!"
+
+Maximilian by this time remembered that he must be somebody's guest.
+"Who receives Us here?" he asked. But none of his court knew. Even
+Monsieur Éloin could only point to the administrador. "Why is your
+master not present?" inquired General Almonte. The administrador opened
+his mouth, and it stayed open. Colonel Dupin had promised to shoot him
+if he breathed a word of Don Anastasio being a prisoner.
+
+[Illustration: THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN]
+
+But someone whispered something to a person on the outskirts of the
+entourage, who passed it on to the very centre till it came to the ear
+of Col. Miguel Lopez of Her Majesty's Dragoons. The someone who
+initiated the message was Don Tiburcio, the watchful herder over one
+golden goose. As a result, an aide rescued Murguía from the claws of the
+Tiger.
+
+Maximilian looked the weazened old man over in disappointment. Here,
+then, was the lord of Moctezuma, an hacendado, and hence one of the
+heavy timbers for his empire building. Don Anastasio scraped awkwardly
+and craved many pardons for not being on hand to welcome His Majesty.
+Overcoming a curious aversion to the man, the emperor straightway
+invested him with the newly created order of Civil Merit, and Don
+Anastasio, without a peon to till his fields or to oil his machinery,
+quaked under the honor of a copper medal.
+
+"And," pursued the monarch, "We find a need of stout officials, for We
+have been grieved to learn of hacendados who secretly aid the prowling
+rebellious outlaws that infest our country.--And as We must have a
+prefect in this district of an integrity like your own, it pleases Us,
+dear caballero, to name you jefe político."
+
+The new jefe's greenish eyes contracted in terror. He thought of the
+brigands whom magistrates were supposed to discourage, and he tried to
+frame excuses.
+
+"Accept, you fool," someone whispered. "Mexicans can't refuse
+office--that's decreed." It was Don Tiburcio, his sombrero against his
+breast. To Murguía the Roman sword on the crown seemed more than ever
+emblematic of "Woe to the conquered." In a veritable panic he accepted.
+
+As it was fitting that this day of a people's emancipation should be
+commemorated by public praise to Almighty God, the Lesser Cortège
+formed, and careful of precedence, went to worship their Maker. The
+freedmen trooped after, waving jubilee branches.
+
+The little church of the hacienda stood on a barren knoll, mid chaparral
+and graves. The curate's white adobe adjoining was the only near
+habitation. A stone walk as wide as the church itself approached for a
+hundred yards, sloping up from a pasture below. The one tower opened on
+four sides for the better ease of the bell ringers. Its bright mosaic
+peak rose peaceful and still in the clear air.
+
+The Emperor and suite arranged themselves within, and the Inditos gaped
+stolidly outside, to hear the Te Deum for their broken shackles. At the
+most solemn moment, the Grand Chaplain availed himself of his exclusive
+privilege, which was to present the Gospel to the royal lips. Assisting
+him in the general service was the hacienda curate. This curate,
+obscurely found in the Huasteca wilds and yet not a Mexican, was a large
+sleek man whose paunch bulged repulsively under the priestly surplice.
+His flabby jowls hung down, and gave his head the shape of a pea, in the
+top of which were the eyes set close together. They were restless
+fawning little eyes and they roved constantly. But more than aught else,
+they were adventurous; two bright, glowing beads of adventure. From the
+folds of dull yellow flesh they peered forth at the august worshipers.
+They hovered first over the Emperor before his cushioned
+_prie-dieu_. Then, in hungry search, they began to roam. They
+lingered with General Almonte for a moment, but darted on, unsatisfied.
+They fluttered yet longer over Miguel Lopez, the gorgeously uniformed
+colonel of Dragoons, and left him only reluctantly. But when they
+lighted on Monsieur Éloin, they gleamed. There was no longer
+uncertainty. They laid bare the man as the print of a mass-book, and
+found him profitable reading. After that, the adventurous orbs returned
+to their larger prey, the Emperor, and gorging themselves, scintillated
+more adventurously than ever.
+
+And such a feast as the unconscious Hapsburg afforded the ghoul of a
+priest! It was a loathsome surgery; greedy fingers trembling on the
+knife, the victim's soul flayed, each nerve of a vanity, or tendon of an
+ambition, or full-throbbing vein of hope, each and all lifted one by one
+from the clotted mass and scrutinized exultantly. There was not a
+feature but held a revelation as sure as vivisection. The high, broad
+forehead of a gentle poet was often shaded by a dreamy melancholy, but
+never once did it furrow in either craft or cruelty. In that the priest
+knew his man for a devout mystic, knew him for a child confidingly
+looking to a Destiny to inspire his every footstep. Then there was the
+beard. It was too great a wealth of whisker, its satin, glossy flow of
+too dandified a precision. The delicate finger tips stroked it softly,
+affectionately, to the left; then softly, affectionately to the right;
+and always dreamily. But the most shameless traitor of all was the lower
+lip. It was the Hapsburg lower lip, heavy and thick and sensuous, and
+ill-fated. Hanging partly open under the silken drooping moustache, it
+revealed the spoiled child of royalty, who mistakes obstinacy for
+decision, and changes whims with despotic petulance. Maximilian believed
+in his star. But a lower lip is more potent than predestination. He need
+only have leaned close to his mirror. Then he might have seen what the
+priest saw so clearly.
+
+Maximilian paused on coming out. The freedmen were just rising from
+their knees among the thorns and stones. Then it occurred to the
+liberator that their participation in the rejoicing was not exactly,
+ah--conspicuous. "Would you not think it well, father," said he to the
+Grand Chaplain, "that these poor people partake of the holy communion on
+this day that has been so eventful for them? If you approve, let it be
+ordered that----"
+
+"But Sire----"
+
+Maximilian turned quickly, a pleased smile on his lips. The interruption
+came in his own tongue, in German. And he who had spoken was a German.
+It was the hacienda curate. His voice was soft, and purring with
+deference. He wished to say, with permission, that the holy sacrament
+for the Inditos was out of the question; scarcely one of them had been
+baptized.
+
+"Not baptized!" Maximilian exclaimed. "And this, is this fulfilling your
+sacred obligations?"
+
+The curate bowed his head. He had found them thus, when he first came, a
+few weeks ago.
+
+"And you came----"
+
+"From Durango, sire, where as secretary I served His Señoría
+Ilustrísimo, the Bishop of the state." But, as he meekly explained, he
+had sought the Lord's service among the Huastecans. Pastors were said to
+be needed, yet never had he imagined----He stopped short, in naïve
+embarrassment.
+
+Maximilian appreciated his delicacy in not wishing to reflect on the
+Huasteca bishop. But from others he learned that neither baptism nor
+other spiritual office had been performed in the community for years and
+years, and that the bishop resided in the capitol, because among his
+flock he had neither comforts nor a befitting state.
+
+"But why," Maximilian demanded sternly, "have you not put to use the few
+weeks you have been here?"
+
+The curate's small eyes leaped to adventure. But he lowered them
+hastily, and folded his hands over his rounded soutane. He had heard
+that His Majesty might come, he said, and he had presumed so far as to
+hope that His Majesty might deign to act as godfather for the poor
+Indians, and so he had waited.
+
+Nothing could have pleased Maximilian more, and he looked at the good
+priest with an awakening favor. "Then let it be this afternoon," he
+commanded. "I will stand their sponsor."
+
+"----Before God, who will bless Your Majesty," murmured the priest.
+
+And to be brief, let it be recorded that they were baptized by the
+hundred, with hurried pomp--"pompes à incendie," as the godfather
+himself described it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+RATHER A SMALL MAN
+
+
+  "Besides the queene, he dearly loved a fair and comely dame."
+                                --_The Ballad of Fair Rosamond._
+
+
+Jacqueline was protesting to a worried personage in Grand Uniform. The
+personage was the Cerberus of the Emperor's antechamber, and he barred
+her way. He was newly a personage, and did not know Jacqueline.
+
+"But, Señor Oficial de Ordenes," she insisted, "don't you see that if I
+put my name in your old register there, the man will be shot while your
+Dignitaries are deciding to grant my audience!"
+
+"Shot?" vaguely repeated the monarchial flunkey. He was a Mexican, and
+took his unfamiliar responsibilities seriously. He turned to the Book of
+Court Etiquette on the centre table.
+
+"I tell you," exclaimed the impatient girl, "you won't find any
+precedence for shooting in that thing. A doomed man hasn't any, take the
+word of the Dama Mayor."
+
+"Dama Mayor?" This was more tangible, and the Grand Uniform seized on it
+gratefully. "But," and he quoted from the Ritual in triumph, "no Dama
+can present herself except on matters of service."
+
+Jacqueline hedged guilefully. "Of course not," she agreed, "and it's
+precisely that why I must see His Majesty. It's about, about a piece of
+valencienne he wished me to bring the Empress from Europe."
+
+The Oficial de Ordenes hesitated. "But the man to be shot?"
+
+"No matter, the lace is my business."
+
+With which assurance, the Grand Uniform presumed to announce la Señorita
+Marquesa d'Aumerle. He reappeared at once from the inner apartment. The
+Emperor's order to admit her that instant rather disturbed his faith in
+the Ritual and the leisurely decorum it prescribed.
+
+Hardly had she stepped within the portières than someone caught her
+hand, and she saw Maximilian bending over it. There was an involuntary
+warmth in his formal courtier grace. The only other occupant of the
+hacienda sala was Bebello, the greyhound. He sprang up from a Hungarian
+bear rug, and frisked about her joyfully. Her greeting to him was
+equally sincere. Quietly releasing her hand, she patted him fondly, and
+cooed endearing French. "My little Tou-Tou! Pauvre petite bête!" Then,
+raising her head, she seemed to perceive His Majesty, "Isn't a bit
+older, is he, sire?"
+
+"Mademoiselle!" the man exclaimed reproachfully.
+
+All the time he was staring at her. He stared at the tempestuous
+ruffling of her petticoat, which had a wanton air that was most
+disturbing, at the rebosa tossed rakishly over her shoulder, with the
+waistline beneath as languorously suggested as though she were
+Spanish-born to rebosas, and lastly, at a freckle on the very tip of the
+creamy nose. He admired extravagantly, but he was no less amazed to see
+her at all. A moment before he had supposed her demurely breaking hearts
+at St. Cloud, and Paris under her feet. He knew how capable she was. It
+had happened to him. How he had sought her, before she left! And how
+maddening she was! He could recall nothing of encouragement, and yet,
+blind, susceptible fool, he had never ceased to be encouraged. She was a
+master craftsman, since her art was hidden. Then she had gone back to
+France; some said because of a note from Napoleon. But he was of the
+gloomy opinion that she had simply ceased to amuse herself. Yet for all
+that, here she was again, and the astonished prince was eager to suffer
+yet more, if it amused her still.
+
+She explained in a word, as though their meeting in the Huasteca were
+nothing extraordinary. Away from Mexico, she had discovered that she
+wanted to return to Mexico. The man left in Mexico would have augured
+much from this, but at her matter-of-fact tone the glad light faded from
+his eyes. Jacqueline, by the way, was a good manager. She reminded him
+that she had no mother nor father nor other relative in France--which
+disposed of France. Then, though he winced, she added that the
+experiment of a New World court was a novel spectacle and she enjoyed it
+more than the conventional affairs in Europe. Accordingly she would
+resume her place as first lady of honor. At Tampico she had wearied of
+ocean travel, and--well, that was all.
+
+Maximilian shuddered. He imagined the terrors she must have encountered.
+"But, mademoiselle, the bandits? You did not come alone through that
+terrible coast country?"
+
+"Of course not, sire. And that's why I reveal myself to Your Majesty.
+You are to save the person that brought me."
+
+"Have mercy, mademoiselle. One must leap too far who hopes to understand
+you."
+
+"But there's nothing to understand. Your Majesty has only to keep
+Colonel Dupin from shooting him."
+
+Maximilian frowned heavily at the Frenchman's name.
+
+"On the porch just now," Jacqueline explained, "when you finished
+speaking, he--the man I am speaking of--announced that he wanted to see
+you, but the Tiger drew his pistols to shoot him if he moved."
+
+"Then naturally your friend did not move?"
+
+"Your Majesty does not know him. But he stopped for me."
+
+"Were you so afraid Dupin would lose his prisoner?"
+
+"I had no desire to see the prisoner commit suicide. But I had to
+promise him that he should see Your Majesty later."
+
+"To beg----"
+
+"He is not one to whine for his life, sire. It is other business he
+means. But Your Majesty need not hear his business. Your Majesty need
+only _see_ him. Besides, it would hardly be court usage, granting
+him an audience so informally, would it?"
+
+"N-o, but if I am not to hear him, why should I see him?"
+
+"To save his life, parbleu!"
+
+"And why, since he is not concerned about that?"
+
+"But I am, sire, and I count on Your Majesty to help me repay an
+obligation."
+
+Maximilian was quick at clemency, but no one likes to have his
+weaknesses played upon.
+
+"Mademoiselle, who is this man? What has he done?"
+
+"An American, sire." Maximilian frowned. "A Confederate, I believe." The
+frown vanished. "And Colonel Dupin believes him to be an accomplice of
+Rodrigo Galán. But he is not. He fought Rodrigo Galán, in--in my
+behalf."
+
+Maximilian frowned again. "And so," he said, trying to do it lightly, "I
+have this unknown American to thank for the pleasure of seeing you,
+mademoiselle? Otherwise, I should not have known that you were here,
+and----"
+
+He stopped. The gray eyes were laughing at him. Was his jealousy then so
+apparent? And was it jealousy? Evidently, since she had discovered it.
+And that vexed him, because he had supposed that he was hiding his pique
+under a great self control. Angrily he stepped toward her, but the saucy
+eyes only grew merrier. Then his mood changed. He resolved grimly on
+open fighting. He meant to have either decisive honors or a decisive
+repulse. For it was his tantalizing doubts of her that made her laugh at
+him. Yet, when he spoke, he could not help the quaver of entreaty in his
+voice.
+
+"Mademoiselle, tell me, _why_ have you returned?"
+
+The question was so abrupt and so stern, she thought in a flash that he
+must have penetrated that Napoleonic intrigue which had flung her back
+upon the Western shores. But Maximilian believed he knew another reason
+for her pallor, and was encouraged.
+
+"You have already given one answer, mademoiselle," he hurried on, "and
+in too great a humility to dare hope it otherwise, I took you at your
+word. But now that you mock me--ah, you shall confess, you are back in
+Mexico on _my_ account!"
+
+"And would that merit this august displeasure, sire?"
+
+Her words sprang from relief; he suspected nothing of her secret
+mission. So the color might flood to her cheeks again, the mischief to
+her eyes, and with it a most perilous daring.
+
+For the Hapsburg, it was coy surrender.
+
+"Mademoiselle--Jacqueline!"
+
+Her name! The old nickname fondly given her in childhood, when she was a
+torment, and an anarchist to all law, and got innumerable scoldings, and
+basked unperturbed in love and adoration! Her name, that only Mexico had
+tainted! For the first time it passed his lips. But the sweet, quaint
+syllables had long been in his thoughts, with something, too, of the
+early worship in their bestowal.
+
+Curiously enough, a whimsical hardy figure in homespun gray took acute
+shape in her mind's eye. The features were oddly sharp and clear. There
+was even the rough trooper's disdain, which had been in his expression
+when first he saw her, but which she had not noticed at the time. She
+brushed the vision aside haughtily, as she would have done had the man
+himself intruded. But she could not stem so easily the wave of self
+disgust that swept her back from this other man, a prince of Europe. And
+when she smothered that self-abasement, it was a matter of will. She
+recalled her interview with the Sphinx in the Tuileries. She recalled
+her country, and the empire she meant to win, a gift to France, worthy
+of Napoleon, of the Great Napoleon. Then her will became as a master
+outside of self, and horrid in its iron cruelty. She half lifted her
+hand, and allowed the royal prince to possess it.
+
+The tapestry behind them parted and fell. A light step crossing the room
+was suddenly arrested, and a low bewildered cry, half stifled in the
+utterance, arrested them.
+
+"Fernando!"
+
+The Emperor straightened and wheeled. Turning round, Jacqueline placidly
+surveyed a young girl, and her brows arched. She was not deceived. There
+was recognition in the startled gaze of the newcomer, and of Maximilian
+too. Only for Jacqueline did the situation hold aught that was amusing.
+
+She was Mexican, a beautiful Mexican. She might have been Spanish too,
+or Moorish even, or perhaps to say that she seemed a gentle, drooping
+Egyptian would give the better idea of her dark loveliness. Under her
+skin, under a faintest tinge of brown, the rich blood drove its color
+through, and blending with that other shade, made the cheeks a dusky
+ruby, and seemingly softer and warmer. Her figure had prettily rounded
+curves, and her wine-red dress and the filmy black shawl over her
+shoulders deepened the tender, trusting depths of two large black eyes.
+The long lashes were wet with tears. She looked once at the calm French
+woman, as though afraid of her, and then at Maximilian, and at
+Maximilian alone. Her gaze was vacant, groping, non-comprehending, yet
+with a something of heartbreak in the beginning of comprehension.
+
+To the Hapsburg came the dignity of proud generations, exalted above
+mere human scrutiny. He turned to Jacqueline, "As you see,
+mademoiselle," he said coldly, "the stupid lackeys outside have admitted
+a second visitor. If you will excuse us----"
+
+"But Fernando----"
+
+This time the girl's moan throbbed with questioning. She was as far from
+understanding as before. But she noted unconsciously his princely
+bearing, his European dress, and the luxury about him in the transformed
+hacienda sala. Her eyes, in spite of grief and doubts, shone with timid,
+admiring love. "Que elegante!" she breathed. "Oh, is he not, truly, a
+caballero!"
+
+"Fernando?" murmured Jacqueline. "Bonté divine, this _is_ bucolic!"
+
+"But Fernando," the girl persisted, "who is there to--to admit me? I
+only come from my room." With a tremulous gesture she indicated a door
+which the imperial scene shifters had covered with portières.
+Maximilian's surprise at the existence of such a door was genuine. "And
+I find," she cried, "I find you here, you, Fernando?"
+
+"There, there, señorita," said Jacqueline kindly, "His Majesty, I
+imagine, can explain----"
+
+"Majesty?" exclaimed the girl. "Don Fernando--Majesty?" Yet a third time
+she repeated it, as by rote; and, very slowly, understanding grew into
+the words, and with understanding, terror. The dark innocent eyes went
+appealingly from one to the other, and the lids began to flutter wildly
+in a kind of spasm. "Majesty? Majesty?" Then, suddenly, she flung both
+hands to her face, and a piteous shivering racked her body.
+
+"Catch her, stupid!" cried Jacqueline. "Don't you see, the child is
+fainting!"
+
+But it was into Jacqueline's readier arms that she fell, and it was
+Jacqueline who let her slip gently into the high-back chair that was the
+imperial throne en voyage, under the claws of the oaken Hapsburg
+griffins.
+
+"Get water! quick--Majesty, you--your cologne flasks!"
+
+[Illustration: "MARIA DE LA LUZ"
+"The tapestry behind them parted and fell"]
+
+A mist was in the prince's eyes. "Pobrecita, pobrecita," he muttered
+helplessly.
+
+On Jacqueline depended what was next to be done. She ran to the door by
+which the girl had entered. "See, there's a corridor here," she cried,
+"and that must be her room, there at the end, where the door is open.
+Help me carry her--unless," and she deliberately punctuated her scorn,
+"unless Your Majesty desires to call for aid?"
+
+But His Majesty was so far from desiring anything of the kind that he
+nodded gratefully, impatiently. So to her own room they bore her between
+them, and laid her on the bed there. A pewter waiter with napkin and
+coffee service was on a little table. But the tiny loaf of pan de huevo
+lay untouched. Her thoughts rather than appetite had possessed the girl
+when she awoke that morning, and they had kept her until she emerged to
+stumble upon an emperor in her father's house.
+
+"Out of here," ordered Jacqueline. "I am going to call the servants."
+She had no sympathy for his wistful, forlorn gazing.
+
+"It's the end, the end of my idyl," he murmured.
+
+"_Are_ you going?"
+
+He came nearer instead, and looked in profound melancholy at the girl.
+The ruby flush was no longer there, and the face was olive and waxen.
+The lips were parted, baring teeth that were marvelously white. The
+shawl had fallen to the floor, and an ivory cross on a chain about her
+neck caught his eye. He turned it over in his hand, and on the gold,
+where the chain was attached, he saw an inscription.
+
+"María de la Luz," he read. "So, that is her name. But I never asked it.
+Identity would have blighted the idyl."
+
+"Sire," Jacqueline protested angrily, "this poor child needs help. I
+shall----"
+
+"One moment, mademoiselle, I wish to say that I still do not know who
+she is."
+
+Then, with a last sorrowful look, he turned back to his apartment of
+state.
+
+Jacqueline's lip curled as she watched him go.
+
+"And you wish me to find out who she is?" she apostrophized his back.
+"But I shall not tell you. And she--no, she is not the kind that would,
+knowing who _you_ are."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+LITTLE MONARCHS, BIG MISTAKES
+
+
+  "How now, good fellow? wouldst thou speak with us?"
+  "Yea, forsooth, an your mistership be emperial."
+                                --_Titus Andronicus._
+
+
+For the moment, Colonel Dupin had established headquarters in the
+granary, which was a long, low adobe among the stables, with a pasture
+between it and the House. The pasture opened on the highway through a
+wide gap in the hacienda wall, and the coaches and steeds of the
+imperial party which had passed in that morning gave the old cow lot a
+gala air. The colonel was seated before a box, improvised into a desk,
+and his rusty jacketed Cossacks lounged everywhere. Tiburcio and other
+scouts were reporting on the dead and wounded of yesterday's raid. A
+maimed enemy brought a chuckle deep in the Tiger's throat, but any
+mishap to one of his own darlings got the recognition of a low-growled
+oath. He was busy over this inventory of profit and loss when Jacqueline
+appeared with the Emperor.
+
+Dupin arose and saluted after the grim manner of an old soldier. The
+half-dozen of obsequious courtiers he did not see at all, but to
+Jacqueline he bent from the waist with a duellist's punctilio. His
+countrywoman was the one adversary whom he never thought of cursing.
+
+There was an opening innuendo. "No, Colonel Dupin," Maximilian reproved
+him sternly, "I have not come to interfere with justice. I merely desire
+to see what prisoners you have here."
+
+Driscoll and Murguía were brought in. Maximilian stared dumfounded at
+his new magistrate in the rôle of criminal. Don Anastasio looked
+apologetic. They had locked him up in his own stable, bronze medal and
+all. Dupin explained. This Murguía, like many another hacendado, had
+long been suspected of aiding the guerrillas, and yesterday morning he
+had actually set him, Dupin, on a false trail. The Contras were tracking
+one of Rodrigo Galán's accomplices in the abduction of Mademoiselle
+d'Aumerle. The accomplice was the other prisoner, the American, whom
+they had found at last taking refuge at Murguía's own hacienda. Here he
+had had the effrontery to welcome them as mademoiselle's rightful
+escort, had even seemed surprised when a dozen Contras pounced upon him
+from behind and disarmed him. Dupin added that mademoiselle herself was
+deceived by the American's cunning, and he did not doubt but that she
+still persisted in his innocence. He might speak further of the fellow's
+part in the ambush and murder of Captain Maurel near Tampico, but he
+confessed that that required further investigation.
+
+No one could say that Maximilian had so much as listened. Such tangles
+had long since become irksome, though he never ceased plunging into the
+mesh. To unravel details, and incidentally confuse them more, was a
+notorious mania with the poet-prince. But his thoughts now were all for
+a girl who had fainted. Murguía he would leave to a court martial. If
+guilty, the medal should be torn from his breast. Don Anastasio's
+terrors, however, ran on the other penalties of court martial.
+
+"Now you," Maximilian turned to the American, "I understand that you
+wish to see me. But you must know that law prevails in Mexico at last,
+and that even the Emperor may not keep a man from trial."
+
+Driscoll's chin lifted eagerly. "Certainly not, but my business with
+you, sir----"
+
+"Not 'sir,'" whispered Jacqueline. "You must call him 'sire.'" Little
+she cared for etiquette, but she did not propose that Driscoll should
+broach his errand.
+
+Maximilian overheard and smiled. "Yes," he said, "one tiny letter added,
+and you change a man into a sovereign."
+
+Now Jacqueline, for her purposes, had thought to disconcert the man
+unused to courts. But it struck her at once that nothing of the kind
+would happen. His easy naturalness was too much a part of him, was the
+man himself. And she was glad of it. She was glad of the something
+distinguished which his earnestness gave to the clean-cut stamp of jaw
+and forehead. He had stopped and looked at them inquiringly, as an eager
+speaker will when interrupted. Then his brown eyes deepened, and there
+was a tugging at the corners of his mouth. He seemed to comprehend. If
+this was their humor, he would play to it. A diplomat must be all things
+to the people he is after.
+
+"'Sire?' W'y," and his drawl was exquisite, "that's what we call the
+daddy of a horse."
+
+Jacqueline turned quickly, clapping her hand over her mouth. Maximilian
+was always uneasy when Jacqueline did that.
+
+"To be sure," he observed affably, "our American friend is not so far
+wrong. Listen, am I not the father of my people?"
+
+The entourage buzzed admiringly at the imperial cleverness; all except
+Jacqueline, who now that she should laugh and relieve the situation,
+obstinately pulled a long, blank face.
+
+Maximilian's tone changed. He meant to wound now, and did. "So," he
+added, with chilling stress, "it's 'sire,' if you will be so good as to
+remember."
+
+Driscoll flushed as though struck. He became aware that it was all some
+patronizing rebuke.
+
+"There is one," he answered gently, "who taught me manners at her knee,
+or tried to, and _she_ never hurt a mortal human being by a word in
+her life, but that, that, sir, seems to be where _you_ have missed
+it. Now look here," he went on, kindling in spite of himself, "I respect
+any man who has grounds--discoverable grounds--for respecting himself,
+and if you are a man, then 'sir' won't overtop you any."
+
+Colonel Lopez of the Dragoons nudged him anxiously. "Don't say 'you';
+say 'Your Majesty.'"
+
+"Better let him alone," Maximilian interposed wearily. "He recognizes in
+me a man, and--it's not unpleasant. But which," he added, "gives me
+leave to hope that as a man himself he will not cringe before the
+drum-head."
+
+"May I," said Driscoll quietly, "have one minute with you alone? It's
+not about myself, I promise you that. But for you, sir, it's of the very
+greatest importance."
+
+Instantly all stirred with curiosity, except Maximilian. All there were
+keenly affected by the stranger's mysterious business with the Emperor,
+except the Emperor himself. And each man's wits were straightway alert,
+according to the hates and ambitions of each. Even Miguel Lopez, dense
+of understanding, had his suspicions. Murguía's yellow features darkened
+malevolently. The hacienda priest whispered to M. Éloin, and M. Éloin,
+brushing the man of God aside as though he had been thinking of the very
+same thing himself, tried to get a word with Maximilian. But Jacqueline
+spoke first to the Emperor. She knew the susceptibility of the royal
+ear. Maximilian nodded at what she said, and Éloin bit his lip.
+Maximilian glanced at the American's clothes. Homespun did not
+correspond with pressing business of state, to his mind.
+
+"My good man," he said, caressing his beard, "it's not regular, you
+know. Another time, perhaps, when you can have yourself inscribed by Our
+Grand Chamberlain and when your application for an audience----"
+
+"But if these señores shoot me before then?"
+
+Maximilian shrugged his shoulders. In any case, the Ritual would suffer
+no outrage.
+
+"But I tell you," cried the exasperated Missourian, "this thing is
+serious. And it can't wait either, not if it's to help you any. I may be
+too late now. I don't know what's happened since I started down here
+three weeks ago. Richmond was in danger then. And the Army of Northern
+Virginia--General Lee----"
+
+"Have surrendered," calmly interposed the Emperor.
+
+Driscoll stiffened as he stood, his lips parted as his last word had
+left them. He wondered why these foreign, unsympathetic beings of
+Austria and France and Belgium and Germany and Mexico looked so blurred
+to him. He never imagined that there were tears in his eyes.
+
+"It is really true," continued Maximilian, addressing them all. "A
+courier brought me the news this morning. Yes, my friends, the North is
+free at last to attack our Empire. But," he added blandly, "let us not
+fear, not while we are sustained by the unconquered legions of France."
+
+"How he remembers us now!" thought Jacqueline.
+
+She thought too of him who had sent the legions. The entire fabric of
+Napoleon's dream of Mexican empire was builded on the dismemberment of
+the American Union. But, as the Southerners began so well by themselves,
+Napoleon had left them to do his work alone. He just failed of genius.
+
+"Oh, mon petit, _bien_ petit Napoleon," she cried in her soul, "how
+terribly you have miscalculated!"
+
+The room had filled with murmurs, with awed whispering, with frightened
+questioning looks at one's neighbor, with ambitions and hates gone
+panic-stricken. Driscoll came forward. The fellow of homespun held the
+Empire in his hand, if they but knew it. "Now let me deliver my
+message," he said earnestly. "And, afterward, on with the drum-head,
+I'll not complain."
+
+"There, there," spoke the unseeing monarch, though affected by the
+dignity of sorrow, "you shall have no cause. I came here, meaning to
+pardon."
+
+"Pardon?" came the Tiger's growl. "Your Majesty saves so many enemies,
+does he fear that soon he will have none left?"
+
+"Perhaps, Colonel Dupin, since my imperial brother, Napoleon, sends me
+so efficient a bloodhound. But I thought the prisoners were already
+tried and condemned. That must come first, of course. Yet We are
+constrained to find another judge, one without preconceived notions of
+guilt, to hold the court martial. Ah yes, as Monsieur Éloin here
+suggests, I name Colonel Lopez.--Colonel Lopez, you will stay behind
+with a company of your own men. Finish the trial to-night, if you can,
+and overtake me before I reach the city.--Colonel Dupin, I have to
+request yourself and men as escort, to replace the Dragoons left with
+Colonel Lopez. And you, Mademoiselle d'Aumerle, shall have a carriage.
+We start this afternoon. You will be ready, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Is Your Majesty quite resolved," Jacqueline asked in French, "that the
+American must be tried? He can easily be found guilty, I warn Your
+Majesty."
+
+"And is that not reason enough?"
+
+"Reason enough that he should not be tried, since he is not guilty. But
+perhaps Your Majesty has thought of sending him under guard to the
+frontier, back to his own country, where he would not longer be an
+annoyance?"
+
+"My dear young lady," returned the Emperor, "it seems that you expect me
+to blot out the processes of law simply because even I cannot make them
+infallible. But you do not answer my question. I offer you protection to
+the City?"
+
+"He must stand trial then?"
+
+"Yes--but will you be ready to start this afternoon?"
+
+"Your Majesty should know that I cannot accept."
+
+"Does this trial interest you so much, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Thanking Your Majesty," said Jacqueline coldly, "I should rather not
+accompany him."
+
+Maximilian swung on his heel and called Lopez aside. "Mi coronel," he
+said, "when you follow to-morrow, you will offer to bring the Señorita
+d'Aumerle, if she desires it.--And Lopez, you remember the young Mexican
+girl we used to meet near here, during the last few evenings?"
+
+"When you and I, sire, would ride over from Las Palmas incognito?"
+
+"Yes. She was able to--to tell me much about the peon life, and I should
+like to reward her in--in some way. Do you know, Miguel, I suspect she
+lives on this very ranch. It was at the church here that we would meet
+her, you know? And now, since I must leave, I wish you to find her.
+Induce her to come with mademoiselle to the City under your escort.
+Assure her that she shall have an honored place at court.--Jove, there's
+my new order of San Carlos for women! She shall have that for--for
+aiding my researches among the peons. Now, Miguel mio, do your best!"
+
+With which words Maximilian turned back alone, and as he went, he
+thought how as a simple man he had won a maiden's heart. He had been
+learning that a prince may miss one or two very dear things in life.
+"It's ended, the little ranchero idyl," he murmured. "But there's been
+no harm. She shall not regret it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+A TARTAR _AND_ A TARTAR
+
+
+  "But all's brave that youth mounts and folly guides."
+                                      --_As You Like It._
+
+
+As Maximilian crossed the pasture, he suddenly had to jump aside with
+considerable sprightliness. A brace of horsemen came swerving through
+the gateway from the highroad and tore down upon him as though the Day
+of Judgment galloped behind. They were abreast, ten feet apart, but the
+oddest thing was a lariat that dangled between them, from saddle-horn to
+saddle-horn.
+
+The thunder of hoofs brought Dragoons and Cossacks and Dignitaries, and
+emptied the granary. Even insane horsemen could see that the Empire was
+encamped over that cow lot. And as nearer they rushed, the two maniacs
+seemed to recognize the fact. One was straightway more anxious to
+arrive; a directly opposite effect was apparent in the other. And there
+was the rope between them, from saddle-horn to saddle-horn. Their
+opinions on destination, unexpectedly diverging, promised something. And
+since one wanted to stop and the other to hasten, the something was not
+long in happening.
+
+One of the horsemen--he wore a sombrero--leaned back frantically. The
+other--who wore a battered soldier cap--passed ahead like the wind. The
+lariat twanged, but held. Sombrero's horse got its feet planted. The
+horse of Soldier Cap slowed to a standstill, and panted. Sombrero flung
+out his pistol, Soldier Cap his. They aimed at each other, the triggers
+snapped, no report. They looked amazed, embarrassed; and tried again.
+Same result. "Por Dios!" "Sacré nom!" They hurled the pistols, each at
+the other's head. Both ducked. Sombrero wheeled, drove home the spurs,
+and headed for retreat. Soldier Cap and horse braced themselves against
+the shock. The spectators, running nearer, now perceived that the lariat
+was tied round each man's waist as well as wrapped over his pommel.
+Soldier Cap weathered the jolt, next plunged suddenly closer, and in the
+instant of the slack, unwound the rope from his saddle and leaped to the
+ground. In two leaps more he had Sombrero about the neck. They fell
+together, rolling and fighting, while Sombrero's horse reared and plowed
+the soil with them. Dragoons and Cossacks heaped themselves on all
+three. It was quite an energetic mystery altogether.
+
+Under the soldier cap, under dust and blood and scratches, Jacqueline
+caught glimpses of a happy face.
+
+"Oh lá-lá, it's--it's Michel!"
+
+"Rodrigo Galán!" roared the Tiger, in his turn recognizing Sombrero.
+"Here, up with him! Six of you, quick there, in line, shoot him!"
+
+It was near the sweetest moment of the old warrior's life.
+
+"One moment, colonel!" someone spoke quietly. "Is it a Huastecan custom,
+by the way, to shoot a cavalier the instant he--ah--dismounts?"
+
+"But this scoundrel is Rodrigo Galán, Your Majesty. And that black
+horse, sacré tonnerre, that is Maurel's horse. Captain Maurel, sire,
+whom he murdered!"
+
+Don Rodrigo straightened pompously. "Your Most Opportune Majesty--" he
+began.
+
+"Also, Colonel Dupin," Maximilian continued, "he waylaid the Belgian
+ambassador, sent by Leopold, brother to Our August Spouse."
+
+"The more reason to shoot him, pardi!"
+
+"Without doubt, monsieur. But his execution must have éclat. Europe must
+know that Mexican outlaws do not go unpunished.--Colonel Lopez, you will
+take charge of Our prisoner. Guard him well, and bring him with you to
+the City. He shall be tried there, with every ceremony."
+
+Colonel Dupin, that policeman of the backwoods forced upon Mexico by
+Napoleon, could only grind his teeth, which he did.
+
+"Now then," said His Majesty, "let Us see this brigand-catcher who
+excels the redoubtable Contra Guerrillas.--As I live, the young man is a
+Chasseur d'Afrique! Step nearer, sir, and tell Us who you are."
+
+"Michel Ney, at Your Majesty's service."
+
+"The Prince of Moskowa!" exclaimed the Emperor. In his court, he was
+grateful for even a Napoleonic prince.
+
+"Sergeant, Your Majesty." It looked as though Ney were hinting to be
+made something else.
+
+"I see," said Maximilian. "And so Our Empire of romance is to hold a
+baton for another of the family of Ney. But to start more modestly, how
+would a lieutenancy suit, do you think?"
+
+"Your pardon, sire, but I report to His Excellency, Marshal Bazaine."
+
+Maximilian's white brow clouded. The French occupation was ever a thorn
+in his side. He could never quite be Emperor in fact. He could not even
+promote a likely young man. He had to "recommend" to one Bazaine, who
+had carried a knapsack.
+
+"Quite so," he answered coldly. "I shall inform Our dear Marshal how
+well you deserve."
+
+"The fact is, Your Majesty," said Ney in some confusion, "I did
+not--exactly--capture him. It was, uh, sort of mutual."
+
+Everybody stared curiously. There was the rope, the unloaded pistols. It
+was a queer puzzle. How did it happen? Ney began with an apology. Would
+Mademoiselle d'Aumerle forgive him? But he had worried though! He should
+not have left her, day before yesterday!
+
+"Because of a greater attraction?" the young woman suggested.
+
+Ney demurred so earnestly that Jacqueline laughed outright. "Don't make
+it worse, Michel," said she. "I know how you regretted the death of the
+terrible Rodrigo. Then you learned that he was alive. Oh no, I couldn't
+have held you.--But go on. Did he prove interesting?"
+
+The Frenchman told his story. It appeared that, on deserting
+mademoiselle two days before, he went at the best speed of his horse up
+the ravine she had so graciously indicated. He hoped to overtake the
+fugitive bandit, and after an hour, at a turn in the arroyo, did meet
+him, face to face. Both were equally astounded. Rodrigo was retracing
+his steps, having been blocked by a dried waterfall. Either man drew and
+covered the other. The Mexican did not fire. Seeing Ney, he supposed the
+Contras at no great distance, and a shot would bring them on his heels.
+But after a time the thing commenced to grow ridiculous, and Ney
+laughed.
+
+"Monsieur Rodrigue," he said, "I hope you will come along quietly."
+
+Fra Diavolo mistook the Gallic humor for an assurance of armed backing
+near at hand. "Where to?" he asked.
+
+"The devil take me if _I_ know! Where would you suggest?"
+
+It dawned then on the puzzled brigand that the other knew nothing of the
+country, and accordingly they struck up an armistice; which, for the
+rest, the alert revolver of each made imperative. Their protocol's chief
+clause required the prisoner to conduct his captor to some neutral
+point. Rodrigo suggested Anastasio Murguía's ranch, and Ney agreed. But
+as to what might happen on arriving, they left in blank. Michel had a
+duel in mind, if honest seconds were to be had. The craftier Rodrigo
+hoped to find some of his own men lurking about the hacienda.
+
+A cessation of hostile moves was further stipulated, though treachery of
+course warranted the instant drawing of weapons. Should the prisoner try
+to betray the captor to guerrillas, this was to constitute treachery.
+Ney for his part insisted on his rights as captor. That is, he could
+call for help if he got the chance. Rodrigo assented willingly. He knew
+the neighborhood. He would avoid the Cossacks, and the Frenchman might
+shout to his heart's ease. To do him justice, the outlaw had no desire
+to kill Ney, even if Ney gave him leave. A duke and prince in one was
+too valuable. A pretty ransom loomed brightly. Ney suspected as much,
+but not being ingenuous enough to obviate the risks, took a huge delight
+in them.
+
+Conforming to the terms of the truce, each man, simultaneously, put his
+gun in his holster. Then, good company enough one for the other, though
+with eyes ever on the watch, they proceeded along tortuous bridle paths
+until twilight, meeting no one. They camped in the same forest which
+that same moment held Murguía, Driscoll, and the two girls. They
+tethered their horses together and made a bed of leaves for themselves.
+Each laid his pistol a comfortable distance away, so that if either
+tried to arm himself while the other slept, there would be much snapping
+of twigs under his feet. Again simultaneously, they sat down and talked,
+and smoked cigarettes in lieu of supper. Ney progressed in his Spanish
+that evening. Fra Diavolo wished to impress on the companionable
+Frenchman that he, Rodrigo Galán, was a more terrible person than
+Colonel Dupin. He seemed envious, even of the compliment implied in the
+Tiger's nickname.
+
+During a pause the brigand said, "Now don't jump, caballero, because I'm
+only getting out my flask."
+
+"The beautiful idea!" returned Ney. "I'll do the same."
+
+But each stopped with the liquor at his mouth. It was consolation for
+lack of food, but if one refrained and the other partook--well, there
+would be a light sleeper and a heavy sleeper. With the tempting fumes in
+their nostrils, they waited, each for the other, to quaff first. And
+neither did. Finally Rodrigo proposed that they equalize the perils of
+indulgence. Accordingly each lowered the contents of his flask by three
+swallows, after which they compared the extent of the ebb tide in either
+bottle.
+
+"But, voyons," Ney objected, "you haven't taken as much as I have!"
+
+Rodrigo admitted the impeachment, and amiably took another draught. But
+the swallow proved too large, and Ney in his turn tried to balance that
+one, only to fail likewise. This entailed another effort from Rodrigo,
+which resulted in still another exaggeration.
+
+"Now you've had _more_ than I have," Michel complained, growing
+vague on the real point at issue.
+
+"Bien, señor, suppose you try a little of this. It's catalan, genuine,
+too, smuggled at Tampico."
+
+"Mine's cognac," said Ney. "Have some?"
+
+They exchanged flasks, and that night in the forest their snores were
+discordant and loud. Ney half awoke once, and remembered that he seemed
+to have heard the tramp of many horses. Toward morning, when it was not
+yet light, he was aroused for good by a savage tightening around his
+waist and a tremendous pull. He sat up, and heard his prisoner scuffling
+and swearing near him.
+
+"You've tied me, you sneaking animal without shame!"
+
+"It's you that's tied me, tête de voleur!"
+
+But as Rodrigo wrested in the dark, Ney found that the brigand's
+stumblings corresponded with the tightening about himself. He clutched
+at his waist, and discovered a rope.
+
+Both men groped vengefully forward with the line, and lurched into one
+another's arms. Each had thought to come on a tree, only to discover
+himself tied to the other. In the first start of suspicion, and in no
+good humor from splitting headaches, one reached for his knife, the
+other for his sabre. But the knife was gone, the sabre was gone.
+Forthwith they grappled and strained and breathed by jerks and tumbled
+and rolled and wound themselves in the lariat, until at last they lay
+exhausted on their backs and blinked up at the beautiful innocent morn
+peeping through the trees.
+
+"Now don't you untie yourself till I get untied," ordered Ney.
+
+"Or you yourself," retorted the other.
+
+"Let us both untie at the same time."
+
+"But one might finish first," objected Rodrigo. The brigand had grown
+amiable again. He saw advantages in the rope. It was well to have his
+prospective ransom never more than a few feet away.
+
+They discussed the problem at length, but were not equal to it. So the
+modus vivendi was stretched a rope's length, and the treachery clause
+expanded to include any untying or attempted untying before their
+arrival at Murguía's. Scrupulously simultaneous, they arose, found their
+pistols, and mounted their horses. To guard against any sudden varying
+in rapidity of travel and its consequences, each wrapped the lariat once
+about his saddle-horn. Where necessary, the brigand rode in front, since
+Ney insisted that the other way would reverse their rôles of prisoner
+and captor. Rodrigo got some tortillas from a charcoal burner, and they
+lunched and rested within the forest's edge till dark. But they traveled
+all that night in the open country, and approached Murguía's before noon
+of the next day. Hoping to find friends about the hacienda's stables,
+Rodrigo suggested that they race up the highway into the pasture. He was
+thinking that then the Frenchmen might be overpowered the more easily.
+Ney fell into the trap. He accepted the challenge and was keen for the
+sport. Thus it happened that they all but ran down the Emperor of Mexico
+himself, and instead of guerrillas, Rodrigo saw Cossacks and Dragoons.
+But the mystery of the rope, added to that of the unloaded pistols,
+rested unexplained.
+
+Jacqueline was delighted. "If it were just conventional heroism," she
+exclaimed, "one might talk of lieutenancies. But sire, this----"
+
+"Never fear," replied Maximilian. "I cannot make him captain, but he
+shall have his reward.--Monsieur le Prince, I will leave you a half
+company of my Austrians, if, though a Chasseur, you will deign to
+command them. In a word, I desire you to have the honor of escorting
+mademoiselle to the City."
+
+"And I thank you, sire. Parbleu, the sergeant is happier with such an
+order than--than the captain without it."
+
+"Michel," cried Jacqueline, "and where in the world now did you get
+that?"
+
+"Why--out of my own head. Really, mademoiselle."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+IN THE WAKE OF PRINCELY CAVALCADES
+
+
+  "... Now swell out, and with stiff necks
+  Pass on, ye sons of Eve! vale not your looks,
+  Lest they descry the evil of your path."
+                                        --_Dante_.
+
+
+The Grand Equerry was again the Dignitary of the hour. He held the
+Emperor's stirrup, while the Emperor, fittingly attired, swung
+gracefully astride a curvetting charger. Behind was his coach, ready for
+him when he should tire of the saddle. It was already late in the
+afternoon, and he meant to travel all night. Flatterers begged him to
+consider the importance of his health, which but made him unyielding.
+Some slight martyrdom for his country appealed to Maximilian. No, he
+said, grave affairs might be afoot since the Confederacy's surrender.
+The capital needed his presence, and he reminded them that the State
+came first, as always.
+
+The retinue climbed into carriages. The escort, Dragoons, Austrians and
+Contra Guerrillas, formed in hollow square about their prince. Colonel
+Dupin scowled because he was going. Colonel Lopez, when unobserved,
+scowled because he was left behind. And Monsieur Éloin, at the Emperor's
+side, thought well of himself in substituting for a rival favorite one
+so distant from favoritism as the Tiger. The Dragoons and Austrians who
+were to remain presented arms on the hacienda porch, and Lopez gave them
+the cue for a parting viva. The emancipated peons, still wet from
+spiritual grace, swelled the din gratefully and stridently, lured to it
+by their thoughtful pastor, the hacienda curate.
+
+But Maximilian still lingered. He looked from window to window under the
+colonnade, and seemed expectant. But Lopez signaled to the buglers, and
+the trumpet call and the redoubled huzzas of a people thrilled him out
+of his melancholy. With a sigh he gave over his private loves and poesy.
+He breathed deep and his eyes flashed. And as the grand monarch and
+good, he departed with the acclaim of posterity in his ears, conscious
+that the superb figure he made was for History's contemplation.
+
+At this time the Marquise d'Aumerle was half way up a ladder in the
+garden. She was picking the fragrant china blossoms, tossing them down
+to Berthe's apron, and humming "Mironton, mironton, mirontaine" in
+blissful indifference to many things, to princes among them.
+
+Nor was the other girl behind the hacienda shutters. Yet she, at least,
+saw him ride away. High up in the chapel tower, between the bell and the
+masonry, crouched a sobbing little figure. She gazed and gazed, with
+straining eyes. Over there below, in front of her father's house, were
+glittering swords and dazzling helmets, and the sheen of gilded
+escutcheons on coach doors. And as the beautiful pageant wound its way
+along the highroad, she watched in fawn-like curiosity. The sobs were
+only involuntary. She was not thinking, then, that this was matter for
+grief. Her dark eyes, that had been weeping, and were now so dry, held
+to a certain one among the cavaliers, to the very tall and splendid one
+with the slender waist, and they kept him jealously fixed among the
+others, and were ever more impatient of the blurring distance. But when
+finally he was lost for an instant in the general bright haze of the
+company, and she could not be quite sure after that which was he, then
+indeed the eyelids fluttered in a kind of despair. Yet only after the
+last carriage had vanished under the giant banana leaves of the hill
+beyond, did the tears come and tremble upon her lashes.
+
+"He is married, the Emperor," she told herself, as though the fact were
+that second written across the burning sky. At last, full, grim
+comprehension was hers.
+
+The stones of the tower glowed like a brazier in the sun, but the girl,
+with her head on her arm against the parapet, shivered as with cold; and
+a numbness at her heart grew heavier and heavier, like weighted ice.
+
+Below her the barren knoll, where an hour before swarthy stolid hundreds
+had crowded awaiting baptism, was lonely as the grave. The peons were
+dispersing to their village down by the river junction, or to their huts
+near the hacienda store, and on the air floated the falsetto nasal of
+their holiday songs, breaking ludicrously above the mumbling bass of
+loosely strung harps. Nearer by, the only life was an old man with a
+fife and a boy with a drum, who marched round and round the chapel,
+playing monotonously, while a second urchin every five minutes touched
+off a small cannon at the door. They did these things with solemn
+earnestness. It was to achieve an end, for San Felipe's day would come
+soon, and meantime each and every lurking devil had to be driven off the
+sacred precincts. But there was one hideous fiend who grinned, and
+pinched, and shrieked. His abode was the girl's heart, and he shrieked
+to her gleefully, that she could never, never in life, wed the man she
+loved. The fife and drum and the stupid little cannon simply made him
+the merrier.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The imps were left in peace for the night, and all about the chapel was
+dark and silent and desolate. But a man was working stealthily at one of
+the rear windows. It was a square, barred window, near the ground. The
+man chipped away at the granite sill with short, quick blows. The butt
+of his chisel was padded in flannel, so that even a chuckling that
+escaped him now and again made more sound than the steel. Soon he
+dropped his tools, and wrapping either hand around a window bar, he
+braced both feet together against the wall, and pulled. The two bars
+scraped slowly toward him across the stone. Then, with a sharp, downward
+jerk he tore them out. Quickly he climbed inside and cut the ropes of a
+man who lay bound on the floor. Both men emerged noiselessly through the
+window.
+
+"Have a care how you step," whispered the rescuer. "Your faithful guards
+are busy sleeping and don't want any disturbance."
+
+"That candle-stinking sacristy!" grumbled the rescued.
+
+"But it's the only stone calaboose on the ranch. In fact, _I_
+suggested it, since Don Rodrigo should be kept tight and safe. That's
+why Dupin left me behind." The rescuer chuckled as before. "Careful,
+hombre, there's a guard there, lying right in front of you!"
+
+Rodrigo made out the prostrate form, and lifted a boot heel over the
+upturned face. But his liberator jerked him aside.
+
+"Fool, you'll wake the fat padre, and he doesn't like my jests, says
+they're inspired of the Evil One."
+
+"Thinking of the Bishop of Sonora's waiting maid, was he?"
+
+"Well, what of it? Didn't he elope here with her?"
+
+"And you, Don Tiburcio?"
+
+"Of course; she naturally wanted to correct her first bad taste."
+
+"By running away with you? If you call that good taste----"
+
+"I call that a good joke on the padrecito."
+
+Having by this time come safely to the front of the church, Rodrigo was
+for making certain his escape at once. But Tiburcio interposed. "There's
+some talk still due between you and me," he said. "Sit down, here in the
+doorway."
+
+"Well?" said the brigand uneasily.
+
+"Well?" repeated his jocular friend.
+
+"Well, there isn't even a moon and we can't deal monte, as if that
+weren't the same as giving you what you want, anyway."
+
+"I risk my hide saving you for money, then?" Don Tiburcio's tone was
+aggrieved.
+
+"Oh no, for friendship," the sardonic Rodrigo corrected himself, "and I
+think as much of you in my turn, amigo mio. Not half an hour ago I was
+wrapped in anxiety, imagining you trying to collect blackmail, and I not
+near to keep my patriots from your throat. Oh, the sorrow of it!"
+
+"God be praised that a dear friend came and eased your worries! But you
+are not an ingrate. Since the Confederate Gringo took all my money the
+other morning----"
+
+"Tiburcio, on oath, I haven't had money either, not since our last game
+at cards. There was Murguía, I know, but I let him off for bringing me
+that French girl. She was good for a big ransom, only your same
+Gringo--curse the intruder! If ever the Imperialists catch him, and
+Murguía is there to testify against him----"
+
+Tiburcio moved nearer on the church step. "And then?"
+
+"That's our secret, Murguía's and mine."
+
+"But Rodrigo, he _is_ caught. They are trying him and Murguía both
+this very minute. And do you know what for? For being your accomplices."
+
+The outlaw started exultantly. "Then, if you want him shot----"
+
+"Well?--Oh don't be afraid, maybe I can help."
+
+"Were you with Captain Maurel when we ambushed them near Tampico?"
+
+"I can't remember," said Tiburcio tentatively.
+
+"If you will hurry down to this court martial, perhaps you will remember
+better. Go, and I'll leave you."
+
+"Not quite so fast, Rodrigo. You forget that your devoted rescuer is
+penniless."
+
+"So am I, I tell you. We'll both have to go to work, Don Tiburcio."
+
+"What's the lay? Tell me." The humorist's tone was unmistakable.
+
+Rodrigo looked about him in the dark. "Listen," he whispered, "there's a
+bullion convoy out of San Luis before long, but--you shall hear no more
+unless it is agreed that I am to meet them first."
+
+"Of course, hombre! How else could I threaten to expose them for
+contributing to the rebels?"
+
+"Bien, it's next week. You will meet them this side of Valles, some time
+Thursday or Friday.--Now I'm off. Adios."
+
+"Stay. You'll find your horse down by the river. The administrator is
+waiting with it. And Rodrigo, don't you want your pistol? Be more
+careful another time, and keep it loaded."
+
+Something in his tone nettled the brigand. "What do you mean? Give me my
+pistol."
+
+Tiburcio pointed it at him instead. "When you cool a little, yes.
+But it takes a good marksman to hit a Frenchman with an empty
+pistol--especially when one wakes up and finds himself tied."
+
+Rodrigo stiffened. This was menacing to his dignity.
+
+"Both lassoed," Tiburcio went on, "and no telling which was heifer and
+which vaquero, stampeding down on poor Max.--Ai de mi, I never thought
+it could be so funny!"
+
+"Give me my pistol!"
+
+"Slumbering like two babes in the wood, and your sweet innocent breaths
+perfuming the woody forest. I'd have covered you with leaves, like the
+little robins, only----"
+
+"Was it you tied us, you----"
+
+"Just like two babes, but," and Tiburcio pointed his thumb to his mouth
+and shook his head sorrowfully, "that's bad, very bad. Why didn't you
+leave me some? Of the cognac, especially?"
+
+"If you don't explain----"
+
+"Softly there, amigo. Yes, I tied you."
+
+"Another of your jokes----"
+
+"Inspired of the Evil One? Oh no, it was--precaution. Yes, that was it,
+come to think; just precaution. You see, I and Dupin had scattered your
+guerrillas, and I was scouting ahead, to stir up any ambush waiting for
+us--which I did later, when we chased them, and burned Culebra. But
+going along, I heard snoring, and found you two, like two----Now sit
+still!"
+
+"Why didn't you wake me? Then we could have roped the Frenchman."
+
+"And have him identify me after we'd gotten the ransom? Oh, no, I'm a
+loyal Imperialist. Now listen a minute, will you?--Our Contras were
+following me not a half mile behind. That meant I had to work quick. You
+see, I wanted to find you both there when I could come back alone. And
+meantime, I didn't want you to hurt each other. If either got killed,
+there'd be no ransom. So I took your knife and his sabre. Then I tied
+you both with my lariat. I was going to get your lariat too, and tether
+the pair of you to a tree, hoping you'd hold each other there till I got
+back. _You_ would do it, for I meant to pin a note on your sleeve,
+explaining. But just that minute the Frenchman stirred, for the Cossacks
+were getting into his ears, so I had to run back and turn them into
+another path."
+
+"So long as it wasn't any of your infernal farces?"
+
+"Well, it _was_ worth a ransom, the way it turned out.--Sit still,
+will you? You _know_ I take you too seriously ever to think of any
+joke with _you_! Here's your artillery and cutlery. Quick now,
+clear out!"
+
+Both rose to go, each to his respective deviltry, but not six steps
+ahead in the black night Tiburcio stumbled over a soft, inert mass. He
+recovered himself, half cursing, half laughing.
+
+"One of your guards, Rodrigo," he muttered. "He must have got this far
+before the drug worked into his vitals."
+
+"Your mescal probably killed him," said Rodrigo indifferently. "But a
+little knife slit will look more plausible in the morning, for you it
+will."
+
+Getting to his knees on the stone walk the outlaw groped over the body
+for a place to strike, holding his knife ready. But all at once he
+stopped and got up hastily, without a word. He only rubbed his left hand
+mechanically on his jacket.
+
+"Well, what ails you?" asked Tiburcio.
+
+Rodrigo gave a short, apologetic laugh. "It--it's a woman!" He quit
+rubbing his hand, seeming to realize. "There's blood," he added.
+
+"Here," said Tiburcio, "you keep back, and run if anybody comes. I'm
+going to strike a match."
+
+By the flare they saw that it was a girl and that her head was crushed.
+Kneeling on either side, they peered questioningly, horrified, at each
+other. Their great sombreros almost touched. Their hard faces were
+yellow in the flickering light between, and the face looking up with its
+quiet eyes and dark purplish cleft in the brow was white, white like
+milk. With one accord the two men turned and gazed upward at the tower,
+whose black outline lost itself far above in the blacker shadows of the
+universe. They understood.
+
+Tiburcio shrugged his shoulders, a silent comment on the tragedy from
+its beginning to this, its end. He threw the match away and arose, but
+Rodrigo still knelt, leaning over her, holding the poor battered head in
+his hands, half lifting it, and trying to look again into those eyes
+through the darkness. He would touch the matted hair, as if to caress,
+not knowing what he did, and each time he would jerk back his hand at
+the uncanny, sticky feeling. Roving thus, his fingers touched an ivory
+cross, and closed over it. With no present consciousness of his act, he
+placed the symbol in his jacket, over his breast.
+
+Tiburcio touched him on the shoulder. "I'll go now, and bring her
+father," he said.
+
+"Yes," returned the other vaguely, stumbling to his feet.
+
+"It's going to kill the old man," murmured Tiburcio, "or--God, if it
+should _not_ kill him! He is a coward, but once he slapped you,
+Rodrigo, for so much as looking at her. And now, the Virgin help--may
+the Virgin help whoever's concerned in this!--But here, you must go, do
+you hear?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then go, go!"
+
+"Yes," said Rodrigo again, moving slowly away.
+
+"By the river, remember. You'll find your horse there."
+
+"Captain Maurel's, the fine black one?"
+
+"Yes, I slipped it out of the stables for you."
+
+"The fine black one?"
+
+"Yes, yes, hombre!"
+
+"And--and she never--she never saw--how magnifico I look on--on that
+fine black horse."
+
+He was still muttering as he reeled and staggered down the hill.
+
+When he was gone, and no alarm of sentinels rang out, Tiburcio took off
+his serape and laid it over the dark blot on the stones. Then he too
+stole away, to tell her father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE RED MONGREL
+
+
+  "Be this the whetstone of your sword; let grief
+  Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it."
+                                            --_Macbeth_.
+
+
+"Where," inquired Din Driscoll, with a benevolent interest in their
+doing the thing right, "is the judge advocate?"
+
+Colonel Miguel Lopez resented what he took for a patronizing concern. It
+festered his complacency, for his was the code of the bowed neck to
+those above and the boot-tip for those below. Luckily for him, he did
+not strike the helpless prisoner. He turned to his judge's bench
+instead, which was none other than the frayed and stately sofa of honor
+from the hacienda sala, deemed requisite to his dignity. The satin
+upholstery contrasted grotesquely with the adobe walls. Pungent tallow
+dips lighted the granary to a dull yellow, and mid the sluggish tobacco
+clouds were a shrinking prisoner in clerical black, and the mildly
+interested prisoner in gray, and red uniforms surrounding.
+
+Lopez flung his sword across the empty box that was to serve as desk,
+and filled the crimson seat with pompous menace. Lopez was a Mexican,
+but did not look it. He had red hair and a florid skin, and he was
+large, with great feet and coarse hands. Yet the high cheek bones of an
+Indian were his. The contrast of coloring and features unpleasantly
+suggested a mongrel breed. The eyes had red lids, out of which the
+lashes struck like rusted needles, and the eyes themselves, of a faded
+blue, seemed to fawn an excuse for Nature's maladjusting. But he had a
+goodly frame on which to hang the livery of a king's guardsman. And as
+the cross of the Legion of Honor ticketed his breast, he must have been
+a goodly man too, and his Maker's insignia only a libel. Once Maximilian
+had said, "What, Bebello, and art thou a better judge of men than I, thy
+master and the master of men?" For it seemed that Bebello, the simple
+hound, had read Nature's voucher instead of Napoleon's, and being thus
+deceived, would ever snarl at the Colonel of Dragoons. Maximilian of
+course knew better. What looked like toadying was only profound
+deference for himself. The royal favorite could discriminate. He could
+also be the thick-headed, intolerable martinet. The sandy lashes
+bristled as the American inquired a second time if he were to have
+counsel.
+
+"Being president of this court," Lopez announced, "I am judge advocate."
+
+In the tone of congratulation Driscoll blandly said, "Well, then, I
+challenge the president."
+
+"Challenge?"
+
+"Certainly, Your Honor. It's my right, either on the ground of
+inexperience, malice, or--but I reckon the first two will do."
+
+"This is insolence!" cried the president, and glaring angrily, he
+maintained that it was a regular court martial for the field, and that
+as he was the ranking officer at hand, there could be no appeal beyond
+himself.
+
+"A regular drum-head," Driscoll observed. "Well, let it go at that. I'm
+in a hurry."
+
+Lopez called a lieutenant of Austrian cavalry to his right upon the
+sofa, and the Dragoon color sergeant to his left, and the three of them
+sat thenceforth in judgment. The charges were read, and next a
+deposition, gathered that day from Michel Ney. Therein appeared the
+American, reinforcing Rodrigo Galán at Tampico, and in so far aiding the
+abduction of Mademoiselle d'Aumerle.
+
+"The complicity is evident," stated Lopez, and his colleagues, blinking
+at the candles on the box, nodded wisely.
+
+"It's straight so far," Driscoll agreed, "but the story goes a little
+further. Does the ma'am'selle herself happen to have left any
+deposition?"
+
+She had, admitted the president, but it merely corroborated the
+foregoing. Driscoll, in sole charge of his own defence, insisted that
+her deposition be read, but Lopez would permit no such waste of time. He
+was brooding on Monsieur Éloin usurping his own place near the Emperor,
+and he wanted to finish the present business so as to overtake them
+both.
+
+Dupin's written evidence provided the rest of the abduction story,
+seemingly, and there remained only the other charge, that of assisting
+at the ambush of the murdered Captain Maurel. For this there was no
+evidence, and the accused himself was examined.
+
+"Your name?" asked the court.
+
+"Driscoll."
+
+"Your full name, hombre?"
+
+"John Dinwiddie Driscoll, Your Honor."
+
+"Din--whatever it is--that's not a Christian name?"
+
+"It was, when I got it. Maybe I've paganized it since."
+
+"Devil take you, this is solemn!"
+
+"Yes, this is solemn."
+
+Lopez cracked his long nails irritably against each other.
+
+"You came here via Tampico," he began anew. "What days were you in
+Tampico?"
+
+"From about the twenty-third or twenty-fourth, till we left a few days
+ago."
+
+All three judges bent over a memorandum which the president pointed out
+among his notes. Captain Maurel was killed about April 26th.
+
+"How did you occupy yourself while in Tampico?"
+
+"Mostly trying to persuade Murgie here that it was his move."
+
+"But your horse needed exercise. Did you at any time ride across the
+river?"
+
+"I didn't notice. Have you anyone who saw me cross?"
+
+"Goot!" blurted out the Austrian who was one of the judges, so suddenly
+that everybody half jumped. "Ya, das iss die cosa, sabe! Who has him
+seen cross?"
+
+The court floundered. The witness demanded by the accused was lacking.
+Murguía, a restless, huddled form on a straw-bottomed chair, was
+watching hungrily every step in the examination. Now he shifted
+excitedly, and his sharp jaws worked with a grinding motion. Then his
+voice came, a raucous outburst.
+
+"Search him, Your Mercy!"
+
+Lopez browbeat the meddler, and--took his advice. Driscoll submitted
+tolerantly to their fumbling over him, and all the while Murguía looked
+on as a famished dog, especially when they pulled out the whiskey flask.
+But when they tossed the thing aside, he sank deep into his black coat
+and gave vent to mumblings.
+
+"Of course we find nothing," Lopez complained, "since his accomplice
+recommended the search."
+
+It seemed, too, that the state's case must fall.
+
+"The Captain Maurel charge cannot hold," announced the court.
+
+"Ya, goot--mucha bueno!" exclaimed the Austrian with enthusiasm, while
+the color sergeant, who had a red nose, wet his lips hopefully. He
+believed that an acquitted outlaw, if a gentleman, would stand a bottle.
+
+"And as to the first charge," continued the president, "here is the
+deposition of the Señorita d'Aumerle, which I have held till now for
+this purpose. Read it, and you will note that though the marquesa bears
+out the Señor Ney, she further testifies to the prisoner having later
+saved her from this very Rodrigo Galán at peril to himself. Bien,
+señores, have you any further questions?"
+
+The Austrian crinkled his brow, and after a momentous pause, shook his
+head till his cheeks rattled. The Dragoon promptly replied, "No, mi
+coronel." Then the three withdrew, and when they came back, the Dragoon
+wiping his lips, they informed the accused that he was not guilty.
+
+"Which isn't news," said Driscoll as he thanked them.
+
+Murguía's turn came next. The proof of the old man's guilt blossomed
+almost of itself. Jacqueline, to clear her protector, had been forced to
+depose how Murguía had willingly betrayed her into Rodrigo's hands. But
+she described the old man's reluctance. He would have saved her, except
+for his terror of the outlaw. The sole case for the defence was
+Murguía's character for stinginess; such a miser could not be accused of
+aiding the guerrillas. But this very point seemed to heighten Lopez's
+prejudice against him. Driscoll, being held to testify, only talked
+sociably, and told nothing, and when under the quizzing he finally lost
+patience, he said, "Oh, let him go! What's the use?"
+
+But they were so far from any such thing that they condemned him to be
+shot.
+
+Then a voice was heard at the door. The sentinel there stumbled back,
+and Don Tiburcio brushed by him into the room.
+
+"Old man," he called, "come with me! Your daughter----"
+
+Murguía started up, weakly swaying. The senile eyeballs, so lately
+parched by fear, swam in a moisture not of avarice. Someone was speaking
+to him of his daughter. He had not seen her yet. They would not let him.
+And now he must think of her in this new connection, which was his
+death. And her misery to learn it, and her misery, afterward! On the
+morrow they would be taking him to the capital, his sentence would be
+confirmed, he would be shot. Nothing of this he doubted. And he would
+never see her again.
+
+Murguía stretched out his arms toward the president of the court, "You
+will let me go to her, señor? Your Mercy will let me go to her?" He
+murmured her name over and over, "María de la Luz! María--Luzita mia!"
+until the words became a kind of crooning. Then he would break forth
+again, entreating, commanding, "Your Mercy will let me see her? Señor,
+you _will_ let me see her!"
+
+At the first note of intrusion Lopez had brought the pommel of his sword
+down upon the box in front of him. But the syllables of the girl's name
+seemed to get into his memory, and he began to stare with a puzzled
+frown at the half-crazed old man. Lifting his eyes, he met Tiburcio's,
+and Tiburcio himself nodded in some deep hidden significance. Lopez
+straightened abruptly, as at an astounding revelation.
+
+"Tell me, Señor Murguía," he said, "your daughter--Yes, yes, man, you
+shall see her!--But listen, what is she like? Has she large black eyes?
+Does she wear red sometimes? Come, señor, answer!"
+
+The father gazed, wonderingly, jealously. How should an elegant officer
+from the City and the Court know aught of María de la Luz?
+
+Tiburcio crept behind the sofa, and bending to Lopez's ear, he
+whispered, "Si, si, mi coronel, she is the one you have in mind, and she
+is his daughter."
+
+Lopez swung round and searched the blackmailer's face. "And now----"
+
+"You will let him come," said Tiburcio. "But bring two guards. And have
+four others with--well, with a stretcher."
+
+Again Lopez searched the dark crescent that was Tiburcio's eye, and
+again Tiburcio nodded with deep significance. "Bring him," he repeated,
+"but tell him nothing. Seeing will be enough."
+
+Murguía went, unknowing. He would see her, thanks to some freakish
+kindness in Don Tiburcio. He was torn between the joy of the meeting and
+the sharp grief of the parting that must follow. At the time he never
+noticed that they led him up the chapel walk instead of toward the
+hacienda house. Tiburcio was ahead with a lantern, but when near the top
+of the hill he turned back to them, yet not before the expectant Lopez
+had seen a black something on the pavement under the swinging light.
+
+"You first, mi coronel," said Tiburcio.
+
+"I, you mean!" cried Murguía, "I, señor!"
+
+"But we wish to see first if she is here," said Lopez. "Don Tiburcio
+thought she might be at vespers."
+
+"Vespers? There are no vespers to-night. Yet we come here! Why? Why do
+we come here?"
+
+Tiburcio motioned to the guards. "Hold him until we return," he ordered.
+
+A Dragoon reached out a hand indifferently to Murguía's collar, and that
+second the old man's ten fingers were at his throat. They overpowered
+him at last, but they would have fared better with a wildcat.
+
+Tiburcio and Lopez went alone. They stopped before the covered thing
+near the church door.
+
+"So," mused the colonel, "she ended it _this_ way."
+
+"From the tower," Tiburcio grimly added.
+
+"His----"
+
+"Well, say it. You mean His Majesty?"
+
+"His Majesty need know nothing of the--of the finale."
+
+"Who is there to tell him, por Dios? I won't. You won't."
+
+"But you forget a third, Don Tiburcio. I mean the man who was with you
+several evenings ago, when you----"
+
+"When I was carrying off the padre's sweetheart?"
+
+"When somehow you two happened in this desolate neighborhood. Since you
+took his name out of my mouth just now, you must have recognized that it
+was His Majesty whom you saw talking to her almost where she now lies. I
+was near by, guarding his privacy, but you both escaped before I could
+stop you. Now then, who was that other intruder?"
+
+The other was Rodrigo Galán, but Tiburcio replied, "The other will not
+have much to say. Poor Captain Maurel!"
+
+"Bueno, bueno!"
+
+"Not yet, mi coronel. Only we two know of Maximilian's part in this, but
+we must keep it from her father above all others. I am a loyal
+Imperialist, Don Miguel."
+
+"What difference does that make?"
+
+"The Empire faces a crisis."
+
+The royal favorite started guiltily. Since the news of the Confederacy's
+surrender, Lopez's ambitions were clouded by a growing fear of the
+fugitive Mexican republic. The Republic would have a good memory for
+royal favorites, and he had been thinking on it. "Will Lee's surrender
+make such--such a difference?" he faltered.
+
+"So much," retorted Tiburcio, "that to-morrow we will have more rebels
+yet. So much, that what with freeing peons and confiscating nationalized
+church lands and giving them back to the church--well, a very little
+more might decide between Empire and Republic."
+
+"A little more? What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean money for the rebels. Luz's father is rich. If he knew that
+Maximilian----"
+
+"Hombre, hombre, he's a miser!"
+
+"Just the same, I'm a loyal Imperialist, and if you are, too, you will
+take good care to tell nothing to Don Anastasio."
+
+"You forget, señor, that I am the one to say that to you."
+
+"Then don't forget, Colonel Lopez. Do not forget that she fell, that it
+was a simple accident."
+
+"Yes, a simple accident. Wait here, I am going to bring her father."
+
+On returning Lopez sent the guards away, and he and Murguía were alone
+together. The old man stood dazed, unresisting.
+
+"One minute more," said Lopez. "First, I must tell you something. And
+afterward, you will remember. Yes, you will remember--afterward. You
+know who I am, that I command the Dragoons of the Empress.--Are you
+listening? But do you know that, in a way, I am Maximilian's confidant?
+Whenever he walks or rides, incognito, dressed as a ranchero, I alone go
+with him, as I did during the past ten days while we stopped at Las
+Palmas, three leagues from here. The very first evening there, we two
+rode out, with our cloaks about us. He likes to commune with nature, and
+gather curious flowers which he pastes in a book and labels with Latin
+names. But this time he was interested in peons, yet as he had a
+delicacy about prying into his host's business, we rode until we left
+Las Palmas behind us. His Majesty would gaze on the hills and look at
+the sunset, and he talked to me of a poetic calm about them which made
+him long for he knew not what. And Murguía----"
+
+Here the speaker paused abruptly, and his faded eyes shifted and
+hardened.
+
+"And Murguía, we came here, and--he met your child. He met her here, at
+this chapel, where she had been to pray for her aunt. Old man, do you
+hear me, the Emperor met your daughter! Then, next day, instead of going
+on with his journey, he complained of a cough, and stayed at Las Palmas.
+But every evening he rode here, he and I. Once I found a chance to ask
+her her name, but she would only tell her given name.--There, you will
+remember? Yes, you will--after you have seen her. Come, she is not far
+away."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+EQUIDAD EN LA JUSTICIA
+
+
+  "... and I think I shall begin to take pleasure in being at home
+  and minding my business. I pray God I may, for I finde a great
+  need thereof." --_Pepys's Diary_.
+
+
+An hour later the candles were still guttering in the court room, and
+here Colonel Lopez assembled his minions of justice a second time. In
+his manner now there was nothing of the uncertainty, nor the feigning of
+penetration, which had before marked his handling of the trials. He
+pounded the box with his sword.
+
+"In the light of new evidence," he announced shortly, "the two cases of
+a while ago are reopened."
+
+Din Driscoll strolled in. "I've come for my belt and pistols. Dupin took
+them," he said.
+
+Lopez signed to the Dragoons to close round him. Then he gave vent. Did
+the Señor Gringo laugh so much at Mexican justice, since instead of
+escaping while he had the chance, he came back, coolly demanding his
+property? It was insolence!
+
+"_Gra_-cious," exclaimed Driscoll in his counterfeit of a startled
+old lady, "what's the matter?"
+
+But Lopez put on a mien of dark cunning, and replied that he would find
+out later.
+
+Murguía's case came first. The stricken father was there, dragged from
+his dead by the petty concerns of this world which cannot bide for
+grief. He was as a sleep-walker. He had come into another universe. The
+hacienda sala, where his child lay mid tapers, where mumbled prayers
+arose, or this adobe, where uniformed men fouled the air with cigarettes
+and looked after the Empire's business--the one or the other, both
+places were of that other universe, dark and silent, in which his dazed
+being groped alone.
+
+The new element in the court martial was Tiburcio, and Tiburcio had in
+mind one golden goose to save and one meddling Gringo to lose. He
+riddled the foregoing evidence with refreshing originality. He testified
+to the brigand attack for possession of the marquise. Had he not found
+Don Anastasio stretched upon the ground? Had not the dauntless anciano,
+the self-same Don Anastasio, fallen in defence of the two French
+señoritas? And yet, did he not keep Rodrigo at bay? Si, señores, he had
+indeed, until Colonel Dupin and the Contras arrived. He, the witness,
+was with them. He had seen these things. Now, let anyone say that the
+loyal Señor Murguía was an accomplice of that cut-throat without shame,
+Rodrigo Galán; whom he, the witness, loathed from the innermost recesses
+of his being; whom he, the witness, should be greatly pleased to strike
+dead. But let anyone again besmirch the character of Don Anastasio!
+
+"No, no," vociferously growled the Austrian.
+
+Lopez opposed nothing. He had a clear notion this time as to what he
+wanted. Driscoll marveled, and enjoyed it. Pigheadedness had made Don
+Anastasio guilty, why shouldn't perjury make him innocent? And it did.
+The mountain of suspicion and some few pebbles of evidence melted away
+as lard in a skillet. The verdict was acquittal.
+
+Driscoll knew well enough that the presence of the loyal Imperialist
+with the baleful eye meant a reversal in his own case too. But the
+recent and very definite animus of Lopez against him he could in no way
+fathom. The blackmailer testified again. The prisoner, this Americano,
+had waylaid him in the wood two days before, and had robbed him of his
+last cent.
+
+"Which you stole from Murgie," suggested the prisoner.
+
+"I? I steal from Murguía?" cried Tiburcio indignantly. "Ask him! Ask
+him!"
+
+Murguía was asked. Had the witness ever, on any occasion, robbed him?
+They repeated the question several times, and at last the rusty black
+wig, which was bowed over a chair, slowly shook in the negative. Perhaps
+he had settled a debt with the witness? The wig changed to an
+affirmative.
+
+Tiburcio gleamed triumphantly. "An audacious defence!" he exclaimed.
+"But luckily for me, Don Anastasio is here."
+
+"Oh, hurry up!" protested Driscoll.
+
+Asked if he knew anything more of the prisoner, witness could not swear
+for certain, except that he recognized in the American one of the
+guerrillas who had ambushed and slain Captain Maurel near Tampico. Yes,
+witness was scouting for the murdered captain at the time. Naturally,
+witness was present.
+
+"You wanted proof, Señor Americano, that you crossed the river?" said
+Lopez. "Well, are you content now?"
+
+"Go on," Driscoll returned. He was bored. "Some people on earth are
+alive yet, but while Tibby is on the stand maybe I killed them too. I
+wouldn't swear I didn't."
+
+Murguía was called next, but he did not seem to hear. His body was bent
+over his knees, silently trembling. A Dragoon pressed a hand on his
+shoulder, but a sobbing groan racked his frame, as of a very sick man
+who will not be awakened to his pain. The pause that followed was
+uncanny--a syncope in the affairs of men like a gaping grave under
+midnight clouds. Lopez spoke again. He regretted that they must intrude
+on a fresh and poignant sorrow, but the case in hand was a matter of
+state, before which the individual had to give way. It was very logical
+and convincing. But the feeble old shoulders made no sign.
+
+Tiburcio leaned over and shook him gently, and whispered in his ear.
+Still Murguía did not move. Tiburcio gripped his arm. "You and Rodrigo,"
+he said, so low that none could hear, "there was something arranged
+between you. What was it? Tell me! Tell me, I say, if you want the
+Gringo shot!"
+
+He bent nearer, and against his ear came a muffled sound of lips. When
+he straightened, it was to address the court.
+
+If he might ask a question, had they searched the prisoner? They had.
+But thoroughly? Thoroughly. But not enough to find anything? No. Then he
+would suggest that they had not searched thoroughly. The court seemed
+impressed, and Driscoll was fumbled over again. Still they found
+nothing.
+
+"Whose flask is that?" Tiburcio demanded, pointing to where it had been
+tossed and forgotten. The prisoner's. "Look that over again," Tiburcio
+insisted. A guard handed it to Lopez, who squinted inside. "There is
+nothing," he said. It was only an old canteen whose leather covering was
+dropping apart from rot.
+
+Murguía's head raised, and his eyes fixed themselves on the judge, and
+in their intense fixity glittered a quick, keen lust. It was hideous,
+loathsome, fascinating. The eyes were swimming in tears, but their
+hungered, metal-like sheen made the sorrow monstrous, and was the more
+foul and ghastly because it distorted so pure a thing as sorrow.
+Driscoll felt queerly that he must, must remove from the world this
+decrepit old man who bemoaned a dead child. The itch for murder
+terrified him, and he turned away angrily from the horrid face that
+aroused it. But Murguía's stare never relaxed while Lopez toyed with the
+canteen. And when Lopez, as though accidentally, thrust a finger under
+the torn leather and brought out a folded paper, the bright points of
+Murguía's eyes leaped to flame. But the head went down again, as once
+more his grief swept over him, and another sob caught at the
+heartstrings of every man there.
+
+Lopez spread out the paper, and as he read, he started violently. He
+passed it on to the Austrian and the color sergeant, and they also
+started. But the most amazed was Driscoll, when he too had a chance to
+read.
+
+"Ha, you recognize it?" exclaimed the president.
+
+"Sure I do. It's an order from Colonel Dupin to Captain Maurel. Rodrigo
+had it in Tampico, making people think that _he_ was Captain
+Maurel."
+
+But the court was not so simple. "How came you by it?" demanded Lopez.
+"Have occasion to be Maurel yourself sometime, eh?"
+
+With wrath, with admiration, Driscoll faced round on Don Anastasio. "Oh
+you pesky, shriveled-up gorilla!" he breathed. He was no longer amazed.
+This accounted for Murguía's borrowing his flask the night they were in
+the forest. It accounted for Murguía and Rodrigo plotting together in
+Tampico. But why tell such things to the court? The Missourian was not a
+fool like King Canute, who ordered back the waves. "Hurry up," he said
+wearily to the waves instead. Since he could not hold the tide,
+anticipation chilled more than the drowning bath itself.
+
+The tide assuredly did not wait. It rolled right on, nearer and nearer.
+Murguía was lifted to his feet. He was remembering already what Lopez
+had told him, about his daughter and Maximilian, as Lopez had said he
+would. The American's easy, stalwart form in gray filled his blurred
+eyes. Here was a Confederate emissary come with an offer of aid for that
+same Maximilian. Such had been Murguía's suspicion from the first, and
+now it moved him with venomous hate. Yes, he would testify. Yes, yes,
+the prisoner had ridden out alone at Tampico. Yes, yes, yes, the
+prisoner was with Rodrigo there.
+
+"But why, Don Anastasio," asked Tiburcio purely in fantastic mischief,
+"did you bring such a disturbing man to our happy country?"
+
+"That will do," Lopez interposed. "The Señor Murguía could not know at
+the time that this fellow was Rodrigo's agent."
+
+"And," Murguía added eagerly, "I was helpless, there at Mobile. The
+Confederates could have sunk my boat, and he held an order from
+Jefferson Davis."
+
+"What's that?" cried Tiburcio, his humor suddenly vanished. "What's
+that, an order from Jefferson Davis?"
+
+Tiburcio's was a new interest, now. He possessed a mind as crooked as
+his vision, and being crooked, it followed unerringly the devious paths
+of other minds. So, they had made a tool of him! Rodrigo and Murguía
+wanted the Gringo shot to help the rebel cause. And he, Tiburcio of the
+cunning wits, had just sworn away, not only the Gringo's life, but the
+possible salvation of the Empire. Coming from Jefferson Davis, the
+Gringo with his mission could mean nothing else. Then there was Lopez.
+Tiburcio did not love this changeling Mexican who had red hair. But what
+could be the mongrel's game? Why had he freed Murguía, if not to unleash
+a small terrier at Maximilian's heel? Why was he trying the American
+over again, if not to poison a friendly mastiff? And why either, if Don
+Miguel Lopez were not seeking to make friends with the Republic? Or
+perhaps he was at heart a Republican. Thus Don Tiburcio, a loyal
+Imperialist, read the finger posts as he ambled down the crooked path.
+
+Yes, and here was Lopez putting on the final touch. Here he was, the
+traitor, pronouncing the death sentence, and poor impotent Don Tiburcio
+gnawing his baffled rage, as one would say of a villain. The execution
+was to take place the very next morning. His Majesty the Emperor would
+be asked to approve, afterward.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+A CURIOUS PAGAN RITE
+
+
+  "È un peccato che se ne va con l'acqua benedetta."
+                                        --_Machiavelli_.
+
+
+The Storm Centre looked round, about and above. He was as a fly in a
+bottle. A massive rough-hewn door, jammed tight, sealed him within adobe
+walls two feet thick. There was one window, cross-barred, as high as his
+chin, and only large enough to frame his head. They had brought him to
+the carcel, or dungeon, of the hacienda, where peons were constrained to
+docility. A wide masonry bench against the wall approximated a couch,
+but it was as blocked ice. By the flickering of a lone tallow dip, Din
+Driscoll noted these things with every sense delicately attuned to
+strategy. But his verdict was unpromising.
+
+"Tough luck!" he observed.
+
+The adobe was built among the stables that bordered on the pasture, and
+when not needed as a calabozo, it served snugly for the administrador's
+best horse. From the one stall came a tentative whinny. Driscoll jumped
+with delight. "Demijohn! W'y, you good old scoundrel, you!" The night
+before, he remembered, he had seen the horse bedded here. "Say howdy as
+loud as you want," he cried, slapping him fondly on the flank, "you'll
+not betray us. _That's_ been done already."
+
+Driscoll was cavalryman to the bone, and it heartened him unaccountably
+to find his horse. If, only, he could have his pistols too! Ever since
+the Federals had cut him off from his furloughs home, those black ugly
+navies were next to the nearest in his affections. The nearest was the
+buckskin charger. And now, only the buckskin was left, which simply made
+the dilemma more poignant. The condemned man gazed critically at the
+walls, the rafters, the ground, and shook his head. Supposing a chance
+for escape, could he bring himself to leave Demijohn behind? He got his
+pipe to going, sat down, and frowned ruefully at the candle.
+
+"I don't want to be shot!" he burst out suddenly, with a plaintive
+twang. Then he grinned. The boy still in him had prompted the absurdity.
+And the rough warrior had laughed at it. Boy and warrior faced each
+other, either surprised that the other existed. The boy flushed
+resentfully at the veteran's contemptuous grunt. His eyes still had the
+boy's naïvely inquisitive greeting to the world before him. Next, quite
+abruptly, the warrior knew a bitterness against himself. If he could,
+but once, whimper as the lad about to be soundly strapped! He took no
+pride in his irony, nor in his hardened indifference to the visage of
+death. How far, how very far, had the few past years of strife carried
+him from the youngster who used to gaze so eagerly, so expectantly, out
+on life!
+
+First, he was home from the University, from the pretty, shady little
+Missouri town of Columbia. But the vacation following he spent in
+bloodily helping to drive the Jayhawkers back across the Kansas line.
+And soon after, when the fighting opened up officially, and his State,
+at the start, had more of it than any other battle ground, how many
+hundreds of times did his life bide by the next throw of Fate? During
+one cruel winter month he had lain with other wounded in a hospital
+dug-out in the river's cliff, and there, wanting both quinine and food,
+he would peep through the reeds, only to see the merciless Red Legs
+prying about in search of his hiding place.
+
+And then there was the wild, busily dangerous life with Old Joe's
+Brigade, with that brigade of Missouri's young firebrands. Once,
+stretched on the prairie, where he had dropped from exhaustion and
+hunger and loss of blood, the Storm Centre awoke to find a Pin Indian
+stooping over him for his scalp. On that occasion, the deft turning of
+the wrist from the waist outward, with the stripping of the pistol's
+hammer simultaneously, had enabled him later to restore to relatives
+certain other scalps already dangling from the savage's girdle.
+
+And now here he was in an adobe with walls two feet thick, and numerous
+saddle-colored Greasers proposing to shoot him first thing in the
+morning!
+
+"I'll be blessedly damned," he drawled querulously, "I object!"
+
+It was the warrior who spoke now, and with him the boy joined hands.
+They became as one and the same person. The common foe was without. They
+would see this through together, with grim stoicism, with young-blooded
+daredeviltry.
+
+The door opened, and one of the common foe, bearing a tray, came within.
+
+"Well, Don Erastus, how goes it?" With a pang of homesickness the
+Missourian thought of darkies who carried trays.
+
+"Juan Bautista, at Y'r Mercy's orders," the Dragoon corrected him.
+
+"Don John the Baptist then, como le whack?"
+
+"Bien, señor, bien."
+
+"Any theory as to what you've got there?"
+
+"Y'r Mercy's supper. The Señor Coronel Lopez does not desire that Y'r
+Mercy should have any complaint."
+
+"Oh, none whatever, Johnny, except what I'm to die of. Set it down, here
+on the feather bed."
+
+There were a few native dishes, with a botellon of water and a jar of
+wine. Driscoll tipped the botellon to his lips. His whiskey flask had
+contained poison, though the poison of ink, and as he drank, he pondered
+on why water should not be an antidote for the poisons that lurk in
+whiskey flasks. Then he wondered why such foolish conceits at such times
+persist in shouldering death itself out of a man's thoughts. And
+meanwhile, there stood the precursor of his end, in the emblematic
+person of a very brown John the Baptist. The fellow's gorgeous red
+jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a sordid dirty shirt. He was officer of
+the guard, and had a curiosity as to how a Gringo about to be shot would
+act. He waited clumsily, lantern in hand. But he was disappointed. There
+seemed to be nothing out of the commonplace. Some condemned Mexican,
+though a monotonously familiar spectacle, would yet have been more
+entertaining.
+
+Driscoll looked at him over the botellon. That earthen bottle had not
+left the prisoner's lips. It had stopped there, poised aloft by an idea.
+
+"See here," Driscoll complained, "where's the rest of the water I'm to
+have?"
+
+"Of what water, señor?"
+
+"For my bath, of course. Don't I die to-morrow?"
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"Here, this wine is too new for me. Drink it yourself, if you want."
+
+"Many thanks, señor, with pleasure. But a bath? I don't understand."
+
+"No? Don't you Mexicans ever bathe before you die?"
+
+"We send for the padre."
+
+"Oh, that's it! And he spiritually washes your sins away? But suppose
+you couldn't get your padre?"
+
+The Indian shuddered. "Ai, María purísima, one's soul would go to
+everlasting torment!"
+
+"There! Now you can understand why I count so much on ablution. It's
+absolution."
+
+The native readily believed. Like others of his class, he thought all
+Protestants pagans, and none Catholic but a Mexican. "Must be something
+like John the Baptist's day, verdad, señor?" he said. "On that holy day,
+once a year, we must all take a bath."
+
+"Quite right too," Driscoll returned soberly. "A man should go through
+most anything for his religion.--Haven't noticed my horse there, have
+you, Johnny?" The guard pricked up his ears. "Of course not," Driscoll
+went on, "you're worrying about my soul instead. Well, so am I. We
+Americans, you know, save our yearly baths for one big solemn final one,
+just before we die. And if I don't get mine to-night, I'll be
+associating with you unshrived Mexicans hereafter, and that would be
+pretty bad, wouldn't it? It's what made me think of my horse there. That
+horse, Johnny, is heavy on my soul. He's most too heavy to wash away.
+Now, I'm not going to tell you that I actually stole him; but just the
+same, if a good man like you would take him, after I'm gone--why, I'd
+feel that he was washed off pretty well."
+
+The Mexican's sympathy grew more keen.
+
+"But the other sins," Driscoll added, "they'll need water, and a great
+plenty, too."
+
+Juan Bautista was feeling the buckskin's knees. Driscoll longed to choke
+him, but instead, he drove again at the wedge. "Another thing, I'll have
+to leave my money behind." He mentioned it casually, but his breath
+stopped while he waited for the effect. The guard straightened.
+Demijohn's knees seemed to be all right. He took up the tray, and opened
+the door, yet without a word. Driscoll's fist doubled, to strike and run
+for it. Then the fellow spoke.
+
+"Does Y'r Mercy want soap too?"
+
+The fist unclenched. "No," came the reply, almost in a joyful gasp,
+"this is for, for godliness only."
+
+"One jar, señor?"
+
+"Bless me, no! Two big ones, bigger'n a barrel."
+
+With a parting glance at Demijohn, the guard stole forth to gratify the
+heathen's whim.
+
+"I'll give him enough to _buy_ a horse," Driscoll resolved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO BE SHOT
+
+
+  "A horse and a man
+  Is more than one,
+  And yet not many."
+          --_Taming of the Shrew_.
+
+
+"Now Berthe--why, what in the world----" Jacqueline began.
+
+It was her second morning to awake in the hacienda house, and the little
+Bretonne tripped into her room under a starchy mountain heaped high.
+"Clothes, madame," she replied.
+
+"Hé mais----"
+
+"They were made yesterday by some of the ranchero women. Madame will
+look?"
+
+"Calico! Grands dieux!"
+
+There were two dresses, one for each girl. The native seamstresses had
+slyly taken stock of mademoiselle the day before, only to discover that
+a "simple" frock from Paris was a formidable thing to duplicate. The
+marchioness smiled, and the maid also.
+
+"But, for example, Berthe, who inspired this?"
+
+"He did."
+
+"He?"
+
+"The American monsieur, of course."
+
+"Oh, the American monsieur, of course! So, monsieur permits himself to
+observe that I need a wardrobe? But you, Berthe, you surely did not----"
+
+"Oh, no, madame! I knew nothing, till just now, when the woman brought
+them. The monsieur ordered them yesterday, she said. And naturally,
+madame, if he could have found better material, I do not doubt----"
+
+"There, child, I'll not be reproached by your even thinking it necessary
+to defend----"
+
+"And madame will see, too, that they will do nicely." She spread the
+frocks on the bed, and began snipping here and there with the scissors
+and taking stitches everywhere. "By letting it out this way--voilà, if
+madame will kindly slip it on?"
+
+"Berthe, you can't mean--Oh nonsense!"
+
+None the less the skirt passed over her head, and the maid's deft
+fingers kept on busily. "And why not?" she talked as she worked, "unless
+one likes rags better. And who will see? Only men. Poof, those citizens
+do not know percale from a Parisian toilette."
+
+Jacqueline began to wax angry with the quiet tyranny of it. She looked
+at the horror and shuddered, then with both hands pushed the calico to
+the floor, gathering up her own lawn skirt instead. It was rather a
+woebegone lawn skirt. She gazed ruefully at the garment, then down at
+the blue flowering heaped about her ankles. Berthe, kneeling over the
+dress, raised her eyes. The puckered brow of her mistress spelled fury,
+and the maid tried not to laugh, at which Jacqueline stamped her foot.
+"Berthe," she cried, "shall I slap you?"
+
+"Mais oui, madame. And madame, I was thinking, what will he say if you
+do not wear it?"
+
+Jacqueline gave her a keen look. "Child, child," she exclaimed, "you
+seem to imagine that whatever _he_ wants----"
+
+"Oui, madame.--I think you can try it on again now."
+
+And madame submitted petulantly. But to herself she had to confess the
+magic in Berthe's fingers. Though she pouted over the fresh, rustic
+effect, yet on her slender figure there was witchery in it.
+
+An orderly knocked. He was one of her Austrian escorts come to say that
+everything was ready for departure. She gladly hailed the chance to
+escape this house of mourning. All night long old women in the death
+chamber had mumbled incantations, and the droning was in her ears as she
+slept. It was not nice. Because she could not blot out the inartistic
+shock of ugly mortality, in very self-hate she yearned to get away. The
+evening before, even while she loaned common sense to the crazed
+household, even while she pressed down the icy eyelids, she
+wondered--obstinately wondered, despite herself, what the dead girl
+could have thought, what she could have felt, during that one horrid,
+thrilling second of flight downward, and what, in anticipation of the
+second after. It was gruesome, this being always and always the
+spectator. Yet Jacqueline knew that, had it been she herself plunging
+from the tower, she still would have been that spectator. Too well she
+knew that she would have analyzed what she thought and felt. She would
+have rated even the second before eternity in its degree as a frisson;
+and, no doubt, would have been aware of a voluptuous satiety, while
+anticipating the second after. She hated herself, and she hated too the
+smart, ultra-refined life that had brought her to it. How many of those
+past years, or of the years to come would she not give to shed a few
+tears without interrogating them!
+
+Ney met the two girls under the colonnade. At the steps was the coach
+and eight mules left by Maximilian for their use, and drawn up in
+stately line were Messieurs the Feathers and Furs, as Jacqueline called
+His Majesty's Austrian Imperial Guards. When she appeared, out flashed
+their curved blades. The queenly little lady in blue-flowered calico and
+a rakish Leghorn hat returned the salute with a smile.
+
+"Where are the Dragoons, Michel?" she asked.
+
+Ney did not know. But a Mexican with a crossed eye approached, doffing a
+silver-lettered sombrero. He had been waiting for her, he said. There
+was time. Otherwise he would have forced his way to wherever she was.
+
+"Indeed, Seigneur Farceur?" said Jacqueline.
+
+She recognized that most sinister of jokers, Don Tiburcio. He was eyeing
+her narrowly, and there was a vigilance in the baleful gleam, as though
+of late he might have been deceived by his fellowmen.
+
+"But," he coolly proceeded, "only a few minutes are left now."
+
+"My good man, whatever are you talking about?"
+
+"And after the few minutes, we'll have the shooting. I came to invite
+Your Mercy."
+
+"Shoot whom?"
+
+"There is but one prisoner."
+
+"You mean Señor Murguía? The American was acquitted, I believe."
+
+"It's the other way, señorita. They were both tried over again, and
+then, the American was condemned."
+
+"Mademoiselle," ejaculated Ney, "you are deathly----"
+
+"I am not!" Jacqueline protested furiously. "It's the powder."
+
+But Berthe knew better. Her mistress used it not, for all the roguish
+freckle on her nose-tip. Tiburcio, too, was satisfied as to her sudden
+pallor. She would save him the American, he decided. "Your Mercy had
+best hasten," he urged her frankly.
+
+Jacqueline ran to the end of the portico, from were she could see the
+pasture. Within, a platoon of red jackets were filing toward the carcel.
+
+"That scoundrel Lopez!" exclaimed Tiburcio, "he has advanced the time on
+us!"
+
+Only for an instant did Jacqueline wring her hands.
+
+"Michel, your horse!" she cried. "Quick, quick! Now hold the stirrup!"
+
+But Tiburcio was the quicker. He bent his knee, on it she stepped, and
+up she jumped, and kicked her heel as a spur. The charger leaped, and
+down the road clattered girl and horse, she swaying perilously.
+
+It was a hundred yards to the pasture gate, and as much again to the
+adobe inside. When her horse rose in his gallop, she caught glimpses
+over the wall. The Dragoons were drawing up before the carcel. Sentinels
+tugged at the huge wooden door, and Lopez goaded them on. He saw her
+coming, and would have it over with before she could interfere. He
+bellowed an order, and the shooting squad threw up their guns at aim.
+They would not wait. They would fire on their victim the second the door
+opened. The heavy oak began to give. But that moment swinging in through
+the gate, Jacqueline could see only the carcel's blank adobe wall. Yet
+she pictured the man just behind. She pictured the door opening.
+And--too late! Dieu, the muskets had volleyed already!
+
+But--what made the shots scatter so? Scattered and flurried, they
+sounded. And no wonder! She saw a miracle in the doing. It was the most
+astounding sight of all her life long. Straight through the blank adobe
+wall, for all its two feet of thickness, she beheld a man on a
+great-boned yellow horse, both man and horse plunge mid a sudden cloud
+of dust, plunge squarely into the light of day.
+
+The dumfounded shooting squad had blazed crazily against the half-open
+door; and for the critical quarter minute following, their weapons were
+harmless. Other Dragoons ran wildly out into the pasture, and as wildly
+fired at the horseman. Only one of the sentinels had happened to be on
+the side of the magic exit, but as the solid wall dissolved into a
+powdered cloud and the apparition hurtled past him, down upon his head
+crashed a gigantic water jar filled with earth. He who had sympathized
+with pagan ablutions the night before stood now with mouth agape. Some
+heathen god was having a hand in this, he knew.
+
+Jacqueline wheeled to Driscoll's side as he dashed toward her. He was
+coatless. His woolen shirt was open at the neck, the sleeves were rolled
+to the elbows. His slouch hat sat upon the back of his head. The short
+cropped curls, gray with dust, fluttered against the brim. She had never
+seen a face so buoyantly happy.
+
+"Morning, Miss Jack-leen! Race you to the river?"
+
+They galloped through the gate together. He was for turning down the
+road, but she blocked his horse with her own. During a second the flight
+was stopped.
+
+"I'm in a hurry just now," he panted, but made no effort to get by her.
+
+"Up that way!" she cried. "Up that way, past the House!"
+
+"But those pretty boys----"
+
+"The Austrians? They'll not stop you, I promise."
+
+"Then it's our move. Careful, little girl, don't fall!"
+
+Jacqueline, waving her arm, signaled the Feathers and Furs to make room,
+and Tiburcio and Ney saw to it that they did. Man and girl raced through
+them.
+
+"Wait here, Michel!" called Jacqueline, leaving Ney still with thumb to
+cap at salute. Tiburcio gazed after them.
+
+Lopez ran across the pasture to the colonnade. His red face was redder
+than ever before. Tiburcio sardonically regarded him. Lopez glared at
+Ney.
+
+"Why aren't you in pursuit?" he demanded hotly.
+
+"And you, monsieur?"
+
+"And I, and I! Who are you to question me, señor? Every girth has been
+cut!"
+
+"Caramba, mi coronel," cried Tiburcio in dismay, "you don't say so!"
+
+"And it will take ten minutes to tie up the cords, while you, you, Señor
+Frenchman, you stand there, your men mounted and ready! Obey me, I tell
+you!"
+
+"Can't," said Ney doggedly. "Against orders."
+
+"Orders? Whose orders?"
+
+"Of Mademoiselle la Marquise, monsieur."
+
+"Who runs away with a convict. A fit commander, por Dios!"
+
+Off came the Frenchman's gauntlet, but he paused in the gesture of
+striking. Too quick at this, and not enough at wits, he might ruin her
+plans.
+
+"As fit," he retorted instead, "as another who lets prisoners escape. I
+advise Monsieur the Colonel to look to his girths."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE PERSON ON THE OTHER HORSE
+
+
+  "Yet am I sure of one pleasùre,
+  And shortly, it is this:
+  That, where ye be, me seemeth, pardè,
+  I could not fare amiss."
+           --_Ballad of the Nut Brown Maid._
+
+
+Din Driscoll had never remotely imagined that there could be such
+intoxication in a horseback ride. The person on the other horse made for
+the difference. How the joy of her filled him that instant of his
+bursting through the black prison wall into the bright morning of the
+world! She, the splendid first thing to gladden his eyes! Could liberty
+be really so glorious? Ravishing horsewoman, she was coming to save him.
+He had supposed her on her way to Mexico, and 'twas she whom he saw
+first of all.
+
+And now, she rode beside him. They two, they were riding together,
+alone. The smell of the wild free air of the universe thrilled them both
+with an exquisite recklessness. Vague, limitless, subtle in mystery, the
+seduction of it was ineffable. Out of the corner of his eye he peeped at
+her. But wasn't she perched entrancingly on that dragoon saddle, wasn't
+she, though? The richly heavy coils of burnished copper had loosened,
+and they were very disconcerting in their suggestion of flowing wealth.
+If they _would_ but fall about her shoulders! And the lace from the
+slanting hat brim, and the velvet patch near the dimple--the velvet
+patch called an assassin. And--what dress was that? Flowered calico?
+Yes, and light blue. His cheeks burned as of one surprised in crime, but
+the self-possessed young woman herself was oblivious. So was it this, a
+blue flowered gown, that made her so suddenly tangible, so tangible and
+maddening? The haughty Parisienne of imperial courts was gone. In fact,
+she had become so distractingly tangible that--well, he didn't know. But
+a lump got into his throat. She might be a Missouri girl, this moment.
+And there came to him the vision of one, of a Missouri girl molding
+biscuits, patting them, and her arms were bared, in a simple piquancy
+just like Jacqueline's now. He even saw the pickaninnies in the shade of
+the porch outside, worshiping the real Missouri girl from the very
+whites of their eyes. How he had loved to tease her! He could not help
+it; she was so daintily prim. That he should thus think of his sister,
+the while gazing on the one-time gilded butterfly--to say the least, it
+was a pertinent comment on the transmuting magic that lurks in blue
+flowered percale.
+
+They slowed to a trot.
+
+"Monsieur is my prisoner, yes," said she in her wonderful English.
+
+He took the other meaning. "I don't know--_yet_," he returned
+soberly.
+
+She laughed, and he realized that he had spoken aloud.
+
+He turned on himself in dismay. "What's the matter with me?" he
+muttered.
+
+"I think, monsieur," said Jacqueline demurely, "that I have the guess."
+
+"You haven't--you can't guess either! I don't know myself."
+
+"Just the same, I wish I knew so well my chances for heaven."
+
+"But you're mistaken, I tell you. I'm not!"
+
+"Not what, monsieur?"
+
+"In, in--w'y, in love."
+
+Jacqueline's laughter was the merriest peal. In the end he half grinned.
+Little use trying to convince the little witch! He had much to do
+convincing himself.
+
+On the farther slope of a hill where coffee grew and the giant
+sheltering banana hid the road, they paused at a trail that crossed the
+highway and wound on down toward the Pánuco river, where tropical stuff
+for Tampico was transferred from burros to dugout barges. Jacqueline
+listened. There were no sounds of pursuit as yet, nor was there any one
+in sight. Making up her mind, she changed to the path. Driscoll
+followed, with a delight in this new leadership over him.
+
+When they gained the river, she stopped again, and he did too.
+
+"But you must go, on, on!" she protested. "They may not be deceived, no.
+They may have you to overtake here." She held out her hand. "There, this
+path, you follow it to Tampico. Good bye. Yes, yes, you have not one
+minute!"
+
+Driscoll took the little gauntleted hand readily enough. He saw that the
+lines of her face were drawn, but her manner was inexorable.
+
+"How do you like your dress?" he inquired.
+
+Had she been on her feet, she would have stamped one of them.
+"Monsieur," she cried, "here is no time to observe the replenishment of
+a lady's wardrobe. Do you go? I insist. I wish you bon voyage to your
+own country, monsieur."
+
+"But it's so far away. I reckon I'd better rest a spell first. A month
+or so, prob'bly."
+
+She watched him clamber down and tie Demijohn to the low branch of a
+live oak on the river's bank.
+
+"There you are, getting stubborn again," she said. But the lines in her
+face had vanished.
+
+"Of course I mean to see you back to your friends," he explained.
+
+"Merci bien. But you will not. You will have this river straight to
+Tampico. I say yes!"
+
+She turned her horse as she spoke, whereat he started to remount his
+own.
+
+"I think, sir----" she began haughtily.
+
+"The road is free."
+
+"Oh, why have you to be so, so quarrelsome?"
+
+"The temptation, I reckon."
+
+"You really will go back with me?"
+
+"I might be going back along about the same time. It's a public trail."
+
+"Then _I_ will stay, and you _must_! I will not permit you to
+go back there now. I will see that you do wait here so long until Lopez
+has the time to start to Mexico after you. Then you will be behind him.
+Have the goodness to hold my bridle. I think I shall take me a rest a
+little also."
+
+Together they sat on a huge live-oak root and watched the sluggish
+Pánuco flow by.
+
+"No hurry now," Driscoll observed comfortably. "Our scarlet upholstered
+colonel won't get away for years yet."
+
+Years, at least, were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her
+quaintly inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned
+it in London long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her
+father played France's diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers,
+then, was as broad as Mayfair, and to the Missourian doubly foreign, and
+doubly alluring.
+
+"I cannot understand," she said, "why it is the Dragoons have not
+followed you immediately?"
+
+"Tibby's the reason, I reckon. That Tibby is a deep one."
+
+She made him explain, and he told her. The blackmailing humorist,
+Tiburcio, had paid him a visit at his dungeon window during the night.
+Being chief witness for the prosecution, Tiburcio could pass the sentry
+unchallenged.
+
+"Come for your money?" Driscoll had inquired, and Tiburcio seemed hurt.
+
+"What is the matter," Tiburcio demanded, "with pointing a revolver at
+the Señor Americano right now, and making him deliver?"
+
+Driscoll had not figured out what the objections might be, but he
+reckoned some would materialize.
+
+"But," said Tiburcio, "I'm not doing it, and why? Simply because I want
+to know if you care to escape?"
+
+"W'y," returned Driscoll, "I'll think it over, and let you know in the
+morning," at which lack of confidence Tiburcio was more hurt than ever.
+
+"What's the use," Driscoll objected, "they'd catch me again?"
+
+"Not if I fixed their horses, and if I do, will you promise to get out?"
+
+And thus the bargain had stood, and thus it was fulfilled, though at the
+last the anxious Tiburcio had called in Jacqueline to help.
+
+"Now," said the marchioness, settling herself for a treat, "I
+_must_ know. Tame for me the miracle, explain it. I cannot longer
+hold my curiosity. But it was fine--exquis--however you have done it!"
+
+"Weren't they a surprised lot, though?"
+
+"But the miracle, monsieur! The miracle!"
+
+"Well, it was this way. Being on the yawning brink--as old Meagre
+Shanks, friend of mine, would say--I figured it out that lacking in
+godliness, I'd try to get the next best thing."
+
+"Please, monsieur!"
+
+"That I'd try to get a bath."
+
+"Of dust and mud, for example?"
+
+At that Driscoll ceased all miracle taming and brushed himself off. But,
+putting him back into his dungeon, one will recall how he plotted to
+obtain two jars of water. This water he used simply to soften the hard,
+sun-baked adobes. First he hung his coat over the window. A suspicious
+guard naturally wanted to know why, and Driscoll appeared at the bars
+stripped to the waist. To keep out the cold air while he bathed, he
+said, and his teeth chattered. Then he went back to work. He handled his
+precious water with desperate economy. He began at the exposed end of
+one adobe brick, soaking it as needed and digging it out with a chip of
+earthenware knocked off one of the jars. The wall was two adobe lengths
+in thickness, but after he had gotten out his first brick, it was easy,
+by tugging and kicking, to tear out the others of the inside tier, since
+luckily they did not dovetail in with the outer ones. Soon he had an
+arch-shaped niche in the wall almost as high as his head when mounted on
+Demijohn. The really tedious part remained, and it was an all night job.
+
+To deepen the niche without breaking through, he had to scrape it out
+piecemeal, wetting the dried mud as he toiled. He measured carefully
+just how much of the thickness to leave, because the weed stalks in the
+adobe could not be trusted to hold too thin a crust, and also he had to
+take care that the water did not soak entirely through and make a
+tell-tale blot on the outside when daylight should come. It was an
+infinitely laborious task, and even with completion at last, there was
+yet the question--which would break first, bone or masonry?
+
+But he would learn when he should dash his horse's skull and his own
+against the shell that remained. He saddled Demijohn, filled an empty
+jar with the soft earth of his excavations, and waited. His dramatic
+appearance at the instant of the door's opening was not a coincidence.
+It was minute calculation. Already mounted, he faced the wall, with the
+heavy jar poised over his head in both hands, his spurs drawn back to
+strike. He waited until sentinels and shooting squad had gathered at the
+door. He waited to draw their fire, to empty their muskets. But he did
+not wait until the door should open enough to give them unimpeded aim.
+In the second of its opening he drove back the spurs, hurled the jar
+against the wall, and--crashed through his dungeon as easily as breaking
+a sucked egg.
+
+"But," demanded Jacqueline eagerly, "how is it you did feel?" She was
+disappointed that the personal equation had had so little prominence.
+
+"I don't recollect," said Driscoll, puzzled, "there was nothing hurting
+especially."
+
+"No, no! Your sensations facing death, then escaping?"
+
+He brightened. "W'y yes," he replied, happy to catch her meaning. "I
+felt toler'ble busy."
+
+She sighed despairingly. Yet there was plenty left her for wonderment,
+and in it she revelled.
+
+"Ingenuity!" she mused. "I declare, I believe the first human being to
+stand up on his hind legs must have been an American. It simply occurred
+to him one day that he didn't need all fours for walking, and that he
+might as well use his before-feet for something else."
+
+"And a Frenchman, Miss Jack-leen?"
+
+She flung up her hands.
+
+"_He!_" she exclaimed. "If ever a compatriot of mine had gotten
+that idea into his--how you say?--pate, would he not carry it out to the
+idiotic limit, yes? He? _He_ would try to walk without any feet
+whatever, and use _all_ of them for other things. Already you have
+seen him doing the, the pugilat--the box--with every one of his fours.
+Voilà!"
+
+But time was passing. Lopez had certainly repaired his girths by this
+time. Driscoll arose. "There's a shorter way back," he announced. "The
+river junction can't be far down stream, and I'll wait for you there,
+Miss Jack-leen, while you scout on ahead to the hacienda house. If all's
+clear, you signal and I will advance with the heavy cavalry."
+
+"C'est bien, mon colonel."
+
+"Whatever that means, I hope it ain't mutiny."
+
+At best it was only mock compliance. Jacqueline also knew that time was
+passing, but she had not mentioned the fact. Now the reason transpired.
+She harked back on their separation, with a grave earnestness and a
+saddened air of finality. He was to leave her here, she said. He was to
+go back to his own country. How badly had his reception fared so far?
+Why not, then, leave Mexico to ingratitude, and have done? The romantic
+land of roses was notoriously a blight to hopes. Why should he seek to
+thrive despite the mysterious curse that seemed to hover over all things
+like a deadly miasma?
+
+Driscoll shook his head. "You know I have come to see Maximilian."
+
+"But you are under sentence. You will lose your life."
+
+"Miss Jack-leen, you said a while back that I was your prisoner. You
+have the Austrian escort. All right. You will deliver me to the
+Emperor," and he waved his hand as though the matter was arranged.
+
+"But monsieur," she cried, "may not others have plans as vital as yours?
+And, perhaps--yes, you interfere."
+
+He did interfere, in grimmest truth. Leaving the Sphinx of the
+Tuileries, she had come with her mission, and with an idea, too, of the
+obstacles that must be vanquished. But here, almost at landing, she
+encountered a barrier left out of her calculations, and which alone,
+unaided, she had to surmount. It was the surrender of the Confederacy,
+and what this upsetting complication meant against her own errand was
+embodied in the man before her. For in him lay the results of the
+Surrender as affecting the Mexican empire. In a word, he brought aid for
+Maximilian at the moment when Maximilian might be discouraged enough to
+give way to France; when the forgetful prince might gladly leave all to
+the generous nation which had placed him on his throne and which by him
+was cheated of the reward of its costly empire building. Should the
+French threaten to withdraw, should they in reality withdraw, still he
+would not abdicate, not with Confederate veterans to replace the
+pantalons rouges. Like the dog of the fable, Maximilian would cling to
+the manger.
+
+"Oui, oui, monsieur," she repeated sharply, "you interfere!"
+
+"In that case," said Driscoll quietly, "I will leave you at the river
+junction. When I see that you are safely at the hacienda----"
+
+"You will go back to America?"
+
+"That need not worry you."
+
+"Then you are _not_ going back, back to your own country?" He would
+keep on to the City alone. She would have no chance to intercept him.
+After all Fate had been good to her--no, cruel!--to cast him in her
+path. "You might find the Austrian escort safer than going alone," she
+said enticingly.
+
+He hesitated. What all this was about, he could not imagine. He knew
+nothing, naturally, of the dark intrigues of an enigmatical adventurer
+far away in the Tuileries, nor how they could affect him. And so he put
+away as absurd the fancy that she in her turn might interfere with him.
+Besides, he was tempted.
+
+"It's a go!" he said.
+
+She for her part was thinking, hoping, rather, that perhaps she was
+mistaken. Perhaps he only bore the offer of a paltry few hundred, a
+handful of homeseekers from his regiment. She hoped so. She would have
+prayed for it, had praying occurred to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+THE STRANGEST AVOWAL OF LOVE
+
+
+  "Nae living man I'll love again,
+  Since that my lovely knight is slain."
+               --_Lament of the Border Widow._
+
+
+Back once more at the hacienda, Driscoll recovered his coat still
+hanging over the dungeon window. Lopez would have called it insolence,
+had he been there instead of scouring the country toward Mexico.
+Jacqueline and Berthe settled themselves in the traveling coach left for
+their comfort by Maximilian. Driscoll's effects, including his gray
+cape-coat and the bundle he had carried behind his saddle, were found in
+his room at the House. Jacqueline took them into the carriage with her,
+along with that absurd little valise that she had brought from the ship
+for an hour's jaunt on shore. Driscoll rode with Ney and the Austrians,
+and was once again headed toward the capital, still sixty fair Mexican
+leagues southward.
+
+For six days it was an uneventful journey, seemingly. By day there were
+sierras, and valleys, and wayside crosses marking violent deaths. By
+night they accepted either ranchero hospitality or put up at some
+village mesón. But within himself, adventures were continuous and
+varying for the Storm Centre. He could not account for the strange,
+curious elation that possessed him, especially when Jacqueline would
+take Ney's horse and ride at his side, perhaps for an hour, when the sun
+was not too hot. Driscoll never knew how long these occasions lasted. He
+did not know that they were long at all. As a matter of fact, he had
+ceased using ordinary standards of measurement. The universe, and sordid
+accessories such as time, radiated entirely about one little velvet
+patch near a dimple satellite.
+
+There came to be long silences between them as they rode, either boy or
+girl content to have it so, and neither the least bit lonesome. And they
+talked too, naturally, though this was not so significant. She would
+slyly provoke him. To her mind, there was never anyone quite so
+satisfying at a quarrel. She would pause in delighted expectancy to see
+his eyes grow big when she thrust, and then to see his mouth twitch at
+the corners as he caught her blade on his own keen wit. She had
+forgotten that he was rustic, except for the added zest it gave. Nor was
+there a false note in him, so happily and totally unconscious was he of
+self. And as for a certain gaucherie, that was the spice to his whole
+manner.
+
+They talked of many things; rather, she made him talk. She learned that
+his name was John, as hers was Jeanne, and she wanted to know why the
+horse was Demijohn.
+
+"Because, Miss Jack-leen," he answered, "he's my other half, and
+sometimes the better one, too." He remembered that once, when he had
+drooped limp over the saddle, the buckskin had carried him out of the
+fighting to the rear. "You see," he added, "we were both colts when our
+little shindy up there broke loose."
+
+"And you both went? Ah, Monsieur the Patriot, you did go, you did
+affront the tyrant? Yes!" She had the explorer's eagerness. Perhaps she
+might discover in him her own especial demon of self-introspection.
+
+"N-o," he replied, "I reckon we went mostly for the fun of the thing."
+
+"Fi donc!" she cried. "But wait till you are old. Oh yes, we have them
+too, those blessed, over-petted veterans of the Grande Armée. They are
+in the Hôtel des Invalides, with medals to diagnose their glory. Oh, là,
+là, but there's a pleasant fashion! The people, the politicians, they
+forget the hot blood that fought simply because there were pretty blows
+to strike. They see only the gray hairs. 'Honneur aux patriotes!' You
+wait, monsieur. You, too, will be made into the hero, ex post facto, and
+you will believe it yourself. Yes, with the wolves, one learns to howl."
+
+"N-o," said the young Confederate, "we--we got licked."
+
+They talked--he rather--of Missouri. He was not reluctant to have
+stirred the memories of his home, not with one who could listen as she
+did. In his heart settled a warmth that was good, and the glow of it
+shone on his face. He became aware that the gray eyes were upon him,
+taking conscious note of his hair, his mouth, his chin, as though she
+were really seeing him for the first time. What made a girl do that way?
+He felt queerly, it being thus brought to him that he had awakened
+interest in a woman, but the tribute she paid him was ennobling, and a
+deep thankfulness, though to whom or for what he had not the least idea,
+made more kindly and good the cheery warmth around his heart. The gray
+eyes had never sparkled on him in coquetry as they sometimes did on
+other men, and now they were grave and sweet. It was a phase of
+Jacqueline that only her maid had known.
+
+The marquise gathered that Missour-_i_, as she called it, was an
+exceedingly strange and fascinating region. She learned that it was a
+state, like a department in France, like her own Bourbonnais for
+instance. But there the comparison ended. The rest was all startling
+versatility. For the inhabitants had not only taken both sides during
+the Civil War, but through their governor had proclaimed themselves an
+independent republic into the bargain. They must be unusual citizens,
+those Missourians.
+
+But they were strangest because they did not seem to be actors. They did
+not refine living into a cult, with every pleasure and pain classified
+and weighed out and valued. No, they actually lived. It was hard to
+realize this, but in the end she did, and with ever increasing wonder,
+with also a beginning of envy and hunger. But there was still another
+thing even more indefinable. It centered in the word "home," which she
+knew neither in French nor Spanish, but which she came to know now, as
+its meaning grew upon her. It was more than a "maison" or a "casa," or a
+"chez nous." It was a manner of temple. And the high priest there was a
+grim lord. How very grim, indeed! There was no compromise, no blinking,
+no midway gilded dais between the marriage altar and the basest filth.
+As grim, this was, as that original Puritanism which has become a
+synonym of American backbone. Grim, yes; but the woman there, where the
+high priest blinked not, was a divinity. She was a divinity in the
+tenderest and most devoted sense of the word. And the Puritanism was
+purity enshrined, as a simple matter of course. The longing, if only to
+know more of this odd country, rose in her mysteriously, and stronger
+and stronger.
+
+When on one occasion she went back to the coach, she found that Berthe
+also was enjoying the change to horseback. Jacqueline was glad of it.
+Now she could be alone, and she believed that she wanted to think. But
+she could not pin down what she wanted to think about; because, no
+doubt, there was so very much. Instead, she looked vacantly at the Storm
+Centre's cartridge belt and pistols on the seat in front of her. They
+were grim, too, these playthings of a boy.
+
+Dupin had left the weapons with Ney, back at the hacienda, and Ney had
+turned them over to Jacqueline as to the real strategic chief of the
+expedition. And Jacqueline had kept them, perhaps to look at, perhaps
+because of a whim that a prisoner should not be armed. She liked to hear
+Driscoll mourn for them, not knowing where they were, and she held back
+the surprise as one lingers before an anticipated pleasure. She picked
+up the great, black revolvers with a woman's fascinated respect for the
+harsh, eternal male of her species, who is primeval and barbaric yet,
+and ever will be, to hold his mate his very own. Her touch was gingerly,
+but there was a caress in her fingers on the ugly things.
+
+She lifted the belt. How heavy of metal it was! Idly, she thought she
+would count the leaden missiles. When finally she laid the belt aside, a
+bullet remained in her lap. It had fallen there out of its shell.
+Starting to fit the bullet in again, she suddenly dropped both bullet
+and cartridge. Her hands trembled. This particular shell contained no
+powder. But it contained a tightly rolled slip of oiled paper. The
+cartridge was a dummy, a wee strong box for some vital document.
+
+It was not for scruples against looking that she paused. On the
+contrary, it was that she must look, absolutely, in sacred, patriotic
+duty bound, that finally decided--nay, compelled her to look. Still she
+hesitated before drawing out the paper. She dreaded what it might tell
+her. Concealed thus, and revealed only by a hazard, the paper held, she
+felt certain, the secret and the significance of the American's errand
+to Mexico. And she did not want to know. She reviled bitterly the cruel
+chance that had thrust it on her.
+
+She read. The paper was a communication addressed to the Emperor
+Maximilian by the Confederate generals of the Trans-Mississippi
+department. Foreseeing Lee's surrender, they had gathered from
+Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, at a place in the latter state named
+Marshall, and there they had decided that they would not surrender. They
+would seek homes and a country elsewhere, swords in hand. At this
+meeting, which had been inspired by Gen. Joe Shelby, they had deposed
+the cautious general commanding, Kirby Smith, and they had put in his
+stead Simon Bolivar Buckner. The Trans-Mississippi department numbered
+fifty thousand men. There would also be fugitives from Lee's and
+Johnson's corps, besides Jefferson Davis in person, should he contrive
+to pass the Federal lines. Many thousands of veterans would shortly be
+marching across the Rio Grande. In Texas, at the Confederate arsenals
+and depositories, they would seize what they needed: guns, ammunition,
+horses, provisions, money. In Mexico they would become citizens, and
+they would defend their new homes against outlawry, rebellion, or
+invasion. The signatory generals prayed the Emperor Maximilian to
+consider this, and "to do it quick."
+
+Jacqueline put the letter back in the cartridge, and everything looked
+as before. But no genii, once out, can ever quite be bottled up again.
+That stray bullet had wounded her to the heart.
+
+"As bad as fifty thousand!" she cried half aloud. "And they will become
+citizens, too--Mon Dieu, _that_ is a nation!"
+
+With them Maximilian would have a people behind him, and his throne
+would be as a rock. He could, and most certainly would, disdain the
+French army of occupation with its thirty thousand bayonets. The French
+might go back home. He would speed them cheerfully, and henceforth be
+Emperor in fact.
+
+"But our treasure and our dead," sighed Jacqueline bitterly, "we cannot
+take _them_ back. No, nor our hopes, though they weigh little
+enough now, for that matter. Oh dear, and _I_ am one of those
+hopes!--Help me Heaven, else I shall hate my own country. Oh, I must be
+true!--Now, _why_ couldn't those Missourians have sent--someone
+else?"
+
+That evening she held a pen, but it would not move, not while her
+thoughts were upon it. So, by sheer will, she nerved herself not to
+think, and wrote mechanically. She wrote a message to Lopez, and another
+to Dupin, and yet a third. The third brought the tears long before it
+was finished. An Austrian took the first two, and rode all that night.
+She kept the other one herself.
+
+This was the fifth day of their journey since leaving Murguía's
+hacienda. They had taken pains to keep behind Lopez. Their pursuer,
+ahead of them, had not made twenty miles the first day, for he had
+delayed in order to search here and there. But the second day, he had
+evidently accepted failure, and hastened on to overtake the Emperor. The
+Emperor himself, after traveling constantly for a night and a day, had
+rested a night and half a day to reflect on his late energy, and
+thereafter he was proceeding as roadside ovations would permit.
+Accordingly on this, the fifth night, Lopez was close behind the
+Emperor, and both were within a day of the capital, and less than a day
+ahead of Driscoll, Jacqueline and Ney.
+
+All the next day Jacqueline kept to her coach. She was cross or
+nervously excited or melancholy, and by erratic turns in every mood that
+was hopelessly downcast, until her maid became well nigh frantic. At
+first Ney would hover near in helpless concern, but she ordered him away
+angrily. However, the storm broke at last when Driscoll reined in and
+waited at the roadside. She could see him through the little front pane
+of glass as the carriage drew nearer, and she watched with a fierce
+hunger in her eyes. All the time she stirred in greater agitation, and
+her breath came more and more quickly. At the very last moment, when a
+second later he might have seen her, she sprang to the window, looked
+once again, then in a fury snatched at the shade and jerked it down.
+Driscoll paused uncertain, but wheeled and galloped back to the head of
+the column. Berthe turned to her mistress. She was lying weakly against
+the cushions, staring at nothing and panting for air.
+
+Toward dusk they reached Tuxtla, a little pueblo on the highroad set mid
+maguey farms that made the rolling hill slopes of Anahuac look like a
+giant's cabbage patch. In the distance, under two snow-capped peaks
+beyond, the mosaic domes and sandstone towers and painted walls of the
+capital glittered in the setting sun like some picture of an Arabian
+city vaguely known to memory. The travelers were not a dozen miles from
+their destination, but Berthe announced that madame her mistress would
+rest at Tuxtla for the night.
+
+The Austrians were quartered in the village, and Ney and Driscoll found
+accommodations for the two girls and themselves farther down the road,
+at the house of a maguey grower whom they persuaded to vacate. While it
+was still light Driscoll amused himself strolling alone between the rows
+of the great century plants. Under their leaves, curving high above his
+head, he watched peons with gourds suck out the honey water from the
+onion-like bulbs into goatskin bags. After a time he wandered through
+the hacendado's primitive distillery and on back to the house, with a
+feeling for supper.
+
+As he entered, he heard the clanking of a sabre in the dark room. He
+thought nothing of it, but almost at once something cut through the air
+and a noose fell over him. He swung round, but the rope jerked tight
+about his knees, and he lurched and swayed as an oak before the axe. He
+struck with his fist and had a groan for reward, but a second lariat
+circled his shoulders and bound his arms to his body. As he went down
+under the weight of men, the shutters were thrown open, and he looked up
+into the red-lidded eyes of Colonel Lopez. A troop of cavalry was
+passing on the road outside, and he caught the sound of wheels
+departing.
+
+"You hear?" said Lopez. "The marquesa is going to the City, having
+decided not to wait for you. But she leaves a note, pour prendre congé,
+eh? You will perhaps have time to read it before the shooting."
+
+Once more Driscoll found himself in an adobe with a sputtering candle
+for company. But he also had her note. It was the third of the messages
+which she had written the night before.
+
+"Monsieur," it began, "I cannot let you die without telling you that it
+was I who betrayed----"
+
+He jumped to his feet. "Oh--the pythoness!" he breathed fervently.
+
+"----who betrayed you," the letter read. "That you know this, monsieur,
+that your last thought shall be a curse at me, such will be my
+punishment. It is a self inflicted one, because you need not have known
+what I have done. The telling of this to you is my scourge, but it is
+not penitence. Worse and more unbearable is my sorrow that the penitence
+will never come, that I can feel no remorse, no more than if some
+inevitable thing, like the fever, had taken you. I would always do again
+what I have just done; as pitiless as I must be for you, Fate is for me.
+Your life, monsieur, is but added to the hundreds already snuffed out in
+this country for France's sake. Those hundreds are my countrymen, and
+you, if you lived till to-morrow, would make _their_ offering
+useless. I have tried to save you, monsieur, but you would not permit.
+You would not return to your own country, and--there was no other way.
+But do not think there will come emissaries in your place. Do not
+believe that I would so send you to death needlessly. There will be no
+emissaries after you. Your Confederates shall know that Maximilian's
+court martial executed you, and is it that your compatriotes will then
+desire to help Maximilian? Believe--only believe, monsieur--that it is a
+cruel duty not permitting that I shall listen to my heart. If you but
+knew, if you but knew--and you shall know. Monsieur Driscoll--oh, mon
+chevalier, it is that I love you. There, know then, dear heart cheri,
+the enormity of my sacrifice. Know the necessity of it. Know that I envy
+you, for you are going, and I must stay, all alone, without you. Mon
+bien aimé, _without you_, through all my long life!"
+
+She had signed it simply, "Jacqueline."
+
+Again Driscoll was on his feet. He paced up and down the room. "There's
+one thing," he muttered, "and that is, there's nothing between her and
+Maximilian, not when she's keeping help from him." And on he paced, his
+fists opening and clenching. Suddenly he came to a dead halt.
+
+"By God," he cried, "I'm not going to be shot, no sir, not now, not
+after--not after this letter!"
+
+Here was neither boy nor warrior. It was very much in the way of a
+lover.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+BERTHE
+
+
+  "Il y a deux êtres en nous: l'acteur et le spectateur."
+                                             --_Sienkiewicz._
+
+
+The same evening, though two hours later, a public hack entered an
+outlying quarter of the City of Mexico called San Cosme, and drew up
+before a white mansion with beautiful gardens. A young girl with soft
+brown hair and gentle eyes got out, ran to the door, and brought down
+the ponderous knocker so terrifically that it abashed her, for all her
+present agitation. To the flunkey, who noted the public hack and was
+reproachful, she said, "I must see His Excellency. Here, I have written
+my name on Mademoiselle d'Aumerle's card. I am her maid. Say to Monsieur
+le Maréchal that he will regret it, if I do not see him at once. Quick
+now, you!"
+
+If possessed of guile, Berthe could not have done better. With
+Jacqueline's card, used only because it had a blank side, her admittance
+was certain and immediate.
+
+She passed the lackey into a luxurious apartment, Marshal Bazaine's
+private cabinet. At one end there was a Japanese screen with a lamp
+behind, and at intervals came the sound of someone turning the leaves of
+a book. But Berthe thought solely of her errand. The marshal, thick
+necked, heavy cheeked and stocky, was standing, waiting for her.
+
+"So," he exclaimed, "milady is arrived, eh, and you bring me her
+commands?"
+
+"No, Your Excellency, my mistress does not know that I am here. When she
+learns, she will dismiss me. I----"
+
+The marshal of France grew cold. "It was a decoy then, the card you
+used?" he interrupted. "And was that one also, young woman, when you
+threatened that I should regret----"
+
+"You will indeed regret, monsieur, if you do not let me speak. There's a
+mistake to correct if--if it's not too late."
+
+The chief of the Army of Occupation shrugged his shoulders until the
+back of his neck folded over itself. He had been correcting mistakes
+ever since Maximilian's landing. But he was a child of the people
+himself, and the distress in her eyes made him patient. "Well, what is
+it?" he asked.
+
+"It is an American. They will shoot him, monsieur!"
+
+"Ah, one who interests the young person now before me, eh?"
+
+"And I want you to stop them, monsieur! I want----"
+
+"Child, child, whom am I to stop?"
+
+"Colonel Lopez, monsieur. The American escaped once, but mademoiselle
+gave him up again. He'd saved mademoiselle's life, too. And mine."
+
+The veteran soldier rubbed his finger tips on his bald, bullet-like
+head. "He saves her, and she gives him to Lopez. He must be an important
+species of American!"
+
+"Yes, yes, monsieur."
+
+"There, don't worry. His Majesty will pardon your friend to-morrow--if,"
+he added to himself, "only from habit."
+
+"But Lopez will shoot him before the Emperor knows."
+
+The marshal had shrewd eyes, and now they opened wide. "Getting more
+important, our American!" he grumbled uneasily. "Berthe, did your
+mistress know that Lopez would shoot him before he could be pardoned?"
+
+"Oh yes, monsieur."
+
+[Illustration: "BERTHE"
+"... Brought down the ponderous knocker so terrifically that
+it abashed her, for all her present agitation"]
+
+"Name of a name, what does she want him killed for? Why is this drôle
+of a Lopez in such a hurry?--See here, child, you know something more.
+What did you mean by my regretting----"
+
+"Because, because everybody seemed to think that the poor brave American
+had come with an offer of aid for Maximilian, and as you need more
+troops, I thought----"
+
+"Who, in all mercy, is this American?"
+
+"A Confederate officer, monsieur."
+
+Not one man, but two, paced the floor because of Jacqueline that
+evening. The second was the marshal of France, and he went at it now, on
+hearing of the first man. "A Confederate officer?" There were twin
+creases over his straight nose, furrows of vexed and intense thinking.
+The lone Southerner was linked intimately in his reflections with the
+parliament of a great nation. The people of France had never warmed to
+the Mexican dream, and the Chambers already were clamoring for the
+return of the troops. And now, for every Confederate enlisted, a
+pantalon rouge could be sent back home. But why--name of a name--should
+Jacqueline try to prevent?
+
+"Did she," he asked, but not very hopefully, "did she have any cause to
+dislike this American?"
+
+"Oh, monsieur!" The cry was pained surprise. That her mistress could or
+would pay a grudge! "On the contrary," she protested vehemently, "I have
+never seen her so moved, never, and if _you_ had seen her,
+monsieur, as we left Tuxtla! I thought she must surely lose her mind.
+One cannot imagine her terror. She cried to the driver, to the
+outriders, to lash the mules, harder, faster, till it's a miracle we did
+not crash over a cliff. And all the time she would look back, and at
+every sound she would clap her hands over her ears and cry out to know
+if that was shooting. And then she would pound at the window to them to
+go faster. She wanted to get out of hearing, monsieur. It was only when
+we were really here in the City that she quieted, but that was worse.
+She lay and moaned. I cried, I could not help it, hearing her. She would
+mutter things, too. 'France, France!' she said once, and it made me
+shudder. One almost thought she had a dagger in her hand----"
+
+"Never mind, what else did she say?"
+
+"She said, 'Oh, I hate thee, my country!' but she wasn't in her mind, oh
+no, monsieur. Then she grew very still, and that frightened me more yet.
+Once I even thought she was dead, and I put my arm about her. But her
+heart was beating, and her eyes were open, wide open and dry. I could
+see, for we were passing between the Paseo lights. I laid her head on my
+breast, and after a while I heard her lips move. 'God bless him!
+God--Oh, I hope there _is_ a God, just for this, to bless him, and
+keep him!'"
+
+"H'm'm," said the marshal, and went back and forth again, more perplexed
+than ever.
+
+Berthe watched him anxiously, jealous of each moment lost. Once she
+started to speak, but his gesture for silence was such that she did not
+dare a second time. There was no other sound in the room except the
+tramp, tramp on the soft carpet. Even the occasional turning of a leaf
+behind the screen had ceased. Bazaine was groping cautiously in the
+mystery. A state reason, and no personal one, had compelled Jacqueline;
+that much was certain. Direct from the Tuileries, she was weighted under
+some grievous responsibility, and this night, back there at Tuxtla, she
+had been true to it. And whatever it was, it exacted imperatively that
+no Confederate aid should reach Maximilian. Such was Napoleon's wish,
+however contradictory to official instructions. But the marshal was
+sufficiently a disciple of the little Napoleonic statecraft to beware of
+meddling. He fretted under methods whereby the whisper of the Sphinx
+reached him through private and unofficial agents, but it was a great
+deal to catch the Sphinx's whisper at all. Besides, he owed his
+elevation to this enigma of Europe, and he meant to be loyal.
+
+"Berthe," he said at last, "there's just one man who can interfere where
+Mademoiselle d'Aumerle disposes, but he is rather far away. I mean the
+Emperor of France."
+
+The little Bretonne looked, comprehended, and burst into tears. "My dear
+mistress!" she sobbed.
+
+There was the sound of a book dropped on a table, and the screen was
+brushed aside.
+
+"Perhaps," came a softly ironical voice, "a woman might so much as veto
+our mighty Jacqueline. At any rate, suppose we try it, Don Pancho."
+
+Bazaine had forgotten his wife, his bride, who, to be near him, often
+retired behind the screen when he was busy with others. Hers was the
+loving ambition of a Lady Macbeth, in that a husband's secret was never
+one for her.
+
+"Step into this little room," she said to Berthe, opening a door. "It
+will not take long," she added, an assured light in her dark Spanish
+eyes.
+
+"You will save him, madame? You----"
+
+"Against all the marshals of France, child. Go, wait in there."
+
+The marshal of France present smiled on his bride indulgently,
+admiringly, as she closed the door and faced him.
+
+She was less than half his age, the girl wife of a gray-haired veteran,
+and as his wife she was second lady of the land. A Mexican aristocrat,
+small and slender, of a subtle, winsome beauty, with the prettiest mouth
+and the most pyramidal of crinolines, she had reminded Bazaine of his
+first wife, and he had courted her. At the wedding Maximilian had stood
+padrino for the groom, and Charlotte madrina for the bride. The imperial
+gift to groom and bride was Buena Vista, as the white mansion and
+gardens in San Cosme were called. Naturally, then, Madame la Maréchale
+approved of Napoleon's _official_ instructions, which directed that
+Monsieur le Maréchal was to establish the Mexican empire solidly and for
+all time.
+
+Now her manner of calling the marshal Pancho was considerable of an
+argument, especially when, archly formal, she made it Don Pancho. What
+if this Confederate aid were to go to the Mexican rebels, as it surely
+would if the emissary at Tuxtla were shot? And, without either French or
+Confederates, the Empire would fall, the rebels would win; and then, she
+wanted to know, what would become of their beautiful home, of their high
+position? Moreover, the United States was threatening to drive the
+French from Mexico, and Madame la Maréchale believed it a very good
+thing for the French to have at their side some of the very men who had
+held those Yankees back for four long years.
+
+Bazaine wavered. Then he smiled. This Mexican bride of his was Mexican
+all the time; and French, sometimes not at all. She had not the big
+trust in the pantalons rouges when it came to those Yankees.
+
+"But, Pancho mio," she went on softly, "now for the real reason, the one
+that holds you back. It is your Emperor Napoleon, verdad? You think that
+he does not want this offer to reach Maximilian. Bien, have you had any
+intimation of what he wants? Any orders? Of course you haven't. Then
+save this American. Look at me--Don Pancho, I say-if----"
+
+"Sapristi, call the girl in! No, first I must have----"
+
+When madame could free herself from what he must have, she opened the
+door and triumphantly called to Jacqueline's maid.
+
+A half-hour later, in one of the marshal's own carriages, Berthe
+returned to the castle of Chapultepec. At once she hastened to her
+mistress's apartments, and confessed what she had done. Still in the
+blue flowered calico, with the dust of their frantic ride still on her,
+Jacqueline was seated before a little desk. Her head was buried in her
+arms, and her loosened hair fell like a shower of copper over her
+shoulders. She did not move as Berthe entered, nor give any sign. But
+when in a word the story was told, she got to her feet and stared
+blankly at the girl. Berthe expected dismissal, but the next instant two
+arms were about her, and lips were pressed to hers, and hot tears, not
+her own, wetted her cheek.
+
+"Berthe, you little addle-pated goose! You--oh you little ninny, you,
+you----" Her phrases were broken by laughter, then by an uncontrollable
+peal that was near a shriek, "Little, little fool, dost thou know, thou
+hast this night lost to France fifteen thousand leagues of empire?
+Thou--thou----" Yet kisses were again the portion of the thief of
+fifteen thousand leagues.
+
+"But do you think they will be in time, Berthe? Yes, yes, you've
+answered that once. And Michel leads them, you say?"
+
+"Oui, madame, Monsieur Ney was most eager to go, above all when His
+Excellency gave him Frenchmen to command. They are the cuirassiers. They
+will surely save the American monsieur."
+
+"But will they be in time? Yes, yes, I think I've asked that already."
+
+Her hysteric glee, changing to anxiety, now changed as quickly to
+something else. Her face went deathly white, the pretty jaws set hard,
+and there was the glint of resolution in the gray eyes. She seized a
+cloak and threw it about her.
+
+"Come," she said to the maid.
+
+"Madame is going----"
+
+"Yes, to _undo_ your mischief. Bazaine must send to overtake Ney,
+must command him _not_ to interfere with the execution. Bazaine
+will do this, when I see him."
+
+"But you will not find His Excellency to-night. Madame la Maréchale
+ordered the carriage for them both, as I was leaving there."
+
+"Indeed? Then she knew you were coming here to me? Then she did not
+mention where they were going?"
+
+"No, madame."
+
+"Of course not. Oh, she is cunning, your Madame la Maréchale!"
+
+Alas for Jacqueline! She might conquer herself, but add to herself a
+second woman against her, and she was beaten. She confessed defeat by
+throwing off the cloak.
+
+"Tuxtla is far, you think they will--will----"
+
+"Oh I think they will, madame!"
+
+"Say you _know_ they will! Say it, Berthe, say it!"
+
+"Oh, I hope so, madame. Monsieur the American is lucky."
+
+The American? Somehow the blood swept hotly into Jacqueline's cheeks.
+"Say they will _not_ save him, Berthe. Say no, no, no!" she
+commanded, and imperiously stamped her foot, but stamp as she would, her
+furious shame was there still, flaunting its glorious color. She was
+thinking of her letter, of her avowal to a doomed man. After that,
+_any_ man was under obligations to get himself shot. Only, this one
+was of a contrary fibre.
+
+In such an April mood, Jacqueline was capable of yet another caprice.
+"Berthe," she cried, even as the whim came, "one is tired after playing
+the goose, n'est-ce pas? Do you, then, rest--yes, yes, while I comb your
+hair."
+
+"Madame!" Berthe protested with what breath astonishment left her.
+
+"Do ye call me chief?" demanded the mistress. "Then, de grace, sit
+still! And why shouldn't I, parbleu? If it took our big French
+Revolution to throw me up an ancestor out of the common kettle, there
+has just now been another revolution here"--she pressed a hand against
+her breast--"to stir me back among the people again. Do you know, dear,
+that your hair is beautiful!"
+
+And so they were two girls, girl-like, passing the evening together.
+
+Of a sudden Jacqueline stopped, the braiding arrested by a most
+startling thought.
+
+"Grands dieux," she told herself slowly, for it had to be believed,
+however improbable, "until this very moment I've never once stopped to
+think of all the emotions I have been having this day. I've never once
+examined them, and such emotions--Oh, là, là, they're a collection, a
+veritable museum of creeps! And here I've hurried through that museum,
+till I've even forgotten my umbrella at the check stand!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+MIKE
+
+
+  "Quand on est aimé d'une belle femme, on se tire toujours d'affaire."
+                                            --_Zoroaster, vide Voltaire_
+
+
+The Storm Centre chafed under a mad desire to verify his name, which was
+not unusual. But it was the first time he had ever craved active danger
+as an antidote for his thoughts. The sound of bars lifting came as a
+relief, and he shook off the dark mood and was himself. Before the door
+opened, he thrust her letter into the candle flame. He had kept it till
+the last minute, but now he burned it, as she knew he would.
+
+Instead of executioners, he beheld a tray, gripped by chocolate hands.
+Involuntarily he looked up to the face above the tray.
+
+"Johnny the Baptist!" he exclaimed. "Well, well, how goes it itself to
+Your Mercy this evening?"
+
+"Pues bien, señor," returned the Baptist, grinning sheepishly. "Would,
+would Y'r Mercy like another bath?" The grimace was not unamiable. It
+betokened that this time he, and not the prisoner, might have a game to
+play.
+
+"A thousand thanks," replied Driscoll, "but I'll try to make that other
+bath answer."
+
+"But señor, you wasted it."
+
+"Well, perhaps so. You see, Johnny, it was this way. I had only one bath
+coming, and on the other hand there were two things to save. Do you
+know, Johnny, I've been mortified ever since, to think how I squandered
+my one bath in saving just my life, and how I left my soul to bustle
+along for itself."
+
+The Baptist drew nearer. "But suppose, señor," he whispered, "suppose
+the need of absolution was again postponed, even now?"
+
+Driscoll's fork stopped half way to his mouth. There was no superstition
+in the affair this time. The once gullible Dragoon, moreover, was
+playing all the leads. "Of course," Driscoll agreed heartily, "I'd
+certainly like it right well," and he went on eating. But his wits were
+in a receptive state, alert for the meaning when it should come. The
+opening innuendoes exasperated him, for the guard was a clumsy agent.
+The man must needs feign a great dread of discovery, and tremble lest
+his colonel, Don Miguel Lopez, should find him out. As though supper,
+instead of a shooting squad, did not belie it all?
+
+"Still your move, Johnny," Driscoll had to remind him.
+
+In the end it was to be gathered that Don Benito Juarez, the fugitive
+Señor Presidente of the fugitive Republic, might welcome an offer of
+Confederate aid, and 'twas a pity that the condemned señor should have
+no chance to escape. But if he did escape, he might find his way to the
+Señor Presidente far off in the state of Chihuahua.
+
+So, the cards were dealt at last. Driscoll looked over his hand. He
+recognized a crooked game, a game of treachery and dark dealing; but
+even so he perceived that a trump or two had fallen to him, perhaps
+unwittingly, and he decided to "sit in for a spell."
+
+He began, with coy hesitancy, to beat his scruples around the bush,
+which was not a bad lead. Supposing he turned his offer from Maximilian
+to President Juarez, wouldn't it, well, look as though he did so to save
+his hide? Brown Johnny opened his eyes as at something unfamiliar.
+Driscoll went on. If he were shot, how was he to go to Juarez? But if
+he, uh, happened to get loose, he might just possibly be influenced to
+think of the Juarez proposal. But actually buying his way out would look
+dishonorable. "Now," he concluded abruptly, "run along, and put it that
+way to whoever sent you."
+
+The man protested, and in some genuine alarm, that he had no employers.
+
+"Oh all right," said Driscoll easily, "then you're bound to help me.
+Because if you don't, I'll sure tell Lopez what you've just been trying
+to hatch up here."
+
+The trap worked beautifully, for the guard tried hard to quake. But his
+fright was not spontaneous enough. Driscoll smiled. Now he knew the real
+player in the game.
+
+"Cheer up, Johnny," he spoke soothingly, "I'd not tell on you. But
+hadn't you better go and think it over by yourself a little?"
+
+The Baptist would hasten straight to Lopez, and Lopez, Driscoll foresaw,
+would interpret his scruples into a disguised acceptance. The
+crookedness of the game left the American no other trump, and he played
+it--against immediate death. Lopez, of course, would send him under
+guard to Juarez, but Driscoll thought he could trust that staunch old
+Roman, when once informed, to call for a new deck and an honest deal.
+
+Juan Bautista "thought it over" outside, and directly returned with an
+answer. But when he again left Driscoll, he did not bar the door behind
+him. Within ten minutes thereafter Driscoll was creeping past a sleeping
+sentinel, on between rows of maguey, toward the road. Around him hovered
+five or six shadows. They were to be his escort and take him to Juarez.
+They would join him openly a safe distance away, at a place where their
+horses waited. But as he emerged upon the road, for the moment alone, a
+voice in French challenged sharply. "Halte-là!"
+
+The shadows hesitated an instant, then showed themselves with energy.
+They sprang out and closed on their "escaped" prisoner. They handled him
+more roughly than did the Contra Guerrillas, who had first cried "Halt,"
+and who were now appearing as by magic. The blended anger and
+gratification of the shadows over the escape and recapture was
+vociferously sincere.
+
+"Take them all, mes enfants," a huge tone of command filled the
+darkness. It was Colonel Dupin. He had that moment arrived. Jacqueline's
+message had reached him in the City not an hour before. The American had
+escaped, it said; he was at Tuxtla. The Tiger, knowing nothing of Lopez
+lying in wait for the same American at the same place, had dismounted
+his men, surrounded town and farms, and was closing in, when Driscoll
+himself fell among them.
+
+The interview between Dupin and Lopez brewed stormy at first. The latter
+turned gray under his ruddy skin when Dupin walked in upon him in the
+front room of the farmhouse. But seeing that his own men were holding
+Driscoll, he nervously congratulated them upon the capture.
+
+"How did he escape this second time?" demanded the Frenchman. "It seems
+to me, mon colonel, that the question would occur to you too."
+
+Lopez was sufficiently alive to his peril. He quickly sent two Dragoons
+to the temporary guard house to investigate. Dupin curtly ordered two
+Cossacks to accompany them. Soon they brought back the sentinel who had
+been conveniently asleep when Driscoll slipped past. The sentinel rubbed
+his eyes as he faced Lopez. So far everything had passed according to
+arrangement, and he looked for a severe mock examination. But the Tiger
+had been left out of the calculations, and the Tiger forthwith
+shouldered himself into the inquisition.
+
+"Do you understand, Colonel Lopez, that your guard here was asleep? Si,
+señor, asleep! What now, mon colonel, is the little custom as to guards
+who sleep?"
+
+Lopez glared at the sentinel. It was a fine simulation of outraged
+discipline, and so life-like that when he spoke of a court martial, the
+culprit weakened. He opened his mouth. At that Lopez's stern anger
+became real. He feared the sentinel would tell all he knew.
+
+"Si señor," cried Lopez, "we don't have to be taught, we Mexicans. We
+shoot them. Here, six of you, out with him! Quick, before he can whine!"
+
+"Go with them," added Dupin quietly to six of his Cossacks.
+
+The sentinel was dragged out. His cries, whether for mercy or not, were
+smothered first by a sabre belt, and then for all time by musketry. The
+Cossacks returned and assured their chief that the execution was bona
+fide. This allayed Dupin's suspicions.
+
+"Permit me to suggest, Colonel Lopez," he said courteously, "that you
+likewise honor our friend the American. I came from the City to do it
+myself, but it is a pleasure to give way before your superior
+vigilance."
+
+It had already occurred to Lopez that Driscoll also might talk. "You are
+very amiable, Señor Dupin," he replied. "My court martial found him
+guilty, and as a matter of fact, he would have paid the penalty by now
+had Your Mercy not arrived. Between us, Colonel Dupin, he will hardly
+escape a third time."
+
+At his command six of the crack Dragoons stood forth. They were brown,
+and Mexicans. Lopez bowed to Dupin, who called forth as many Contras.
+The Contras were of variously hued races, but they were all the Tiger's
+whelps. The file of Dragoons was jaunty crimson, the other corroded red.
+Driscoll fell in meekly between them.
+
+"Sacred name of a dog, you are honored, señor!" Dupin exclaimed
+reprovingly. It angered him when a victim quailed. The present one ought
+to appreciate, too, that he was answering for two besides himself, for
+Murguía and Rodrigo, whose escape had wrenched the old warrior's bowels.
+
+The Storm Centre glanced at the picked hussars, at the famously infamous
+Cossacks, and assented modestly. So plain in gray, he did indeed look
+colorless among them. The Contra at his elbow was an American, whose
+brutish, swaggering scowl meant the world to know what a bad man he was.
+The type gives the decent citizen a mad desire to be bad himself just
+once, only long enough to prove the tough a contemptible sham.
+Driscoll's neighbor leered ferociously, that the prisoner flanked by
+sabres and muskets might respect him and be cowed. Driscoll kept him in
+mind, and in the tail of his eye.
+
+There was one anxiety for the Storm Centre. If they should bind him! But
+they had not, he was so docile. And as they marched out the door, he
+exulted, and could hardly wait. Wouldn't it be a lovely row, though!
+Just one good, last good time! He did not feel hard toward them, not
+when they had left off the ropes. He felt that he was to have value
+received, and all the while he figured out his desperate campaign.
+
+As they passed outside beyond the window's sphere of light, docility
+changed to whirlwind. A blow with his left, a jerk with his right, and
+he had the tough's carbine. He swung it between the two files, a grazing
+circle. He got blows in return, but not a man fired. That was because of
+the darkness, and a first shot would inspire a wild, general fusillade,
+endangering them all. As it was, the blows were impartial, except one,
+which came down with pointed favoritism on the tough's cranium. After
+that Driscoll helped one side or another, and when they were nicely
+mixed, he ran. He got as far as the road, but to find a troop of cavalry
+charging down upon him. Changing ends with the carbine, he fired from
+the waist at the leader of the new arrivals. This leader dropped his
+sabre, plunged heavily, and was dragged by the stirrup. Driscoll had not
+the time to change back to club musket, he used the barrel as such. But
+being for the instant alone, he was marked out, and Cossacks and
+Dragoons threw themselves upon him and brought him down.
+
+"It _was_ lovely," he muttered under the heap.
+
+They brought him back to the house, swathed in a mesh of lariats. Lopez
+awaited them, frothing oaths. Dupin was there too, and he looked an
+epicure's satisfaction as they stood his victim against the wall. He did
+not regret the incident, since it had turned porridge into so choice a
+morsel.
+
+"'Tis you, monsieur," he confessed with rugged grace, "who have honored
+us."
+
+"Oh, your grandmother!" said Driscoll.
+
+"Well, be patient. It will be all over in a minute more."
+
+The Tiger was, in fact, ordering the shooting squad, when through the
+open door glittering helmets and excited French and clanking sabres
+flooded the room. It was still another wondrous uniform for Driscoll,
+this of the cuirassiers, with so much of brass, and a queue of horse's
+hair, and loose pantaloons that merged into gigantic black boots. In
+they strode, an agitated host of bristling moustaches, while outside was
+the restless sound of many hard breathed horses. The cuirassiers bore
+their wounded leader, and laid him on the iron bed in the room. But the
+man struggled to his feet. He called loudly for "Monsieur le Colonel,"
+and only by force, though gentle, could they hold him quiet.
+
+"What is it?" responded both Dupin and Lopez.
+
+"I, I mean the American Colonel. He--he----"
+
+"Hello, Mike!" cried Driscoll.
+
+He could not see for the others, nor move, but he recognized the voice
+of Michel Ney. He knew, too, that Michel must be the cavalry leader he
+had just shot. "Darn it, Mike!" he exclaimed, "I'm sorry! But weren't
+there enough of 'em without you?"
+
+"Monsieur Ney," the Tiger interrupted, "let your men tend you here, and
+we will be back at once to see what can be done for your hurt. But just
+now----"
+
+He signed to Lopez, and Cossacks and Dragoons caught up the prisoner and
+started for the door.
+
+"Wait!" Ney moaned feebly.
+
+"Tonnerre, mon prince, your wound must be paid for, first. Hurry there,
+Messieurs les Imbeciles!"
+
+"Wait!" Ney gasped. He half raised himself, but sank back with closing
+eyes. He made a gesture to his breast. All halted as in the presence of
+death.
+
+"Help him, you there!" cried Driscoll. "Open his coat!"
+
+The cuirassiers, eager, awkward nurses, fluttered round the bed, and
+tore away the sky-blue jacket, thinking to find the wound beneath.
+Instead, they drew out a paper. One of them read the address on it.
+
+"Al Señor Coronel Don Miguel Lopez."
+
+Lopez broke the seal, frowned, and put the message in his pocket.
+"Nothing--oh, nothing important," he volunteered. "Now, once for all,
+let us finish our work."
+
+"Wait!" a faint whisper came from the bed.
+
+"He says to wait," doggedly repeated a cuirassier.
+
+"Yes, wait," Driscoll pleaded suddenly. "Just a minute, before I go,
+before we both go, perhaps,"--he thought in a flash that it might be a
+last word from Jacqueline--"perhaps, gentlemen, he, he has something to
+tell me."
+
+But Ney's head, moving weakly on the pillow, was a negative.
+
+The prisoner's voice grew firm again.
+
+"Then hurry up!" he ordered in the old querulous drawl. "Don't you know
+I'm in a hurry?"
+
+Ney opened his eyes as he heard the shuffling of feet. Men were carrying
+out the prisoner. With feeble anger he brushed aside the hand of a
+cuirassier who was trying to staunch the blood at his groin.
+
+"I--I----" His lips barely moved.
+
+The cuirassier sprang to his feet. He looked to his fellows, spoke to
+them. Puzzled, mystified, they rushed to the door and barred the way.
+
+"We don't know why we came," stammered one, "and he can't speak. But his
+signs are enough for us. It's, it's----"
+
+"It's something to do with the American," declared a second cuirassier.
+
+Dupin pounded back his half unsheathed blade. Brusquely he wheeled and
+faced the colonel of Dragoons. "Lopez," he roared, "what was that
+message?"
+
+"N-nothing, mi coronel, absolutely."
+
+"If it was from Maximilian, I'd know it to be a pardon, and not blame
+you. But I recognized the marshal's seal, and that's different."
+
+Lopez blanched, yet insisted again that the message was nothing.
+"Besides, señor," he added, "I do not take orders from His Excellency,
+the marshal."
+
+"But _I_ do," thundered Dupin. "And I see them obeyed too. Oh, you
+can protest to your Emperor afterwards, my royal guardsman, if you want
+to, but a marshal of France is the law when I am near."
+
+Grunting contemptuously, Dupin turned to the bedside. The cuirassiers
+had gathered cobwebs from the rafters, and were dressing the wound.
+Michel tossed and groaned in the beginning of delirium. Dupin muttered
+with vexation, but he took hold of the lad's wrist, and firmly closed
+his hand over it.
+
+"Listen," he said, very distinctly, putting into his tones every timbre
+of quiet, compelling will. "Listen, hear me!"
+
+Slowly the feverish man grew still.
+
+"Hear me," said Dupin. "There are two questions--two, only two. You are
+to answer them.--You will shake your head, 'Yes,' or 'No'--do you hear
+me?"
+
+The Chasseur's eyes opened wide, and they were calm.
+
+"Good, that's the brave gentleman! Now then, steady. The first question:
+Shall we shoot this American?"
+
+Slowly, painfully, the head rocked on the pillow, from one side to the
+other.
+
+"It's 'No'!" cried a score of men.
+
+"Silence!" roared the Tiger. "Now, the second question: Does this order
+come from Marshal Bazaine?"
+
+Michel's chin sank to his breast. He groaned, he could not lift it
+again.
+
+"Yes, thank----" Ney himself, his voice!
+
+Dupin swung round. "Colonel Lopez," he ordered savagely, "you will turn
+your prisoner over to Sergeant Ney, at once, sir! Open your mouth, you
+dog, and every Dragooning dandy of a Mexican among you----"
+
+The Tiger's pistols were drawn. His whelps looked hopeful. The
+cuirassiers bristled in sympathy.
+
+Cracking his finger nails, fawning to the marrow, Lopez agreed.
+
+"Unbind the prisoner," ordered Dupin.
+
+"Thank God!" came faintly from the bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+THE WHISPER OF THE SPHINX
+
+
+  "La politique, première des sciences inexactes."
+                                  --_Emile Augier._
+
+
+Jacqueline had divined in Bazaine another obstacle to her mission. And
+yet it seemed preposterous that he should not be her staunchest ally,
+since Napoleon had found a marshal's baton for him in his knapsack, just
+as he had transformed his own policeman's club into a sceptre.
+Nevertheless Jacqueline had her doubts, and they were homage to her sex.
+In other words, she returned to Mexico to find that His Excellency had
+married again.
+
+The very day after her arrival she called to see her dear friend, now
+Madame la Maréchale. The two women were hardly more than girls, but who
+shall fathom the depth of their guile? They kissed each other
+affectionately on the cheek, and while the marshal was in the other
+room, reading the packet Jacqueline had brought him from Napoleon, they
+expressed earnestly their joy at meeting again.
+
+When Bazaine returned, madame rose to leave them to their "stupid state
+affairs." The marshal smiled, knowing how ravenous was his bride for the
+same stupid affairs of state, but Jacqueline agreed that indeed they
+were wearisome. Of course she might tell His Excellency much about
+Paris, but as to politics--and her little shrug bespoke a Sahara of
+ignorance.
+
+In the packet delivered by Jacqueline, the Sphinx had by no means turned
+oracle, and Bazaine wished to know what his crafty master would have
+said between the lines. But the first topic of their conference was
+Driscoll.
+
+"Your prisoner is incommunicado then?" said she.
+
+"Have no fears, he is comfortable, here in this very house?"
+
+"He has sent no word to Maximilian of his arrival?"
+
+"Not as yet, mademoiselle."
+
+"And why not, pray?"
+
+"Because I anticipated the honor of seeing you before permitting him so
+much. I must know the campaign better. A plain soldier is dense at
+guessing, mademoiselle, while you--you have talked with Napoleon.
+If----"
+
+"Oh, don't be tedious. You alone hold the knight that means royalty
+triumphant or checkmated, and you know that you do."
+
+"But you who are inspired, tell me how I shall play."
+
+"You forget that I left this man to be shot?"
+
+"Then I am to destroy him?"
+
+Jacqueline shuddered. "That was my only way, but you, monsieur, you can
+lift him off the board entirely."
+
+Bazaine rose from his chair and stood before her. "I am no poet," he
+said, "and these flowers of speech hide the trenches. My American means
+that I may have thousands more like him, and he is a good one to be
+multiplied even tenfold. Mademoiselle, _what_ am I to understand?"
+
+"Does Napoleon's letter satisfy none of your doubts?"
+
+Without a word he handed her the packet. It was from Napoleon's minister
+of finance, and it exuded woe. The French loans were exhausted by
+Maximilian's luxury and mismanagement, and therefore Bazaine was
+instructed not to advance a cent further. He was, moreover, to take
+charge of the Mexican ports, and administer the customs. Here, then, was
+the annihilation of Maximilian's sway. Here was the whispering of the
+Sphinx. France herself would take over the Empire.
+
+"Hardly," returned the marshal, "but we will frighten His Majesty into
+bettering his finances," and he handed her a confidential missive that
+had accompanied the other. Bazaine was therein authorized, when the
+security of the Mexican Empire absolutely demanded it, to advance ten
+millions of francs.
+
+Jacqueline sank back disheartened. Not even Napoleon would help her. The
+Sphinx had not the courage of his own designs, and she contemptuously
+flung him out of her way. She would strive alone, and against him,
+Napoleon, among the rest. First of all, there was his captain general,
+the man before her.
+
+"Monsieur le Maréchal," she began, as impersonally as though quoting a
+dry paragraph of history, "there is a party among the Mexicans who fear
+the republicans and what the Republic would do. Yet their hope for the
+Empire is gone, and they want no more of it. These, monsieur, are the
+moderate liberals, and strange to say, they are the clericals too; in a
+word, the great landowners. They are for what is good in Mexico. They
+demand order. But they would not take it from the United States. They
+look to France--to France, which is Catholic, and liberal."
+
+"I know," said the marshal. "They have already hinted at annexation."
+
+"Annexation to France, of course. Now then, monsieur, if we stay at all,
+we shall have to fight the United States. But do you imagine that we
+would undertake such a fight for Maximilian? Parbleu, the French people
+would mob Napoleon over night. But, supposing we were to do it for
+ourselves, and not for an impecunious archduke----"
+
+His Excellency's eyes blazed. "Ah, it would be a fight superb!"
+
+"And you commanding, Monsieur le Maréchal. And behind you, with our own
+pantalons rouges, those Confederates against their old enemies.
+_Then_ would be the moment to set your knight on the chess board.
+And," she added insidiously, "France would need a viceroy over here."
+
+The plain soldier started as though shot.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he gasped, "you--_you_ are Napoleon! The
+_great_ Napoleon, I salute you, mademoiselle!"
+
+"Hélas, monsieur, that I am not in a position to credit Napoleon III.
+with what I have said!"
+
+"Yet you wish me to believe that you are only inspired by him? Pardon
+me, mademoiselle, but _he_ is the inspired one, and--mon Dieu, I do
+not blame him!"
+
+"But it's very simple," said Jacqueline, "and honorable too.
+Maximilian's bad faith nullifies our treaty with him. Très bien, we are
+free, free to withdraw our troops. At least we may threaten as much.
+Then he will, he must abdicate, unless--well, unless he first sees Your
+Excellency's prisoner."
+
+She arose, feeling that she was leaving a good Frenchman behind her. But
+Madame la Maréchale appeared to bid her adieu, and Madame la Maréchale
+looked sharply from one to another, noting especially Bazaine's flush of
+enthusiasm. The good Frenchman straightway became uneasy. And
+Jacqueline, riding back to Chapultepec in her carriage with its coronet
+and arms and footmen, did not know that Driscoll had not been
+incommunicado against Madame la Maréchale. Who could be? And Madame la
+Maréchale betimes had paid her respects to a third woman, who also was
+but little more than a girl. She and the Empress Charlotte had discussed
+both the prisoner and Jacqueline.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE AMBASSADOR
+
+
+  "Receive then this young hero with all becoming state;
+  'Twere ill advis'd to merit so fierce a champion's hate."
+                                          --_Nibelungenlied._
+
+
+In his bedroom at Buena Vista, the marshal's residence, Driscoll the
+next day received a personage, and offered him a cigar. Declined, with
+bow from shoulder. Hoped he would have a nip of peach brandy? Declined,
+with sweep from hips. He _was_ a personage. Driscoll noted regalia,
+medals, cordon; and apologized for the temerity of Missouri hospitality.
+
+"Especially," he said, "as you're a Grand Divinity."
+
+"Dignity, señor," the hidalgo corrected him, "Grand Dignity."
+
+"You'll have to pardon me again," said Driscoll, "but I really didn't
+intend any short measure at all."
+
+It was the Imperial Grand Chamberlain himself. There were no
+incomunicado doors before _him_; he came from the Emperor. The
+Empress had spoken to His Majesty, having just had her discussion
+aforementioned with Madame la Maréchale, so that Monsieur le Maréchal
+had had to lift from his prisoner the ban of the incomunicado. But
+monsieur had been extremely reluctant about it.
+
+The Chamberlain's name went well with his exalted fourth degree of
+proximity to the throne. It was Velasquez de Leon, a very bristling of
+Castilian pride. He looked over the battered American in homespun gray,
+and wondered where the mistake was. For, as arbiter of precedence,
+appraiser of inequality between men, and supervisor over court functions
+generally, he had been sent in the way of business. Driscoll felt sorry
+for him.
+
+"Just tell them to let me out of here," said the prisoner, "then I'll
+call in on the Emperor whenever it's convenient for him."
+
+"But, señor," the don objected testily, "with what status, pray? Has
+your country a representative here? You must obtain a letter from your
+ambassador, or have him present you."
+
+Driscoll shook his head. "Can't," he said, "haven't any country."
+
+The minion of etiquette despaired.
+
+"But," Driscoll added, "I've got as good as credentials from what used
+to be my country."
+
+Velasquez de Leon grasped at the straw. "Then," he cried, "we can
+register you as an ambassador."
+
+"Bringing my country with me," Driscoll suggested.
+
+So it was all straightened out pleasantly, and quite in the orthodox
+manner, too. The American's status was defined. His reception would fall
+under the rubric: "Private Audience." There remained only one grave
+drawback. The protocol allowed no hints as to the un-protocol aspect of
+an ambassador's wardrobe. The hidalgo could only finger nervously the
+Imperial Crown in his Grand Uniform, and with stiff dignity take his
+leave.
+
+The ambassador who was his own country rode in the marshal's landau to
+court, with a retinue of Lancers that was also his guard. Soon they
+entered the Paseo, which Maximilian was making beautiful at inordinate
+cost as a link between the City and his summer palace, the alcázar of
+Chapultepec. Turning into the wide, stately boulevard, Driscoll was that
+moment plunged into an eddying splendor of Europe transplanted, and he
+blinked his eyes, half humorously. There were mettlesome steeds, and
+coaches with a high polish, and silver weighted harness, and the
+insolence of livery, and armorial bearings, and the gilt of coronets on
+carriage panels. There were silk hats and peaked sombreros, lace
+mantillas and Parisian bonnets. A lavish use of French money was doing
+these things, and the Mexicans, believing in their aristocracy since the
+revival of titles never heard of in Gotha, believed also that such
+brilliancy of display made their capital the peer of Vienna, or of the
+Quartier St. Germain. The Mexicans were very happy and arrogant over it.
+
+"I wonder how they can fight and yet keep their clothes so pretty,"
+thought the Missourian.
+
+The gallant carpet-knighthood of uniforms was bothering him again. They
+were dashing, militant, these paladins, a bal masqué of luxurious oddity
+and color. They twisted waxed moustaches, and their coursers cantered to
+and fro in the gay parade, and among them only the charro cavaliers with
+a glitter of spangle let one guess that this could be Mexico. There was
+the Austrian dragoon with his Tyrolean feather, and the Polish uhlan,
+fur fringed, and the Hungarian hussar, whose pelisse dangled
+romantically, and there were some fellows in low boots and tights and
+high busbies, who were cross-braided on the chest and scroll-embroidered
+on the front of the leg, and looked exactly like Tzigane bandmasters or
+lion tamers. The Slav, the Magyar, the Czech, and yet others of the
+Emperor's score of native races, all were here out of the nearer Orient,
+with curved swords and ferocious bearing. There were the countrymen of
+the Empress, too; the Belgians, who were as bedecked of sleeve as a drum
+corps. And as to the French, there they were in green and silver, in sky
+blue, in cuirassier helmets, in the zouave fez, or in any of the other
+ways in which they bore _their_ chips on the shoulder.
+
+Shelby's ragged Missourians had tossed on straw for the lack of quinine,
+and yet were presuming to save this gorgeous empire of golden spurred
+gentlemen. The thought of his mission gave Driscoll an ironic twinge.
+
+But there was the pantalon rouge, the little soldier boy of France who
+did the work, and the sight of him put the American into a friendly
+humor. He was everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the
+walks, dotting the cafés with red, and every wee piou-piou under the
+great big epaulettes of a great big comic opera generalissimo. His huge
+military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the crimson pompon cocked on his
+little fighting képi was more often awry, and he could not by any effort
+achieve a strut. He was only bon enfant, this unconquered soldier lad;
+so he gave over trying to be martial, and left to his officers the rôle
+of the Gallic rooster, taking it all as a droll joke on himself, while
+his vivacious eyes danced with fun.
+
+The ambassador's coach passed under the cypresses and wound round the
+Aztec hill of the Grasshopper, and came at last to the castle on the
+summit. And as Guatemotzin had once ventured to this place to plead with
+Moctezuma to save his empire, and to show him how to do it, so Driscoll
+now entered the portals of Chapultepec on a very similar errand.
+
+The superb Indian lord was never so hedged in with barbaric ceremony as
+was his Teuton successor of three centuries later. But Driscoll was
+patient. He advanced as the red tape gave way, humming under his breath
+"Green Grows the Grass," a schottische which the American invaders of
+'48 had sung in taking this same fortress, which also had given all
+Americans the name of "Gringo."
+
+Guardias Palatinas saluted the Missourian at the entrance. Two
+Secretaries of Ceremony, Grand Uniform, with cordon and the Imperial
+eagle, bowed before him in the Gran Patio. One stepped to his right, the
+other to his left, with all the ceremony of which they were secretaries,
+and the three walked abreast the length of the Galería de Iturbide,
+where they were joined by the Lesser Service of Honor. Thus, swelling by
+cumulative degrees of impressiveness, Trooper Driscoll came at last into
+the Sala de Audiencias, and gazed with admiration at its beautiful
+Gobelin suite.
+
+The Emperor was there, tall, white browed, refined. He bowed. Driscoll
+bowed, and started toward him, for they were scarcely in speaking
+distance. But His Imperial Highness bowed again. He was absent-minded,
+evidently, but Driscoll bowed also, and pretended not to notice. Then
+yet a third time the monarch bowed. And with true courtesy the American
+overlooked what was growing ridiculous, and did likewise. Thus the
+ritualistic three obeisances were accomplished.
+
+Maximilian dismissed the Lesser Service, and he and his guest were
+alone. Now Driscoll supposed, considering the discommoding interest his
+mission had awakened in everybody except in the Emperor, that the
+Emperor himself would this time be concerned enough to "get down to
+business." But not so. There were yet the formalities.
+
+"I understand, Señor Embajador," Maximilian began in the language of his
+court, "that Your Excellency----"
+
+"Thank you, sir, but my name is Driscoll."
+
+"That Your Excellency comes accredited from a government that no longer
+exists. But We will waive that, since the said power existed at the
+moment of Your Excellency's departure."
+
+This was to harmonize the absurdity with the Ritual. Maximilian liked to
+play at receiving an American representative. It grieved him sorely that
+the United States had never recognized his dignity, but that it had
+consistently rated him as merely "the Prince Maximilian."
+
+Driscoll's first words cut short the make-believe.
+
+"You'd hardly call them credentials," he said. "Our president, it is
+true, helped me on my way, but I have nothing from him to you. And yet I
+bring more than Mr. Jefferson Davis could send. Here," and he produced
+the memorandum from the Confederate generals of the Trans-Mississippi
+department, which in his belt Jacqueline had had restored to him with
+his other effects.
+
+Maximilian took the note handed him, but stared at the emissary.
+Charlotte had induced the monarch to grant the audience. She had hinted
+at its importance, but not until now did Maximilian recognize his guest.
+Driscoll was attired in the full uniform of a lieutenant colonel of
+cavalry, which, by the way, was what he had carried so jealously in the
+bundle behind his saddle. From the dignified young officer in gray back
+to the desperado young giant in homespun proved considerable of a reach
+for the Hapsburg; but at last, by virtue of much caressing of his silky
+beard with delicate finger tips, he arrived.
+
+"So, it was you the marshal saved!" he exclaimed. "Yes, yes, I should
+have remembered sooner. Colonel Lopez told me. A capable, faithful
+officer, is Lopez! I could not but approve the finding of his court
+martial. And yet, against his urgent advice, I have decided to pardon
+you."
+
+"To apologize, you mean?"
+
+The Emperor looked hurt. As a foil for his royal clemency, there should
+be humble gratitude. Maximilian often mistook fawning for such.
+
+"Isn't it a bit odd," Driscoll queried whimsically, "that an ambassador
+should be arrested?"
+
+"Jove, that's a fact! I hadn't thought."
+
+"Certainly. But if it don't occur again, we'll just let the apology go."
+
+"No, no," protested the monarch. "You must have your apology. You will
+receive it from the Grand Chamberlain to-morrow, and it will appear in
+the Journal Officiel."
+
+"Oh, all right," said Driscoll, "anything to clear the way." Whereupon
+he plunged and stated his business.
+
+With debonair Prince Max it was not a question of even who talked best.
+It was who talked last. And Driscoll, being for the moment an exhorter
+of both descriptions, drove home conviction as a sabre point. He spoke
+bluntly, earnestly; and, at the scent of opposition, he spoke fiercely.
+The South was defeated, he said, and the North would now make good its
+threat to drive out the French. And the French would go, too. Suppose
+they were even willing to undertake a great war for Maximilian, yet they
+would go just the same. And why? Because they had fought the Russians.
+They had fought the Austrians. And they were keeping the Italians out of
+Rome to help the Pope. So they had not a friend left, not one, to help
+them against the enemy they must soon fight, which was Prussia.
+Consequently they would draw every bayonet out of Mexico, and Maximilian
+would be left alone to face his rebels. But Maximilian could not face
+the rebels alone. They had been dominant before the French came. To
+replace thirty thousand French, Driscoll offered fifty thousand
+Southerners, fifty thousand well-equipped, splendid veterans.
+Twenty-five thousand were already on the frontier, he meaning those
+under General Slaughter at Brownsville, and Shelby and the others were
+not far behind.
+
+"But," said Maximilian, smiling bitterly, "you forget that the United
+States would still object to my poor Empire."
+
+"Not when the French leave, they wouldn't. We would become citizens. We
+would not be a foreign intervention. You would be backed up by Mexicans
+against Mexicans, and the North could not interfere. But, suppose that
+the French remain, wouldn't they have to fight? And they would need our
+aid to do it, too. Don't you see, sir, that in any case you should make
+us very welcome?"
+
+"There is assuredly no other way to look at it!" admitted the prince
+uneasily.
+
+Dreaming himself a monarch of chivalry days, Maximilian was subtly
+enthralled by the idea of a band of heroes flocking to his standard,
+their swords on high. Stouter than those warriors who had helped
+Siegfried to his bride, they would hold for him a treasure greater than
+that under the Rhine. Themselves and their children forever, they would
+be the real mainstay of the dynasty founded by Maximilian the Great.
+They were Anglo-Saxons, Germanic, his own kindred, and to him they came
+for new homes and a new country. They would be his landed gentry, his
+barons, his hidalgos. It was a prospect for an emperor; above all, for a
+poet emperor. As he looked now on the young Confederate officer, on him
+who had seemed a desperado, Maximilian thought that here stood one who
+was the instrument of Destiny.
+
+"Can--can they really come?" he demanded breathlessly.
+
+Driscoll smiled. "Of course, there's no time to lose," he replied. "For
+instance, if I'd had your answer there at Murguía's ranch, I'd have
+gotten back in time to head off whole regiments who've probably given up
+their arms since then. But you can still count on an army west of the
+Mississippi that hasn't surrendered yet. At least _my_ general
+hasn't, not Old Joe, and he won't either. But you must say 'yes' pretty
+quick. We're restless, and might conclude to run the French out of here.
+We haven't forgotten how Napoleon forgot to help us."
+
+It was a cunning stroke. Maximilian would have asked nothing better than
+independence from his "dear imperial brother," and just this was the
+bribe so temptingly held out by the instrument of Destiny. But the
+Hapsburg of the heavy, trembling underlip credited wavering as
+statesmanlike prudence.
+
+"To-morrow," he said, "no, the day after, you shall have my decision."
+
+Jacqueline witnessed the ambassador's departure. Hidden among the roses
+of the fortress rock, where she sat with a book, she peeped out as he
+came down the steps to the marshal's landau. The glacial Secretaries of
+Ceremony flanked him on either side, and the statuesque Palatine Guards
+saluted. She could not be mistaken, the corners of his mouth were
+twitching. It was such an inimitable commentary on the Ritual that she
+had much to do not to dart out and laugh with him in gleeful mischief.
+
+Then, she noted his uniform. After the ornate regimentals of all Europe,
+what a relief was the simple gray! There was the long coat, the belt,
+the dragoon sabre, the unobtrusive insignia on the collar, and she
+murmured her verdict advisedly. It was beautiful! Next she noted the
+man--as though she had not in the first place. His easy frame still had
+that charm of gaucherie, and the rollicking daredeviltry lurked
+quiescent in the brown eyes, but enough to recall the rider of fury, her
+chevalier de Missour-_i_, plunging through a wall and cloud of dust
+on a big-boned yellow charger. And though now he was in this beautiful
+simplicity of gray, she looked in vain for some hint of martial stride
+or pompous chest.
+
+She wondered for a moment why he had worn the uniform. It signified
+nothing, since the Confederacy had fallen. Then she understood.
+_He_ had not surrendered. Nor had those he represented. The gray,
+for him, still had its reason, and was a power yet; the power to decide
+an empire's fate. It was the grave dignity of a lost cause; striving,
+before being doffed forever, to leave behind a new cause. Or, if
+failing, to accept the lot of surrender. In either case, her chevalier
+de Missour-_i_ was wearing the dear uniform for the last time. With
+her keenness for intuition and sympathy, Jacqueline _knew_. She
+knew what it must mean. And he looked so strong, so splendid! Her eyes
+unexpectedly dimmed in tenderness for him.
+
+Driscoll, being now a free man, established himself at a hotel near the
+diligencia office in the busy Plateros street. He drilled through the
+following day with tedious waiting for the day after, when he was to
+have the promised reply. Used to men who knew their own minds, he hoped
+for strength in this emperor fellow. Then, his mission successful, he
+would be in the saddle by the next night, perhaps by noon, and hastening
+toward the border with tidings of homes and more fighting for his
+comrades of the Old Brigade. But the next morning, even as he was
+mounting Demijohn to go to Chapultepec, a thin man in riding breeches
+entered the hotel patio and accosted him.
+
+"I am Monsieur Éloin," the stranger announced in English that could be
+understood, "of Her Majesty's household. Also aide and secretary in
+private to the Emperor. I see, you go to horse. It is well, sir. Mine is
+outside."
+
+"What's the answer?" asked Driscoll. "I'm not up on conundrums."
+
+"It is that we go to Cuernavaca."
+
+"You don't say! Now where's that, and what for?"
+
+"Cuernavaca is His Majesty's country sit-down, about a douzaine of
+leagues from here. You have not read of this morning the Journal
+Officiel? Here it is. The court went there yesterday. His Majesty has to
+need rest."
+
+"But he was to see me to-day! What's the matter with him?"
+
+M. Éloin's brow contracted narrowly, and he shrugged his shoulders. "His
+Imperial Highness is much worked. He is worse of good health. Her
+Majesty sought at having him stay, to give you that same-self answer he
+had promised already. And the Marshal Bazaine, sensible this once, did
+talk yesterday night before last, after you were there, and beseeched
+him to accept your offer. And they all beseeched, Her Majesty and Madame
+la Maréchale, and I.--But, what would you?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know. What the devil----"
+
+"No, not him! But her, sir, her!"
+
+"Her, who?"
+
+"Why, her. We all talk, argue, beseech; and she, in one little whisper,
+she only tell His Majesty he has to need that rest--and, poof! off they
+all go to Cuernavaca, and I know nothing. Her Majesty leave me a note. I
+bring you it here."
+
+"But who is the 'she?' You don't mean----"
+
+"Yes, we others call her Jacqueline. She did it, against everybody who
+beseech. But we--how you say?--we fool her, you and me. Come, we are
+there to-night, at Cuernavaca."
+
+"Just that little girl----" Driscoll murmured wonderingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+CARLOTA
+
+
+  "Der sicherste Weg nicht sehr unglücklich zu sein ist das Glück nicht
+  erwarten."--_Schopenhauer._
+
+
+Everybody he met seemed to twist Driscoll's business into a vital
+personal issue, and it did not take him long to place M. Éloin. The
+supercilious Belgian of the rancid brow, as Driscoll mentally described
+him, wanted the perpetuation of the empire, and he wanted it for the
+very simple reason that the favorite of a realmless prince does not
+amount to much. Hence he intrigued for the acceptance of Driscoll's
+offer and for the confusion of Jacqueline.
+
+A small escort of Belgians joined him and Driscoll at the garita, or
+little customs house, on the edge of the City. Accompanying them was a
+burly priest with a head shaped like a pear. The padre had very small
+eyes for so large a man, but they were exceedingly bright and roved
+adventurously. They would settle with crafty calculation on Éloin time
+and again, though his manner toward the favorite was always a thing of
+humble deference.
+
+"His Dutch Holiness from Murgie's!" Driscoll observed to himself.
+
+But there might be an ecclesiastical college along, for all the
+Missourian cared. His own thoughts were battalions. "When it's over, one
+way or another," he kept deciding, "I'll speak to her, yes I will!
+What's there to be afraid of? W'y, she's--only a girl." It might be an
+unfair advantage, his not dying after the confession in her farewell
+letter to him, but he would have her, he would have her! The Lord be
+good to him, he _had_ to have her!
+
+Late in the afternoon they arrived at the quaint old Aztec village of
+Cuernavaca, which had been the country seat of Cortez, and was now that
+of a second fair god and a second Hernando. After dismounting at the
+hotel near the conquistador's palace, Éloin hurried Driscoll across the
+plaza into the beautiful Italian gardens where Maximilian made his home.
+At the villa, Charlotte's own residence in the gardens, Éloin had
+himself announced to Her Majesty. The American reflected that women
+seemed to have a great deal to do with the reigning business. In the
+drawing room, the Empress received them.
+
+She was a slender young woman whose lips were thin and proud, whose eyes
+were dark and lustrous. Her hair was black and very heavy, coiled in the
+old fashioned style away from a high forehead that was beautifully
+white. She could not be older than twenty-five, and there was even a
+girlishness in her bearing. But she had a steadiness of gaze--one eye
+seemed the least heavy lidded--and there was a firmness to the slightly
+large mouth, which gave an impression of strong lines to what was really
+a soft, oval face. Yet the temperament could not be mistaken. She was a
+woman of acute nerves. She was tensely strung, inordinately sensitive.
+
+Driscoll believed now what he had heard, that the Empire fared better
+when Charlotte was regent and her lord on a journey. Maximilian dreamed,
+while she realized. The Hapsburg cadet, gazing over the Adriatic from
+the marble steps of Miramar, had brooded fondly on what Destiny must
+hold for him. He would be king of a Poland born again among the nations.
+Then Louis Napoleon whispered of another throne in the building.
+Whereupon _she_ began the study of Spanish; _she_ decided her
+half hesitating spouse to accept, however loftily they both scorned the
+adventurer who helped them to it.
+
+Carlota, for so the natives called her, amiably greeted the Missourian.
+She was a woman of tact, and though one Din Driscoll was for her as
+impersonal a thing as some opportune event, yet events must be neatly
+turned to account.
+
+"His Majesty and I have discussed your presence in our country, sir,"
+she began in English, "and feeling that he desires to see you again, I
+requested M. Éloin to bring you to Cuernavaca."
+
+"Why, thank you, ma'am," said Driscoll.
+
+She all but reproved the form of address. But, for her at least, common
+sense was beginning to prevail. The rigid court punctilio, largely of
+her own enthusiastic designing, had gone hard with her. Her husband had
+proved no more than consistent to the medieval revival. He was but true
+to that old chivalry which distinguished between the divinely fair
+damsel to be won and the mere woman won already. He was the monarch, she
+his consort. Classifying others, the Empress found herself classified.
+He was her liege, and she might not even enter his presence unannounced.
+But how much happier was she in the blithe sailor prince who came
+a-wooing, who wooed for love, in accordance with that same ancient
+chivalry!
+
+A princess of the Blood, of the House of Orleans, Charlotte had had that
+nicest poise of good breeding, the kind that is unconscious. But here
+among the Mexicans, she had to proclaim a superiority not taken for
+granted, and the nice poise was gone. In her the generations--Henry IV.,
+the Grand Monarch, and all of that stately line--in her they stooped.
+And an element of sheerest vulgarity, as plebeian as a Jew's diamond,
+crept in perforce. Poor tarnished escutcheon of Orleans! Poor princess
+of the Blood, become menial with scouring it! She was weary. Over this
+New World there floated too much of obscuring democratic dust. So she
+allowed "ma'am," like a homely fleck, to settle unreproved on the
+ancestral doorplate.
+
+Driven to expediency for her very Empire's sake, she herself trampled on
+the Ritual. Waiving all formalities, they would go and seek out His
+Majesty. He must be somewhere in the gardens, perhaps beside the pond
+with its fringe of deep shadows from the trees. There they expected to
+find him, breathing the air of orange blossoms, gazing enraptured into
+the water, and on the gold fish and the swans and the fountains. He
+would be teasing Nature for a sonnet's inspiration.
+
+Driscoll went ahead, since Carlota and Éloin talked earnestly in French,
+intent on their plot for the persuasion of the Emperor. But as the
+American parted a clump of oleanders and laden rosebushes that hid the
+little lake, he stopped, his eyes wide on something just beyond. In the
+instant he fell back, and confronted the other two with such a look on
+his face that both started in vague alarm. They saw the sickened look of
+one who turns from a revolting sight. A wretch stricken suddenly blind
+may know at once the fact of a terrible grief, yet he cannot quite at
+first gather to himself the fullness of the horror. He is only aware
+that, afterward, the meaning will slowly take shape, like a gradually
+darkening despair.
+
+Driscoll gazed uncertainly at the Empress, as though she had somehow
+arrested his thoughts. Then, as a strong man rushing from danger, he
+comprehended that here was a frail woman near the same peril.
+
+"You will not go, ma'am," he ordered in a kind of terror for her.
+
+Éloin had already hastened on to the screen of roses. Being a fellow of
+the arras and closets, he scented a royal secret. The Empress lifted her
+shoulders and would have followed, but Driscoll did not hesitate. He
+took her by the elbow and gently turned her the other way.
+
+"You must not!" he said again, with that same scared manner on him.
+
+She bridled indignantly, but when she saw how white he was, and how
+earnest, something there awed her. In a flash she understood. Her lip
+curled, baring teeth of the purest pearl, and a sneer quivered on the
+highbred nostrils. But suddenly, in piteous tumult, her breast heaved
+once, and betrayed the wound. It gave him to know the knighthood which
+covets blows in a woman's behalf. But she, with a will that held him in
+admiration and reverence for her, spoke to him, and her tone was even,
+was unbroken.
+
+"I dare say you are right," she said, and turned to retrace her steps.
+But, as if to drink deeper of the bitter cup, she paused, and forced
+herself to a last word.
+
+"I suppose I should thank you," she went on, and her eyes, still dry of
+tears, were lustrous as they lifted to his, "but a gentleman--and I have
+never known one more than you, sir, this minute past--will understand
+that I cannot--There, I am going now. And after--after this that you
+have just beheld, I shall never see you again, sir. Alas, it's the more
+pity. Such as you are rare, even in--in my world."
+
+Driscoll watched her blankly as she left him, her head poised high, her
+step as slow as dignity itself. His own face was cruelly drawn, with the
+first sickened ghastliness still on him. He stumbled to a bench, and sat
+down. But there was nothing to think about, nothing he could think
+about, just then. Yet his brain was full to throbbing, and he had no
+consciousness of where he was, nor of the passage of time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+THE WOMAN WHO DID NOT HESITATE
+
+
+  "The soul of man is infinite in what it covets."--_Ben Jonson._
+
+
+Stealthily Éloin drew aside the bushes, and peered through. The tiny
+pond with its crystal surface sunk deep in foliage, its flowering island
+in the centre, looked not unlike a mirror on a dining table luxuriantly
+wreathed by garlands. The Belgian stared greedily. He did not see quite
+what Driscoll had seen, yet he saw enough to draw his brow to a
+narrowing fold of keenest interest. Jacqueline was seated on the raised
+edge of the basin, pensively dipping a hand into the water. Her plump
+wrist showed rosy, like coral, and glancing sideways now and again at a
+poor agitated prince striding up and down, she looked as she did that
+day in the small boat, while tempting a shark. As she leaned over, the
+line of her waist and neck was stately and beautiful; and there were the
+maddening baby tendrils of soft, glowing copper. Maximilian had
+evidently found her there, in a reverie perhaps, and was at sight of her
+lured to some act bold and desirous; for just as evidently, if his
+flushed face and the way he bit his lip were tokens, he had that moment
+been repelled. Éloin watched them avidly, the tall archduke pacing up
+and down, the demure lady seated on the basin's edge.
+
+"It was but the lowly homage of a prince," Maximilian cried out
+peevishly. Such was his apology.
+
+"Homage of a play-king," she corrected him with exasperating sweetness.
+
+He turned on her angrily. "Why do you say that--a play-king?"
+
+"Whose embassies," she proceeded calmly, "cringe for recognition. Like
+beggars they prowl about that White House at Washington, yet never cross
+the threshold."
+
+Maximilian was too amazed for denial. "How do you know?" he exclaimed.
+
+"While at the same time," she went on, "the same neighbor receives the
+minister of the Mexican republic, and sends one in turn. But no matter.
+The marionettes of empire can dance, so long as Napoleon holds the
+strings. Was the princely homage a make-believe, too?"
+
+"But--but, if I should convince you, mademoiselle, that the majesty
+which only asks to kneel is genuine?"
+
+Her eyelids narrowed, and she looked at him with the oddest smile.
+
+"You know--sire--that I only ask to be convinced. Where will Your
+Imperial Highness begin?"
+
+"Know then that the American peasant named Lincoln, who would not
+recognize a Hapsburg, is dead. He has been assassinated. He will no
+longer encourage our rebels in Mexico."
+
+"That poor gentleman whom you call a peasant," she returned with galling
+frankness, "was greater than any Hapsburg. He was fifty million people,
+and one million are still under arms. Your rebels know it. They still
+cry, 'Viva la Intervención del Norte!' But go on, _sire_."
+
+He chafed under her mockery in the title. But sitting there, goading an
+imaginary shark, she was no less inciting than when he had ventured his
+caress.
+
+"They are of no consequence," he burst forth, "neither the Americans,
+nor the dissidents. Your own countrymen, mademoiselle, will, and must,
+assure my empire."
+
+"H'm'n," she ejaculated, with a quick shrug. "Even the marshal, greatly
+against his will, has had to inform Your Majesty that we will shortly
+withdraw."
+
+"Then I shall depend on my subjects alone!"
+
+She contented herself with repeating, "Viva la Intervención del Norte!"
+That too, was ample comment as to the loyalty of his subjects. The
+Emperor paused in his walk. "Alas," he sighed wearily, "a Hapsburg
+sacrifices himself to regenerate a people, and--they do not appreciate
+it."
+
+Jacqueline bent her head to hide a smile. She dreamily made rings in the
+water, and seemed to fall into his mood of poetic melancholy. "A
+comedietta of an empire," she mused sympathetically, "a harlequinade,
+nothing more. Grands dieux, I do not wonder that Your Highness finds it
+unworthy!"
+
+There is no such incense to a man as when he imagines himself understood
+by a pretty woman.
+
+Yet the temptress now found herself the harder to master. It was the
+thought of what she must yet do. But she gave her head an impatient
+toss, and the tears that had come were gone. The lines of her mouth
+tightened, and the dangerous glint shone in her eyes. "So," she added,
+almost in a whisper, "you did not mean it, sire, when you offered only a
+play-empire--to me."
+
+She knew that he started violently, and was looking down at her. But she
+kept her gaze averted, that he might not see the hard expression there
+that was merciless for them both. He did see, though, the long lashes,
+and the warm pink of her forearm, so tantalizing for shark or man.
+
+"These imperial gardens, they are beautiful," she went on softly, "but,
+hélas, they are not the Schönbrunn. Nor is Chapultepec more than a
+feeble miniature of the Hofburg. Oh, the wretched farce! The wretched
+farce, sire, in your pretension to--to honor me! A wooer from the
+throne, indeed? A straw throne--no, no, I do not like it!"
+
+Then she let him see her eyes. Half raised, half veiled; they held the
+daring suggestion hidden in her words.
+
+"And if," he cried, "and if we _were_ in the Schönbrunn----"
+
+"Yes, yes," and she clapped her hands with delight, "yes, where the
+heroic figures on the crest of the hill are silhouetted against the sky,
+where----"
+
+"Never mind the heroic figures! But where I shall be really an emperor,
+_the_ Emperor over Austria, over Hungary. Then, what then?
+Jeanne--Jacqueline, tell me!"
+
+She had brought him to it. Yet her face clouded pitifully, as that day
+in the small boat, when she told Ney that a woman might only give. Such
+a woman too, would be lost for the reason that she would _not_
+hesitate. Here was the errand of the Sphinx, and achievement at her
+hand. Dainty flower of France, yes! But in truth, what was she?
+
+"And then?" she repeated, and the maddening promise in her voice
+thrilled him. "Why, sire, I suppose that I could not help but listen to
+you. Yet first," she hastened to add with subtle emphasis, "first, you
+would have to give up your play kingdom here."
+
+His blue eyes flashed. "I will!" he cried. "It shall be mine, the Roman
+empire of Charles V. They are tired of my brother Franz. Already they
+cry out for me. Our mother made an uncle abdicate for him, I will do as
+much for myself. I will, Jeanne, I will!"
+
+Éloin behind his screen moved uneasily.
+
+"The devil go with her!" the eavesdropper muttered. "She'll have him
+abdicating himself in another minute. She must be stopped, she must!"
+
+He tiptoed back, and once out of hearing, he ran. He found Driscoll on a
+bench, slowly passing his fingers through his hair, and staring fixedly
+at the ground.
+
+"Coom," said Éloin, "coom quick! He is alone. You find your chance. He
+is that happy, he say yes to anything."
+
+Driscoll got heavily to his feet. There was his mission. For the sake of
+that, for the sake of comrades depending on him, he would go and once
+more offer succor to this libertine princelet.
+
+"No, not that way," the Belgian directed. "The path here, it leads the
+more direct at the pond, so. Quick!" He knew that foliage would hide the
+couple until Driscoll should turn the corner of the hedge and burst on
+them squarely. The American hastened down the walk. "A nice surprise,
+mutual." Éloin chuckled to himself.
+
+Jacqueline did not falter before her victory. She knew that Maximilian
+rated the Mexican throne as a stepping-stone to another in Europe. She
+knew of a certain family pact among the Hapsburgs and how it rankled in
+Maximilian's breast. Therein he had, on accepting the Mexican throne,
+solemnly renounced all right of inheritance to that of Austro-Hungary.
+But she knew also that he considered his oath as void, since Franz Josef
+had forced it on him. Craftily she pictured the Mexican enterprise, how
+instead of enhancing his prestige at home, it but turned him into a
+sorry and ridiculous figure. And so she won the child of Destiny. Yet,
+when in a sudden fervent outburst he came and sat beside her, and would
+have taken her hand, she still did not falter. Napoleon would have the
+glory, and she a shame unexplained, but for all that her country would
+have Mexico. Her country would have Mexico! Would have a vast expanse of
+empire, greater and more enduring than any won for her by Bonaparte
+himself.
+
+Nevertheless, she brushed away the gallant's arm with more vigor than
+her coy rôle demanded. "No, no," she moaned faintly, "not yet!"
+
+"But, _cruelle_----"
+
+"Not yet, not until I know that you will try to win in Austria, not
+until--you abdicate here!"
+
+"But, I shall sail this very month, I----"
+
+"And never return, never to Mexico?"
+
+"Never!"
+
+Frankly, then, she placed her hands in his.
+
+That moment Driscoll turned the corner of the hedge, and was before
+them. He fell back, and reddened as though himself caught in wrongdoing.
+It was strange how he noted, at such a time, that she was clothed in
+light blue, in the very dress he had given her. But no, he perceived at
+once that it was of some delicate silk from Japan. Yet the pattern was
+so nearly the same. She must have selected it--she had selected
+it!--with him in mind. And now, against a girl's love so quaintly, shyly
+revealed, to behold this contrast, her hands there, wantonly
+surrendered!
+
+Instantly she tore herself free and confronted him.
+
+"Oh, why, _why_," she cried fiercely, "did you not let them kill
+you?"
+
+Suddenly her hands flew up to her hot face. "Then," she moaned, "then
+you would not have lived to see!"
+
+The Emperor stepped between them. Tall, severe, he was cold in anger.
+
+"It's the intrusion of a rowdy, mademoiselle." To Driscoll he said,
+"Now, go!"
+
+Utterly confused, the trooper turned to obey. But at the first step he
+swung round, looking as he had never looked in the bloodiest of cavalry
+charges.
+
+"I am here for your answer, sir," he said.
+
+"Answer? What answer, fellow?"
+
+Driscoll breathed once, he breathed twice, and yet again. It may be he
+counted them. Then he spoke.
+
+"You understand, of course, that I might call you a puppy? Or break you
+over my knee? But I've got something harder on hand. It's to make you
+honor your promise. I've ridden forty miles for what you were to give me
+six hours ago at Chapultepec. Now then, shall I bring the men to save
+your empire? Think well. You need not take the question from me. Take it
+from them, from an army of fifty thousand men. Now, answer! And
+remember, you can save your empire."
+
+"Save my empire?" Maximilian repeated the words.
+
+There was a reluctant note in the query. Jacqueline heard. And the
+bravest act of her life was when she raised her head and faced her
+shame, with _him_ to see. She must begin her fight all over again.
+
+"Yes, your play empire, sire," she said, wielding two weapons, the
+mockery in her voice, the seduction of her eyes.
+
+Driscoll saw his cause forlorn against eyes like those.
+
+"It's unfair!" he protested involuntarily.
+
+She turned on him in defiance. "It is _not_ unfair! And you,
+monsieur, of all men, know that it is not. You, and you alone, know what
+I, what I would give--what I tried to give--that I might win in this!"
+
+He could not help a thrill of admiration. She was battling against all
+men and women to change the destinies of two continents.
+
+"W'y, I take it back then," he said.
+
+She stared at him in wonder, and drew farther away. It was his tone,
+altered as she could never have thought possible, nor had she known that
+aught on earth might hurt her so. She heard a decent man addressing some
+unavoidable word to a strumpet. All vestige of respect was gone, gone
+unconsciously, except that respect for himself which would not allow
+that the word be coarse or an insult. She looked in vain, too, for a
+trace of anger. Once she had sought to kill him, but that had not
+changed his big heart. While now! How much--oh, how much easier--was
+that other sacrifice of hers than this!
+
+"Perhaps, sir," she found the strength to say, "perhaps I have even, in
+my humble opinion, favored the acceptance of your offer. But His Majesty
+knows far better than I under what conditions he might accept."
+
+Driscoll turned to Maximilian direct. "Name them."
+
+"There is but one. We cannot give refuge to the enemies of the United
+States----"
+
+"The conditions?"
+
+"Therefore, to avoid complications, your men must lay down their arms on
+entering Mexico. Then we would deliver the arms to the United States on
+their recognizing Our Empire----"
+
+"Trade us off, you mean?"
+
+"Or, in case the United States still held aloof, then, as citizens of
+Mexico, you could take up your arms again."
+
+Driscoll looked at Jacqueline. She, the inspiration of such a condition,
+knew quite well beforehand that he would not submit.
+
+"This is final, is it?" he demanded.
+
+"It is, because We cannot provoke war with the United States, but,"
+Maximilian urged querulously, "you have only to surrender your swords."
+
+"After refusing them to the Federals, to the men who _fought_ for
+them? And now we are to give them up to a pack of----" Driscoll stopped
+short and took another breath. "By God, sir, no sir!" he cried.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+A SPONSOR FOR THE FAT PADRE
+
+
+  "Every man is as heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse."
+                                                        --_Cervantes._
+
+
+When Driscoll had gone, Jacqueline would not linger. Maximilian sought
+to detain her, but something had happened that he could not fathom. She
+was no more the same person.
+
+"Not even a token to bid me be brave so far away in Austria?" he
+pleaded.
+
+"There have been tokens enough," she returned shortly. "I ask Your
+Majesty's leave. Good-night."
+
+She gained her room, and worked till late on a cipher dispatch to
+Napoleon. Its purport was, that now, if ever, Maximilian must be
+discouraged absolutely. Following on what she herself had done, such
+would bring his abdication. She implored, above all things, that Bazaine
+be kept from meddling, from extending false hopes. Poor girl, after what
+it had cost, she was passionately bent on success. A courier took her
+packet to the City the next day, whence the message was to be sped to
+Paris.
+
+"That foolish Prince Max," she thought, "if he does give it up and go, I
+am really saving him from terrible sorrow. But, who will save me from
+mine, I wonder? Mine, that is come already! God in Heaven cannot."
+
+Maximilian had watched her as she left him, till her stately girlish
+figure was lost in the dusk under the trees. Then with a sigh he turned
+away. At the villa he found his wife. She was seated apart from her
+maids, and Éloin was talking to her, in tones low and swift. Charlotte
+only half listened. Her agitation was nearly hysterical. Her eyes
+gleamed wildly, and sometimes they would close, as though they ached for
+the soothing that tears might bring.
+
+"Who," demanded Maximilian, "has had the presumption to introduce a spy
+on these grounds?"
+
+Éloin glanced quickly at the Empress. "A spy, sire?" he said uneasily.
+
+"I mean that American, sir. But shall I ask the sentinels at the gate?"
+
+"That, Ferdinand," Charlotte interposed icily, "is not necessary.
+Monsieur Éloin, at my command, brought the American here. You should
+know why."
+
+"To save my play-empire, I suppose?"
+
+"An empire," she cried, catching up the word the more hotly because she
+knew it to be Jacqueline's own gage of battle, "an empire, August Sire,
+to be gained by fighting, as your forefathers, as mine, won theirs. And
+that is nobler, _I_ suppose, than puny inheritance. I do not know
+what the Hapsburg may be fallen to, but a daughter of Orleans still has
+the right to expect a crown from her husband. If not, she is unworthily
+mated."
+
+Maximilian thought of that other empire, which that other temptress
+exacted of him. It seemed that he had many realms to conquer. But the
+grimmest humor of all was that he blithely imagined himself capable of
+satisfying the whims, not of one woman, but of two. Deluded Prince Max!
+
+But the Emperor was not there to discuss empire building, much less to
+face the tigerish light in his lady's eyes.
+
+"Monsieur Éloin," he said, "this is my first personal complaint against
+you, but there have been others, long, insistent ones, from French and
+Mexicans alike. You lose me my friends, sir, however I assure them that
+you have not the slightest influence over my policy. So, after the
+awkward intrusion of to-day, I am resolved that you had best leave us."
+
+"Your Majesty desires----"
+
+"That you leave the country at once, Monsieur Éloin."
+
+"But," protested Charlotte, "that is open disgrace. At least cover it
+with the pretext of some mission."
+
+The downcast courtier took heart. Watching his master with narrowed
+sycophant eyes, he said, "But it need not be a pretext, sire. Since I
+must leave Your Highness, permit me, then, to find my mission, and one
+in which I can still serve my sovereign, though in spite of himself."
+
+Imperceptibly Maximilian fell under the spell of the old fawning.
+
+"And what mission could that be, my good friend?"
+
+"To feel the Austrian pulse, sire. To know when the time is ripe, to
+hasten the time----"
+
+"The time for what?"
+
+"For Your Majesty's return. Even now the unpopularity of His Imperial
+Highness, Franz----"
+
+"Éloin!" Maximilian stopped him sharply. But he could not hide the flash
+of his own blue eyes.
+
+"What would Your Majesty? In Vienna, in Budapest, in your own Venetia,
+sire, they long for you; at least as regent till the crown prince shall
+come of age. Would you rebuke them also, as you do me?"
+
+Charlotte stared at the Belgian in amazement and distrust. He had only
+just warned her how Jacqueline had kindled Maximilian's Austrian hopes
+in order to get him out of Mexico, and here he was borrowing that
+woman's guile. And here was Maximilian, too, softening under the
+enervating blandishment, softening behind his frowns for the officious
+meddler.
+
+"There, there, Éloin," he said, "you know that I must be inexorable. But
+in the Journal Officiel it will appear that you are gone on a secret
+mission, though you have no mission at all. None at all, do you
+understand, sir?"
+
+Éloin protested that he understood.
+
+"None," repeated the Emperor, "except to win back my confidence. When
+you have taken leave of Her Majesty, you may come to my cabinet to bid
+me farewell."
+
+As Maximilian left them, Charlotte turned on the favorite. "Indeed,
+Monsieur Éloin?" she said in utter scorn.
+
+"But, Your Majesty----"
+
+"Is Napoleon, then, so liberal a paymaster?"
+
+"Your Majesty!" and in genuine distress the courtier hurried on. "If you
+would listen, Madame! 'Tis true that Jeanne d'Aumerle has found the
+surest lever to pry His Highness out of Mexico----"
+
+"So good a lever, that you would use it too, to topple over my throne."
+
+"Not so, Madame. It's a cunning lever, yes; but _I_ shall use
+another fulcrum."
+
+"Really, monsieur, if I were in the mood for riddles and such pretty
+trifles, I'd ask you to favor Us with a chansonnette."
+
+"But this is as plain as day. First, our little intrigante knows that if
+His Majesty tries for the Austrian throne, he must leave Mexico.
+_That_ is her lever to move him. But suppose we shift it to my
+fulcrum. Then, whatever encourages his hopes for Austria, will make him
+but the more determined to cling to Mexico. For to succeed in Austria,
+he must triumph first in Mexico. He must prove to Europe that he can
+reign brilliantly. But if he abandons Mexico, as Jacqueline would
+persuade him, what of his prestige then? What of his glory to dazzle the
+Austrians? If Your Majesty would suggest to him this phase----"
+
+"And you, meanwhile in Europe?"
+
+"Oh, I shall find his chances good over there, but conditional on his
+success here."
+
+"Monsieur Éloin, I find that I must congratulate you. More, I even
+regret that you are going, for I dread that some other will replace you
+in favor with the Emperor who----"
+
+"Who may not be in accord with our views, Your Majesty would say? But if
+you will permit, Madame, I believe I know quite a different man.
+Moreover, he has already made an impression on His Highness, during our
+brief stay at an hacienda in the Huasteca. Now he is here. I brought him
+to commend as a future loyal follower."
+
+"Pray, who is the paragon?"
+
+"A priest, Madame, a German priest, who perhaps would not refuse the
+Bishopric of Durango. The hope of that rich see would insure his
+devotion. His name is Fischer. He is a clerical, he is an imperialist,
+he is resourceful. Our Jacqueline will have much to do to outwit him.
+This corpulent padre, Madame, would wheedle the sulky pope himself into
+a good humor with us. If I might venture so far as to present him
+before----"
+
+"Oh, I suppose so," said Charlotte wearily.
+
+
+
+
+PART SECOND
+
+
+THE ROSE THAT WAS A THORN IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+  "The rugged battle of fate, where strength is born."
+                                             --Emerson.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+MEAGRE SHANKS
+
+
+  "... and should a man full of talk be justified?"--_Book of Job_.
+
+
+At the hotel in the City of Mexico where Driscoll stopped, the entrance
+was big enough for a stage coach to drive through. But as to height, it
+did not seem any too great for the attenuation of Mr. Daniel Boone, who
+therein had propped himself at his ease, delightfully suggesting a
+tropical gentleman lounging on a veranda under the live oaks. One
+shoulder was impinged on the casing of the archway, from which contact
+his spare frame drifted out and downward, to the supporting base of one
+boot sole. The other boot crossed it over, and the edge of the toe
+rested on the pavement of the Calle de los Plateros, familiarly
+so-called.
+
+Mr. Boone hailed from Boonville, but in Missouri, with Kentucky for
+ancestral State, such was not a strained coincidence by any means. An
+individual there of the name of Boone, and a bit of geography likewise
+distinguished, are bound to fall together occasionally. For instance, a
+flea's hop over the map, and Mr. Boone and Boonville both might have
+claimed the county of Boone. Under the circumstances, Daniel's Christian
+name was the most obviously Christian thing his parents could do, and
+followed (to precede thereafter) as a matter of course.
+
+Now, Missouri, in the beginning of the Civil War, was a very Flanders
+for battles, and this sort of thing had ended by disturbing Mr. Boone
+considerably in the manipulation of an old hand-press, dubbed his
+Gutenberg, which worked with a lever and required some dozen processes
+for each impression of the _Boonville Semi-Weekly Javelin_.
+Finally, when Joe Shelby and his pack of fire-eaters were raiding
+Missouri for the second time, Daniel plaintively laid down his stick in
+the middle of an editorial on Black Republicans, and what should be done
+to them. The shooting outside had gotten on his nerves at last. That
+blazing away of Missourians back home made him homesick. He was like the
+repressed boy called out by the gang to go coasting. And he went. An
+editorial by example, he went to do unto the Black Republicans somewhat
+personally. The Javelinier was a young man yet.
+
+"There's been rumors hitherto about the pen and the sword," he mused,
+"but type, now--that's _hot_!" Wherewith he emptied his cases into
+a sack, took down a squirrel rifle, chased off his devil, locked in the
+Gutenberg, and joined the raiders. Flinging his burden of metal at
+General Shelby's feet, he said, "There sir, is _The Javelin_ in
+embryo for months to come. Now it's pi, which we'll sho'ly feed out by
+the bullet weight, sir."
+
+From then on the newspaper man followed his proclivities and turned
+scout, and it was a vigilant foe that could scoop him on the least of
+their movements, whether in the field or in their very stronghold, St.
+Louis itself.
+
+At the present moment Mr. Boone was retrieving a lost familiarity with
+good cigars. There was a black one of the Valle Nacional in his mouth,
+and also in his mouth there was a wisp of straw. The steel-blue smoke
+floated out lazily, which his steel-blue eyes regarded with
+appreciation. It was an Elysium of indolence. The cigar, the not having
+to kill anybody for a few minutes, and a place to lean against, these
+were content. Troubadour phrases droned soothingly in his brain. Of
+course he had to apostrophize the snow-clads:
+
+"Popo, out there, grand, towering, whose frosty nose sniffs the vault of
+heaven, whose mantle of fleecy cloud wraps him as the hoary locks of a
+giant, whose--Sho', if I had some copy paper now, I'd get you fixed
+_right_, you slippery old codger!"
+
+The wisp of straw hardly tallied with poesy of soul, nor did the lank
+figure and lean face, nor the cavalry uniform, badly worn, though lately
+new, nor yet the sagging belt with dragoon pistols. But the eyes did.
+Those eyes held the eloquence of the youth of a race. They were gentle,
+or they flashed, according to what passed within. It did not matter
+necessarily what might be going on without. They would as likely dart
+sparks during prayer meeting, or soften as a lover's mid the charge on a
+battery. Shaggy moustached Daniel, not yet thirty, was a scholar too, of
+the true old school, where dead languages lived to consort familiarly
+with men, and neither had to be buried out of the world because of the
+comradeship. Once, in Pompeii, Daniel blundered suddenly on that mosaic
+doormat which bears the warning, "Cave canem"; and before he thought, he
+glanced anxiously around, half expecting a dog that could have barked at
+Saint Peter himself. From which it appears that the editor had traveled,
+and it would not be long in also appearing that he had gathered enough
+of polite and variegated learning to fill a warehouse, in which
+junk-shop he was constantly rummaging, and bringing forth queer
+specimens of speech wherewith to flower his inspirations.
+
+Streaming back and forth before the shops in lively Plateros street were
+elegance and fashion and display, the languishing beauty of Spain, the
+brilliancy of the Second Empire, the Teuton's martial strutting, the
+Mexican's elation that Europe had come to him and with the money to pay
+for it. The toughened Boone gazed on the bright morning parade of
+ravishing shoppers and ogling cavaliers with the unterrified innocence
+of a child, or of an American. He had the air of doing nothing, such as
+only a newspaper man can have when really at work. He did not look as
+though he were waiting for some one. But only a half-hour before he had
+gotten from the saddle. He had just ridden four hundred and fifty miles
+for the express purpose of waiting for someone now.
+
+Finally the keen, lazy eyes singled out an immense yellow horse and
+rider from among the luxurious turnouts. "Jack!" he exclaimed gladly.
+"The Storm Centre," he improvised, as the new comer approached,
+"straight as Tecumseh, a great bronzed Ajax, mighty thewed, as strong of
+hand as of digestion--w'y, bless my soul, the boy looks pow'ful
+dejected, knocked plum' galley-west! I never saw him look like that
+before."
+
+Man and horse had come all night from Cuernavaca. But Din Driscoll never
+tired, wherefore Boone knew that _something_ was the matter. At the
+doorway Driscoll flung himself from the saddle, gave the bridle to a
+porter of the hotel, and was following, his face the picture of gloom,
+when he heard the words, "How' yuh, Jack?" His brow cleared in the
+instant. "Shanks!" he cried, gripping the other's hand.
+
+Mr. Boone untwined his boots and for the first time during a half-hour
+stood in them. As he shook Driscoll's hand, he shook his own head, and
+at last observed, in the way of continuing a conversation, "It was the
+almightiest soaking rain, Din, for the land's sake!" And he shook his
+head again, quite mournfully.
+
+Driscoll had not seen Mr. Boone since leaving Shelby's camp back in
+Arkansas. He naturally wished to know what was being talked about. But
+his woeful friend only kept on, "It wet all Texas, heavier'n a sponge,
+and," he added, "they ain't coming."
+
+"Shanks! You don't mean----"
+
+"Don't I? But I do. They're a surrendered army. The whole
+Trans-Mississippi Department of 'em, pretty near. But not quite, bear
+that in----"
+
+"But the rain? What in----"
+
+"What did you come down here for, I'd like to know? To say how the
+Trans-Mississippi wouldn't surrender, didn't you? Well?"
+
+"Oh, go on!"
+
+"Well, it rained, I tell you. Didn't it rain before Waterloo? Didn't it
+now?"
+
+Mr. Boone believed in trouble as an antidote for trouble. When he had
+stirred Driscoll out of his dejection enough to make him want to fight,
+he deigned to clear the atmosphere of that befogging downpour in Texas.
+
+"You rec'lect, Din, that there war god we put up in Kirby Smith's place,
+who so dashingly would lead us on to Mexico?"
+
+"Buckner, yes."
+
+"Him, Simon Bolivar B., whose gold lace glittered as though washed by
+the dew and wiped with the sunshine----"
+
+"Now, Shanks, drop it!" Driscoll was referring to the editorial pen
+which Mr. Boone would clutch and get firmly in hand with the least rise
+of emotion. Against his other conversation, the clutching always became
+at once apparent.
+
+"Anyhow," said Daniel meekly, "he wilted, did our Simon of B. B.
+calibre, and he gave back the command to Smith. And Smith's first order,
+his very first order, sir, was that the Department, the whole fifty
+thousand, should march into Shrevepoht and--and _surrender_, by
+thunder!"
+
+"Dan, you're not going to tell me----"
+
+"That _we_ surrendered, we, the Missourians, the flower of 'em all?
+Now s'pose you just wait till Joe Shelby gets back to us in Arkansas,
+after that conference with the other generals? Then you'll see what
+_he_ does. He proclaims things, on wall paper. The Missouri Cavalry
+Division will march to Shrevepoht, will depose Smith for good, will head
+off the surrender, will lead the other divisions on to Mexico. And we
+started to do it too. And then, and then--it rained. Rained, sir, till
+our trains and guns were mired, and we couldn't budge! And all the time
+we knew that regiment after regiment was stacking arms off there at
+Shrevepoht. Did Little Joe rave? Opened Job his mouth? He did. His
+fluency gave the rain pointers. I sho'ly absorbed some myself, me, that
+have language tanks of my own. Well, I reckon all our hearts pretty near
+broke. But we had our Missouri general and our Missouri governor, and
+the Old Brigade just decided to come along anyhow. And we're a coming,
+Din, we're a coming!"
+
+Driscoll's face went blank. He thought of the scant welcome his homeless
+comrades would get. But Mr. Boone did not notice. He had only stretched
+his canvas, a big one, and there was a picture to paint. His long body
+began to straighten out, and his eyes glowed. From Xenophon to Irving's
+Astoria, from Hannibal crossing the Alps to Marching Through Georgia, he
+ransacked both romance and the classics for adequate tints, but in vain.
+The colors would have to be of his own mixing.
+
+"Din Driscoll," he began solemnly, "_you_ know that devil breed? Of
+coh'se, you're one of 'em. You're a chunk of brimstone, yourself. And
+you'll maybe rec'lect they did some fighting off and on. There was that
+raw company, f'r instance--boys, hardly a one broke in his yoke of oxen
+yet--and they hadn't even gotten their firearms, but they took a battery
+with their naked hands, and got themselves all tangled up in the fiery
+woof of death. But you'll not be rec'lecting that that there Brigade
+ever _lost_ a gun. And those raids, Din, back into Missouri, a
+handful back into the Federal country, when men dozed and dropped from
+their saddles and still did not wake up, and some went clean daft for
+want of sleep, and fighting steady all around the clock too, fair and
+square over into Kansas! And there was the night they buried eight
+hundred!"
+
+In all this Daniel might have said "We," but reportorial modesty
+forbade.
+
+"And," he went on, gaining momentum, "I don't reckon you'll be
+forgetting Arkansas, and the ague and rattlesnakes? And how the
+small-pox swooped down on that camp of cane shacks? And how the quinine
+gave out, and--and the _tobacco_? Lawd!--And how those boys forgot
+how to sew patches, their rags being so far gone! And how they made
+bridles out of bark, and coffee out of corn! And how they kneaded dough
+in old rubber blankets and cooked it on rocks! Well, Jack, there they
+were, in Arkansas like that, and the War was over at last, and Missouri
+was just a waiting for 'em. And then, to think that they had to face
+square around another way entirely! Din, you'll just try to imagine that
+there devil breed facing any other way except to'ds home!"
+
+"Don't, Shanks, you----"
+
+"Devils? They were the wildest things that are. It's a mighty good thing
+they didn't go back. Think of their neighbors across the Kansas line,
+getting ready for 'em with every sort of legal persecution under the
+sun, and carpet-bag judges to help! Outlaw decrees? Well, I reckon those
+decrees will make a few outlaws, all right, and there'll be
+unsurrendered Johnny Rebs ten years from now. Shelby's boys had the look
+of it. Your own Jackson county regiment would have flared into
+desperadoes at sight of a United States marshal. They were all in just
+that sort o' mood, as they turned their backs on Missouri. And after
+four years, too! But there, it's a stiff wind that has no turning, so
+cheer up! _They_ did, as soon as that deluge got done with and they
+were headed for Mexico, one thousand of 'em. Soldiers mus'n't repine,
+you know. For them, Fate arrays herself in April's capricious sunshine."
+
+Driscoll had to smile. "Careful, there, Dan, don't stampede."
+
+"I ain't, but if now 'I hold my tongue I shall give up the ghost,' and I
+want to tell you first that Texas is a handsome state. We--they--were
+considerable interested all the way through it."
+
+"But, Meagre Shanks, where'd you leave 'em?"
+
+"Back in Monterey, drinking champagne with Fat Jenny. Alas, 'who can
+stay the bottles of heaven?'"
+
+"Fat--who's she?"
+
+"Now you wait. They've got heaps to do in Texas yet, before they get to
+Fat Jenny. First, they helped themselves out of their own commissary
+departments, horses, provisions trains, cannon, everything. Decently
+uniformed for the first time, and the War over! You should of seen 'em,
+a forest of Sharpe's carbines, a regular circulating library of Beecher
+Bibles. There were four Colts and a dragoon sabre and thousands of
+rounds of ammunition to each man. They had fighting tools to spare, and
+they cached a lot of the stuff up in the state of Coahuila. And they
+fed, and got sleek. This ain't editorial, my boy. It's God's own truth.
+Adventures every step of the way only did 'em good. They saved whole
+towns from renegade looters by just mentioning Shelby's name. They
+fought all day and danced all night. San Antone was the best. There they
+gathered in generals, governors, senators, and even Kirby Smith, all
+yearning to join Old Joe--our Old Joe, who ain't thirty-four yet."
+
+The speaker paused, and when he began again, there was a light ominous
+of inspiration in his eyes.
+
+"At the Rio Grande," he said, solemnly, "they crossed out of the
+Confederacy forever, so it was meet and right that there, in midstream,
+they should consign their old battle-flag to the past. They had not
+surrendered it, but as a standard it existed for those gallant hearts no
+more. Woman's loyal hand had bestowed it. Coy victory had caressed its
+folds mid the powder pall and horror of ten score desperate fields. And
+now it floated over the last of its followers, ere the waves should
+close over it forevermore. With bowed heads, they gathered sadly
+about----"
+
+"Lay it down, Shanks, lay it down," Driscoll pleaded. He was referring
+again to the pen in hand.
+
+"All right, Din," Boone answered hastily. "Yes, I know, we all got kind
+of weepy too. No wonder Colonel Slayback wrote some verses. Reckon you
+can stand just one? This one?
+
+  'And that group of Missouri's valiant throng,
+  Who had fought for the weak against the strong--
+    Who had charged and bled
+    Where Shelby led,
+  Were the last who held above the wave
+  The glorious flag of the vanquished brave,
+  No more to rise from its watery grave!'
+
+"And," he added savagely, "just let any parlor critic smile at the
+sacred feet of those same lines!"
+
+"Let him once!" said Driscoll. His eyes were moist.
+
+Mr. Boone faithfully traversed the rest of the way with the "Iron
+Brigade," and no company of errant knights, perhaps, ever had such a
+junketing as those same lusty troopers. No sooner did they set foot in
+the enchanted land of roses than a damsel in distress, the República
+Mexicana herself, came to them for succor. Or more literally, a
+dissident governor, backed by the authority of President Juarez, offered
+Shelby military control of the three northern states and grants in the
+fabulously rich Sonora mines, if he would hang high his shield and
+recruit his countrymen in the republican cause. There is little doubt
+that General Shelby could have raised an army and become henceforth a
+power in Mexico, for Washington would have smiled on the undertaking and
+all Texas would have afforded a base of supplies. But the Missourian's
+Round Table voted it down. They awaited Maximilian's reply which
+Driscoll was to bring. Perhaps, too, they would have a chance to wage
+war against the United States again, and that was better than being
+smiled on.
+
+Henceforth they fought the forlorn damsel herself, fought every foot of
+the way through desert mesquite thick enough to daunt a tarantula. There
+were guerrillas, robbers, spies, deserters, and Indian tribes. It was
+one eternal ambush, incessantly a skirmish, often a pitched battle. They
+saved a French garrison. They rescued a real maiden by a night attack on
+an hacienda stronghold, and did it with strictly de rigueur dash and
+chivalry. Once or twice they were even stung, by some "langourous
+dusky-eyed scorpion of a saynorita" to fight among themselves,
+cavalryman's code. Daniel was never one to spoil a romance by mentioning
+that a tropical maid was faced like a waffle-iron, though more than
+likely she was. Finally, as a last stroke, Fat Jenny promised to shoot
+Shelby and hang the rest.
+
+"You've been derogatory about this lady before," Driscoll interposed,
+"and I want to know who she is."
+
+"She is the English for Jeanningros, the French general at Monterey,
+who'd heard about those negotiations with the República. But Shelby
+formed in battle line, to storm his old city, and at the same time sent
+word explaining that he hadn't accepted any offer from the República.
+So, instead of shooting and hanging, Jenny asked us around for supper.
+That's where I left 'em."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"W'y," said Boone in surprise, "to see if you'd gotten here, and to take
+back Maximilian's answer."
+
+"But what's the use? The Trans-Mississippi went and surrendered."
+
+"Gra-cious, but you're in a vicious humor! Now, here's the use. Instead
+of fifty thousand, we're only one thousand, I know. But there are
+hundreds and hundreds of Americans down here like us, and all of 'em
+wanting service. There's that colony just starting at Córdova near Vera
+Cruz. But they'd fight, if there was an American to lead them, and more
+yet 'ud come from the States. Quicker'n that, Old Joe will have a
+division."
+
+Driscoll ruefully shook his head. "Maximilian wants us," he said, "if
+we'll give up our arms first."
+
+"If we----"
+
+"If we will surrender, Dan."
+
+Mr. Boone's jaw fell. The phrase that would measure the depth of the
+proposed ignominy would not come. Finally, he dug from his pocket a
+bright new gold coin, twenty pesos, and contemplated reflectively the
+side that bore Maximilian's effigy.
+
+"I've got the cub repohter's superstition," he said at last. "You get
+your cards printed," here he tapped the coin significantly, "and you're
+sure to lose your job--still we might of helped him."
+
+There was nothing, though, for Daniel but to turn back and meet the
+Brigade. Learning Maximilian's decision, the Missourians would probably
+join the Córdova colony. Boone reckoned that _he_ would. He
+discovered that he was tired of fighting. Perhaps the new citizens at
+Córdova would want an organ, a weekly at least; and already his nostrils
+were sniffing the pungent, fascinating aroma of printer's ink. Then he
+asked Driscoll what he thought of doing, now that he was free.
+
+"Don't know," came the reply lonesomely. "Stir around, I guess. There's
+a flying column leaving this week to capture Juarez. Maybe that'll do
+me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE BLACK DECREE
+
+
+  "So may heaven's grace clear whatso'er of foam
+  Floats turbid on the conscience."--_Dante._
+
+
+That unleashed hawk which was the flying column failed to clutch its
+prey. From the City of Mexico across the far northwestern desert the
+Chasseurs and cuirassiers rode their swift Arabian steeds, and into the
+town of Chihuahua at last. But the old Indian for whom they came was not
+there. Benito Juarez had fled. He must have known. Yet how, no one might
+conjecture. It was as though some watchful Republican fairy had marked
+the sturdy, squat patriot as the one hope of the Empire's overthrow, and
+did not propose to have him taken. Scouts, spies, the entire French
+secret service, delved, gestured, and sweated. But they laid bare next
+to nothing. At the Palacio Munícipal a number of functionaries told of a
+peon in breech clout, a wretch coated with alkali dust till the muscles
+of his legs looked like grayish ropes, who had emerged from the cacti
+plain ten days before and come running into Chihuahua. The peon had made
+direct for the Palacio, where, in some way, he had contrived a secret
+word with Don Benito; and that very day Don Benito with his one
+minister, Lerdo, had set out toward the north.
+
+Afterward the functionaries had questioned the messenger, but he knew
+next to nothing. A señor chaparro had sent him, was all he said. It was
+a ridiculous anti-climax. A señor chaparro, "El Chaparrito," "Shorty,"
+such a one to be the omniscient guardian of the Republic! But for all
+that "El Chaparrito" was to be heard of again and many times, and always
+as an enigma to both sides alike, until the absurd word became freighted
+on the lips of men with superstitious awe. There was an inscrutable,
+long-fingered providence at work in the blood-strife of the nation. The
+warning to Juarez at Chihuahua was its first manifestation.
+
+Their quarry had escaped, but Driscoll was not sorry. More than once he
+had felt a vague shame for the unsportsmanlike chase after one lone,
+indomitable old man. Driscoll held a commission, which Michel Ney,
+happily recovering, had procured for him from the marshal. But as the
+American's healthy spirits, like cleansing by vigorous blood, swept the
+gloom from his mind, he began to wonder at the craving for bustle and
+forgetfulness which had made him snatch at such an offer. The corners of
+his mouth twisted in whimsical self-scorn. He, one of your drooping,
+unrequited lovers! "Shucks!" that is what he thought. And he persuaded
+himself that it was all over. Quite, quite persuaded himself. But as a
+matter of fact, he hoped that he might never have to see her again.
+
+It was not until October of the same year that Driscoll saw actual
+battle in his new service. With the Fifth Lancers under Colonel Mendez,
+the best of the few native regiments in the field, he had been assisting
+at a manner of pacification. That is, they marched from town to town,
+and received allegiance. Guerrillas of course punished the towns later,
+but Maximilian would not be induced to organize a native army, and
+thirty thousand French could not garrison fifteen thousand leagues. They
+could only promenade, through sand storms, through cacti. Then the
+battle took place. It was the last vestige of Liberal resistance to the
+Empire. A few hundred men near Uruapan in Michoacan flaunted their
+defiance. Driscoll noticed an expectant and wolfish look in his
+colonel's eyes. Mendez was a strikingly handsome and gallant Indian, but
+his expectancy now was not for battle. It was for the battle's sequel.
+Michel Ney and a squad of Chasseurs had just brought him an Imperial
+packet from the City, and the packet contained general orders very much
+to his Indian taste.
+
+The fight was a rousing one, and Driscoll enjoyed himself for the first
+time in many days. His Mexicans behaved as he could have wished, better
+than he had hoped. At the start in the familiar uproarious hell, he
+missed the hard set, exultant faces of his old Jackson county troop, and
+seeing only tawny visages through the smoke and hearing only foreign
+yells, he felt a queer twinge of homesickness. But he was at once
+ashamed, for the humble little chocolate centaurs whom he had been set
+to train were dying about him with lethargic cynicism, just as they were
+bidden. Wearing a charm, either the Virgin's picture in a tin frame, or
+the cross, they might have worn the crescent. They were as effective as
+Moslems. They were ruthless fatalists.
+
+Michel Ney also spent a diverting half-hour. He had lingered for the
+fray. Waving a broken sabre snapped off at the hilt, he charged with
+Gallic verve and got himself knocked under his kicking and wounded
+horse, and pummeled by Liberal muskets on every side. Driscoll saw, and
+straightened out matters. Handing the Frenchman a whole sabre, he
+reproved him soberly, as a carpenter might an apprentice caught using a
+plane for a ripsaw.
+
+After it was over, the living of the enemy were prisoners. The victors
+marched them to Uruapan near by, because it was charged that at this
+place two of the captured Liberals, Generals Arteaga and Salazar, had
+lately shot two Imperialists. Here, in their turn, they were promptly
+executed.
+
+Driscoll heard the volleys, ran to the spot, and saw the last horrid
+spasms.
+
+"What--what----"
+
+Ney turned on him a sickened look.
+
+"Don't you know, it's the new decree."
+
+"What new decree? These dead men were prisoners of war. If murderers,
+they weren't tried."
+
+"It's the decree I brought from Maximilian, the decree of general
+amnesty."
+
+Driscoll glared fiercely at such a jest, but to his utter amazement Ney
+was quite in earnest.
+
+He who had commanded the shooting squad stooped over the corpses, a
+smoking pistol in his hand. Now he glanced up at Driscoll. "Pues, si
+señores," he said, "of amnesty, yes," and chuckling, he indicated the
+bodies with his pistol. "But wait----" He thought he saw a form quiver,
+one he had overlooked. Remedying this with a belated coup de grace
+through the brain, he shoved back his white gold-bordered sombrero and
+mopped his forehead as a laborer whose labor is done.
+
+"Under which general amnesty, caballeros," he went on merrily, "you have
+just witnessed the first act. My loyalty to the Emperor grows. His
+Majesty has a sense of humor."
+
+It was Don Tiburcio. He had deserted the Contras to waylay the rich
+bullion convoy of which Rodrigo Galán had told him. But the convoy never
+came. Rodrigo, the "sin vergüenza," had not levied toll at all. He had
+swallowed it whole, a luscious morsel of several millions in silver and
+gold. The coup was of a humor the less appreciated by Don Tiburcio
+because he had figured on doing the very same thing himself. At present
+he was chief of scouts under Mendez, and commanded the Exploradores,
+audacious barbarians who were invaluable for their knowledge of the
+country.
+
+From Tiburcio and Ney Driscoll finally gathered the meaning of the
+decree. It was the keynote to the Imperialist hopes. Its cause was the
+flight of Juarez across the border. Maximilian was surcharged anew with
+enthusiasm. Even the United States must now recognize his empire, he
+believed. And confounding flurry with activity, as usual, he fervently
+proclaimed the courage and constancy of Don Benito Juarez, but added
+that the Republican hegira finally and definitely stamped all further
+resistance to the Empire as useless. Then, august and Cæsar-like, he
+allowed amnesty for those who submitted immediately; he prescribed death
+for all others. Rebels taken in battle were not even to have trial.
+Maximilian believed that ink, thus sagaciously besmeared by a
+statesman's fingers, would blot out further revolution. But it was so
+fatuous, so stupidly unnecessary! The court martials, or French gardens
+of acclimatization, as the dissidents called them, were already doing
+the work of the decree. The poet prince merely lifted the odium of it to
+his own shoulders. His amnesty became infamy, and was called the Bando
+Negro, a nefast Decree to blacken his gentleness and well-meaning for
+all time.
+
+Driscoll left his informants, and walked up and down, up and down,
+alone. It did not occur to him to fill the cob pipe between his teeth. A
+scowl settled between his eyes, and it deepened and grew ugly. The
+desperado was forming in the man--desperado, as contrast to polite
+conventions. Desperado, as primitive man, who hews straight, cutting
+whom or what he might, cutting first of all through the veneered bark of
+civilization. For this reason, in this sense, he might be termed outlaw.
+And walking up and down, up and down, he hewed till he had laid bare the
+core of the matter. And he saw it naked, without the polish. Thereupon
+he knew what he was going to do.
+
+He saddled Demijohn, and Demijohn followed at his shoulder to the
+jefetura. Here, at the entrance, under the brick-red portales, Driscoll
+left the horse, untied, and opened the door and passed within.
+
+The jefetura, or prefecture, was at present the headquarters of the
+command, and in the long front room were assembled a number of officers,
+including Ney and Tiburcio, besides the jefe of the place and several
+town magistrates, all chatting with Colonel Mendez about the recent
+victory. They greeted the American cordially, and poured out tequila for
+him. He had done as much as any to win the fight. Michel laid a hand on
+his shoulder.
+
+"Monsieur," he said with mock formality, "to-day, when you permitted
+yourself to save my skin, you called me a fool. But I would have you
+observe, monsieur, that only my patron divinity, the god of fools, is
+permitted to know so much."
+
+Driscoll loosed himself from the affectionate grip, and turned to
+Mendez.
+
+"Colonel," he said, "I'm going to get out of this."
+
+"_What?_ Oh come, mi capitan, find a better one!"
+
+"It's not a joke, sir. Profiting by a commission that does not bind me,
+I am here to tell you good-bye."
+
+"Jean, mon ami!" Ney cried in protest.
+
+Don Tiburcio waited with keen appreciation, as he always did when the
+unexpectedness of this Gringo was unfolding. The others stared agape at
+the man between them and the door. Mendez saw too that he was in
+earnest, and he began to argue, almost to entreat. The Mexican leader
+had lost the quality of mercy in civil wars that had touched him
+cruelly, that had exacted many near to him, but there was sincerity in
+the man, and men were won by the stirring sound of his voice.
+
+"You would retire now," he exclaimed, "now, when every soul here may
+look for promotion, and none of them more than you, Señor Dreescol?"
+
+But he did not stop there. He conjured up a tempting vista of long and
+honored life under an empire that was now supreme. Even the scum of
+rebellion yet left on the calm surface was that day swept away, and
+naught remained but to enjoy the favors of his grateful Majesty.
+
+"Which only makes it," said Driscoll, "a good time to quit. I should
+mention, too, that I intend to join the Republic, that is," he added,
+"if there's any of the Republic left."
+
+Don Tiburcio was not disappointed.
+
+Mendez sprang to his feet and his voice was stentorian, as when he
+rallied his men by the magnet of fury and hatred.
+
+"It's desertion!" he roared.
+
+"Or simple honesty," Driscoll corrected him. "But it doesn't matter. The
+penalty is no worse for a deserter, if you catch him."
+
+Mendez curbed his rage. He did not wish to lose this man. That is, he
+would regret deeply having to kill him.
+
+"_Why_ do you mean to change?" he demanded.
+
+"Because I can't feel _right_! It's like--somehow it's like being
+an accomplice of murderers."
+
+"Dios mio, I suppose Your Mercy and his tender heart refers to the
+Decree?"
+
+"Partly. That thing is a blanket warrant of death. Just because your
+enemy can't fight any longer----"
+
+"But you forget, señor, the mines that exploded in the highways. You
+forget the poisoned springs, the ambuscades, the massacres. Would they
+not shoot prisoners too, your new friends?"
+
+"Si señor, as you and others may some day experience personally."
+
+"Then, mighty judge, condemn them also."
+
+"Don't I? But I can't blame them. They are punishing crime."
+
+"But not of murder, as we did to-day."
+
+"That too, for that was murder to-day. But I was thinking of a worse
+crime. I was thinking of theft, sir."
+
+"Theft? How can that be worse?"
+
+"Theft of their country, I mean, and as your accomplice I owe
+restitution. Leaving after a victory ain't so bad, but if I'd known that
+I was fighting for that Black Decree, I'd of dropped out before the
+fight. But look at it anyway you please. _How_ it looks be damned!"
+
+"Señor, lay down your pistols and sabre, there, on that table, because,
+by Heaven, I shall stop you! But if you are armed, I--I shall have to
+shoot you, too."
+
+"Hang it, Mendez, you're a good fellow! But--I can't help it."
+
+"Lay them down, you renegade!"
+
+Driscoll removed his sabre and gravely placed it on the table.
+
+"The guns are my own," he said. "Dupin had them returned to me.
+_He_ took them. Suppose _you_ take them, Colonel Mendez!"
+
+He was in the doorway, and from there he faced them. The day was hot,
+and Mendez had taken off his belt with his weapons. But the others were
+armed. Yet they hesitated. They were brave enough for death, but before
+the certainty of death for at least one among them and the uncertainty
+of which one, they paused. Driscoll had not touched the black
+six-shooters under his ribs. That would have snapped the psychological
+fetter. As he expected, Mendez sprang first. This put an unarmed man
+between himself and the others. In the instant he wheeled, was in the
+saddle, and clattering down the street.
+
+Back in the room Mendez saw his blunder and made way. Ney passed him
+first, reached the door, aimed and fired. But someone behind him touched
+his arm, and the ball sped high. Ney turned, and saw Tiburcio filling
+the door against the others, and regarding him with evil challenge in
+his eye.
+
+"Oh, don't think that I hold it against you," Ney cried gratefully.
+
+Tiburcio half laughed.
+
+"A man who don't want prisoners shot is better with the enemy than
+dead," he said.
+
+Tiburcio's chuckle was prophetic. The enemy invariably executed
+Exploradores, and would certainly do as much for Don Tiburcio if they
+caught him.
+
+Ney heard the hoof beats, already far away.
+
+"May the god of fools look after him too," he murmured heavily.
+
+The fugitive swept round the first corner of the street and on through
+the town. None thought to stop him. Soldiers and townsmen supposed him
+on the Empire's urgent business, and when they knew better, there was no
+longer hope for their ponies against the great Missouri buckskin, now a
+diminishing dusty speck mid cacti and maguey.
+
+"The devil of it is," Driscoll muttered ruefully, "I don't know where
+there's anybody to desert _to_!"
+
+However, he was feeling much better.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+AS BETWEEN WOMEN
+
+
+  "A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market."--_Lamb._
+
+
+Jacqueline had wrought close to success during that May twilight on the
+edge of the Cuernavaca pond. She had won a promise of abdication. Yet in
+the end it was not the Emperor that left Mexico, but the Empress. And
+Jacqueline was to accompany her, to leave despite herself the scene of
+her labors. Such was the case precisely, and it all came to pass in this
+wise.
+
+Maddened by the distance which his temptress kept, also goaded to it by
+the sorry state of his empire, Maximilian thought only of abdication.
+Napoleon responded to Jacqueline's cipher dispatch with orders to
+Bazaine. But Bazaine, urged thereto by Empress and maréchale, ignored
+the orders, and advanced Maximilian more money. And Maximilian, having
+no longer his excuse to quit, stayed on to spend the money. Jacqueline
+sighed, and--began all over again. Consequently Bazaine, hearing once
+more from Napoleon, found himself a defaulter, and virtually recalled.
+Consequently, Napoleon set dates for evacuation. Consequently the
+rebellion sprang into new life, and the Empire lost armies and cities,
+and thousands of men by desertion. But the darkest cloud was formed by
+one hundred thousand Yankees massed along the Rio Grande. Napoleon took
+heed. He ordered that the French troops should leave at once, unless
+half the Mexican customs were turned over to the French administrator.
+This was during the summer of 1866, only six months after the bright
+hopes embodied in the Black Decree of general amnesty. Utterly appalled,
+Maximilian took up his pen again to sign his abdication.
+
+But there was Charlotte. Even yet she pettishly clung to her crown. The
+Mexican agents in Paris had availed nothing with Napoleon. Bien, she
+would herself go to Paris. She would get the ultimatum recalled, and
+Bazaine as well, because Bazaine no longer advanced money. The imperial
+favorites, among them the sleek-jowled padre recommended by Éloin,
+seconded her intention. And as they all talked so well, Maximilian
+quaffed of hope. With a spite hardly noble though entirely royal, he
+predicted that soon the marshal would find himself in a sadder fix than
+himself, the Emperor.
+
+Suddenly, secretly, a little after midnight, Charlotte left the capital.
+Maximilian bade her good-bye with a solemn promise to rejoin her in
+Europe if she failed. Three days later Dupin and his Contra Guerrillas
+met her in the Tierra Caliente, and offered to join her French cavalry
+escort. The Empress took his presence as an affront. Of late small
+things excited her to a feverish agitation which she was unable to
+control. The Tiger bowed over his saddle, and kept his gray hair bared
+to a torrential downpour while her carriage passed on. It was the
+tropical rainy season. The clouds hung low around the mountain base and
+truncated the more distant peaks, while the valley below was a bright
+contrast in wet, tender green. The wheels sank deep, and mired in the
+black, soggy earth. Men tugged constantly at the spokes, and the
+steaming mules reared and plunged under the angry crack of whips.
+
+The Tiger of the Tropics waited as carriage after carriage toiled past
+him and creaked and was forced on its way. Behind the dripping
+windowpane of the very last he saw a face he knew, a beautiful, saddened
+face, puckered just now by some immediate ill-humor. She frowned on
+recognizing the French barbarian, but unlike Charlotte, she did not jerk
+down the shutter. Instead, she lowered the glass by the length of her
+pretty nose.
+
+"Is it dotage already, monsieur? Then put on your hat!"
+
+"Name of a name, yet another petulant grande dame!" But the Frenchman
+turned his horse and rode beside her coach.
+
+"Did Her Majesty pout, then?" inquired the lady within.
+
+"Almost as superbly as Mademoiselle la Marquise."
+
+"Thank you well, but I have a superb reason for it."
+
+"Because you return to Paris, surely not? Yet, if that is the reason,
+you need not quite despair."
+
+"Why, what--what do you mean?"
+
+"Only brigands, mademoiselle. When everyone is looking for abdication, a
+cortège mysteriously leaving the City must be the Emperor who goes back
+to Austria. The news travels like wildfire. The Indito runners go as
+fast as when they brought Moctezuma fresh fish from the Gulf. I rather
+think they have carried the news to an old friend of ours. It's my
+chance to catch him."
+
+"Not my Fra Diavolo--Rodrigo Galán?"
+
+"None other. But Rodrigo is stirred by more than patriotism these days.
+Upon it he has grafted a deep wrong, and he swears lofty vengeance by a
+little ivory cross such as these Mexican girls wear. The conceited
+cut-throat imagines there is a blood feud between himself and His
+Majesty. So if he hears that Prince Max comes this way----"
+
+"He will find Charlotte instead? But he must not detain her."
+
+"Tonnerre!" exclaimed the Cossack chief. "Why not? She goes to Europe to
+sustain the Empire, while we French----"
+
+"All the same, let her go. She will gain nothing there. Listen to me,
+monsieur. She leaves that he may _not_ abdicate, while if I stay,
+she fears that----"
+
+"He _will_ abdicate?"
+
+"Your wits, mon colonel, are entirely satisfactory. And so she invited
+me to go with her, and as first lady of her household, I could not
+refuse. I wonder, now, if Fra Diavolo would deign to capture just me,
+alone!"
+
+The sharp look which Dupin gave her from behind the streams tumbling off
+his sombrero was the sixth of a half-dozen. But it was this last one
+that seemed to satisfy him.
+
+"Put up the window, mademoiselle," he said, "you're getting wet."
+
+Ten minutes later Jacqueline felt the coach lurch heavily and sink to
+the hub on one side.
+
+"Go on with your nap, Berthe," she said to her one companion. "They'll
+pull us out, as usual."
+
+The customary yelling and straining began, and men grunted as they
+heaved against an axle. After a long séance of such effort there came a
+sharp exclamation, like an oath, and the confusion fell to a murmur of
+dismay. Someone jerked open the door, and Dupin's grizzled head
+appeared.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I regret to have to announce that a wheel is dished in."
+
+Jacqueline's gray eyes regarded him quizzically. The sardonic old face
+spread to a grin, but deftly readjusted itself to the requisite despair.
+
+Not a carriage except the wrecked one was in sight. Only the Tiger's
+whelps, by the hundred, surrounded her.
+
+"And the others? Her Majesty?"
+
+"The others did the sensible thing. They know that you will catch up
+with them when they themselves are mired. Her Majesty, being ahead, is
+probably still in ignorance of your accident."
+
+"But the wheel?"
+
+"If mademoiselle wishes it mended?"
+
+"Is it so bad?"
+
+Dupin caught her expression. "It will take six hours," he said
+mercilessly.
+
+"Oh dear!" said Jacqueline.
+
+"There's a settler's cabin a mile from here. If you will accept my
+horse, and Mademoiselle Berthe can mount behind----"
+
+"Poor Berthe," sighed Jacqueline. But she nodded eagerly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE LACKING COINCIDENCE
+
+
+  "Achilles absent was Achilles still."--_The Iliad._
+
+
+Colonel Dupin helped first one and then the other of his charges upon
+the same horse and wrapped them about in the same gaudy serape till only
+two pair of pretty eyes peeped forth at the rain. The Vera Cruz highway
+clung to the mountain side, but the Contra Guerrillas took a venturesome
+little bridle path which dropped abruptly down into the rich valley of a
+thousand or more feet below. Emerging from the dense tropical growth of
+the highland, they beheld a vast emerald checkerboard of cultivation,
+field after field of sugar cane, and set in each bright square a little
+house of bamboo with a roof of red piping. After the dreary black gorges
+behind them, the light of the sun seemed boxed in here under a leaden
+cover of cloud. Coming suddenly out of the chill and mist, the two girls
+felt the very rain gratefully warm and the fragrant smells of the wet
+earth a thing of comfort. As the beauty and the cheer of it subtly
+gladdened her mood, Jacqueline thought that here at any rate was an
+adequate mise-en-scène for whatever tremors might befall.
+
+There was one circumstance that already seemed a portent, and got on a
+person's nerves like the stillness of nature just before a Kansas
+cyclone. This was the curious absence of all human life. Except for the
+grimly expectant troop around her, and the clanking of metal as the
+Contras rode, she had no token of a fellow creature. The first of the
+plantations was deserted, and likewise the next. But the house doors
+were open. Nothing showed preparation for departure. The riddle was
+uncanny. At the third Jacqueline stated that she would go no farther.
+She hated to tramp down a man's field when the man himself was not about
+to express an opinion, and the ruthless swath made by her escort through
+the cane gave her shame. Besides, it was too much like wading, the way
+her skirts brushed the long leaves and knocked off glistening drops by
+myriads.
+
+The third cabin was abandoned too, but there were inducements within for
+any houseless creature. A hammock was hanging from corner to corner in
+the front room, probably to thwart the fauna of tropical stingers, and
+there was that comfort unfamiliar to French women, a rocking chair,
+before a most inviting fireplace, itself a luxury rare in Mexico. The
+two girls removed their cloaks, and settled themselves to dry their
+shoes before a roaring fire which the men lighted for them. Then the
+Cossacks, including their colonel, left on some stealthy business
+without, and Jacqueline and Berthe were alone.
+
+Jacqueline tried the rocker, found it good, and smoothed her skirts over
+her knees to the warmth of the blaze. "We've only to yawn at the flies,
+eh, ma chérie?" said she.
+
+"Not a thing else, madame," came a cheery voice from the hammock.
+
+Jacqueline was at once suspicious. "You absurd little mouse," she cried,
+"don't I understand that gaiety of yours! And all the while you are
+really trembling in fear of terrible bandits. For months now you grieve
+because you imagine that I--well, that I am sad. But you'll not make me
+hilarious, you won't, Berthe, as long as it's 'madame.' Child, child,
+will you not let me have my friend in you, I who have none, nor a mother
+or sister! There now, if I'm not to be--ah--pensive--remember there's no
+'madame' between thee and me, dear!"
+
+The Bretonne's gentle eyes filled suddenly. Jacqueline had before sought
+to change their relations, ever since Berthe's part in Driscoll's rescue
+from execution, but she had always tried to bring it about by playful
+bantering. Now, however, Berthe was given to see the utter loneliness of
+an orphaned girl in one who for all the rest of the world was the
+disdainfully independent little aristocrat, who had met the proffered
+intimacy of the French empress with a sneer, who was the cold princess
+when among princesses of the Blood. The loyal child of simple Breton
+folk sprang impulsively to the arm of the rocker, and was herself
+clasped no less impulsively.
+
+"But there," said Jacqueline, laughing rather brokenly, "we're
+forgetting the flies."
+
+A belt over the fireplace caught her eye, and she unexpectedly
+discovered that her breath had quickened. She stared fascinated at the
+letters on the buckle. "C. S. A.," she murmured. Then her startled gaze
+roved hurriedly over the walls. It became even frightened before a faded
+gray cape-coat of the Confederate cavalry and a battered white gauntlet
+sticking from the pocket. Involuntarily, trembling foolishly, she looked
+to see if there might not be an old cob pipe also. There was not, but
+the other familiar objects made her imagination leap fearfully to what
+might be. Both hope and dread will always override common sense, and
+convoy imagination perforce. If _he_ did live here--if they should
+meet! Could such a coincidence happen, could it, outside the neat
+ordering of a book or play?
+
+She sprang to her feet and began investigating. She went awesomely as
+one would tiptoe over a haunted house. In the next room she came upon
+what was an odd treasure trove for an isolated bamboo cabin tucked far
+away under the Tropic of Cancer. It was a printer's shop, after a
+fashion. The case was a block of stone, in whose surface the little
+compartments had been chiseled. They were sparsely accoutred with type
+and plentifully with cigar ashes. As for a press, there was none. But a
+form had been made up on a slab of marble, and near by were a tiny
+hillock of ink, a roller and a mallet. The mysterious printer could at
+least take proofs. There was one now on a file. Jacqueline pulled it
+off, and contemplated a miniature American newspaper, of one sheet,
+printed on one side only, and no larger than a magazine cover. At the
+top she read the legend, in German caps: "_The Córdova
+Colonist_--_Weekly Independent_."
+
+"Is that a pun?" she wondered.
+
+But now at least she could identify the ghostly company of the valley,
+though not its scribe. That word "Córdova" gave the clue. A year ago one
+thousand hardy men had ridden into the capital from the north. Their
+leader was a fiery, black-whiskered little man with a plume in his hat
+and the buff sash of a brigadier general around his waist. They were the
+Missourians, defamed as "Shelby's horse thieves and judges of whiskey,"
+honored as "The Old Brigade," and so feared and respected under any name
+that the City fairly buzzed and stared goggle-eyed. But Maximilian again
+refused their offers to enlist under his standard, and they could only
+disband. Some took ship to hunt for Kidd's treasure in the Pacific,
+others went to Japan and the Sandwich Islands, and a number joined a
+congenial regiment of veterans, the Zouaves. But the majority, she
+remembered now, had been settlers, persuaded thereto by their
+countryman, Commodore Maury, who was Imperial Commissioner of
+Immigration. Maury had secured a grant of land near the town of Córdova,
+within a hundred miles of Vera Cruz. There were one-half million acres
+of rich land, suitable for the three Big C's of southern countries,
+cotton, cane and coffee. But until now the strip had not been
+cultivated. The Church had held it fallow. Then the Republic had
+nationalized it; and the Empire was selling it to the Americans at $1.25
+an acre. The hopeful settlement bore the name of Carlota.
+
+So the cape-coat and those other things were explained. She was denied
+her coincidence. But as there was so much of a plot forward anyway, she
+ought to have been satisfied--as an artist, she ought. She craved an
+ecstasy of peril or of terror, not as the former dilettante of emotions,
+but as the lotus eater who exacts forgetfulness.
+
+Meantime she read editorials, and got interested. The _Colonist_
+never advanced beyond the proof-sheet stage, but as such it circulated
+with avidity over the valley. Eloquence flowed serene under mashed type
+and variegated fonts. The editor persisted in viewing the Empire and
+Republic as political parties, and the horrors of civil warfare as
+incidents of an electoral campaign. He had congenial scope for his
+unpartisan and independent pen, advising with owl-like sagacity or
+abusing with peppery virulence, and either, for either side, with blithe
+impartiality. At times, though, the strained analogy between ballots and
+bullets evidently cracked, and rather floored the editor. For instance,
+in a pot-pourri of long primer and pica with a dash of Old English
+lower-case was the following:
+
+  As we wen[t] to press last week we paused to entertain a torchlight
+  procession of the Young Imperialists' Flambeau [C]lub, which was
+  collecting a campaign contribution in the semblance of our alfalfa
+  stack. The spectacle of citizens taking an active [p]art in the issues
+  before their country ne'er fails to rouse in us a spirit of
+  collaboration, so [w]hat could we do but join heartily in the
+  celebration, so that a most excellent time was had. Later our
+  editorial staff, a score who in our canefields teach the tender
+  sprouts [h]ow to shoot, knowing t[h]e same so well themselves, gently
+  laid to rest a score and one Cossacks, past members of the [F]lambeau
+  Club, wh[o] had lingered behind for the reason that they _were_ past.
+  But, we ask, _ad quod damnum_?--i.e., isn't it as futile as
+  cauterizing a wooden leg? How much longer, O Jove, must we let our
+  public-opinion moulds cool off while we chase enthusiastic young
+  patriots away from our alfal[f]a!!!... In conclusion, with a cool
+  brow, we are constrained to say that if the party in power cannot
+  discourage the depredations above ci[t]ed, we shall have to fortify
+  ourselves to the contemplation of a c[h]ange of administration.
+
+[Transcriber's note: characters in brackets were originally printed
+as bold Old English lower-case as explained above.]
+
+"Why," cried Jacqueline, "what an _animal disputans_ it is!" She
+perceived an ink bottle, and exclaimed, "Ah, more milk from the black
+cow!" Taking up a wad of copy paper, on which a future editorial was
+already begun, she read, and quickly her amusement changed to a livelier
+interest.
+
+"Rumor goes," she read under the caption, _Ardentia Verba_, "that
+Father Augustine, political manager for the administration, vice Éloin,
+is soon to leave for Europe. He goes to have a pourparler with the Pope.
+He will concede everything, since the Empire no longer hopes to win over
+the moderate Mexicans. But the obstinate though Holy Father will
+negotiate a concordat on one basis only, and that is the return to the
+Mexican church of all nationalized church lands.
+
+"Men of the colony, attention now! We each own something like three
+hundred acres apiece of these lands. And we are paying for them, we are
+cultivating them, and we have to defend them against both guerrillas and
+contra-guerrillas. And now they are to be confiscated! Our new homes are
+to be taken from us!! Alas, we who are peaceful settlers, to think that
+we were Trojans on a time!!! Fellow citizens, with us it's a severe case
+of _e pluribus unum_. Oh, for a leader! But our incomparable chief
+of yore will not stir. Yet there _was_ one, gallant cavalier of the
+South, peerless captain, just the dauntless heart for any forlorn hope
+under the starry vault of heaven, if he were only here! If he, John D.
+Driscoll, were only----"
+
+The matter stopped abruptly. More than that, by force of habit the
+scribe had ringed the figures "30" underneath. They meant "finis." The
+editor had known, then, that he would not return to end his harangue.
+
+"A flea bite," mused Jacqueline, "would interrupt the penning of an
+Alexandrian line. Now, I wonder who or what the flea could have been,
+and what----"
+
+But there, she would ask herself no question concerning the editorially
+mentioned "John D. Driscoll."
+
+It was mid afternoon when Colonel Dupin, like a shaggy, dripping bear,
+returned to the house and begged leave to dry himself. Standing before
+the fire, he reloaded his holster pistols. They were tremendous, elegant
+utensils of French make, with a nine-chambered cylinder, and a second
+barrel underneath that carried a rifle ball. Where no prisoners were
+taken on either side, the owner of such a weapon usually reserved the
+murderous slug for himself, and the loading of that lower barrel became
+a sort of ghastly rite. Jacqueline shuddered as she watched him fix on
+the cap.
+
+"How do you explain your desertion of Her Majesty?" she asked. "Our Fra
+Diavolo should thank me for drawing you off."
+
+The Tiger adjusted the double hammer so that it would play on the
+cylinder first. A rumbling chuckle came from the depths of his throat.
+
+"I should be honored with mademoiselle's approval," he said, "for at
+court mademoiselle is a guileful warrior. The casualties there may not
+be so sanguinary, but the strategic principle is the same. Know, then,
+that Rodrigo Galán employs a spy whom I own, body and soul. By now
+Rodrigo has learned from this spy that the Imperial coach broke down,
+and that to-night Her Majesty rests--here. So you see that she is not
+likely to be attacked----"
+
+"But I see that _we_ are, parbleu!"
+
+"Of course," and the Tiger unctuously rubbed his hands in the blaze.
+"It's my chance to trap him. He has only three hundred men."
+
+"And you, monsieur?"
+
+"Our mutual spy has told him that I have less than two hundred men. The
+brigand knows that I was forced to leave a garrison at Tampico."
+
+"But how many have you, really?"
+
+Dupin motioned her to the window. But she saw not a man, not a musket.
+She saw only the wet fields of cane, and the black mist-shrouded
+mountains beyond.
+
+"Just the same," the Frenchman assured her pleasantly, "they are there,
+full five hundred of my little tribe. Does mademoiselle approve?"
+
+"It looks like the curtain on 'Fra Diavolo,'" she replied, shuddering.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE MISSOURIANS
+
+
+  "Men sententious of speech and quick of pistol practice."
+                                  --_Major John N. Edwards._
+
+
+An hour before nightfall the guerrillas attacked. Jacqueline was
+standing at the window, when she heard a jubilant din and saw a tawny
+troop charging through the fields toward the house. They yelled as they
+came, waving machetes and carbines. It was the usual theatrical dash of
+Mexicans. Like savages, they thought first to frighten their
+adversaries.
+
+"Won't you come and see, Berthe? It's like a hippodrome."
+
+She felt sorry for them. The dulcet cane grew thorns. Under the leaves
+the black soil was become clay red with leather jackets. The Cossacks
+had fixed sword-bayonets to their muskets, and were waiting on their
+knees.
+
+Stung by the hidden barbs, the first horses reared in air, pawing and
+screeching frantically. Many sank down again, and they were limp as the
+life ebbed. Others crashed backward, their riders underneath, and those
+behind plunged over them, unable to stop. Soon it was a fearful jumble;
+men and beasts, hoofs and steel, curses and shrill neighing. Then the
+firing began, a woof of fine red threads through the warp of pale-green
+reeds. The guerrillas yet fought. The myth of their own heavier numbers
+kept them from panic. Ragged fellows with feet bare in the stirrups
+leaned over to slash at heads between the tasselled stalks. They
+squirmed like snakes from under kicking horses, and fainting, got a
+carbine to the shoulder at aim, and someway, pulled the trigger. Then
+they were taken in the rear. One-half of the Contra forces, mounted, had
+waited under the sapling growth of the nearest foothill. Now they sprang
+from cover, bloodthirsty whelps trailing the Tiger. The guerrillas could
+not turn back. To retreat they must cleave the way in front, and they
+did, by sheer desperation. Falling in the mesh at every step, they at
+last gained the large open space around the cabin.
+
+Then it was that Jacqueline got a near view of Don Rodrigo. He was
+superbly mounted, and his long body made a heroic figure on the
+curveting charger. He frowned, and his mustachios bristled fiercely, and
+his shouts of command were heavily ominous. The wind turned the folds of
+his black cloak. It was faced with scarlet silk; and the charro elegance
+beneath was black and resplendent. All told, he was a very outburst of
+glitter; breeches, jacket, sombrero, saddle, stirrups, and bridle; not
+of silver, but of gold. Good carbines for his vagabond Inditos,
+magnificence for himself, these had come from that fabulous theft of the
+bullion convoy. And he had arrayed himself this rainy day to dazzle a
+princess of the Blood. So now he wielded his sword with a conscious
+flourish, glancing toward the window to see if he were seen.
+
+"The poseur, never out of his rôle," murmured his audience there. "How
+will he enjoy running, I wonder?"
+
+But to her astonishment he did not run, though Dupin was cutting closer
+and closer through tangled bodies, eager to grapple with his old-time
+slippery foe. Don Rodrigo raised in his saddle, and looked anxiously in
+all directions. Suddenly his dark face lighted, and wheeling round, he
+called to his men, and in his turn strove as furiously to reach the
+Tiger as the Tiger had striven to reach him. Jacqueline could not now
+tell which side to feel sorry for. But she exulted in the thrill of it,
+even as she wrung her hands at sight of the red agony.
+
+Then something happened, which even the Tiger, who knew his warfare so
+well, had never known; which got into even his dried and toughened
+marrow. It was the Rebel yell. It rose over a sudden thunderous rush of
+hoof beats. And next, as a puff of air, a herd of horsemen, a wild
+mud-spattering streak, surged past the house. On across the open, and
+straight upon the fray, they merged everywhere, and made bigger and
+livelier the blotch of mad swarming. Some wore slouch hats, others straw
+sombreros, and all were ruddily burned. They fought with revolvers, and
+often one would pause between shots to spit tobacco. They brought to the
+battle one thing above all else, and that was vim, vim unbounded, vim
+that simply had to have vent.
+
+Jacqueline caught her breath. What race of men were these? Exalted,
+quivering, she watched them doing as workmen what fell to their hands,
+yet ever with that whirlwind of vim.
+
+"The Missourians--of course!" she cried.
+
+Through powder smoke and misty rain the figure of one horseman slowly
+grew familiar. She caught fleeting glimpses of him, as he darted into a
+mêlée, as he spurred round to find a hotter field. Suddenly her eyes
+widened, and she pressed a hand hard against her breast.
+
+"The coincidence!" she gasped, trembling from head to foot. "It is the
+coincidence!"
+
+Her nose flattened against the wet pane. She remembered how that general
+of the Missourians had told Charlotte about this man, for the Empress
+had asked. And the general had related how the troop had dubbed him the
+Storm Centre.
+
+"And no wonder!" she breathed. "Mon Dieu, how he _enjoys_ it!--But,
+oh--he will be killed--oh!"
+
+Yet nothing of the kind happened. When she uncovered her eyes, his
+assailants were in flight. Every Cossack survivor was in flight. The
+Storm Centre wheeled and confronted Don Rodrigo, who raised his sombrero
+effusively.
+
+"Rebellion makes strange comrades," thought Jacqueline. "But no,
+my--the--chevalier--does not take his hand."
+
+Indeed Driscoll was looking the guerrilla over with little favor. "So,"
+he exclaimed, "it was you I was to help here!"
+
+"And what better patriot, señor----"
+
+"Never mind that. Why didn't you wait till dark to attack? Weren't those
+the orders, or--that is, the suggestion?"
+
+"But whose suggestion? Perhaps, señor, _you_ know who El Chaparrito
+is?"
+
+"Haven't the least idea, nor anyone else. But it's certain, Rod, that
+this is your first experience of Shorty. Another time, and you'll have
+sense enough to take his hints. Now then, where's the emperor we were to
+catch?"
+
+Fra Diavolo's smile was Satanic. "Your Chaparrito was either mistaken
+about the Emperor, or," and he glanced toward the window, "or he
+deceived you into helping me capture a beautiful young woman."
+
+"How? What----"
+
+"I mean that His Cautious Majesty did not come, however much El
+Chaparrito seems to want him. But--" and Rodrigo's tone lowered heavily,
+"but his August Spouse came instead. She is in that cabin now. It is
+well, señor, for vengeance in kind is just. It is righteous, it is
+biblical. Since fate has thrown----"
+
+"E-a-s-y! Eas-y, boy. Of course, if we've gone and netted an empress,
+we'll ask 'em to please take her back. This ain't a woman's game."
+
+"Give up a queen's ransom?"
+
+Driscoll nodded cheerfully.
+
+"I believe, caballero," said the brigand with awful dignity, "that I
+command here."
+
+Driscoll looked at his Missourians returning from the chase. "Well," he
+laughed, "you might try it on, and see how they take it."
+
+Behind Jacqueline the door opened. She almost jumped. Of the hundreds
+likely to enter there, her startled fancy pictured only one. But the new
+comer was a stranger.
+
+"Oh-ho, come a-visiting, eh?"
+
+The voice was cordial, robust, Western.
+
+"Missour-_i_!" she exclaimed involuntarily.
+
+"Yes'm, Cooper county."
+
+She turned, won to friendliness, and beheld a man who, to use her mental
+ejaculation, was "of a leanness!"
+
+"Monsieur----" and she paused.
+
+"Boone, ma'am. Daniel, your most obedient servant. If I'd known--Sho',
+we might of had things spruced up a bit. Are you the queen, maybe?"
+
+The lady's laugh rang as clear as a bell. Taken aback, Boone sought to
+correct his mistake. He saw that Berthe was seated in the hammock. She,
+then, must be the Empress.
+
+"I'm downright sorry we went and captured Your Majesty," he began.
+
+"Her Imperial Highness does not understand English," Jacqueline
+explained.
+
+Then to her surprise the man proceeded in French. He was evidently
+greatly disturbed because Missouri hospitality did not harmonize with
+war. "It was a blunder," he apologized earnestly, "come of our deciding
+just this morning to make you Europeans vacate our continent. But don't
+let that worry Your Majesty. Here, under my roof, the decision doesn't
+hold, _at_ all!"
+
+Berthe lifted her head quickly. It was her second promotion in the
+social scale that day. She had trembled when the door opened, for she
+knew that Rodrigo's side had triumphed. But this tall stranger brought
+relief to one's nerves, and somehow she had watched him trustingly. He
+was of the same race as Monsieur Driscoll, to whom also she had once
+turned instinctively for help. But when the tremendous young fellow
+addressed her with reverence due a queen, she felt only the respectful
+admiration due a pretty young woman. It unexpectedly awakened in her the
+knowledge that she was a pretty young woman; and with a winsomeness that
+amazed and delighted Jacqueline, to say nothing of its effect on Daniel,
+she gently put him right as to her identity.
+
+"It doesn't matter," Boone protested stoutly, "you ought to be one!"
+
+The door opened again. It struck the wall with an insolent bang, and in
+strode Don Rodrigo. Jacqueline noted who it was and indifferently seated
+herself in the rocking chair, with her back toward him. The Mexican
+advanced to the centre of the room. The brief twilight had fallen, and
+the place was in half light except for the blazing logs. He stopped
+rigid and flung his scarlet-lined cloak back over his shoulder.
+
+"Where," he demanded in the huge tones of a victorious general, "is the
+tyrant's empress?"
+
+No one volunteered as to where the tyrant's empress might be. The toe of
+Jacqueline's boot was indolently busy with the embers on the hearth. The
+heads of both girls were in shadow.
+
+Rodrigo's furrowed brow creased more deeply. "Which of you is she?" The
+heavy syllables dropped one by one. He stepped tentatively toward
+Berthe. So did Boone.
+
+"Stand aside, señor!"
+
+"Can't, dear brigand," said Daniel.
+
+Then Berthe spoke. "Please, messieurs," she began, "Her Majesty is
+not----"
+
+"It's only a maidservant," Rodrigo exclaimed in chagrin.
+
+"Don't make any difference," said Boone, "she's come a-visiting."
+
+"If, Seigneur Brigand," spoke a clear voice, "you had not interrupted
+Mademoiselle Berthe, you would stand informed by now that Her Majesty is
+not here. Will you deign to close the door?"
+
+Rodrigo knew well those bell-like tones. Forgetting the question of an
+empress, he drew nearer to the lady of the rocker. She gave him no heed,
+but her profile against the red glow was very soft and beautiful. His
+chagrin vanished. Here was a more ravishing triumph.
+
+"A vengeance in kind," he muttered, wetting his lips. "Ha, he took
+nobody's wife, as to that; and his wife may go. But in the matter of
+sweethearts--ah!"
+
+Bending, he laid a hand caressingly on her neck, against the tendrils.
+
+At the touch she sprang to her feet, and Boone leaped forward with fist
+drawn back. But both stopped. Her face changed from fury to pallor.
+Boone's expressed approval.
+
+The room had filled through the open door with men and torches, but the
+first man among them had come as far as Rodrigo's shoulder even as the
+insult occurred. From behind, the man's arm had straightened under
+Rodrigo's chin, and twisting to a lever, was gradually forcing back his
+head. Rodrigo groped for a knife, but half way to his waist the fingers
+clutched vainly in a sharp spasm, and all involuntarily flew up and
+gripped at the vise under his chin. Yet another ounce of pressure, and
+it seemed his neck must snap like a dry twig. Suddenly his spine bent
+limp. Muscles relaxed. The whole body capitulated. Then the man behind
+stooped a little, and Rodrigo began to rise. Slowly at first, and next,
+as from a catapult, the brigand shot backward over the man's shoulder
+and struck his length on the floor.
+
+"No, not that, boys," said the man. "Don't kick him. Laugh at him, it
+hurts more."
+
+He spoke more particularly to one "Tall Mose" Bledsoe of Pike county who
+was purple with indignation that a "saddle-colored Greaser should dare
+lay hands on a white woman."
+
+But there were also "Rube" Marmaduke of Platte, "Mac" Crittenden of
+Nodaway, the "Doc" of Benton, "Cal" Grinders from the Ozarks, Clay of
+Carroll, and Carroll of Clay, besides a ruddy sprinkling from the county
+of Jackson. Among the latter was "Old Brothers and Sisters," a plump
+little young man with cherubic eyes behind round brass spectacles. Clem
+Douglas had been ordained in the M. E. Church (South), and became
+thereupon the Rev. Mr. Douglas. "Old Brothers and Sisters" was a
+theological degree of later acquirement, lovingly bestowed by the Iron
+Brigade. But in his more recent gospel of pistol practice, Clem Douglas
+was not a backslider. He was simply all things Southern to all men. Like
+the others in the cabin, his hat was off, his muddy boots scraped; and
+like the others, he was not unaware of the two girls.
+
+"Rather showery out," he observed genially, wiping the mist off his
+glasses, and imagining weather a livelier topic than battle.
+
+Jacqueline did not hear. Her eyes were still on the man who had
+disdained to strike Rodrigo from behind, who had flung him away instead,
+as one would a dog. She stood motionless, and her face was very white.
+She saw that he wore loose leather "chaps," a woolen shirt, and an old
+coat, with only stained shoulder straps, green braid on dark blue, to
+indicate a uniform. His wet black hair was curly. His brown eyes flashed
+whimsical contempt on the resplendent guerrilla at his feet. He was the
+Coincidence; he was the Storm Centre. He turned, expecting to see the
+Empress, and he met her eyes. His own darkened with a new anger, and
+involuntarily, he swung round, himself to kick the Mexican who had
+insulted her. But a flood of memory swept over him, the memory of what
+he had seen at Cuernavaca. Not for her could he touch a fallen man.
+
+"Take him into the back room, two of you."
+
+Red, red to the neck, he was turning to follow, when he saw Berthe.
+
+"Miss Burt!" he exclaimed.
+
+Heartily he shook hands with her. "It's my first chance, you know, to
+mention what you did for me over a year ago. But I sure appreciate
+having my life saved, you know that. There now, you're not to worry over
+this present mess. We'll have it straightened out, just in no time."
+
+He stammered as he spoke, and when he turned and left the room, his
+bearing was constrained. Jacqueline's eyes followed him until the inner
+door closed behind him. Then, with a half shrug, she sat down and
+pensively resumed the building of fiery mounds on the hearth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IF A KISS WERE ALL
+
+
+  "A man, a woman, a passion--what else matters?"--_Sardou._
+
+
+"Tall Mose" Bledsoe and the Rev. Mr. Douglas conveyed Don Rodrigo to the
+back room, and here Driscoll and Boone joined them. They did not disarm
+the Mexican. It did not occur to them that any man would risk drawing a
+weapon in such company. And as to Fra Diavolo they surmised correctly.
+He sulked a little at first, for there were sore tendons that ached. But
+in the end he grew reasonable, and his white teeth gleamed acquiescence
+to all that the señores were pleased to say. He agreed to bivouac his
+men apart from the Missourians and go his own way at daybreak. The
+Contras were routed. The Tiger had barely escaped. There was no further
+need of combined forces. Indeed, Don Rodrigo feared a night attack so
+little that he meant to reward his men with many copitas of aguardiente.
+Might he send a barrel over to his esteemed allies?
+
+Mose Bledsoe turned a pleading look on the parson, and to his surprise
+the Rev. Mr. Douglas beamed tolerant benevolence. "Why yes, my friend,"
+he himself said to Don Rodrigo, "good liquor is always acceptable,
+especially when soldiers must sleep on the wet ground."
+
+The brigand was then allowed to depart, and Old Brothers and Sisters
+explained. It was best to let Rodrigo send the brandy, for then one knew
+what to expect. Otherwise the Christian brother and rascal would hatch
+up some other plot, and any other plot might take them off their guard.
+
+When an hour later, Rodrigo did in fact attack the presumably somnolent
+Americans, more happened than either he or they expected. A third was
+also waiting to strike for the sake of a woman. He was Dupin, who wanted
+nothing better than the allies at each other's throat. Crouching warily
+near, the Tiger sprang at both of them. In the rain and the black night,
+the three-cornered fight raged like firecrackers under a tin bucket. The
+guerrillas, repulsed by the Americans, fled upon the Contras, whereat
+the Americans swept them both back indiscriminately. Instead of a lady,
+the Tiger carried off Don Rodrigo, and was quite glad to carry himself
+off. But Boone, scouting near, reported that Rodrigo was held a prisoner
+instead of being executed at once. This meant something. It meant beyond
+any doubt that the Mexican and the Frenchman would combine, Rodrigo for
+his life, Dupin to rescue Jacqueline.
+
+The Missourians held council in Daniel's sanctum. To restore the
+captives to Dupin had been Driscoll's intention from the first. But now
+it was a question of trading them against Rodrigo. Dupin must know the
+American offer before he and Rodrigo should attack. Driscoll proposed
+for himself alone the errand to the Tiger's camp. Rising to his feet, he
+left his protesting friends without a word further. But he had to pass
+through the front room first, to get the cape coat hanging there. It
+was, in fact, his own. The two girls were seated before the fire,
+Jacqueline still in revery, Berthe nervously agitated from the late
+racket of battle. Daniel Boone had laid before them a ranchman's supper
+with tropical garnishing, but it was untouched. Driscoll nodded, crossed
+the room, took the coat from its nail, and started for the outer door as
+he drew it on.
+
+"Snubbing--an acquaintance," spoke an impersonal little voice, "is
+cheap."
+
+He stopped, waited.
+
+"Of a gentleman, I reckon you'd say," he interrupted uneasily. "Maybe
+not, but a ruffian's got his instincts too. When he's afraid of hurting
+someone, he hides himself."
+
+"I was mistaken," she said gravely, with that quaintest inflection of
+the English he had ever heard, "yes, mistaken. Hé mais--but it is just
+that the complaint. You hurt more by _not_ speaking."
+
+"But there's nothing to say," he faltered. "I'm just going to Old
+Tige's--to Dupin's camp, and get him to come here for you."
+
+"Monsieur, monsieur, you fight for your captives only--only to give them
+up?"
+
+"That's not the question. You can overtake the Empress yet. Dupin
+will----"
+
+"But it is not that I want to overtake empresses at all. I--Berthe,
+would you mind carrying back these supper things?--I," she continued,
+when they were alone, "have no wish to go back to Paris. I shall return
+to the City."
+
+Again the liaison with Maximilian, he thought bitterly. And Charlotte
+away! It was infamous. However, he had no right to be concerned.
+
+"Very well," he said, "then Dupin can take you to the City, or wherever
+you wish."
+
+"Ma foi, what trouble to be rid of your prisoners, monsieur, and after
+two battles too!"
+
+"That's got nothing to do with it."
+
+She meant, though, to have him confess that she had had a great deal to
+do with it. She was taken with the self-cruel fancy to lay bare and
+contemplate his love for her, that she might feel more poignantly the
+happiness she had lost. But he abruptly turned again to leave, and all
+else was forgotten in terror.
+
+"You go to that Tiger!" she cried. "Do you not know that----" She darted
+between him and the door--"that he recognizes no rules of war? He will
+shoot you, he will, he will!"
+
+Driscoll laughed.
+
+"Oh, I'll be safe enough all right, thank you. Dupin holds Rodrigo, we
+hold you. So it's simply an exchange of prisoners. And he'll not do
+anything to me, for fear of what might happen to you here. You're not a
+hostage, sure not, but as long as he thinks so, I'll profit by it."
+
+"You are right," she admitted, yet not heeding his anxiety to pass.
+"Dupin will not even detain you. He will judge you Missou-riens by
+himself. So, voilá, he frees Diavolo. He comes for me. And--and you,
+monsieur?"
+
+"Me? W'y, I'll wait for the boys at Dupin's camp, after he takes charge
+here. Then we'll march."
+
+"And--you do not come back?"
+
+"No need to. Now will you please get away from that door?"
+
+"Not coming back!" she repeated. Could the Coincidence be for naught
+after all? Could not real life be for once as complacent as art? He was
+going, and when, where, in the wide world, in all time, might they ever
+meet again? And he was going, like that! Except for her, he would not
+even have spoken.
+
+But--if he were the man to hold her, despite herself? If he were primal
+man of primal nature, the demigod raptor who seizes his mate? Yes, she
+would forgive him--if only he were that man. If, as such, he would but
+hold her from her duty, from her sacrifice, despite herself,
+if--if--if----And so her daring fancy raced, raced as desire and hope to
+outrun sorrow. And why not? She could look him in the eye with that
+honesty which pertains to woman, for she knew that the shame he thought
+of her was only in the evidence of what he had seen, of what he had
+heard the world say, and not--no, not in fact. And for the kindness of
+that fact she thanked Providence. Then, daring to the end, her insane
+hope for happiness gave her to remember that there was a clergyman among
+these Americans, and to see in that the ordering of fate.
+
+But Reality was still there, grim and greater than either Providence or
+Art. The man was waiting for her to step aside, and when she did, he
+would pass through the door and out of her life. She gazed, as for the
+last time, on his stalwart shoulders, on his splendid head, the head of
+a young Greek, on his flushed face, his mouth, and those obstinate
+little waves of his hair. How good he was to look upon--for her, that
+is! No, no, she could not let him go.
+
+And she tempted him. With all her woman's beauty she tempted him. If
+beauty were aught, it must win her now what she held dear. Afterward,
+when she should tell him why, he would forgive her the unmaidenly
+strategy. She had noted with a passionate joy that the lines of his face
+were tightly drawn, were even haggard, that his breath came short; in a
+word, that he suffered. It told her that his gruff manner was not
+indifference, but the rugged front of self-control. What a will the man
+had! Knowing that strength, she must have been an odd young woman indeed
+not to try to break it.
+
+"I suppose," she said, lowering her head and shaking it in demure
+resignation, "no, I suppose a captive has not the littlest thing to say
+of her disposal? But if the poor child has curiosity, monsieur? If, for
+the instant, she wonders why a monsieur fights for her, and then why he
+hazards his life to be rid of her?" With which she raised her eyes
+inquiringly. It was disconcerting.
+
+"We'll not talk of that any more," he grumbled. "Are you going to let me
+pass?"
+
+Frail creature between him and the door, how easy to remove her! But he
+feared the warmth of her hand, should he but touch it, or the faint odor
+from her hair, should a stray lock no more than brush his cheek.
+
+"Even a captive will wonder why she is so little prized," observed the
+perverse maid.
+
+She considered with glee that the window was too small, and with yet
+keener delight that his wits for strategy had left him. He did not once
+think of exit by the inner door.
+
+"Why do you keep me?" he demanded.
+
+His tone was harsh command, and for the moment it frightened her. She
+all but gave way, when she perceived that the menacing growl was really
+a plea. The poor fellow was at bay. She very nearly laughed. Then, too,
+he would not meet her eye again.
+
+"Oh, am _I_ keeping you?" she exclaimed in innocent dismay.
+
+It provoked him to what she wanted. He came toward her angrily, while
+she stepped back against the door and spread her arms across it. Her
+pose was a dare; and the trouble was, he had to look. He had to see the
+girlish, the wonderful line of head and shoulder, the color flooding
+cheek and neck, and most dangerous of all, the challenging gray eyes.
+His teeth snapped to, and his hand closed over her wrist. He pulled, she
+yielded. He felt her other hand laid on his. The touch seemed to sear
+his flesh.
+
+"You must not go," she whispered, "must not!"
+
+He drew her farther from the door, toward himself.
+
+"Must not!" she repeated. He could feel the breath of her whisper.
+
+"Don't--Jack-leen!"
+
+She barely heard the words, but she knew the agony there. And he, as he
+gripped her wrist, sensed the throbbing that passed through her whole
+body. For pity, he was powerless to thrust aside a lass who pitied him.
+
+"It is that common, yes. It is not the instinct of----"
+
+Yet, all the while, like another Brunhilde, she was praying in her heart
+that she had not taunted him in vain. A very eerie Valkyrie, she had
+taunted him to be the stronger, stronger than his will, stronger than
+herself, to strive with her, to master her. And now she saw a fury of
+love and hate aroused in him, a fury against herself for making him love
+her more than his great will could bear. In her lust for seeing this
+anger of his, she forgot her mission absolutely, forgot why she had come
+to Mexico, forgot all but the prayer in her heart.
+
+Nothing was left her but to learn the answer, and this she did, by
+tugging firmly, coyly, to free her wrist. The answer was rapture; his
+grip had tightened. She pulled harder, and felt herself being drawn
+toward him. Yes, yes, her triumph was a fact. Slowly an arm of iron, a
+tremulous, masterful vandal, circled her waist.
+
+She pushed at him with her fists, and panting, tried to fight him off,
+however the blood stung in her veins and coursed hot as in his. The
+matter had gone far enough. It was time for explanations, for an
+adjustment. But he did not seem to think so. He was relentless.
+Barbarian Siegfried with the warrior virgin was not more so. The tendons
+in that arm of his suddenly went rigid, and crushed her body against
+him. It was then that a sudden horror took her, and she struggled like a
+tigress. She gasped out a cry for help, but the scream had no volume.
+Before she could try again, his hand covered her mouth.
+
+And then, and then--oh, the words he was whispering! Even as he
+smothered her shriek, she heard them.
+
+"Well--we'll just have in Clem Douglas. You've seen Clem, little girl?
+He's our parson."
+
+His life long, Driscoll had never dreamed of heaven as he saw it then in
+her eyes. Never, his whole life long, as she raised those eyes to his.
+And the sweet relaxing of herself, the trustful pillowing of her head on
+his breast, the soulful content as she softly breathed there, instead of
+that wild panting of a moment before! Blinded to the world, he fervently
+thanked God that he had been made.
+
+He touched her white brow lovingly, and gently tilted back her chin.
+Again her eyes lifted, confidingly. His head bent. She waited. His lips
+drew nearer to hers, very slowly. He was held in a deep reverence, in an
+awe of something sacred. It was a rite of adoration before a shrine. And
+she, seeing that look in his eyes, wanted him to know that the shrine
+was truly as pure as in his oblivion to the world he for the moment
+believed. For later memory would come to him, and that she could not
+bear. He must know now, before their lips met. Yet a good woman may not
+brazenly avow that rumor and evidence speak what is false. But for all
+that he still must know, in some way. With a playful gesture she
+intercepted his lips against the soft palm of her hand, her eyes the
+while holding his in their communion of soul. And thus she spoke,
+prettily, saucily, and blushing the while,
+
+"And are you so sure, sir, that you are the first?"
+
+She had looked for protestation, and she would have answered. And he
+would have believed. He must have believed. But instead the spell of
+faith broke sharply. Poisoned memory rushed in before it could be
+belied. She could see the tragedy of it in his changed look, in his
+ashen face, cold and gray. He thought her question a gloating over his
+weakness, and it revolted him. He was, then, but a caprice for her. He
+remembered that after all he had only happened by, and that she was
+returning to Maximilian. But still she was hardly less tempting. He had
+a moment of cruel conflict with himself, which left him with a sullen
+rage against the princelet in Mexico, against the order of princelets,
+that thus fell a deathly pall between an honest man and a true love
+kiss. Yet, she was there in his arms, dear and fearfully clinging
+and--no less tempting.
+
+"Take this woman to my mother?" the question rose.
+
+As one might close the eyes of his dead wife, he loosed the arms about
+his neck, and let them fall at her side. Once free, he leaped to the
+door, flung it open, and was gone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A CROP OF COLONELS
+
+
+  "And thus they led a quiet life
+  During their princely raine."
+          --_Ballad of King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid._
+
+
+Some years after the events recorded here, there appeared in the
+Boonville Javelin (post-bellum and revived) a serial of reminiscences,
+which, behind an opalescent gossamer of romance, pictured the
+Missourians and the chivalrous rôle they played around that forlornly
+chastened and be-chased damsel, la República Mexicana.
+
+Quite aside from the prodigious deeds set forth therein, the
+journalistic epic is of itself naïvely prodigious, as anyone knowing Mr.
+Boone with pen in hand will at once suspect. All the little Trojan
+band--call them Gascons if you will, but own that if they boasted they
+were ever keen to substantiate the bluff--all of them, then, strove and
+blazed away invariably as heroes and were just as peerless as could be.
+You wouldn't look for anything else from Mr. Boone. He must, however, be
+credited with one peculiarity, that he never hinted at himself as one of
+the glorious company. Daniel knew his newspaper ethics. He knew that the
+newspaper man is _not_ the story, however they may regard it in
+France, for instance, where the reporter is ever the bright particular
+cynosure of any interview that bears his signature.
+
+A few strokes of the Meagre Shanks brush in the way of excerpts from his
+narrative, with plenty of extenuating dots in between, should make an
+impression, even though impressionistic, and serve perhaps as a sketch
+of what befell after Din Driscoll had bearded the Tiger, freed Don
+Rodrigo, and surrendered his own two captives. To begin:
+
+A retreat was had [Daniel always got under way slowly, as though
+fore-resolved not to stampede.] Echo demands, "Retreat?--The Iron
+Brigade in retreat?" 'Twas true. Rallied once again, but under another
+flag than the Bars, the Missourians rode all that dank, wet night lest
+they meet and have to fight their new friends, the guerrillas under
+Rodrigo Galán. It was a weird predicament. Two days before, they were
+peaceful settlers in the land--_omne solum forti patria_--their
+blood-flecked swords as ploughshares fleshed in earth's warm bosom....
+But tyrannical confiscation of the soil they tilled loomed
+foreboding.... Pestered nigh unto forceful phrases with shooing robbers
+of both sides out of their melon patches, and fired at last by the
+sentiment that it behooved them to sally forth and regulate things
+themselves.... They only lacked a Cincinnatus. Their old general would
+not lead them. Wearing his bright chaplet of renown, Joe Shelby now
+drove mules, a captain over long wagon trains....
+
+Then gallant Din Driscoll appeared among them, the dry-humored, reckless
+Jack Driscoll of other days, attired now in the brave, dashing
+regimentals of the Republic[!] From out the wilds of distant Michoacan
+he came with the long gallop that never would tire, and pausing at cabin
+after cabin in the Colony's broad acres, summoned his old comrades to
+arms ... to arms against the invader.... Who, now, will argue bucolic
+content? Those lusty young planters smelled the battle from afar. What
+now were waving tassels to the glory of deeds?--_a cuspide
+corona_--to a wreath of powder-burned laurel? That very day the Iron
+Brigade rallied again, gathered once again at the oft remembered bugle's
+full, resonant blare.
+
+Fighting came sooner than the Missourians hoped. Even as they started
+for Michoacan, a ragged Indito, whose village had been razed by the
+Cossacks, met the command and asked for the Señor Coronel Gringo.
+Driscoll heard what he had to tell, and was greatly concerned, though
+the others laughed at first and scoffed. For it seemed that the Indito
+did not know who sent him, except that it was a señor chaparrito, a
+short little señor. "Then you must be a Shorter Yet?" said Driscoll.
+"Well, what do you bring?" The Indito produced from his ragged shirt a
+bit of parchment, whereon Colonel Driscoll was urged to join with his
+new recruits in an attack on Maximilian's escort, for Maximilian was on
+his way to Vera Cruz. The parchment was signed, "El Chaparrito."
+
+"Shorty! That word means 'Shorty'," the troopers guffawed. But Driscoll
+showed them another handwriting at the bottom. The parchment had been
+countersigned in blank, thus: "Benito Juarez, Libertad y Reforma." The
+Missourians were respectful after that. Many thought that the mysterious
+guardian angel of the Republic's battles must be the Presidente himself,
+though the Presidente was thousands of miles away.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the victory won against Dupin's Contra Guerrillas [so the
+chronicle goes on], the Missourians found their ally to be none other
+than that picturesque buccaneer of the Sierras, Don Rodrigo, wild as a
+prairie wolf, handsome as Lucifer; and their captives to be not the
+Emperor and suite but two beautiful women....
+
+When the prisoners had been exchanged--i. e., the two fair girls
+restored to Dupin, and Rodrigo freed--and Rodrigo had hurried away to
+gather his scattered vagabonds from among the foothills, the Missourians
+realized their predicament. That day they had fought the Empire. Then
+they had turned and fought the Republic in the person of the guerrilla
+chief, Rodrigo Galán. They had rebelled against the rebels, so were
+doubly rebel, doubly outlawed. Ye gods, it _was_ bizarre! And as
+morning dawned on them trailing along a dreary inferno gorge of the
+Sierra Gorda, they blinked at each other ruefully. Poor waifs, they had
+lost their native country. And now, one rainy morning, they found they
+had lost an adopted one. But each man looked into a face likewise so
+rueful that his own broke into a grin.
+
+"We'll just start a _new_ country," cried Driscoll abruptly.
+
+His voice sounded strange and very unlike him, but the inspiration was
+characteristic of the man, and true to the old irrepressible Storm
+Centre they had known. Hunted outlaws, they too were in the mood for any
+desperate venture. Spontaneous as wildfire, they seconded this one ere
+they had asked a question. They never did ask "How?"
+
+"A new country," roared Tall Mose, "but where?"
+
+"And when?" Old Brothers and Sisters inquired gently.
+
+"We'll start right after breakfast," their intrepid leader replied. "And
+right here in Mexico. It's anybody's country yet, and we might as well
+slice off a little private republic for ourselves."
+
+"And won't we fight, by Jiminy!" drawled Cal Grinders, with Ozarkian
+deliberation.
+
+"And it don't matter whom we fight," Marmaduke added. "Let 'em show
+themselves, Slim Max or Don Benito. We'll meet all comers."
+
+That was the mood they were in, and they were in it to the chin. Submit
+a wholesale fighting order, and they bid for it like neither bulls nor
+bears, but like wolves.
+
+"About taxation?" asked Clay of Carroll dubiously.
+
+But as a good general, or as another Romulus, Driscoll had figured it
+all out. His answer brought comfort.
+
+"We'll not have any. We will levy on commerce, as republics have the
+right to do."
+
+"Then," said Carroll of Clay, "we'll need a seaport?"
+
+"Of course. Ain't Tampico simply waiting for us? The French aren't there
+now. They are concentrating in Mexico City for evacuation. There's no
+more of a garrison than what Old Tige left, a few hundred Cossacks. If
+we get there before the Liberals----" ...
+
+... And why not? They were nearly five hundred and greater than Romulus.
+They were Missourians, sir. They were from that State which gave the
+best fighters to both sides; which, population considered, gave more to
+the North than any other Northern state, more to the South than any
+other Southern state, and yet as a state would be a Republic unto
+herself. What, then, might not be possible to these her sons on a
+foreign shore? Intrepid youngsters, they were of royal State lineage,
+Missourians from Kentucky, Kentuckians from Virginia, which was in the
+beginning. Dauntless cavaliers of the Blood, if they chose to carve
+themselves a kingdom, why not?
+
+But they themselves answered the questions, questions that had men's
+lives in them thicker than hard words in the Blue-back speller. The
+business was as already done, and Mose Bledsoe could go back to his
+chant with an easy mind. And once more Missouri's revered saga echoed
+among the crags:
+
+  "I come from old Missouri,
+    Yes, all the way from Pike.
+  I'll tell you why I left there,
+    And why I came to roam
+  And leave my poor old mammy,
+    So far away from home."
+
+Then, the bard leading in a fashion vociferous, the whole command helped
+out:
+
+  "Says she to me, 'Joe Bowers,
+    You are the man to win;
+  Here's a kiss to bind the bargain,'
+    And she hove a dozen in...."
+
+... Bivouacked under the black-lipped howitzers of Tampico's sullen
+heights.... Dismal fens ... where fever exhaled its dread gray breath
+thick over swamp and lagoon ... above, the vast ægis of the firmament,
+wrought in a diamond dust of stars ... a sickly, jaundiced, moon tilted
+drunkenly.... Through ooze and fetid slime the Americans crept
+stealthily out of the reeds; and on, over cypress roots, silently in the
+silent night; on, up the hill under the low walls of Fort Iturbide.
+Gently and fleeting as a dark beauty's sigh in old Castile, they were
+come in canister range.
+
+"Steady, men," their leader whispered.
+
+"Unto death," came the low-breathed response.
+
+[No such words were uttered, as Daniel knew perfectly well, but he knew
+that they should be--in the telling.].... A sharp cry ... fearful
+alarums from the crest of the hill ... next a belching fury of grape....
+But Tall Mose was happier for it. The seal was off his lips at last, and
+out thundered his stentorian war-song:
+
+  "O Sally! dearest Sally!
+  O Sally! for your sake...."
+
+... still upward, until the cannon fumes broke as a dun-colored wave
+over pennant and plume ... and grimy troops fell as spring blossoms in a
+balmy south breeze.... Dying as they loved to die, game to the last ...
+they stumbled back to the river, which swept over the gallant stranger
+slain....
+
+  "... It's enough to make me swear!--
+  That Sally had a baby,
+  And the baby had red hair...."
+
+... Then piercing and wildly plaintive, the clarions rang out, clamoring
+for victory and _væ victis_ ... and Din Driscoll's hoarse voice....
+"We are the last of the race, let us be the best as well."... "Back at
+'em, fellows!" Bledsoe bellows.... And the parson murmurs, "He prays
+best who fights best, both great and small" ... his soft voice tremulous
+enough for Glory, his superb trigger finger disturbing enough for
+Chaos.... At last, the supreme command "like volley'd lightning"--"Give
+'em the revolver. _Charge!_"...
+
+Not until the story is told shall ... for over the battered masonry, in
+through the splintered doors, felling shadowy foes on every hand....
+When well within-side ... the prowess of each unto himself ... tempest
+of pistol cracking ... bleeding deathfully ... ah, the killing is fast
+and desperate ... and not a candle over the pitiless fray.... Huddled
+together for a brief last stand, the Cossacks ... panic, flight....
+_The fort is taken!_
+
+When the incarnadine embers of sunrise glowed in the east, the
+Missourians stood on the battlements and surveyed their domain. "You are
+the man to win, Joe Bowers," Mose hummed with an I-told-you-so air, but
+softly, for many of his comrades were wounded, though he was not, as
+usual, for all his seven feet of perpendicular target. But "the Doc," of
+Benton, was, of course. Getting wounded was the greatest trouble with
+Doc. If he attacked a hornet's nest, he would contrive some way to get a
+leg shot off. But with him such things had become to be a matter of
+course, so now he crated himself together enough to move around and
+attend to the others. Driscoll was most innumerably barked, with a
+perforated humerus as climax. [The modest Boone might have catalogued
+similarly his own casualties.] Old Brothers and Sisters, that cool
+Christian, had lost a lens out of his spectacles, and was now replacing
+it from a supply he always carried. What, though, were fractured arms
+and busted specs to becoming a republic over night?
+
+But eternal vigilance is ever ... and menace was not long in coming.
+Three French gunboats, like sluggish water beetles, crossed the bar and
+steamed up the river.... Promptly the howitzers on the ramparts were
+trained.... But there was no need ... a white flag ... a naval
+lieutenant at the fortress gate.... The gunboats had not come to fight.
+Bazaine had sent them to carry off the endangered garrison, it being
+expected that a Liberal army under a General Pavon would shortly besiege
+the place. The Frenchman was astounded to find that the Liberals, as he
+imagined the Missourians, had already arrived. Driscoll allowed him to
+embark the dislodged garrison, as well as the defenders of the other
+fort, Casa Mata; that is, all except those who might want to change
+sides. And nearly every Mexican among the Cossacks did change. It was a
+sign of the panic that had spread throughout the Empire. Driscoll also
+insisted on the burial of certain guerrilla corpses which Dupin had left
+hanging to the town's lamp posts. After which the gunboats took
+themselves out of republican waters.
+
+Yet they left behind expectancy. So, a Liberal army two thousand strong
+was approaching? The Missourians provisioned themselves from the town
+and rested on their arms. The Liberal host appeared, variegated of
+costume, piratical of aspect.... Again a flag of truce.... "If the
+señores Imperialistas desired to surrender?"... "We are not
+Imperialists," came the reply from the fort, "and we're blessedly d-n-d
+if we desire to surrender."... "Then, the saints bless us, _who_
+are you?"... "The Republic of Tampico, de facto and determined."
+
+The dumfounded Liberals scratched their heads. They were Republicans,
+and here was a republic, and naturally it bothered them. But when they
+had gotten it tangled unmistakably enough, they decided that they wanted
+surrender anyhow, if the señores Tampicoistas would have the kindness
+... and on refusal from the fort, they withdrew to load their siege
+guns.
+
+They had sent a shot or two and received a dozen, when an Indito,
+emaciated and loathsome from scales of dirt, dashed from nowhere through
+the cross-fire and pounded at the fortress door. Driscoll ordered him
+admitted. The first President of the Tampico Republic seemed
+extraordinarily anxious about this ragged vagabond, especially as he had
+perceived a second one, likewise from nowhere, dash into the Liberal
+camp. Ten minutes later the enemy ceased firing. "Now come, all of you,"
+Driscoll then said to his little army, "and hear what he's got to tell.
+I reckon he's a Shorter Yet."... "From Shorty, then!" exclaimed his men.
+And so it proved, for the Indito produced the usual bit of parchment,
+signed El Chaparrito and countersigned Benito Juarez, Libertad y
+Reforma. The message thereon demanded why the Coronel Driscoll and his
+new recruits for the cause had turned against it.... "'Cause we don't
+hanker after hanging," Cal Grinders interposed.... Was it, Driscoll
+continued to read, because they thought they had lost favor by fighting
+Rodrigo Galán? If so, there was naught against them, nothing, because
+President Juarez had outlawed Galán for robbing a bullion convoy. It was
+true that the writer of the parchment had used the said Rodrigo, in the
+hope of capturing Maximilian, but the bandit was not for that reason a
+Republican officer.... "In other words," lisped Crittenden of Nodaway,
+"we're in-lawed because the good patriot Don Rodrigo is away
+outlawed."... "Therefore," the parchment went on, "His Excellency the
+Presidente through the writer has herewith sent a message to General
+Pavon of the besieging camp to comply with whatever Their Mercies the
+Americans may deem fit to require. Further, knowing the temper of Their
+Mercies, General Pavon is ordered to at once cease operations and leave
+Their Mercies in possession."
+
+The Missourians looked at one another and were reluctant. They hated to
+forego a battle. But it takes two sides to make one. Not outlawed, not
+even threatened, they had no excuse to hold against the Liberals.
+
+"But," said Crittenden, "as an ally of this sister Republic, we'll still
+have our fighting."
+
+"Well," demanded Driscoll, "what will you ask for?"
+
+"Our Córdova lands back, after we've won them from the Empire."
+
+"And," put in Grinders, "equality. We want republican equality."
+
+"Then we'll all be privates?"
+
+"No sir-ee, by cracken! Equality high up, that's what! We'll be
+colonels, breveted colonels, every last one of us--Colonel Driscoll,
+Colonel Grinders, Colonel Brothers and Sisters, Colonel----"
+
+"That's easy," said Driscoll smiling. "Now I'll go and fix it up with
+General Pavon, before he gets away."
+
+... To conclude this chapter on the Missourians' Republic, there is yet
+a word, which perhaps is also explanation of the saddened change that
+had come over Din Driscoll since that night after the battle with Don
+Rodrigo. It must be remembered that the peerless lad had just won his
+old comrades to the Mexican Republican cause. While yet rejoicing that
+here he more than made good the three hundred Liberals he had helped to
+capture when a captain under the Empire, he found that he had only cast
+his recruits out of the pale of law, first against the Empire, and then
+against the Republic.... Then he proposed their own republic, and for
+themselves they took Tampico from the French. But why? What was the real
+object in Driscoll's innermost thought? The suspicion arises: Was it to
+win a peace-offering wherewith to make friends again with the Liberals?
+Such an explanation of his otherwise wild scheme is but a theory, but
+the theory fits, for John D. Driscoll, though as reckless as any and
+quick for any forlorn hope, was, when a leader, scrupulously practical.
+
+The above suggestion, moreover, is apropos in these later days, when the
+Tampico Republic has become to be folklore throughout Missouri, and when
+our cousins, the Kentuckians, even those proud colonels by acclamation,
+cannot rank beside these five hundred colonels scattered over the sister
+state; so that, when a stranger questions, a Missourian answers: "He a
+colonel? W'y yes, of course, sir. And, by God sir, a Tampico colonel,
+too! Yes, one of the five hundred!" and the stranger's eyes bulge as he
+takes off his hat.
+
+[The deposition of Meagre Shanks ends here.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ROYAL RESOLUTION
+
+
+  "... O restless fate of pride,
+  That strives to learn what Heaven resolves to hide."--_The Iliad._
+
+
+On returning to the capital, Jacqueline did not once set foot in any
+Imperial palace, but she established her own salon of a grande dame, and
+there installed herself mid a simple elegance. What was left of the
+mortgaged château in the Bourbonnais went to pay for it. Jacqueline
+would accept not a louis out of Napoleon's Black Chest. A French
+gentlewoman, she impoverished herself to work for France. And when, a
+little later, Napoleon dishonored his own name and that of France in his
+dealings with Maximilian, she thanked the instinct that had kept her
+free. Puddles muddied one's skirt so! The valiant maid broke her sword.
+She would serve no longer. At least, she was quite certain that she
+would not.
+
+Napoleon's shame lay in this. Maximilian had accepted his harsh
+ultimatum regarding the Mexican customs, and in return for such
+humiliation he depended on the presence of the French troops for yet
+another year. But the United States threatened war, and Napoleon
+cringed. He would withdraw the troops immediately. He would abandon
+Maximilian, treaty or no treaty. Thus the quiet forces in the American
+Legation at Paris battled against the proud House of Orleans. The
+princess of that House failed. She could not save her husband's throne,
+and her own. Her mind gave way. She became a raving maniac. So much for
+Charlotte's mission.
+
+With the news Maximilian was a broken man. He seemed to remember his
+promise to rejoin her in Europe, for he set out coastward and left the
+marshal a letter that was virtually his abdication. Yet in the Hot
+Country he stopped for his health. An Austrian frigate waited for him.
+But behind him was his capital. Would he return? History will never
+know, perhaps, the soul-despairing network of intrigue and
+counter-intrigue that wound and tightened about the young sapling roots
+that would strike deep in an unnourishing soil and become a dynastic
+oak. The rabid clericals, who were Maximilian's ministers at the time,
+thought their puppet gone, and in terror of an avenging Republic they
+resigned. But Bazaine, urged to it by Padre Fischer, prevailed upon them
+to remain, and Fischer gave his word that the puppet would not escape.
+So France lost another chance to take back the Mexican Empire, and
+thereby pave a way out of her shame. For while Maximilian recuperated,
+he reconsidered. Clerical generals assured him of armies, the ministers
+talked eloquently of treasure from the Church coffers. The fat padre
+manipulated generals and ministers and Emperor, He was supreme. None
+might come near the royal ear except at his pleasure.
+
+It was at this time, about the first of the year, some six months after
+Charlotte had sailed to Europe, and only a few weeks before the French
+would do the same, that one evening Jacqueline's footman brought her a
+plainly sealed envelope, without crest, without writing. She tore it
+open, and started as she looked at a simple autograph on the card
+inside.
+
+"His--this gentleman, Tobie, you admitted him?"
+
+The well-trained servant stood impassive. "What would madame have?" he
+replied. "The man walked in like a lord, keeping his face hid in a
+cloak. But if madame----"
+
+"Was there a carriage?"
+
+"No, madame, but I noticed a saddle horse at a little distance, held by
+a mounted soldier with a carbine. But if madame----"
+
+"He is in the drawing-room, then?"
+
+"Oui, madame, and without removing his Mexican sombrero. But if madame
+desires that this citizen find himself--h'm--pressed to go----"
+
+"Tobie! No, on the contrary, you will permit him to wait undisturbed,
+until I come."
+
+A few minutes later Jacqueline beheld a tall figure in elegant charro
+garb striding the length of her salon. As she entered, her guest threw
+off sombrero and Spanish cloak, and revealed the drawn and troubled
+features of the Emperor of Mexico.
+
+"Your Majesty has returned to His capital!" she exclaimed. "Then it is
+true----"
+
+"That I shall cling to my play-empire? But I do not know yet,
+mademoiselle, I do not know yet. If I did, I should not be here, here in
+your house for the first time, and against your wishes----"
+
+"Will Your Highness be seated?"
+
+Maximilian flung himself wearily into an armchair. The fire of the
+enthusiast had died out of his eyes, and the fire of fever had left them
+faded. They reminded one of the blue of old-fashioned china.
+
+"But why----" she began.
+
+"Why come to you, you mean? I don't know; instinct, I suppose."
+
+"Isn't that rather vague? Your Imperial Highness returns to the City, to
+his palace----"
+
+"Not to his palace, mademoiselle, not while it would seem a mockery of
+my poor imperial state, but to an hacienda in the suburbs. If I enter my
+Mexican palace again, it will be because I have decided to remain an
+emperor."
+
+"And for the reason that you have _not_ so decided, you do me the
+honor----"
+
+"I do myself the service, mademoiselle. I can bear this torment of
+indecision no longer, and you can help me, for you, dear lady, see
+clearly where the vision of others is distorted. The enthusiasm of the
+others is unsafe. Yes," he sighed, with a little superior air of
+resignation to all human foibles, "those on whose loyalty I can depend
+are indeed few, but I am thankful that among them are my ministers, and
+my faithful secretary, Father Augustin Fischer----"
+
+"Then why, in heaven's name, does Your Highness come to me?"
+
+"Instinct, or--perhaps it's mania. Something has forced me to learn what
+_you_ would say."
+
+Jacqueline's foot--a small digression, at most--was slippered in blue,
+and this she pillowed on a cushion of red. And on another cushion she
+settled her elbow; and the sleeve of the chemisette, or blouse, or
+whatever the high-necked filmy white garment was, fell away, revealing a
+rounded forearm clasped in a band of gold. And resting her chin on her
+thumb, she regarded the young prince thoughtfully. In her look there may
+have been a sedate twinkle of amusement, but all was gently, pityingly
+sympathetic.
+
+"Let me know," she said, "more of the doubts that trouble Your
+Highness."
+
+Unerringly she touched the right chord. Doubts, yes, doubts of a broken
+dreamer. Illusions shattered as bubbles. A dweller in an ideal shadow,
+believing that subjects needed only lofty phrases, Maximilian was
+finding himself tragically maladjusted to the modern day in which he
+lived. But as the words tumbled from his lips in the passionate relief
+of unburdening, it quickly appeared that his misgivings arose only
+because he had fallen short of Dark Age standards. He recalled bitterly
+how, unlike the illustrious among his ancestors, he had not stirred
+until others had won his crown for him. But destiny was kind. He had the
+chance for redemption. To hold his empire now depended on him alone. He
+would mount his horse, give to the light a true Hapsburg blade, and
+valiantly ride forth to conquer or perish, and in any hazard be worthy
+of his House.
+
+Then, without abrupt change, he talked of Austria's late woes. Had he
+but commanded his country's ships at Lissa! Could he but have risked his
+life at Sadowa! And moreover, he was still needed over there. But in
+some quick recollection a moisture dimmed the blue eyes. He drew from
+his vaquero jacket a dispatch. It was from Franz Josef. If Maximilian
+returned to Austria, the message ran, then he must leave behind the
+title of Emperor--leave behind even the title!
+
+"And will that hurt so much?" asked Jacqueline.
+
+The Ritual again! For it a man withheld asylum from his brother.
+
+"Is there no mother," cried the exasperated girl, "to spank both your
+Majesties?"
+
+"'Tis of Her Serene Highness----" Maximilian began with dignity.
+
+"Highness? Yes, I forgot, but not high enough to chide majesty, though
+she be a mother."
+
+"Yet she has only just warned me of her deep displeasure if--No, her
+message shall wait. I wish to hear first what you think. Tell me, shall
+I go, or shall I stay? Tell me, tell me, and why!"
+
+Feverishly the man craved one frank word. There was in his look the
+prayer of a desperate gambler who watches a card poised between the
+dealer's fingers. Jacqueline had one answer only. But exactly how to
+express it, lest she be wrongly taken, made her pause.
+
+"In the first place," she began slowly, "there is only a single
+consideration involved, and in that lies the solution of Your Majesty's
+doubts. I mean the consideration of honor. Now if Your Highness
+is--_whipped_ off his throne--_that_ is ignominy--But wait,
+wait, I am not through. I----"
+
+"Almost my mother's words!" he cried triumphantly. And with a hand that
+trembled, he got out the letter from that Archduchess Sophia who had
+given one son a crown and loved this other as her darling.
+
+"'Rather than suffer humiliation by a French policy'" he read from her
+letter, "'stay, stay, though you be buried under the walls of Mexico!'"
+
+"But----" Jacqueline interposed. She had been taken amiss after all.
+
+"You too bid me stay," he insisted. "But I might have known. I might
+have known. One who never errs said that this would be your counsel. The
+Padre is wonderful--wonderful!"
+
+Father Fischer, of course! What else? How consummate was the snake in
+his cunning! He counted on honesty and nobility in another, though
+having none himself. He knew Jacqueline. He thought that, both good and
+frank, she must advise the Emperor as his mother had done. Accordingly,
+when Maximilian became afflicted with doubts, the priest allowed him to
+go to Jacqueline. She would be an accomplice despite herself. Only his
+judgment did not go quite far enough. Jacqueline had not spoken
+_all_ her mind.
+
+Imperiously she compelled Maximilian's attention. "I said ignominy,
+yes," she persisted, "but I would have added that honor--the modern and
+the decent--and the only courage, lies in facing this same ignominy.
+Listen. If the least of impure ambition enters in your decision to
+remain, then for each death in the civil war that must result, Your
+Highness may hold himself to account, and so be held by history. Now,"
+she went on, unmoved by the fact that he had winced, "the question
+remains with Your Highness--does aught besides honor hold you to stay?"
+
+To himself he answered as she spoke, and guilt confessed mounted his
+brow.
+
+"But there," she said, "Father Fischer will interpret the will of the
+Almighty. Before Your Imperial Highness retires to-night, my words will
+be forgotten."
+
+The lash fell on flesh already raw and smarting. To predict that he
+would change yet again, when to change he branded himself a wilful
+murderer--no! That was more than he could endure. She must not think
+that of him. He held out his hand. "Jeanne!" he murmured imploringly.
+
+"Don't!" she cried, "Don't call me that!"
+
+Then she bit her lip, and her fury turned against herself. "Jeanne" was
+feminine and French for "John," which was masculine and--American. This
+important discovery she had made months ago when riding beside a man
+whose horse was "Demijohn." As a girl in love, she had found a cozy joy
+in their names being the same. But for that very reason any recollection
+of it, since then, was the less to be borne.
+
+Blushing indignantly, she saw that Maximilian was regarding her with a
+puzzled expression. Manlike, he referred it to himself, and suddenly, he
+too started. Only once before had he addressed her thus familiarly,
+which was during that memorable afternoon beside the artificial lake at
+Cuernavaca. Here, therefore, must lie the association that caused her
+agitation. Yet, since that afternoon, she had permitted no reference to
+their interview, unless to raise her brows quizzically at his continued
+presence in Mexico. But now, what of the self-betrayal into which he had
+just surprised her? It could not but be connected with that other time
+when he had murmured her name. There was, however, no conscious vanity
+in the remarkable explanation. It was remorse. He thought of Charlotte,
+his wife. And this other woman, had he wronged her also? For during the
+past weeks of trouble he had forgotten that he had loved her, and she
+had not forgotten. In two such facts, falling together, was the wrong,
+and one that a woman scarcely ever forgives, as he had had reason to
+know.
+
+"I could not help supposing, mademoiselle," he ventured diffidently,
+"that what you said at Cuernavaca was inspired by--by no feeling toward
+myself. I could suppose nothing else in the light of your utter
+indifference since then, and--and your aversion for my very presence."
+
+Jacqueline laughed pleasantly. "In that Your Highness deceives himself.
+I did then, as I do now, feel for Your Highness enough to wish him
+safely out of Mexico."
+
+"Charity, then?"
+
+She did not protest.
+
+"As I thought," he said. "There was no feeling in--in----"
+
+Jacqueline raised her eyes and met his frankly.
+
+"When a woman feels in the sense you mean, sire," she said, "then she
+does not make an empire, even the Austrian Empire, a condition. If the
+man in question has no more than his horse, his pistols, even his pipe,
+then the woman----" But she stopped abruptly.
+
+"With you," he granted honestly, "it was not a matter of personal
+ambition either. But if neither of these, then what--_Now_ I see!"
+he cried. "A state reason! A decoy, to tempt me out of Mexico! Yes, yes,
+now I see!"
+
+"It is good to know," said Jacqueline, not ungratefully, "that Your
+Majesty at least, if no other, can see a high motive in my self
+abasement."
+
+"Now what can she mean by that?" he demanded of himself. "What other, in
+particular, thinks hard of her that she should care?"
+
+Éloin was the only other man who could have seen them, there at
+Cuernavaca. No, little it mattered to her what Éloin thought. But--yes,
+there was another. There was the American who had intruded and wanted to
+save his empire. Maximilian recalled now her change to bitterness after
+the American had left them, and a moment ago he had seen the identical
+pain of self-contempt tug at her lips. And yet, once she had left the
+American to die. But Maximilian answered even that objection. Leaving
+him to die was a necessity for her country. And the sacrifice had gone
+farther. It had not faltered before the self-degradation of which she
+had just spoken.
+
+The admiration in his eyes grew. The chivalry in his race awoke within
+him, and exalted him. He felt himself become the true knight, in the
+purity of devotion to a woman--a gentleman, as real chivalry would have
+the term. Poor man and poet, he felt even the impulse to bend the knee
+and crave as a boon some risk of life in her service, without thought of
+boon thereafter--a knightly impulse nearly obsolete in chivalry, if ever
+customary. But he knew now that the impulse was really possible, and the
+proof was this: that the constraint between them had vanished, that soon
+he was talking with her easily and naturally.
+
+For Jacqueline also the air had become blessedly pure, and deeply,
+gratefully, she breathed of it. Because now she talked with one whose
+respect was a fact, who _knew_ her for what she was, and during a
+moment's space she was happy, with the happiness of delusion. It seemed
+that other men, that one other man, might one day know her too, and give
+her his esteem. But the phantasy passed. The knowledge must forever be
+restricted to the man before her, and for him she did not care.
+
+Maximilian, very strangely, was thinking of the very self-same thing.
+Here was a service in her behalf already offering. If he could cause
+that other man to know? But it was out of the question. Men may convince
+one another of a woman's guilt, and only too easily. But of her
+innocence? No, it was absurdly out of the question. Besides, next day
+the true knight would be starting back for Europe. Had he not just
+decided?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+INTERPRETER TO THE ALMIGHTY
+
+
+  "... and could make the worse appear
+  The better reason."--_Paradise Lost._
+
+
+After half an hour's sharp canter, Maximilian dismounted at La Teja, his
+suburban hacienda. He had come quickly from Jacqueline's, for his heart
+was light. The stress and storm of wavering were ended at last. Soon now
+he would be at Miramar, at beautiful Miramar, overlooking the sea, where
+Charlotte awaited him, but knew it not. And by love and tender care he
+would coax her back to sanity. Ah, no, the pure joy of living was not
+done for them yet!
+
+"Desire Father Augustin to attend me in my private cabinet," he said to
+the first lackey.
+
+The huge priest came on the instant. He bore a candle in one fat,
+freckled hand, and above its light the dull flesh of his face shone
+yellow. His head was as ever pear-shaped with its heavy, flabby jowls,
+and in the apex the two little beads of eyes leaped adventurously at
+sight of the prince.
+
+"I am here, sire," he said purringly. "Your Majesty, then, wishes me to
+prepare for his return to the imperial palace to-morrow?"
+
+"No, father," His Majesty answered stoutly, though not without an uneasy
+glance. "To-morrow I set out for the coast. The _Dandolo_ is still
+there at anchor. You will give the necessary orders to my Hungarians,
+who will be my escort."
+
+Fischer opened his lips, to close them. The involuntary creasing of his
+brow smoothed at once. Maximilian, who had dreaded argument from this
+man, breathed easier. But of course any man would give way when a
+Hapsburg had irrevocably made up his mind. The padre laid down the
+candle, and interlaced his bloated fingers over his paunch in an
+attitude of sleek calmness. He was smiling and fawned meek anxiety to
+second his patron's least wish.
+
+"Your Imperial Majesty's wisdom, I see, is not a thing to be turned by
+the fräulein?"
+
+"On the contrary, Mademoiselle la Marquise d'Aumerle counseled my
+departure, not my remaining."
+
+The fingers tightened slightly over the bulge of the sutane. "She then
+presumed to differ from Her Serene Highness, Your Majesty's mother?"
+
+"My mother would counsel the same, were she in Mexico. I thank you,
+padre, that I went to see the only one who could so take my mother's
+place, because now, at last, I know what I must do."
+
+The priest took a long breath, and drew back, mentally, to some vantage
+point whence he could survey the field and plan his campaign anew. He
+nodded humble acquiescence, but the small bright eyes seemed to gorge
+themselves on the prince. Maximilian stirred restively. One has seen a
+lion watch the trainer's whip, as though he wondered that a creature
+with only a whip should yet, in some way, compel him to do this or that.
+Before an obscure adventurer the monarch hastened to justify his
+abdication. But it did not make him easier because the padre listened so
+obsequiously, with never a quiver before the horror and misery pictured.
+He only listened, this man of God, noting it all deferentially, item by
+item, with a smiling gesture that he heard and understood, and was quite
+ready for the next. Maximilian became aware at last of his own low
+stooping. And that moment he stopped abruptly.
+
+"The Lord reward Your Majesty's tender heart," now spoke the priest,
+"and may the reward be such as a ruler should expect from his God!"
+
+"What do you mean?" demanded Maximilian in impatient anger. "Have all
+the barbarities of civil war no power to move you? Do I not know that
+the savagery has already begun?"
+
+The curate crossed himself. In humility he would bear the charge of
+hardness of heart. "Power to stir me?" he repeated. "If Your Majesty
+would think on his power to bring this same savagery to an end! That is
+his reward offered by Heaven, the reward of bringing holy peace to a
+stricken land."
+
+"Did I not come for that? You only remind me how I have failed."
+
+"And why, sire? Because your instruments were not blessed. The French
+oppressed the Church as well as the people. But now the French are
+leaving. It is the hand of Providence."
+
+"She _said_ he would interpret the will of Heaven!" Maximilian
+exclaimed.
+
+The priest heard, stammered, and went to wreck miserably, as a hypocrite
+unmasked knows that his next word must sound like hypocrisy. How slyly
+she had checkmated him! Forseeing his thrust, she had countered his
+every shift of cunning through this feeble fencer before him. And the
+mistake he had made, in sending Maximilian to her! For a moment the
+expression of the apostate Lutheran was very ugly in its baffled rage.
+But he was too wise a trainer to lose patience utterly. He realized
+instead that the struggle was harder than any he had yet had with his
+royal dupe, since now his real antagonist was the young Frenchwoman.
+
+"I? I interpret the word of God?" He said it very humbly, with bowed
+head. "Alas, Your Majesty knows I am the last to presume to that. But
+there are those who can. There is the Holy Father in Rome, who is
+infallible. I only know that _he_ told Your Majesty's servant,
+myself, that a ruler blessed by the Church is an instrument of God. But
+if the ruler turns his back ere his work is done----"
+
+Maximilian's nostrils were dilating strangely, and the consummate
+tempter hurried on. He exalted the grandeur of the Emperor's task, yet
+craftily made success appear simple and easy. The forces of "the
+arch-rebel Benito Juarez" were concentrated in "a horde of impious
+thieves calling themselves the Army of the North." But Miramon, His
+Majesty's own general, was hastening to meet them. One decisive battle,
+and there would be no more rebels. The nation must then recognize that
+the Empire had sustained itself without French aid.
+
+"Of course a few lives will be lost," he quietly sneered, "and we who do
+not understand may grieve for them, but the ways of Heaven, for its own
+ends, are inscrutable. Your Majesty knows that others before him, his
+ancestors, have had to wade through the blood of God's enemies. But Your
+Majesty's glorious ancestors were fulfilling their destiny. And why
+should not you, also, sire, you who are the child of destiny?"
+
+It was a magic word. Fischer knew his man devilishly well.
+
+"But how can I tell," Maximilian demanded petulantly, "that my destiny
+really lies in Mexico?"
+
+"Then your destiny, sire, must lie in Europe, in Austria," was the
+priest's astounding concession. "After all, a prince's intuitions, being
+given him by divine revelation, can alone be his guide."
+
+Maximilian's eyes flashed.
+
+"Then I abdicate--herewith!"
+
+Fischer meekly assented.
+
+"There are rumors, nay, more than rumors," he mused aloud, "that a
+strong hand is needed in Austria. I repeat only what all Europe says
+boldly, that Franz Josef cannot long hold his throne. Yes, yes, sire,
+but do not stare so!--Yet the crown prince is a child. Who then shall be
+regent? Who but----"
+
+"Enough, enough, I say! Now look to my orders. We start to-morrow."
+
+The secretary beamed unctious joy that his master had so decided, and
+was bowing himself out, when abruptly he paused, "Oh, I forgot, a packet
+for Your Majesty."
+
+Maximilian took the missive. It was not heavy. It did not seem as heavy
+as Fate, not as heavy as a coffin.
+
+"This is an old date," he said in a puzzled way. "See, the postmark,
+'Brussels, Sept. 17.'"
+
+"It just came by courier from Vera Cruz, being sent via New York no
+doubt accounts for the delay."
+
+Maximilian sighed. Even the post no longer considered royalty. Packets
+had taken on leisurely habits since the Empire's crumbling--or since the
+secretary's ascendancy. He broke the seal with tremulous fingers. The
+thing must tell him of Charlotte.
+
+"From Monsieur Éloin," he said.
+
+"But he--he does not send bad news, nothing, sire, of Her Imperial
+Highness?"
+
+Well enough did that soul of mud know the letter's contents. Well enough
+he knew that Éloin and himself could waste no time on an insane woman.
+Their chances of future position were in too critical a state. And the
+packet was designed for just such a crisis as the present.
+
+Maximilian frowned, read excitedly. He was swept along as by a torrent.
+Fixed on him were the small bead eyes of the priest, darting a light,
+like a flame on oil. And when the Emperor gasped quickly and sprang to
+his feet with hands clenched in the manner of a strong man, the priest
+was ready.
+
+"Good news, then?" he cried. "What fortune! Now Your Majesty will hurry
+the faster to Vienna?"
+
+Maximilian gave him a glance, as though he were dense to think so.
+
+"Here, read, read it!"
+
+M. Éloin, sycophant, courtier, had never sung for his royal patron a
+roundelay more pleasing than his prose of the moment. It caused to
+vibrate the very heart chords of the susceptible prince. There were
+subtle appeals to spite ungratified, to wounded pride, to ambition, to
+honor. The letter ran:
+
+  ... Nevertheless, I am convinced that to abandon the throne now,
+  before the return of the French army, would be interpreted as an
+  act of weakness.... If this appeal (to the Mexican people) is not
+  heard, then Your Majesty, having accomplished his noble mission to
+  the end, will return to Europe with all the prestige that
+  accompanied his departure; and mid important events that are
+  certain to happen, he will be able to play the rôle that belongs
+  to him in every way....
+
+And then the supreme refrain:
+
+  In passing through Austria, I was able to bear witness to the
+  general discontent that reigns there. Yet nothing is done yet. The
+  Emperor is discouraged; the people fret and publicly demand his
+  abdication; the sympathies for Your Majesty are spreading visibly
+  throughout the entire Empire; in Venetia a whole population wishes
+  to acclaim its former governor....
+
+Thus it was that Éloin pilfered Jacqueline's lever, and thus he used
+another fulcrum, as he had promised Charlotte he would. By pandering to
+Maximilian's Austrian ambitions, he showed the weak prince how they
+could yet never be realized if prestige were lost in Mexico. To keep
+this prestige, to increase it, Maximilian must prove to Austria that he
+could hold the empire he already had, and that without foreign bayonets.
+He had only to stay a short time after the French should evacuate. And
+then, within a few months, a few weeks, he might lay down the sceptre
+voluntarily, to take up the one awaiting him across the ocean.
+
+"We will leave here in the morning," cried Maximilian--"no, to-night, at
+once!"
+
+"For Vera Cruz, sire?" queried the padre.
+
+"No, for my capital, for my palace! And father, allow no one to mention
+abdication to me again. My decision to stay is irrevocable."
+
+The padre promised faithfully that he should not be disturbed, and this
+was one promise that the good padre kept.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+ALONE AMONG HIS LOVING SUBJECTS
+
+
+  "And Jove himself shall guard a monarch's right."
+                                          --_The Iliad_.
+
+
+Early one morning a month later, a solemn little group of uniformed men
+climbed to the roof of Buena Vista, the imperial wedding gift to Marshal
+Bazaine, and nerving themselves, pulled down the Tricolor. France, a
+Napoleon, were again leaving the New World. It was Evacuation.
+
+The Army of the Expedition came tramping down the Paseo. There were
+heavy Dragoons and Cuirassiers, on majestic chargers. There were light
+Chasseurs and Lancers, on fleet Arabians that had often proved
+themselves against the Mexican pony. There was the clanking of steel,
+and the flash of helmets through the dust. The imperial eagles, gilded
+anew, were poised for flight back to their native aeries. Lower in the
+earthly cloud bobbed the tasseled fez of the bronzed Zouave, and the
+perky red pompon on the fighting cap of the little piou-piou. With the
+steady beat of the march, the pantalons rouges crossed, spread, crossed,
+spread, like regiments of bright, bloody shears. The bands played. And
+yet it was not a martial scene. Feet, not hearts, lifted to the fife's
+thrilling note. Nor was the multitude that thronged the wide avenue a
+fiesta populace. It looked on stolidly, without a huzza, yet without a
+hiss. Enthusiasm in either sense would have been relief, but the
+Mexicans assisting at the bag and baggage of an invader were as unmoved
+as those other spectators, the colossal figures in the glorietas; as the
+two Aztec giants, leaning on their war clubs; as Guatemotzin, with high
+feathered crest and spear aloft, foreboding as in life to the European
+conqueror; as Columbus, who, having himself suffered, gave now no sign
+of remorse for the blows which this new hemisphere gave the old; as
+Charles IV. on his iron horse, who had bargained with a former Napoleon
+to be called Emperor of America, and who, unlike Maximilian, had wisely
+surrendered such a crown.
+
+Cavalry, infantry, cannon, wagons, on they came through the city and
+past the Zócalo, under the Cathedral towers, under the lifeless,
+shuttered windows of the Palacio. Here in the Zócalo, in the central
+plaza, the sometime first lady of Her Imperial Majesty's household sat
+in her barouche, and opposite her a pretty girl, and she was talking
+with an officer of Chasseurs d'Afrique whose horse was restive, and all
+the while there was the rumbling of wheels, the tread of feet, and the
+ring of hoofs.
+
+The sometime first lady was saying good-bye to the officer, as she had
+already to many another gallant chevalier pausing beside her carriage.
+But for her it was farewell to all her countrymen there, to the little
+piou-pious most of all, and her gray eyes were frankly moist.
+
+"And now they are going," she mused aloud, "really going, because,
+parbleau, a monsieur in Washington says they must."
+
+"I wish to heaven," swore the young officer gloomily, "some monsieur
+would say as much to you! See here, we'd give you and Mademoiselle
+Berthe enough room on the ship for a barracks, if you'd only come.
+There's a many less welcome," and he jerked his head toward a stream of
+vehicles straggling among the troops. They were filled with Mexican
+aristocrats whose doubtful titles had been revived by the Empire, all
+eagerly accepting French transport out of their native land.
+
+Jacqueline laughed. "They're so afraid of the Liberals, they will forget
+their escutcheons. So of course they've forgotten the bouquets. You
+should have seen the garlands, Michel, that heralded our grand entry
+here. Oh, lá-lá! We paid for them ourselves. Thus arrived the Drapeau
+Civilizateur de la France. And now behold the departure. Not the cost of
+a violet to spare from Napoleon's strong chest! Hé mais, hear that tune!
+It's 'Leaving for Syria,' the thing decreed into our national hymn. For
+once I'm glad, glad it's not the 'Marseillaise.'"
+
+"Mademoiselle--dear friend," spoke the slow-thinking Michel, "you do not
+wish to answer my question. Why do you stay behind, alone? Why? Nothing
+good ever happens to anyone in this country, and who can tell what might
+happen to you when the army is gone? Come now," he went on, forcing some
+bluff cheer into his words, "Jeanne d'Aumerle, your friends want you out
+of it. Fall in with us, here, now. Let me give the order, 'Cocher, à
+Paris!--Voilà, what more's to be done?"
+
+Indeed, what more simple? Or more to be desired? Yet there was nothing
+she desired less. She thought of what she had found in Mexico, and must
+leave behind. It was a dead thing, true, and already buried. But--the
+grave was too fresh as yet. However, the real reason for her staying
+involved something else.
+
+She made no reply, for at the moment a strange voice, with a jagged
+Mexican accent and a thin insidious inflection, broke in upon them, and
+startled them all three.
+
+"Nay, Monsieur le Duc," it began, rolling the title as a morsel on the
+tongue. "Your Grace would deprive us of too much honor. Why, indeed,
+should mademoiselle not remain among us?"
+
+Turning quickly, Jacqueline beheld the stranger's black eyes upon
+herself. He, too, wished to know why she stayed in Mexico, but in his
+sharp, shifting look there was a penetration quite different from that
+of the guileless Michel. He bestrode a magnificent horse that seemed
+made for armor, whereas he himself would surely have been crushed under
+so much as a Crusader's buckler. Being so very small, and perched so
+very high, he cut a ludicrously martial figure with his plumed hat and
+epaulettes and gold buttons and braid and medals and exquisitely mounted
+sabre. It was not a French uniform that he wore, but Mexican Imperial,
+and stupendously ornate. And within the brave array, he was such a
+little, little man!--insignificance glorified into caricature.
+
+But the pigmy was not altogether on parade. He had that morning been
+receiving arsenals and fortresses from the French; in short, the keys of
+the Empire. For he was Commander in Chief of the Imperial armies, was
+this species of manikin. And ugly? He was a man of lifted upper lip
+under a bristling moustache, a man of fangs, a wee, snarling, strutting,
+odious creature of a man. A deep livid scar split his cheek and would
+not heal. Instead of arousing sympathy, it proclaimed him rather for the
+scratches he gave to others. For he was that Mexican of infamous name,
+the Leopard. Once he had looted the British Legation. Another time he
+massacred young medical students attending the wounded of both sides.
+There were stories of children speared and tossed in ditches. Yet
+certain priests blessed his ardor as defender of the Church. Maximilian
+had sent him on a mission to Palestine, since he was abhorrent to the
+moderates. But now he was back again, to lead the clerical armies. The
+valley of Mexico shrank from his brutal proclamation demanding
+submission. "Mexicans, you know me!" so ended the snarl. He gathered
+forced loans. He drafted peons, though they were exempt. He emptied the
+prisons, and convicts he sent in chains as recruits for the Imperial
+garrisons. In such a fashion Leonardo Marquez began his duties as
+generalísimo of the Empire.
+
+"Your Excellency is most kind," said Jacqueline, for no other reason
+than to annoy him by changing from French into his own language.
+
+"On the contrary," returned Marquez, "I am flattered that you will be
+here to observe how we, alone, shall crush the rebels. Your countrymen,
+señorita, happily leave plenty of them. But I cannot believe that this
+is why you remain."
+
+"Make her tell you, then," interposed the helpless Ney. He was utterly
+at sea. There was a trial of strength on between these two, but how or
+for what was quite beyond him.
+
+Jacqueline pushed back the Persian shawl she wore--this fifth day of
+February was the Mexican springtime--and settled herself to the contest
+in earnest. "I fear," she began slowly, "that my motive in staying can
+hardly be intelligible, unless, perhaps, Your Excellency knows why I
+came to Mexico in the first place. No señor, that blank smile of yours
+will not serve. Your Excellency cannot feign ignorance of public
+gossip."
+
+"Of course, I have heard that----"
+
+"To be sure you have," she returned dryly, "and you might add that I
+failed, since Maximilian has not yet abdicated. But Your Excellency is
+not one to imagine that the end can be long delayed."
+
+She, too, was searching for a motive, his motive in the interview.
+
+"The Mexicans alone will sustain our patriotic ruler," stoutly declared
+the generalísimo. "But let us suppose, merely for pastime, that His
+Majesty does abdicate. What then? What profit to France, since at this
+moment, before our eyes, her army is leaving?"
+
+Jacqueline smoothed the ruffled pleats on her full gray skirt. They
+looked like an exaggerated railroad on a map, and doubtless needed
+smoothing.
+
+"And remotely supposing," she said, "that our army _might_ come
+back again?"
+
+Then, in a flash, she raised her eyes, and surprised the start he gave.
+But she laughed at once, and at him, for taking her nonsense as serious.
+
+"No," she exclaimed, "Your Excellency can more easily recall Santa Anna
+from his island exile."
+
+This, too, was nonsense, or so he was forced to consider it. But knowing
+that the Empire could not endure, he was believed even then to be
+negotiating with the rich former dictator. In his scowl Jacqueline
+discovered what she sought. He wanted, in brief, to negotiate with
+Napoleon also, and he wanted to negotiate through her. Napoleon could
+bid higher than Santa Anna. She saw, moreover, what was worrying the
+traitor. If Napoleon did not mean to bid, why then was she staying in
+Mexico?
+
+Marquez glanced fretfully at Ney and Berthe. If he might be honored in
+the privilege of calling to pay his respects?----
+
+But Jacqueline regretted that she was to be too much occupied in
+preparations for her own early departure. And that very evening she sent
+a note to Maximilian, frankly warning him against the Leopard. But she
+warned His Majesty farther, that if he did not heed, that when it should
+be too late to save him in any case, and Marquez still had something to
+sell, that then she would advise her own emperor, should her own emperor
+wish to buy. Hoping, though, for the best, she sent by Ney a message to
+Bazaine at the head of the column, suggesting that he delay embarkation
+as long as possible. She had in mind Maximilian awakened to the
+faithlessness of his chief support and wishing to overtake the French
+troops.
+
+For which it appears that Jacqueline still wielded a free lance,
+belonging to her own country alone and owning no master other than her
+own conscience.
+
+As Bazaine at the army's head rode through the Zócalo, he looked up to
+find the palatial shutters closed. The Mexican Empire was sulking like a
+spiteful child. The marshal wearily shrugged his shoulders, and thought
+on the ingratitude of princes. But the silence of the Palace was only a
+pose, mean and despicable. Maximilian himself was peeping through the
+shutters down upon the gallant, moving sea of color. It was a stream of
+gleaming bayonets, of champing horses, of lumbering artillery. His eyes
+would single out and cling to this or that figure till it was lost in
+the street beyond, and then he would try to realize that it was lost to
+him forever. For the street beyond lay toward the coast, where many
+ships awaited. The archducal petulance gave way to vague melancholy.
+
+Finally he looked upon the last swinging foot, then at the dust
+settling. Below, in the Zócalo, what had been a fringe of mourning
+around the troops, became a scurrying of human creatures. They were his
+subjects. Not a French uniform remained, but the prince sighed heavily
+as he turned from his ignoble peep-hole. Courtiers and counselors
+glanced at each other significantly. By tacit consent one among them
+spoke.
+
+"Free at last, sire, free at last! Ah, see them, there below. They know
+their shackles are broken, they know that the foreign invader who
+chilled their allegiance is gone. Nay more, their loyalty has already
+borne fruit. In the north, sire----"
+
+"How, father? You do not mean----"
+
+"Yes, sire, yes, the mother of God be praised! I mean victory, and death
+to many traitors. The news has just come. Miramon has won a decisive
+battle and taken Zacatecas."
+
+"Zacatecas! But Juarez was there?"
+
+"Yes, sire, and Miramon entered so suddenly the arch rebel surely could
+not have escaped."
+
+"Juarez taken, that man taken!"
+
+"Even so, sire, And"--Fischer's interlaced fingers tightened until the
+veins grew large--"and, it only remains for Your Majesty to dispose of
+him, according to the law."
+
+Maximilian trembled with joy. He was master of the situation. His people
+had made him master. Here was divine right vindicated. It was--Destiny!
+He had but to follow whither the heavenly finger pointed. And in
+rapture, he seized his pen.
+
+  Palace of Mexico, Feb. 5th, 1867.
+
+  My dear General Miramon:
+
+  I charge you particularly, in case you do capture Don Benito
+  Juarez, Don Sebastian Lerdo de Tejado, and others of his suite,
+  to have them tried and condemned by a council of war ... but
+  the sentence is not to be executed before receiving Our
+  approbation....
+                                    Your affectionate
+                                                    Maximiliano.
+
+Bazaine and the French camped the first night, the next day, and yet
+another night outside the City, waiting. They did not reach Puebla until
+the tenth. The rear guard fell farther and farther behind, keeping the
+road open. At last there was news. Juarez had escaped Miramon at
+Zacatecas, warned in time through some mysterious agency. And farther,
+Miramon had encountered another Republican army, by whom he was not only
+defeated, but routed completely. In panic he was fleeing to Querétero.
+
+"Maximilian must surely abdicate now," thought Bazaine, and he sent back
+a message. "I can," he wrote, "yet extend a hand to His Majesty to help
+him retire."
+
+In Vera Cruz the marshal waited for an answer. Day after day passed, and
+then the answer came. Too late, was its refrain. Maximilian had left his
+capital with what troops he could spare. He had left for Querétero, to
+join Miramon there.
+
+Bazaine, the last to quit the shore, climbed aboard his ship, and taking
+one final look for a chance horseman with word to wait yet longer, and
+seeing none, gave the order to weigh anchor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FATALITY AND THE MISSOURIAN
+
+
+  "Si debbe ai colpi della sua fortuna
+  Voltar il viso di lagrime asciutto."
+                            --_Machiavelli._
+
+
+The mountain villages were arming. Bronzed men, savagely joyful, poured
+from under roofs of thatch, strapping on great black lead-weighted
+belts. In the corrals others lassoed horses. It looked like a sudden
+changing from peaceful highland domesticity, as the clans of Scotland or
+the cantons of Helvetia might gather. But these men were not rising to
+defend their homes. The hamlets clustered among the crags were their
+barracks, nothing more. The wildest cañons of the Sierra Madre del Sur,
+far away in the rocky southwestern corner of the continent, were only
+their camping grounds, their refuge. To be armed was their natural
+state. They were fighters by occupation. They were an army. Unceasing
+hardship and constant peril had seasoned them, and their discipline was
+perfect, unconscious, because it came from the herding instinct of
+wolves. During years they had waged war against a ruthless foe, and
+they, too, were relentless. The penalty of defeat was massacre.
+
+The foe of this army was a greater army, and between the two it was a
+duel of chieftains, of General Régules in the Sierra, of General Mendez
+on the plain. Deadlier antagonists might not be imagined. Mendez, he who
+had shot two Republican generals under the Black Decree, was above all
+men the likeliest to hold stubborn Michoacan for the Empire. But even he
+failed, because the man against him was not less a man than he, because
+also the spark of resistance to sceptre and crosier never dies out in
+Michoacan.
+
+The man as good as he was Régules. A Spaniard, Régules had fought with
+the Catholic Don Carlos. And now, he was suffering for Mexican Liberals
+the most that any general can suffer, defeat after defeat, and sometimes
+annihilation. But he was a Marion, a Fabius. He knew the mountain
+recesses as no one else, even better than Mendez, who was born among
+them, and here he would gather fugitives, draft every straggler, until
+in time he sallied forth again to badger his arch enemy. He hoped only
+to exist till that day when the French should leave Empire and Republic
+face to face, on equal terms. It had taken tenacious faith and gloomy
+years, but the day came at last. The news sifted through defile and
+gorge. The invader had embarked for Toulon. Nearer at hand Mendez had
+evacuated Morelia, and was marching to Querétero. And at Querétero was
+Miramon, driven there from the north by Escobedo. At Querétero was the
+Emperor--was the Empire, desperate, ferocious, an animal at bay. Out
+boldly upon the plain, then! But no longer as a slinking guerrilla
+horde! As an army rather, with thrilling bugles and the Mexican eagle
+aloft, and regiment numbers in gold on pennons of brightest red! For the
+Empire was the hunted mad-dog now, and the dignified host was the
+Republic. The barracks of the Sierra were arming.
+
+In one of the corrals an officer of cavalry was quelling insubordination
+with soft words. But the mutineers, not knowing their man, did not
+fathom the dangerous sweetness of his tone. They were deserters from
+Mendez, come that morning, and as they had horses, were foisted on the
+officer's splendid troop. But like the native infantry, they insisted
+that their women, the soldaderas, should go with them on what was to be
+a swift march to Querétero. Having brought useful information concerning
+Mendez, they were insolent in their demands.
+
+"Now, muchachos," said the officer of cavalry, "you see how absurd it
+is, so quiet down. The women can follow later."
+
+"A Gringo to dictate to us, bless me the saints! Us, free Mexicans, and
+Republicans!" And the ringleader drew his machete and rushed on the
+officer.
+
+The Gringo smiled, in a way that a man rarely smiles. His eyes opened in
+mild surprise, and as the mutineers looked to see his head roll from his
+shoulders, he was still smiling in that poisonously sweet way. Perhaps
+there passed across his face just the shadow of pity or of revulsion,
+but none might say for certain, because of a pistol's flash that came so
+quickly after. With the report the assailant plunged headlong, and on
+the ground seemed to shrivel in his rags. Behind the smoke the officer
+was carelessly holding a large black revolver, no higher than his hip.
+
+"Because," he added, "it's not a woman's game."
+
+Then he thrust the weapon back under his ribs and sauntered away. The
+mutineers gaped in trembling at his back. When they picked up the
+ringleader, they saw that his fingers had been neatly clipped at the
+hilt of the machete.
+
+The cavalry officer was Driscoll--but changed! He was changed as bland
+Mephisto would change a man, if the material were adaptable and Mephisto
+an artist. Such exquisite gentleness in peril and in slaying could be no
+other than the devil's own, and in the most devilishly artistic mood of
+that suave dilettante.
+
+It was natural that any man should color somewhat into a desperado,
+considering such an existence among those Sierras, but Driscoll was a
+desperado refined by cynicism. And yet there was still naught of
+self-consciousness in it all. The change had not been abrupt, but
+gradual, as a growing into maturity. The roughened native instincts of a
+gentleman had sobered from Quixotic impulses into a diabolic calm. His
+bravery was turned to cool and almost supernatural self possession,
+mocked withal by gentleness. And yet he was not a villain. To the
+mutineers, to those who beheld his smile, he seemed a fiend. But his
+horse knew no change in him, which was significant. Something had gone
+wrong, that was all. The young man who had looked out on the world, half
+challenging, half expectant, must have seen too suddenly that part of
+life which is unlovely. However, the thing may not be thus easily
+explained. The soul of a man, when bent or distorted under stress, is a
+weird and fearful growth. One may contemplate it in awe; but understand
+it, never.
+
+More than a year before, when Driscoll changed sides, he was embarrassed
+to find a side to change to, so thoroughly had the Empire swept away all
+vestiges of the Liberal strength. But on achieving that farewell of his
+to Mendez, he rode happily southward, with some vague notion of tracking
+the Republic into Michoacan. The first night he slept under the stars
+mid tunas and Spanish daggers, and when he awoke it was to find a
+strange Indito squatting patiently at his feet. He sat up and rubbed his
+eyes at what might have been a Hindoo image, except that it doffed a
+straw sombrero.
+
+"Y'r Mercy is awake?" queried the idol.
+
+"N-o, but it will probably not be long now. Who in thunder are you?"
+
+The Indito explained, and Driscoll covered his knees with his hands, and
+stared and grew more astounded. The ragged fellow said that he had
+escaped from Mendez's camp by squirming on his belly through the cacti,
+and he had followed the American señor, on foot. He was, he added, a
+Republican spy.
+
+Driscoll mechanically drew his pistol, but recalled that now he also was
+Republican.
+
+"But why follow me?" he demanded.
+
+"I was sent to watch only Y'r Mercy, Y'r Mercy's thousand pardons."
+
+"The devil!"
+
+"And with Y'r Mercy's permission, I was to kill Y'r Mercy at the first
+chance. But since Y'r Mercy has changed sides----"
+
+"Now look here, who--who put you up to this business, I want to know?"
+
+The man shrugged his shoulders. He only knew that a señor chaparro had
+sent him.
+
+"A short señor?" Driscoll repeated. "Then we might call you a Shorter
+Yet, and maybe you know where this República is hiding out?"
+
+The Indito brightened. "That's why I'm here, señor. I'll take Y'r Mercy
+to the Citizen General Régules."
+
+At the name Driscoll frowned involuntarily, but laughed as he again
+remembered that he no longer shared the Imperialist hates.
+
+"Régules?" he repeated. "But we all thought he was dead, since the last
+time we scoured his mountains."
+
+"That the Virgin would have let me kill Y'r Mercy before then!" said the
+Indito regretfully. "But no matter, Y'r Mercy will discover that the
+citizen general is still alive."
+
+And so he was. They found him in the wildest of the wild region of the
+Sierra Madre del Sur, far away beyond the Rio de las Balsas, beyond
+Michoacan, in the impassable tierra caliente of the Pacific slope. The
+Indians here were the Pintos, who knew naught of the world outside, and
+owned allegiance to none but a grizzly old dictator, royally described
+as the Panther of the South. One thing was certain, the Empire could
+never follow Régules to the fever and ambush of the Panther's marshy
+realm, and Régules was hard pressed indeed when he sought such
+protection. But he was there now, in that last refuge of Liberalism,
+alone, wounded, fever stricken, emaciated, but undaunted. Driscoll found
+him so, and became his first recruit.
+
+For the moment Régules had no army, but armies were only weapons
+brandished by the real principals in the duel. Over battle and rout and
+slaughter the two chiefs would glare each at the other, blade in hand
+and panting, but either ever ready for the stroke that should thrust
+through the army to the heart of its general. Such a struggle needed
+only antiquity and a bard to be Homeric. No Greek could equal either
+champion in cunning, nor Trojan in prowess, nor both in grim persistence
+and rugged hate. It was truly a fight to have a hand in, and with big,
+lusty zest, the Storm Centre bounded into the lists. He leaped backward
+into the age of colossal, naked emotions, which strove as great veined
+giants with a rude splendor that was barbaric. It was the grandeur of
+primeval man, of majesty resting on him who fought best. After a
+thousand years of roof and tableware a man may be no longer primeval,
+but he is no longer quite a man either if his primeval state does not
+sometimes appeal to him. As for the young Missourian, he was enthralled.
+
+During that winter, the Spaniard and the American were a recruiting
+squad of two, picking up the seeds of rebellion among the fertile rocks.
+The vago, or poor Indito, was drafted wherever caught. Guerrilla
+fugitives rejoined their leader. The little band grew slowly, but in
+appearance merited Mendez's contemptuous epithet of brigand thieves.
+Fluttering yellow rags revealed only leathery-hided bones. Sandals
+sloughed away. There were a few machetes, and one or two venerable
+musketoons. But the commoner weapon was a heavy wooden staff, used for
+trudging up the steep paths. Imagine a Mexican abandoning his horse! But
+pursuers often tracked "the brigand thieves" by their mounts dying here
+and there--a pitiful blazed trail. And their exhausted riders often lay
+down as well, and would not rise, though Régules lashed them, though the
+terrible Mendez followed close behind. If at this time the Republic
+compared its conditions with the tapestried court in Mexico, then hope
+of success must have seemed lugubrious irony. Yet there was the
+watchword still, "Viva la Intervención del Norte!" Régules looked to the
+United States to drive away the French. Driscoll's face would twist to a
+grimace. It was a peculiar position for an ex-Confederate.
+
+The Republicans in Michoacan were cut off from all outside help, while
+those along the Rio Grande drew from the friendly Americans in Texas
+much aid and comfort. Driscoll pondered on this, until in June he got
+leave to go to the Córdova colony and there enlist, if possible, his old
+comrades of Shelby's brigade. The result is known. After the affair at
+Tampico, he came back with a troop of colonels. They were the nucleus of
+a cavalry which he loved more than Demijohn, more than his ugly pistols,
+more than his pipe.
+
+It was a grim affection that Driscoll bore his regiment of horse. He was
+no longer the same man as when he left. He returned from Córdova with a
+mood on him, which settled more and more heavily as he nursed his troops
+into a splendid fighting machine. There was a dangerously quiet
+exultation in the patience with which he built the regiment up to full
+strength and trained it into the power of a brigade. He did wonders
+through the idea, pleasantly instilled, that much of the fun of fighting
+lies in the winning, and he demolished, as an absurd fetich, the idea
+that the hunted men of Régules were doomed never to win.
+
+Thus he labored with the Inditos, his terrible little fatalists in
+combat. There were enough to choose from, since by now the tide of
+desertion was changing toward the Republic. The problem of mounts in
+time solved itself. The French began selling their horses rather than
+transport them back to Europe, and these being declared contraband of
+war by the Liberal government, were complacently taken away from their
+owners without even Juarez script in payment. The question of arms
+proved more troublesome, but the answer at last was even more
+satisfactory. For the besieged at Quéretero, Driscoll's troop later
+became some unfamiliar dragon hissing an incessant flame of poisonous
+breath. This was due to a strange and mystical weapon which not only
+carried a ball farther than any rifle known before, but sixteen of them,
+one after the other. The strange and mystical weapon multiplied a lone
+man into a very genii of death, until the Missourian's twelve hundred
+were more to be dreaded than many battalions.
+
+The repeating rifles, it may be explained, formed a part of the cache
+which General Shelby had made on crossing into Mexico. He had taken
+them, among other things, from the Confederate depositories in Texas.
+Driscoll knew of the cache through Boone, and by infinite patience had
+it brought into Michoacan. A solitary Indito journeyed eight hundred
+miles unnoticed with some seeming fragments of scrap iron. Other vagos
+were in front of him. Others followed. And these passed yet others,
+empty handed, trudging in the opposite direction. So an arsenal came to
+the Sierra Madre del Sur all the way from the Rio Grande, and each and
+every cavalier, whether miserable ranchero or veteran Missourian, became
+an engine of destruction, good for a fusillade of forty shots without
+the biting of a cartridge, for sixteen from his rifle, for six from each
+of his revolvers, and after these, good for terrific in-fighting with
+his dragoon sabre. It was no marvel that Driscoll loved such a troop,
+but the wonder lay in his smile, soft and purring and far-away, as he
+stroked his murderous darling.
+
+Colonel Daniel Boone, chief of scouts, was harassed nearly to insomnia
+over the change in his friend. At the bottom of the mystery there must
+be inspiration for a glowing line, and with pen ready poised over the
+violet fluid of romance, it was disheartening to have the solution elude
+him. He proposed clues as a poet tests rhymes. There was vendetta. There
+was blighted passion. But he ruefully discarded both. Either would be
+marked by violent growth, while this thing that touched the Storm Centre
+formed as slowly as the gravity of wisdom. But what baffled most was
+that Driscoll himself was completely oblivious. If _he_ knew
+nothing of the effect, how then could one ask him about the cause?
+
+Daniel, however, overlooked the fact that a malady may break out
+variously, according to temperament. As an instance Daniel's patient
+would lose himself in reverie, long and deep and mellowing. Now he was
+riding with a girl whose gray eyes were upon him in that pensive way she
+had; or rather, in the pensive way of a girl who finds herself in love,
+and wondering at it, seeks to learn the reason through a grave scrutiny
+of the object. It seemed very good to be riding with her again like
+that, for there was a soothing sense of companionship, of dear
+camaraderie that needed no words, but only that expression of her mouth
+and a pair of gray eyes. The day dream, while it lasted, had nothing of
+bitterness, but lulled his soul instead, and when it passed, he would be
+left with thankfulness for his moment of fleeting bliss and ineffable
+comfort. Or again, he awoke to reality with a longing that fiercely
+would not be denied. "Oh, I want--Jack'leen!" Often and often the
+imperious smothered cry all but passed his lips. And then he would shake
+himself, as out of physical slumber, and he would take up his life
+again. But he would be a shade deeper in the devil's own mood, of
+gentleness and a smile.
+
+After Cuernavaca Driscoll had brooded somewhat, yet rather as a boy
+whose melancholy is callow and easily fades. But during that evening in
+Boone's cabin, he had changed to a man, for it was then he came to know
+the meaning of possession, and in the same moment he learned the meaning
+of loss. A dull and indefinable resentment thereafter grew on him. But
+against whom? Against no one, perhaps. Yet he had had a vision of his
+life's dearest happiness, and it was gone, that vision, beyond recall.
+
+Ignorant as he was of Jacqueline's mission, Driscoll had but one
+explanation. A man had been born a prince, and a prince dazzles a woman.
+Yet the rankling in him was neither because of the prince, nor because
+of the woman. It was much more hopeless than that. It was because a man
+could be born a prince at all. Something was out of harmony in the
+world. The irony of it made him grim, and to his sense of humor that
+such things could be came the smile. A prince in the New World and in
+the Nineteenth Century!--Now here was as incongruous a juxtaposition as
+a bull in a crockery shop. And the result?--A people robbed of their
+dignity as men; a spike among the cogs, and the machinery everywhere
+grinding discordantly. For the pilfered people, however, the matter
+could be righted, and Driscoll felt his vague wrath as one with theirs.
+Together they would drive the bull from the shop. The Mexicans could
+later repair _their_ crockery. But as to his own precious little
+bit of bric-à-brac, that was shattered beyond hope. His only balm was to
+help the other sufferers. His only resentment was against fatality. But
+to pout at fatality is such a foolish business that he smiled, in a
+gentlemanly, sardonic way. Lucifer himself would be obsequious before
+fatality. And as for presuming to chastise it, that does indeed require
+the devil's own mood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE RENDEZVOUS OF THE REPUBLIC
+
+
+  "It may be short, it may be long,
+  'Tis reckoning-day!' sneers unpaid Wrong."
+                                      --_Lowell._
+
+
+It was a long column that undulated over the cacti plain with the
+turnings of the national highway. Men and horses bent like whitened
+spectres under a cloud of saltpetre dust. They burned with thirst, and
+had burned during fifteen days of forced marching over bad roads. They
+kept their ranks after the manner of soldiers, else they would have
+seemed a hurrying mob, for there was scant boast of uniforms. The
+officers wore shoulder straps of green or yellow, and some of the men
+had old military caps, high and black, with manta flaps protecting the
+neck.
+
+Except for an occasional pair of guaraches, or sandals, the infantry
+trudged barefoot, little leather-heeled Mercuries who cared nothing for
+thorns. Their olive faces, running with sweat, were for the most part
+typically humble, patient under fatigue, lethargic before peril. Here
+and there one held the hand of his soldadera, like him a stoic brown
+creature, who shared his hardships that she might be near to grind his
+ration of corn into tortillas. Veterans were there who had fought the
+French at Puebla, and on coarse frayed shirts displayed their heroes'
+medals. Some among them had meantime served the Empire, and had lately
+deserted back again--but no matter. In the cavalry there were those who
+on a time had ridden against the Americans in Santa Anna's famous guard.
+Now they rode with Driscoll, among the Missourians. And the Missourians
+sang:
+
+  "My name it is Joe Bowers,
+    And I've got a brother Ike;
+  I come from old Missouri,
+    Yes, all the way from Pike."
+
+Their mouths opened wide to the salty dust, and they roared with
+great-lunged humor, the stentor note of Tall Mose Bledsoe--Colonel
+Bledsoe of the State of Pike--far and away in the van of the chorus.
+Even the Mexicans, who comprised over half the regiment, chanted forth
+the tune. They had heard it often enough, and thought it a species of
+appropriate national hymn. Only the colonel of the troop rode in
+silence, but not gloomily. This playfulness of his pet before a snarl
+was music that he liked. The other Missouri colonels (brevet) were as
+boys ever, were still only Joe Shelby's "young men for war." There was
+Colonel Marmaduke of Platte. There was Colonel Crittenden of Nodaway.
+There was Colonel Grinders from the Ozarks. There was Colonel Clay of
+Carroll, and Colonel Carroll of Clay. These were captains. Colonel
+Bledsoe was a major, and so was Colonel Boone, also chief of scouts.
+Colonel Clayburn, otherwise the "Doc" of Benton, was ranking surgeon;
+while the chaplain, lovingly known as "Old Brothers and Sisters," and
+the choicest fighter among them, was lieutenant-colonel.
+
+Of course some of the four or five hundred colonels had to be privates.
+But they did not mind, they were colonels just the same. Which provoked
+complications, especially with a Kansan who had wandered among them some
+time since. The Kansan, whose name was Collins, was an ex-Federal, even
+one of their ancient and warmest enemies, of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry.
+And being a mettlesome young man into the bargain, he rose by unanimous
+consent to command a native company of the troop. But Captain Collins
+found it hard to address a Missouri private as colonel, and to be
+addressed by the Missouri private as an inferior in rank. A sporadic
+outburst of jayhawker warfare generally ensued. But according to the
+merger treaty between the Republic of Colonels and the República
+Mexicana, the Missourian was strictly in his rights. Besides, both
+needed the exercise, and after the business of fists, formality dropped
+of itself. Captain Collins thereupon became "Harry;" and the private
+"Ben" or "Jim," or whatever else.
+
+Driscoll's troop wanted for nothing. Regimentals, luckily, were not
+considered a want. But in replacing worn-out slouch hats and cape-coats,
+the Americans set an approximate standard, which was observed also by
+their fellow troopers among the Mexicans. They were able to procure
+sombreros, wide-brimmed and high-peaked, of mouse-colored beaver with a
+rope of silver. The officers and many of the men had long Spanish capas,
+or cloaks, which were black and faced in gray velvet. Their coats were
+short charro jackets. As armor against cacti, they either had "chaps" or
+trousers "foxed" over in leather, with sometimes a Wild Western fringe.
+They came to be known as the Gray Troop, or the Gringo Grays. The
+natives themselves were proudest of the latter title.
+
+The brigade marched as victors, but they remembered how they had
+formerly skulked as hunted guerrillas, and also, how Mendez had scourged
+the dissident villages. They found bodies hanging to trees. At Morelia a
+citizen who cried "Viva la Libertad!" had been brained with a sabre. It
+was the hour for reprisals. And Régules exacted suffering of the
+_mocho_, or clerical, towns that had sheltered the "traitors."
+Requisitions for arms, horses, and provisions marked his path. Deserters
+swelled his ranks. He had enough left-overs from the evacuation to
+organize what in irony he called his Foreign Legion. At Acámbaro a
+second Republican army, under General Corona--"welcomer than a stack of
+blues," as Boone said--more than doubled their force, and together they
+hastened on to Querétero.
+
+But at Celaya, when men were thinking of rest in the cool monasteries
+there, they learned that they must not pause. The word came from El
+Chaparrito, who ever watched the Empire as a hawk poised in mid-air.
+General Escobedo of the Army of the North had pursued Miramon south into
+Querétero, but only to find him reinforced there by Mendez and the
+troops from the capital. This superior array meant to attack Escobedo,
+then turn and destroy Corona and Régules. The Republicans, therefore,
+must be united at once.
+
+The message was no sooner heard than the two weary brigades of Corona
+and Régules set forth again. They covered the remaining thirty miles
+that night, expecting a victorious Imperialist army at each bend in the
+road. But they met instead, toward morning, a lone Imperialist horseman
+galloping toward them. Régules's sharp eyes caught the glint of the
+stranger's white gold-bordered sombrero, and with a large Castilian oath
+he plucked out his revolver. Driscoll touched his arm soothingly.
+
+"But, María purísima," cried Régules, "he's an Explorador!"
+
+The Exploradores were Mendez's scouts, his bloodhounds for a Republican
+trail, and the most hated of all that breed.
+
+"Aye, Señor General," the stranger now spoke, "I was even the capitan of
+Exploradores, who kisses Your Mercy's hand."
+
+There was a familiar quality in the man's half chuckle, and Driscoll
+hastily struck a match. In its light a face grew before him, and a pair
+of malevolent eyes, one of them crossed and beaming recognition, met
+his.
+
+"Well, Tibby?" said Driscoll quietly.
+
+"First your pistols, then what you know," commanded Régules. "Here, in
+between us. Talk as we ride, or----"
+
+Don Tiburcio complied. Such had been his intention.
+
+"I am no more a loyal Imperialist," he announced, with a gruesome
+contortion of the mouth.
+
+"Nor a live deserter for long," said Régules. "Quick, what's the news at
+Querétero?"
+
+"Carrai, my news and more will jolt out if I open my mouth. Eh, mi
+coronel," he added to Driscoll, "you've taught this barbarous gait to
+the Republic too, I see?"
+
+"Better obey orders," Driscoll warned him gently.
+
+"But there's no need of hurry, señores. Not now, there isn't."
+
+"You mean the Imperialists have whipped Escobedo, that----"
+
+"Not so fast, mi general. If they had, wouldn't I want you to hurry, for
+then there'd be a conquering Empire waiting for you?"
+
+"Colonel Driscoll," said Régules, "fall back a step. I'm going to kill
+this fellow now."
+
+"As you wish, general. But he's got something to tell."
+
+"Then por Dios, why doesn't he?"
+
+"Yes, Tibby, why don't you?"
+
+Don Tiburcio cocked a puzzled head toward the American. He had not known
+such softness of voice in Mendez's former captain of Lancers. But he saw
+that Driscoll had drawn his pistol, which accorded so grimly with the
+mildness of his tone that the scout chuckled in delight and admiration.
+
+"You know that I'll tell--now," he said reproachfully. "In a word,
+there's been no battle at all, curse him, curse both----"
+
+"No battle! Escobedo kept away then?"
+
+"No, not even that. The Imperialists would not fight, and the Empire has
+lost its last chance. Curse them both, curse----"
+
+"Well, curse away, but who, what?"
+
+"I curse, señores mios," and the scout's words grated in rage and
+chagrin, "I curse His Excellency the general-of-division-in-chief of the
+army of operations, Don Leonardo Marquez. I curse, señores, the Reverend
+Señor Abbot, Padre Augustin Fischer----"
+
+"Good, that's finished. Now tell us why there was no battle."
+
+"I curse His Ex----"
+
+"You have already, but now----"
+
+Tiburcio flung up his hand in a gesture of assent, and his ugly features
+relaxed. Though going at a brisk trot, he rolled a cigarette and lighted
+it. Then he told his story. Querétero? Ha, Querétero was now the Court,
+the Army, the Empire! Pious townsmen shouted "Viva el Señor Emperador!"
+all day long. The cafés were alive with uniforms and oaths and high
+play. Padres and friars shrived with ardor. There was the theatre.
+Fashion promenaded under the beautiful Alameda trees, and whispered the
+latest rumors of the Empress Carlota. Maximilian decorated the brave,
+and bestowed gold fringed standards. Then came Escobedo and his Legion
+del Norte, but they kept behind the hills. Bueno, the Empire would go
+forth and smite them, and the pious townspeople climbed to the housetops
+to see it done. And yesterday morning the Empire, with banners flying
+and clarion blasts, did march out and form in glittering battle array.
+
+"And then, hombre?"
+
+"And then the Empire marched back again, señores."
+
+Régules and Driscoll were stupefied. What gross idiocy--or
+treachery--had thrown away the Empire's one magnificent chance?
+
+Tiburcio sucked in his breath. "I curse----"
+
+"Marquez?" cried Régules.
+
+"Si señor, Marquez! Marquez cried out against the attack, and His
+Majesty ordered the troops back into town again."
+
+"But Miramon, hombre? Miramon, the best among you, where was he?"
+
+"General Miramon fairly begged to fight, but he has been defeated once,
+and now Marquez warns the Emperor against Miramon's 'imprudence.'
+Marquez is chief of staff, and crows over Miramon, who was once his
+president. He personally ordered Miramon off the field, yet it was
+Miramon who first made the insolent little whelp into a general."
+
+"This," said Driscoll, "does not explain why you desert to us?"
+
+For an instant the old malignant humor gleamed in the baleful crescent.
+"It's the fault of the fat padrecito," he replied. "Your Mercy perhaps
+does not know about the pretty servant he eloped with from the Bishop of
+Durango's to Murguía's hacienda? Well, but trouble started when I saw
+her, or rather, when she saw me, even me, señor, for then she perceived
+that the padrecito was not a handsome man. Presto, there was another
+eloping, and the holy Father Fischer felt bad, so very bad that when he
+got into favor with Maximilian, he had me condemned for certain
+toll-taking matters he knew of. But I vanished in time, and I've been
+serving under Mendez as a loyal and undiscouraged Imperialist until
+yesterday. But yesterday the padre recognized me at a review of the
+troops. Your Mercy figures to himself how long I waited after that? Your
+Mercy observed how fast I was riding?"
+
+The fellow's audacity saved him. The news he brought proved correct.
+Escobedo had not been attacked. Besides, Régules perhaps hoped to trap
+Mendez through the former Imperialist scout, though Driscoll derided the
+idea and even counseled the worthy deserter's execution.
+
+Don Tiburcio's lank jaw dropped. Driscoll's advice was too heavy a
+recoil on his own wits, for had he not once saved the Gringo's life,
+feeling that one day he might be a beneficiary of the Gringo's singular
+aversion to shooting people? And now here was the Gringo in quite
+another of his unexpected humors. But what bothered Don Tiburcio most
+was the acumen that tempered the American's mercy. The facts indeed
+stood as Driscoll casually laid them before General Régules. Tibby, for
+instance, had neglected to call himself a "loyal" Republican. Asked for
+a description of the new earthworks on the Cerro de las Campanas, he
+only told how peons and criminals were forced to carry adobes there
+though exposed to Escobedo's sharpshooters, which had in it for Tibby
+the subtle element of a jest. Or asked about the new powder mills, he
+described how Maximilian slept patriotically wrapped in a native serape,
+woven with the eagle and colors, or related how the Emperor won the
+hearts of soldiers and citizens by his princely and ever amiable
+bearing.
+
+"Now sing us the national hymn," said Driscoll, "and the betrayal of
+your former friends will be complete."
+
+But though Don Tiburcio had deserted for convenience and perhaps meant
+to be a spy in the dissident camp, yet Régules saved him, while Driscoll
+lifted his shoulders indifferently and at heart was not sorry.
+
+The Celaya road, crossing a flat country, first touches Querétero on its
+southwestern corner, and from here the two Republican brigades beheld
+the ancient romantic town in the dawn as they approached. Many beautiful
+Castilian towers, stately and tapering to needles of stone, rose from
+among flat roofs and verdure tufts, and pointed upward to a sky as soft
+and warm as over the Tuscan hills. Other spires were Gothic, and others
+truncated, but the temples that gave character to the whole were those
+of Byzantine domes. Lighted by the sun's level rays of early morning,
+their mosaic colors glittered as in some bright glare of Algeria, but
+were relieved by the town's cooling fringe of green and the palms of
+many plazas within. It might have been a Moorish city, in Happy Arabia
+called paradise, a city of fountains, and wooded glens, like haunts of
+mythical fauns. Querétero once boasted a coat of arms, granted by a
+condescending Spanish monarch, and for loyalty to the hoary order of
+king and church she in those old days described herself as Very Noble
+and Royal. Stern cuirassed conquistadores held her as a key to the
+nation's heart, as a buckler for the capital, and lately the French did
+also. And now the Hapsburg had come to a welcome of garlands, and called
+her his "querida."
+
+But however excellently Querétero served as a base of military
+operations, as a besieged place pocketed among hills her aspect altered
+woefully. She was like an egg clutched in the talons of an eagle. On
+north and east and south the hills swept perilously near, a low,
+convenient range, with only a grass plain a few miles wide separating
+them from the town below. On north and east the heights were already
+sprinkled with Escobedo's tents and cannon. They commanded the only two
+strongholds of the besieged, as well as the town itself, which lay
+between. One stronghold was the Cerro de las Campanas, a wedge-shaped
+hill on the northwestern edge of the town, which held nothing but
+trenches. On the northwestern edge was the other stronghold, the mound
+of Sangremal, which fell away as a steep bluff to the grassy plain
+below. From the bluff, across the plain, to the hills opposite,
+stretched a magnificent aqueduct. On the mound's commodious summit of
+tableland there was the Plaza de la Cruz, also the Church de la Cruz,
+and an old Franciscan hive, called the monastery de la Cruz. Here
+Maximilian established himself in a friar's lonely cell. On the north a
+small river skirted the town, on the south, where nothing intervened
+between the grassy plain and the wooded Alameda, the besiegers found the
+most vulnerable flank.
+
+On this side investment began with the arrival of Corona and Régules,
+and soon after, of General Riva Palacio. The Republicans numbered
+fifteen thousand already, and more were coming daily, but as yet there
+were ragged strands in the noose being woven around the beleaguered
+place. Curiously enough, the most feverish to see the cordon perfected
+was none other than Don Tiburcio.
+
+"Marquez will escape! Marquez will fly the net!" he kept bewailing. "Si
+señor, and the padrecito with him, curse them both!"
+
+Two weeks passed, filled with skirmishes and ominous tests of strength.
+At night fiery parabolas blazed their course against the sky, up from
+the outer hills, sweeping down on Las Campanas or La Cruz. Imperialist
+chiefs urged a general attack, but again Marquez foiled their hopes.
+Then, at two o'clock one morning, there came to pass what Tiburcio had
+feared. A body of horse stole out upon the plain, and gained the
+unguarded Sierra road to Mexico. Four thousand cavalry pursued over the
+hills, but in vain. The fugitives were Marquez and the Fifth Lancers,
+his escort. He was gone to the capital to raise funds, and to bring back
+with him, at once, the Imperialist garrison there of five thousand men.
+Doting Maximilian had even named him lieutenant of the Empire, and
+Mexico City would shortly have the Leopard for regent. Querétero,
+moreover, was seriously weakened by the loss of the Fifth Lancers, and
+there were those who remembered how, when Guadalajara was besieged by
+Liberals seven years before, Marquez had likewise set out for aid, and
+had returned--too late.
+
+To his wrathful disgust, Don Tiburcio learned that Father Fischer was
+also gone with Marquez. The priest had disguised himself in an officer's
+cloak, and for the moment none in the town knew of his flight. The fat
+padre, it appeared, no longer hoped for the luscious bishopric of
+Durango. His was the rat's instinct, as regards a sinking ship.
+
+The Leopard and the Rat got away only in time. The very next day ten
+thousand ragged Inditos, largely conscripts, arrived from the Valley of
+Mexico and filled the gap in the besiegers' line. Investment was now
+complete, against a paltry nine thousand within the town.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A BUCCANEER AND A BATTLE
+
+
+  "The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature
+  of man."
+                                                       --_Bacon._
+
+
+But the paltry nine thousand were the best army of Mexicans ever yet
+gathered together. For weeks they kept more than thirty thousand
+Republicans out of an unwalled, almost an unfortified town. But while
+the Republicans were largely _chinacos_, or raw soldiery, they
+inside were trained men. There were the Cazadores, a Mexican edition of
+the Chasseurs, organized by Bazaine under French drill masters. There
+was Mendez's seasoned brigade. There was Arellano's artillery, though
+numbering only fifty pieces. There were the crack Dragoons of the
+Empress, the Austro-Mexican Hussars, and a squadron of the Municipal
+Guards. There were veterans who had fought at Cerro Gordo, and steadily
+ever since in the civil wars. There was the ancient Battalion de Celaya,
+mainstay of the Spanish viceroys, and later of the Emperor Iturbide, its
+colonel. There were the Battalion del Emperador, the Tiradores de la
+Frontera, a company of engineers, and several well-disciplined regiments
+of the line.
+
+But the day came when they began to starve, and being hungry took the
+heart out of many things. It took the heart out of bombarding Escobedo
+in his hillside adobe; out of taunting "uncouth rebels." The rebels were
+in trenches often not a street's width distant, and for reply they
+pointed to certain dangling acorns who had been "traitors" caught
+slipping through the lines. Being hungry took the heart out of the
+quick-time diana, played after a brilliant sortie. Out of the embrace
+Maximilian gave Miramon. Out of Miramon's call for vivas for His Majesty
+the Emperor. Out of standard decorating and promotions and thrilling
+words of praise. Out of the anniversary of Maximilian's acceptance of
+the throne. Out of a medal presentation for military merit, which the
+generals bestowed on their Emperor in the name of the army. Out of being
+made a caballero of the Order of Guadalupe, especially as the monarch
+could give only a ribbon, since the cross must wait until his return to
+the capital. And being hungry certainly made pathetic his prediction
+that some among those present would one day wear the medal for
+twenty-five years of faithful service to the Empire. Being hungry took
+the poet-hero's glow out of his wan cheek as he declared again that he,
+a Hapsburg, would never desert, for even then he heard Imperialist
+platoons shooting recaptured deserters. Or he thought of the wounded
+left to die on the grassy plain and lying there unburied. No, all the
+heart was being taken out of these things, for Marquez still did not
+come with the help he had gone to bring, and the noose was tightening
+day by day. Attempts were made to send some one through to depose
+Marquez, but each one failed. Splendid sallies resulted in prisoners
+taken, which were only so many more mouths to feed. The Roman aqueduct
+had long since been cut off, and now the wells were giving out. Mules
+and horses drank at the river, while sharpshooters picked them off. The
+feebler animals were butchered and distributed as rations. And still the
+sorry Marquez gave no sign. Even hope failed the empty stomachs.
+
+But for those who waited outside as Vengeance enthroned, expectation
+began to take on a creepy quality. The besiegers were preparing against
+themselves a host, not of men, but of frightful spectres, of famished
+maniacs, of unearthly ghouls, who would clutch and tear with claws any
+man that stood between them and a morsel of food. And the fury of
+desperation sharpened with each succeeding irony of a dinner hour.
+
+The siege had endured six weeks. Marquez had been gone a month. But the
+Republicans held ready for whatever force he might bring. Their key to
+the situation was the Cimatario, the highest hill on the south. Between
+it and the wooded Alameda stretched the grassy plain. Republican
+trenches from base to shoulder of the peak opposed Imperialist trenches
+under the Alameda trees. Republican troops flanked the Cimatario on
+either side, lying in wait for Marquez. On one side Driscoll's Grays
+guarded the Celaya road.
+
+So here they were sleeping encamped on the morning of April 27, when the
+bugle of a patrol cracked their slumbers. They lay booted and spurred. A
+moment later they were horsed as well, blinking across the plain in the
+pearly mist of dawn. They had heard hoofbeats, sharp and dry on the high
+tableland. Now they saw a wild, shadowy troop, which was hotly pursuing
+a spectral coach of gossamer wheels, with six plunging mules frantically
+lashed by outriders. At once, almost, the coach was lost among the dim
+strangers, who snatched at flying ends of harness, and with their prize
+raced on again.
+
+The Grays stared. It was like some pictured hold-up, not real. But they
+knew better when from among themselves a colossal yellow horse and rider
+dashed toward the road. Then they awoke for certain, and tore after
+their colonel to solve this ashen mystery so early in the morning. Was
+it Marquez, perhaps? But the coach white with dust, and white curtains
+flapping, what was that?
+
+Striking their flank at an angle, Driscoll drove hard into the fleeing
+horde. The Grays saw his hand raise as a signal, whereat they did not
+close in, but swerved and galloped parallel, some fifty paces distant.
+Driscoll struggled alone against the heaving sea about him. But no
+cut-throat of that pirate mass so much as drew a knife. By force of
+brawn, he wedged his way toward the coach, reached it, leaned forward,
+and caught up the curtain. And what he saw was a poke bonnet. The bonnet
+was a bower of lace and roses, held by a filmy saucy knot under a lady's
+chin. He saw a face framed within, of a skin creamy white, of lips
+blood-red, of hair like copper, and he saw a pair of eyes. They were
+gray eyes, and as they opened suddenly and wider upon him whom she
+thought must be her captor, the lady started violently, her cheeks
+aflame. But at once the eyes snapped as in mockery, and her lips moved.
+
+"Monsieur permits himself----" she began, but no one heard except her
+terrified companion within the coach. Driscoll had already dropped the
+curtain as a thing that burned, and was raging on again with the
+turbulent stream. He got to the leader of the band, and jerked the
+fellow's bridle. He raised his voice, and louder than the pounding of
+hoofs he cursed in wrathful disgust.
+
+"Dam' you Rod, this here's getting monotonous!"
+
+The man swung in his saddle. His eyes were black-browed and savage. He
+was Rodrigo Galán, the terrible Don Rodrigo. But shabby, how very shabby
+he looked for the thief of million dollar convoys! Yet that bonanza coup
+of the bullion train had happened two years ago. Since then the outlaw
+had visited the capital. Boldly, audaciously, he had gone as a rich
+hacendado, and after the manner of rich hacendados he had "seen the
+City." Mozos with gorged canvas bags on their shoulders had followed his
+stately stride into the gambling casinos. He had played with regal
+nerve, and on the last occasion, had flung the emptied sacks away as
+nonchalantly as on the first. Only, the last time, he had felt remorse
+that the "bank" had profited instead of Tiburcio. In that matter of the
+bullion convoy he had not treated Don Tiburcio as one caballero should
+another.
+
+Their horses--Rodrigo's and Driscoll's--were racing by bounds shoulder
+to shoulder. This endured for possibly the space of a second. Then
+Demijohn felt his rein tighten, and he took more time. Next his bit
+suddenly pinched, and down the old fellow came upon his front feet
+together, firmly planted, and sank to his haunches. Driscoll still held
+Rodrigo's bridle, and Rodrigo and horse, being in air, lunged backward.
+
+"We stop here," Driscoll announced.
+
+Don Rodrigo plumped down heavily in his saddle. His bristling moustache
+lifted over his cruel white teeth. Two hundred swarthy little demons
+reining in around them looked expectantly for a signal. But their chief
+frowned at the twelve hundred Gringo Grays hovering on his flank. They
+too wanted only a sign, and they outnumbered the Brigand's six to one.
+But Rodrigo believed he held the advantage. First he obediently halted
+himself and his minions.
+
+"Now then señor," said he in pompous and heavy syllables, "I am at your
+disposition. Will your people commence the battle, or shall we?"
+
+Driscoll appreciated the dilemma. The carriage would be in the line of
+fire. He had had an intuition of its occupants, and for that reason had
+kept back his men.
+
+"Where was she going?" he demanded.
+
+Rodrigo feigned surprise. "And where," he asked, "or rather, to whom,
+should Your Mercy imagine?"
+
+To Querétero! To Maximilian, of course! This, too, Driscoll had divined
+already.
+
+"No matter," he retorted shortly, "but how did you run across her this
+time?"
+
+The outlaw filled his chest, "You Americans, señor, do not understand
+the feelings of a man bowed under a heavy wrong. You----"
+
+"We'll let it go at that," said Driscoll, with a little wave of the
+hand, "but--how in----"
+
+"You scoff already, señor? But will you, at these stains of blood? Then
+let me say to you, señor mio, they make me remember one shameless deed
+for which the tyrant Maximilian must pay."
+
+The stains Rodrigo meant were on a little ivory cross which he had taken
+from his jacket. The emblem served him to lash his emotions, to goad his
+precious sense of wrong. He studied the cross intently; then, by a vast
+and excruciating effort, thrust it into Driscoll's hand.
+
+"Yes, yes," he cried, "you must take it! He said so."
+
+"He?"
+
+"Si, señor, he who shares my wrong, Don Anastasio Murguía."
+
+"Murgie!" exclaimed the bewildered American. "But--why, hombre, I
+haven't seen the old skinflint since--since he and I both were
+court-martialled by Lopez!"
+
+"Still I promised him to send the cross to you, because you will have a
+chance to give it to him. He said so."
+
+"Oh, he did?" But Driscoll put the trinket in his pocket, not unwilling
+to see more of this foolish drama in Latin-American sentiment. "Now
+then, Rod," he went on impatiently, "you haven't explained yet how you
+happen to find her again."
+
+"That," replied the outlaw, "was _his_ part of the bargain."
+
+"Whose?"
+
+"Anastasio Murguía's."
+
+"Rod, you talk like a----"
+
+"But no, señor, it's because you Americans cannot understand. Murguía
+also believes in vengeance. I haven't seen him either, not since he sold
+his hacienda over a year ago. But I do know that he or some spy of his
+is in the capital, for a messenger from him came to me in the mountains.
+The messenger said that the Marquesa d'Aumerle was leaving for
+Querétero. If I captured her, it would be vengeance in kind. But Murguía
+wanted pay for his information. He wanted that cross--it was his
+daughter's--and I was to send it to him through you. Dios mio, but I had
+to hurry! A little more, and the Marquesa would have been inside your
+lines."
+
+"She is already," Driscoll corrected him, "and so are you. Will you
+fight it out, or surrender?"
+
+He pointed to the Grays as he spoke. They had dismounted, and each man
+had a rifle at aim across his saddle. It was a reminiscence out of
+Driscoll's boyhood of Indians and the Santa Fé trail. But Don Rodrigo
+only smiled.
+
+"You want the coach first?" he said.
+
+"No!" Driscoll retorted. "You're the one that's wanted, and you can
+either wait for your trial, or be shot now, fighting. The coach will
+have to take its chances. But see here, if the firing once starts, not a
+thief among you will be left standing----"
+
+It was a perilous "bluff," and none might say if it would have broken
+the deadlock. But the outlaw interrupted.
+
+"Listen! What's that?"
+
+"Oh, nothing. We're only throwing a few bombs into Querétero."
+
+"Only!" The brigand's eyes flashed, and his voice was filled with envy.
+Throwing bombs among the traitors?--and magnificence like that had grown
+common! Yet he, whose patriotism was a passion that fed and thrived upon
+itself, must be barred from such exquisite satiety.
+
+Driscoll understood, and thought it droll. First there was that loyal
+Imperialist, Don Tiburcio, frothing chagrin because he had had to
+desert. And now here was this rabid Republican, heart broken over being
+outlawed from the ranks of his country's avengers.
+
+Again Rodrigo interrupted, more excitedly yet. "Señor, señor, you don't
+shoot them that way every day? What does it mean?"
+
+Both gazed across the plain to the city of domes under the green hills.
+Driscoll's chin raised, and he listened intently. What had commenced
+like indolent target practice against a beleaguered town had suddenly
+burst into a terrific cannonading chorus. More, there was musketry,
+vicious and sustained. There were troops deploying over the plain.
+Something critical was happening. If it were the supreme rally of the
+famishing Empire!
+
+Driscoll stirred uneasily. He glanced at his outlaw. He thought of the
+coach. To leave her with these ruffians? To miss a fight? Here was a
+quandary!
+
+"You are not going?" Rodrigo cried at him furiously. "Now, now," he
+raged, "is the hour of triumph for the incarnation of popular
+sovereignty. Go, I say, go, the Republic needs you!"
+
+Until those words Rodrigo had held the situation. With them he lost it,
+and Driscoll was master. And Driscoll grew serene, and very sweet of
+manner. He began filling a cob pipe. A nod of his head indicated the
+coach as a condition of his going.
+
+"Look, look!" Rodrigo shouted. "Oh, que viva--they're running! We've
+smoked them out! We've smoked them out!"
+
+Driscoll swept the country with his glasses. Thousands of men were
+running like frightened rabbits down the Cimatario slope, and spreading
+as a fan over the grassy plain. Mountain pieces boomed farewell behind
+them, until in abject panic they cast away carbines and scrambled the
+faster. But other troops were pushing up the slope opposite the town,
+and these were ordered ranks of infantry. Up and up they climbed, to
+trench after trench, and the howitzers one by one stopped short their
+roar. When Driscoll laid down the glasses, his face was white. Rodrigo's
+glee turned to uncertainty.
+
+"What--what----"
+
+"Smoked out, you fool? We're the ones smoked out!"
+
+"But those runaways?"
+
+"Are our own men, ten thousand of 'em, raw conscripts to support our
+batteries on the Cimatario."
+
+"But the Cimitario?" Rodrigo knew by instinct the crucial importance of
+the black cone.
+
+"The Cimitario is taken by the Imperialists!"
+
+Driscoll did not forget, however, the nearer contest, and as the Mexican
+grew frantic, he was the more coolly indifferent.
+
+"Max has everything his own way now," he added soothingly. "He can
+either evacuate, or go around on the north side and thrash Escobedo."
+
+But the Grays were clamoring for action. "By cracken, Din, hurry up
+there!" yelled Cal Grinders.
+
+Driscoll raised his palm, waving the fingers for patience. He scanned
+the plain again. The Imperialist ranks were breaking. Hungry men rushed
+on the besiegers' camps, snatching untouched breakfasts. The townsmen
+poured out among the uniforms, and darted greedily in every direction.
+The llano was alive with scurrying human beings. Driscoll could well
+wait for the psychology of Republican defeat on Don Rodrigo, since at
+the same time he awaited the effects of victory on a starving army. The
+Grays fretted, but they knew their colonel was never more to be depended
+upon than when his blood grew cold like this.
+
+"If," Driscoll observed pleasantly to the Mexican, "Escobedo isn't
+already making tracks for San Luis----"
+
+It was the last straw. The patriot brigand jerked off his sombrero and
+flung it to the ground. He gestured wildly over the plain, and he
+gestured in the American's face. He choked on words that boiled up too
+fast.
+
+"You--you--traitor!" he spluttered. There was actually froth on his
+lips.
+
+"We haven't," Driscoll reminded him with exceeding gentleness, "settled
+this other yet," and again he nodded to the coach.
+
+"That--that is why you wait?" Rodrigo had forgotten his prize entirely.
+"Take her, then, take her! Only go, go, kill all the traitors!"
+
+"After you, caballero," Driscoll returned with Mexican politeness. He
+wanted to be sure of the outlaw's departure, since holding him prisoner
+was now out of the question. But Rodrigo chafed only to be gone. With a
+reed whistle he signaled his little demon centaurs, then at a touch of
+the spurs his horse leaped forward and all the band clattered close on
+his heels.
+
+"Sure anxious to escape," thought Driscoll. But he stared after them in
+wonder. Instead of turning to the safety of the mountains, they charged
+straight ahead on the town, straight against the Empire, and in any
+case, straight into the maw of justice. Behind, the coach and mules
+stood high and dry in the road. Driscoll was at once all action.
+
+"Shanks," he called.
+
+Mr. Boone hurried to him from the Grays.
+
+"Shanks, will you stay here with six men----"
+
+"Jack Driscoll!"
+
+"To watch that coach, Dan. There's two girls in it."
+
+"Jack! Miss that there fight!"
+
+"But Dan, _these_ girls are friends of yours, you met them once."
+
+Mr. Boone started violently.
+
+"Never mind, I'll ask Rube Marmaduke or the Parson."
+
+A pitiful struggle racked Mr. Boone.
+
+"You, you're not fooling me, Din?" he pleaded.
+
+"Sure not. It's your empress all right. It's Miss Burt all right."
+
+"Then, Lawd help me, I'll stay!--But you'd best be hustling and get to
+work."
+
+"Just a minute, Shanks, there's the other one in the coach. She wants to
+go to Querétero. If she gives her word of honor--never mind, she knows
+honor from a man's standpoint--if she gives her word that she brings
+nothing that will help 'em inside, then you can escort the coach into
+the town after things quiet down some. All right? Good. Then we're off!"
+
+Demijohn's hoofs pelted dust balls with each impact. The Grays were
+ready. They surged behind. The sound of them was a swishing roar. In the
+apex of the blinding tempest, Driscoll sat his saddle as unmoved as an
+engineer in his cab. He looked ahead placidly. Empire and a prince had
+just triumphed. So he was going to readjust fatality. The smile touched
+his lips as it never had before, and hovered there in the midst of
+battle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+BLOOD AND NOISE--WHAT ELSE?
+
+
+  "On stubborn foes he vengeance wreak'd,
+  And laid about him like a Tartar,
+  But if for mercy once they squeak'd,
+  He was the first to grant them quarter."
+                            --Orlando Furioso.
+
+
+Only for the moment of a cooling breath is Nature gray in Mexico. The
+sun's barbed shafts had already ripped away the cloak of dawn when
+Driscoll and his cavaliers swept over the glaring road. But there was no
+longer any battle. The plain swarmed confusion only. Panic cringed
+before hunger. The defeated besiegers panted, stumbled, ran on again, or
+lay still in trembling. The victorious besieged were gorging from
+fingers crammed full. It was the hour for trophies. A prosperous
+townsman bore a stack of tortillas, and gloated leeringly as he hurried
+to put his treasure safely away. A dashing Hungarian with fur pelisse
+shouted gallant oaths at a yoke of oxen and prodded them with his curved
+sword, as though a creaking cart filled with corn were the precious loot
+of an Attila. Pueblo and soldiery tore ravenously at fortifications that
+had so long kept them from one savory broth. With nails alone they would
+demolish walls and trenches. Some lurched over fugitives in the grass,
+and then pinned them there with bayonets, the lust for food turning
+fiendishly to a lust for blood.
+
+But what most inflamed the Grays were the captured cannon. They counted
+as many as twenty being dragged into the Imperialist lines. The
+Missourians were aggrieved. Never, never had Joe Shelby's brigade ever
+lost a gun. And as they galloped, they looked anxiously about for
+chances of more battle. Just then Rodrigo's outlaw band caught their
+eye. These had swerved from the road out upon the field, hot to engage
+anything, everything. A long provision train offered first. Many carts
+had been loaded with Republican stores, and were being convoyed to the
+town by a squadron of Imperialist cavalry. It was the clash between this
+escort and the brigands that attracted the Grays coming on behind. But
+the escort wheeled and fled and the brigands pursued, slashing with
+machetes, and so charged full tilt into the Dragoons of the Empress who
+were sent to retake the abandoned prize. Red tunics mixed with ragged
+yellow shirts, and war-chargers and mustangs swirled together as a
+maelstrom. Then the Grays pounded among them, in each hand of each man a
+six-shooter. The red spots began to fall out of the peppered caldron.
+The red tunics that were left broke, retreated, ran. It became a rout.
+Only a few of the Empire's best survived those ten minutes of
+blood-letting. Fatality? Driscoll's lip curled. Fatality? The Dragoons,
+now no more, had twice held him for their bullets.
+
+Grays and brigands chased them back toward Querétero. The fleeing
+remnant began yelling for help. Driscoll rose in his stirrups, and saw
+just ahead a large force of the enemy. It was gathered around the Casa
+Blanca, a little house on the plain. The large Imperialist force there
+was an army, nothing less, though still disordered from the late action
+and victory. Surrounded by a brilliant staff was a tall, golden bearded
+chieftain, sumptuously arrayed as a general of division, regally mounted
+on a cream-coated horse of Spain. He was Maximilian, viewing from there
+the winning of his empire. The army behind him filled his ears--"Viva Su
+Majestad!"
+
+But he who had given the cue for that thrilling music now saw the
+convoy's fate. He rode up and down anxiously, striving for order in the
+confused ranks. He wore the green sash of a general. He had a moustache
+and imperial, searching black eyes, and an open brow. His fine features
+showed in the blend of French and Castilian blood. He was the real
+chieftain. He was Miramon. Impetuously he made ready to avenge the
+Dragoons.
+
+These things that he saw ahead brought Driscoll to his senses. With
+reluctance, but instantly, he made up his mind. He held high his sabre
+and halted his own men, turning at the same time to collide obliquely,
+and purposely, against Rodrigo.
+
+"Not that way, Rod, not that way!"
+
+"But it's the tyrant! It's the tyrant!"
+
+Driscoll got the brigand's bridle and swung him around fiercely. "Let
+the poor tyrant be!" he yelled. "We've got to take that there Cimatario
+hill."
+
+A moment later Grays and brigands wheeled to the right and were off.
+Back at the Casa Blanca Maximilian lowered his glasses. "They surely,
+they surely are not--yes," he cried, "they _are_ going to attack
+the Cimatario!"
+
+Miramon smiled. "Then they are lunatics," he said. "Why, Your Highness
+knows that we have five thousand of our best men on the Cimatario."
+
+"Yes," Maximilian agreed uneasily, "but I thought I recognized the man
+who leads those lunatics. Do you happen to know, general, how Tampico
+fell?"
+
+"Do not worry, sire," Miramon replied, willing to humor the prince, "I
+will take our infantry to the Alameda and strengthen our reserve there,
+should anything really happen."
+
+Across the grassy plain raced the twelve hundred cavalry and the two
+hundred outlaws. They raced to attack five thousand brave men who had
+that morning dislodged ten thousand. Five thousand in the trenches
+above, fourteen hundred in the open below, such were the odds of Empire
+against Republic.
+
+Grays and brigands drew rein under the Cimatario's west slope, and the
+bugle sounded to dismount.
+
+"But señor," Rodrigo protested, "don't we charge straight up?"
+
+"And not have a man left when we do get up? Here Clem," Driscoll added
+to Old Brothers and Sisters, the lieutenant colonel of the Grays, "you
+circle round and up the other side with eight companies. Take all the
+horses, but leave 'em back of the hill as you go. Don't that look like
+the best scheme?"
+
+The parson's cherubic features beamed. "Good-bye, Din," he said. "But
+pshaw, I reckon--I reckon we'll be meeting up above." He referred,
+however, to the top of the Cimatario.
+
+Four companies and Rodrigo's band remained. These Driscoll spread out in
+a skirmish line that made a long beaded chain around their side of the
+hill. It was evidently an unfamiliar method, for the Imperialist
+tiradores fired down on them contemptuously. But each time, while the
+enemy above were reloading, the Grays and outlaws below were climbing a
+few yards, each man of them individually, up from behind his own
+particular rock. The Imperialists, it now appeared, had blundered
+incomprehensibly, since they had actually taken away nearly all the
+cannon captured on the Cimatario. But six-pound affairs from batteries
+in the Alameda soon began to splinter and furrow around the climbing
+men. One loosened boulder rolled and struck Doc Clayburn on the tip of
+the shoulder, bringing him down like a bag of meal. He arose, feeling
+himself. "Now, by the Great and Unterrified Continental----" he began,
+as he always did at the monotony of being hit. Then his disgust changed
+to wonder. "W'y," he cried, "I'm not either, I only thought I was!"
+
+They mounted higher, and the business grew hotter. Each man had to look
+to himself more and more sharply, lest he forget that economy of the
+individual was now the hope of the regiment. But for all that, when a
+Missourian craved tobacco--it is a craving not to be denied, in no
+matter what danger, as most any fireman knows--he would leave cover to
+beg his nearest neighbor for a chew, and obtaining it, would feel the
+heart put back into him.
+
+As they drew close under the first of the trenches, they concentrated
+for a bit of sharp in-fighting, and so suffered more. But once they
+provoked the next volley, they meant to rush the works. The Imperialists
+though were loath to squander the one ball to a carbine when Indian-like
+fighters like these were so near. They had one mountain piece, a brass
+howitzer, and the gunner stood ready, the lanyard in his hand. But he
+hesitated, bewildered. His targets were not twenty paces below, yet
+nowhere crouching behind the rocks were the foe massed together. His
+pride forbade that he waste twelve pounds of death on a single man.
+
+But suddenly that happened which the gunner never in this life
+explained. Poised expectant in the lull of the fray, he was trembling
+under the tense silence, when he saw the impetuous Don Rodrigo dart up
+the slope, full against the muzzle. At the same instant he heard shouts
+of warning behind him, and he heard the tiradores there above firing at
+someone almost at his feet. But the figure that had scaled up the back
+of the hill, crawling around the trench, was already on him. He drew
+back his arm to drive the heavy shot through Don Rodrigo in front, but
+only to feel the cord in his hand part before a knife's keen edge. With
+a cry of dismay he sprang to grasp the rope's end, but as in a vision a
+head of curly black and an odd smile rose between, and a swinging fist
+of a great bared arm crashed back his chin, and he sank as a brained ox.
+
+"Lambaste 'em, Din Driscoll!"
+
+It was a rapturous shout, and Cal Grinders, passing Rodrigo, tumbled
+over the earth-heap and joined his colonel against five hundred. Behind
+swarmed others into the newly awakened hell, coatless men of Saxon necks
+tanned a dark ruby, and in the hot Imperialist fire they settled to
+their work.
+
+"By cracken, lambaste 'em! Why in all hell _don't_ ye lambaste
+'em?"
+
+This fury boiled through oaths, unable to spend itself in blows. The
+tigerish rage seized on them every one. Teeth grated vengefully as men
+struck.
+
+"Lambaste 'em, Din Driscoll!"
+
+"Lambaste 'em--_good_--Din Driscoll!"
+
+The yell swelled to a murderous chorus. These men did not know that they
+were raving. A war cry is just the natural vent. It is simply the whole
+pack in full cry.
+
+But never before--for now around him there was the contrast of hate and
+panting and passions in ferment--had Driscoll seemed so distant a thing
+from flesh and the human sphere. In grime, in dust, in smoke, among
+faces changing demoniac wrath for the sharp, self-wondering agony of
+mortality, his face was cool, serene, with just the hint of a smile
+tugging at his lips. His own men would try to look another way, try
+uneasily to break the fascination of this strange warrior who led them.
+
+The battle was short, but of the hottest. Its central point was the
+little brass howitzer. Driscoll, Grinders, Bledsoe, the Doc, all four
+pushed at the carriage or pulled at the trunnion rings, while around
+them, hindering them, swaying back and forth over rocks and in the
+ditches, the two forces battled for possession, hand to hand, with
+six-shooters and clubbed muskets. Grinders fell, cursing angrily.
+Bledsoe fell, toppling heavily his great length. The Doc fell. "By
+the----" he began, but got no further. He was not mistaken this time.
+But the gun was turned at last, and a vicious hand jerked the rope.
+Powder grains pierced the eyes of the nearest Imperialists. The shot
+tore through the mass of them. Yet Driscoll remembered most how wan, how
+_hungry_, they looked.
+
+"Death to the traitors! Á muerte! Á mu-erte!"
+
+It was a heavy nasal, hurled from the lungs with that force and venom
+peculiar to the Spanish tongue. It came from Don Rodrigo, who had pulled
+the lanyard, and who now pulled it again and again, crazed first with
+joy, then with rage because the emptied gun would not respond.
+
+While the combatants were so confused together, the tiradores in the
+upper trenches had to hold their fire, but when the defenders gave way
+at last, those above could wait no longer. Four thousand and more, they
+leaped their earthworks, and came charging down the slope on what was
+left of Driscoll's six hundred.
+
+Grays and brigands faced about, but most of all they looked beyond the
+enemy's right flank, to the line of the hill's crest there. For just
+beyond that jagged line and somewhere below Old Brothers and Sisters and
+the eight other companies must be toiling up. But they would have to
+appear in the interval of the Imperialists' downward rush. Driscoll
+turned to his bugler. "Blow, Hanks! Blow like the _very_ devil!"
+
+The blast sounded long and shrill, like a plaintive wail. The six
+hundred pumped lead up the hill mechanically, but their hearts were
+echoing the clarion's cry for help, and rather than on the foe sweeping
+down over the rocks to crush them, their eyes were strained on the
+sun-emblazoned line against the sky. But the parson was a man. At last,
+just over the slope's crest, a head appeared, a cherubic head with
+spectacles, and two arms waved for haste to others behind. And instantly
+more heads bobbed up, and more yet, until the jagged line was fairly
+encrusted with mouse-colored sombreros, like barnacles on a stranded
+keel.
+
+From where they were the new comers began their work, lying flat on
+their stomachs. Once over the ridge, down each man fell and joined the
+chorus of musketry. Their fusilade thickened to a blanket of flame,
+closely woven. The host rushing down the slope forgot the tales that
+were told of the marvelous sixteen-shot rifles. They thought instead
+that an army of Republicans, and not a man less, were upon their flank.
+For how else could volleys be so well sustained, how else so deadly? And
+how fast they themselves were dropping! The thing was not like bullets,
+but as the earth caving under them. The charge turned to panic. They
+plunged on downward, indeed, and even sheer into the cross fire of
+Driscoll's six-shooters and the one howitzer. But it was headlong
+flight. At the trench they did not stop to grapple, but fought their way
+through and fled on down the hill, on across the grassy plain, nor
+paused until they had crowded pell-mell into the main Imperialist army
+drawn up before the Alameda.
+
+Maximilian and his resplendent staff were there at the Alameda. The
+Emperor was perhaps less astounded than they.
+
+"Ai, general, if you _had_ known how Tampico fell!" he said to
+Miramon.
+
+Yet neither was actually dismayed. The Cimatario and five thousand men
+had succumbed to a thousand or fifteen hundred daredevils. It was hard
+enough to believe, in all conscience. But the daredevils could be
+dislodged, and they must be, at once. Miramon's orders rose sharply and
+quick, and the Empire sprang to obey. The Alameda batteries were trained
+on the hill, and a few moments later the guns on the roof of the La Cruz
+monastery were also. At the same time, the army, the entire Imperialist
+reserve, battalion after battalion in close, hurried ranks, set out
+across the grassy plain, straight toward the Cimatario's front slope.
+Foot, horse, artillery, the concentrated might of the Austrian's
+sceptre, was being hurled against a handful of jaded warriors.
+Maximilian flushed with something like shame at the thought.
+
+Back on the slope Driscoll cried, "No, no, keep to the trenches, you
+fellows! This ain't _our_ promenade."
+
+And soon, when screaming comets began to fill the air and burst around
+them, they were glad of the ditches. There they waited, smoking,
+spitting tobacco against the torrid rocks, but with sullen eyes on the
+army moving nearer and nearer. Where, all this morning, was Escobedo,
+who, with his thousands of Republicans on the north of the town had
+taken no thought of the Republican stress on the south? He had not fired
+a shot. Yet surely he must know by this time. But no matter. Over a
+hundred outlaws were left, and nearly a thousand Grays. Missourians,
+brigands, and guerrillas of Michoacan, they were a dangerous blend.
+
+"Got a match, Harry?" asked Driscoll of the Kansan, as he filled his cob
+pipe.
+
+They _had_ to wait, you see. Yet haste was all they would have
+begged of the advancing Imperialist host.
+
+The red jackets of the Dragoons--the few that were left--brightly dotted
+the van of the attacking thousands. On either side rode the Second and
+Fourth Lanciers. Behind tramped the battalions of Iturbide, of Celaya,
+and regiments of the line. They gained the foot of the hill and the
+cavalry were dismounting before they drew fire. The baptism had a
+sharpshooter deadliness, even at that distance, but the Imperialists
+waited tentatively. No, there was but one volley. When the second came,
+it was only after an interval long enough for reloading. Officers and
+men glanced at one another more hopefully. The terrified fugitives were
+of course mistaken, they thought. For the force above could not be
+large, nor yet possess the mysterious sixteen-shot rifles. The assurance
+gave the buoyancy of relief. To charge against carbines that made each
+man as sixteen were uncanny, too much like challenging the Unknown. But
+a thousand men who fired only every two or three minutes--an antagonist
+like that was quite well known to their philosophy. So breathing hard,
+they valiantly marched up the hill. They suffered cruelly under the
+scattered fusillades, yet were not materially resisted. At last they
+were near enough, and the bugles sounded for the final rush.
+
+Now what was odd, the Republicans stopped firing altogether. But they
+were waiting for shorter range, and a moment later, at a hundred paces,
+their reopening volley had all the clockwork dispatch of platoon drill.
+Yet the Imperialists took the dose as a thing expected, and sprang over
+their wounded to gain the trenches. They required only the lull of
+reloading. But instantly a second volley prolonged the first. The column
+staggered, and faces blanched. In a sudden despair they realized the
+enemy's tactics, for the enemy did have those terrible rifles, after
+all. From the trenches a low sheet of flame had spread, searing the
+breasts of rank after rank that pressed against its edge. Scarlet-coated
+Dragoons, the last of them, flecked the rocks, and over them fell green
+uniformed troopers, as grass will cover a bloody field, and the
+Municipal Guards, swaying up from behind, paid out a sprinkling of
+blue--a ghastly pousse-café, as one grim jester described it afterward.
+The long massed lines wavered.
+
+"They've stopped, they've stopped!" cried Rodrigo. "Now we'll close with
+them, eh, señor--por Dios, _now_!"
+
+"All you fellows," shouted Driscoll, "just fill your rifles while they
+wait. Stopped nothing, Rod! And anyhow, who'd hold the hill if we left
+it? Who?"
+
+The answer came at once, and in dramatic form. One of the pickets
+stationed on the flank ran among them.
+
+"There's another big slew of 'em a-coming!" he yelled excitedly.
+"Yonder, over yonder!"
+
+Driscoll rose and followed the man to the east slope. From there he
+beheld an overpowering force, advancing diagonally across the llano
+below. It came by the Carretas road, which skirted Querétaro on that
+side, and it was hurrying toward the Cimatario. The colonel of Grays
+watched them anxiously through his glasses.
+
+"Shucks," he said at last, "the fight's over. It's Escobedo. He's sent
+his reserve. Don't you see those black shakos, Jim, and those gray
+coats? They're the Cazadores de Galeana, and the best yet. Now we'll
+have someone to hold the hill!"
+
+But getting back to the trenches, Driscoll saw that the help might not
+come soon enough. For however the Imperialists squandered their lives,
+they would yet overcrowd death. Some had already gained the first
+trench, and were there engaged hand to hand, with sabre and pistol. In
+the trenches above the Grays steadily fed the molten flame. But Driscoll
+chose the in-fighting, and naturally became himself the centre of the
+hottest patch.
+
+"Help's here! in five minutes, just five minutes!" he spoke right and
+left to his men, as a carpenter will converse and hammer at the same
+time. For the outnumbered Grays it was the help arrived already.
+
+The Imperialist cannon had of necessity ceased firing, so what should be
+the consternation of the attacking column to have a shell fall among
+them from the rear! All eyes turned, and a murmur of panic rose. It was
+not that their own batteries had made a mistake, but that there had not
+been any mistake. The reserve sent by Escobedo, hearing the battle, had
+wheeled and rushed straight down the centre of the plain on the chance
+of giving quicker assistance. Once in sight of the trenches, though
+still considerably to the right of the hill, they had unlimbered a gun,
+while cavalry and infantry pushed on to the rescue. Not to be caught
+between trenches and plain, the Imperialists acted with soldiery
+decision. Their clarions sounded retreat.
+
+"Now it's _our_ turn!" shouted Driscoll, and with the parson and
+the Kansan and the outlaw chief, and guerrillas and Missourians pouring
+out of their ditches, he chased down hill the concentrated might of an
+Empire. So closely was that chasing performed that pistol flashes burned
+into standards and uniforms.
+
+Maximilian and Miramon and the high officers of the realm were still at
+their post of observation in front of the Alameda. For the third time
+that morning they faced Imperial cohorts hurled back upon them by a man
+named Driscoll. Miramon reproached himself bitterly. His plans to
+intercept Escobedo's reserve on the north had failed. The Emperor's
+pallid features were drawn with the tensity of a big loser. Yet in the
+soft blue eyes there flashed a chivalrous wonder at an enemy's valiant
+deed.
+
+On the llano fugitives and pursuers mingled as one in the human wave of
+confusion. Escobedo's cavalry had overtaken the mêlée, and blended with
+the rear of the fleeing column, until it seemed likely that both must
+enter the town together. But a charge of grape, fired obliquely from the
+Alameda, mowed a path between them--a Spartan business, for it reaped
+Imperialists among Republicans. However, a second and third blast were
+better gauged, and these carpeted the new alley-way with Republican
+bodies. Also, the Imperialists were re-forming, and under a withering
+fire the little band of victors had to draw back to the Cimatario.
+
+As Escobedo's reserve occupied the hill, Driscoll marched his own force
+behind the same to get his horses there. But the mustangs of the
+brigands had disappeared, and far to the southwest were the brigands
+themselves, moving swiftly over the plain toward the mountains. They
+hardly numbered two-score now, and at that distance seemed a few men
+herding a drove of empty saddles. The late indignant patriot, Don
+Rodrigo, had changed back to outlaw. As another Cid, he might have
+looked for pardon from a grateful country, but possibly he feared the
+Roman justice of Juarez too much to risk it. Besides, a man will not
+lightly give up his career. That same night Rodrigo lay again among the
+sierras, quite ready for the first bullion convoy or beautiful
+marchioness passing by.
+
+Shells and minié balls were yet dropping perfunctorily, and the llano
+between hill and town was still a dangerous place enough, but scattered
+here and there were a few of both sides looking for their wounded, and
+often themselves going down before the aim of sharpshooters. Stiffening
+bodies lay under the trampled grass in every varied horror of
+mutilation, and glassy eyes peered unseeing upward through the stalks,
+like the absurd and ghastly contrast of a horrible dream. But among them
+were the stricken living in as varied an agony, of raw wounds stung by
+gnats, of pain cutting deep to vitality, of thirst, of the broiling sun,
+of a buzzing fly, or of an intolerable loneliness there with death.
+Groans rose over the plain, and guided the searchers. Driscoll had
+already found many of his men in this way. Once he heard his own name.
+The voice was weak, but there was something vaguely familiar to it, and
+involuntarily he held his pistol against treachery as he parted the
+grass and revealed a wounded man at his feet. It was a piteously
+famished body that raised itself a little by one hand. It was a
+soul-tenanted death-head that crooked gruesomely down on the shoulder
+and lifted its eyes to Driscoll's in greeting. They were glowing coals,
+those eyes, glowing with the virile fire of twenty men, however wasted
+the face or tightly drawn the yellow parchment skin.
+
+"Murgie!"
+
+Driscoll's exclamation was a shudder rather than the surprise of
+recognition. What could it be that had grown so--so _terrible_ in
+the weazen, craven miser! And to find the abject little coward on a
+battlefield, and wounded! An occasional bomb even then screeched
+overhead. And he was clothed in uniform, a soldier's uniform, he, Don
+Anastasio!
+
+"Gra-_cious!_" Driscoll muttered.
+
+More and more stupefying, the uniform was not Republican, but
+Imperialist. There were the green pantaloons with red stripes, the red
+jacket, the white shoes, the white kepí, of the Batallon del
+Emperador--a ludicrous martial combination, but pathetic on an aged,
+withered man. The Batallon del Emperador? Driscoll remembered. They were
+the troop that had surrounded Maximilian during the recent battle in
+front of the Alameda, and Murguía had fallen on the very spot. The
+venomous Republican was then become one of the Emperor's bodyguard!
+
+As the Republican, so also was the coward gone. The gaunt little old
+Mexican seemed oblivious of peril, as fever blinds one to every nearest
+emotion. There was even a grimness in the shifting gaze. And a certain
+merciless capacity, born of unyielding resolve--born of an obsession,
+one might say--was there also. He could have been some great military
+leader, cruel and of iron, if those eyes were all. Little shriveled Don
+Anastasio, he had no sense of present danger, nor of the red blood
+trickling.
+
+"That's bad, that," said Driscoll, overcoming his repugnance. "Here,
+I'll get you taken right along to our surgeons."
+
+But Murguía shrank from the offer as though he feared the Republicans of
+all monsters.
+
+"No, no," he protested feebly, yet with an odd ring of command. "Some
+one on--on my side will find me."
+
+"But you called?" Driscoll insisted.
+
+"Yes, you--have heard from Rodrigo Galán? He was to have sent you a--to
+have sent you something for me."
+
+More and more of mystery! Rodrigo had said that Driscoll would see
+Murguía to give him the ivory cross, and so it had come to pass. But the
+battle, the old man's wound, surely these things were not prearranged
+only that a trinket might be delivered.
+
+"How was I to see you?" Driscoll asked abruptly.
+
+Murguía started, and there was the old slinking evasion.
+
+"There, there," said Driscoll hastily. "Don't move that way, you'll
+bleed to death! Here, take it, here it is."
+
+Murguía clutched the ivory thing in his bony fingers.
+
+"María, María de la Luz," he fell to murmuring, gazing upon the cross as
+though it were her poor crushed face. In the old days she had made him
+forget avarice or fear, and now, before this token of her, the hardness
+died out of his eyes and they swam in tears. Driscoll gazed down on him
+pityingly. The old man was palsied. He trembled. There passed over him
+the same spasm, so silent, so terrible, as on the night of her death,
+when he had sat at the court martial, his head buried in his arm.
+
+"Rod said you would want it," Driscoll spoke gently. Then he moved away.
+An Imperialist officer was approaching over the field who would bring
+the help which Murguía refused to accept of the Republicans.
+
+Driscoll looked back once. The Imperialist officer was carrying Murguía
+into the town. He was a large man, and had red hair. His regimentals
+were gorgeous. There seemed to be something familiar about him, too.
+Greatly puzzled, Driscoll unslung his glasses, and through them he
+recognized Colonel Miguel Lopez. Lopez, the former colonel of Dragoons,
+now commanded the Imperialist reserve, quartered in the monastery of La
+Cruz around the person of their sovereign. But Lopez had once condemned
+Murguía to death. A strange solicitude, thought Driscoll, in such a high
+and mighty person for a little, insignificant, useless warrior as poor
+Murgie. A strange, a very strange solicitude, and Driscoll could not get
+it out of his head.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+OF ALL NEWS THE MOST SPITEFUL
+
+
+  "O poor and wretched ones!
+  That, feeble in the mind's eye, lean your trust
+  Upon unstaid perverseness."--_Dante_.
+
+
+Her gestures, her every word, were an effervescence. There was something
+near hysteria in the bright flashes of her wit. However gay, joyous,
+cynical, Jacqueline may have seemed to herself, to Berthe, terrified
+though the girl was, Jacqueline's mood was a sham.
+
+"The _frisson_, oh, those few exquisite seconds of emotion, eh
+Berthe?" she exclaimed. "Pursued by robbers--the chase--the rescue--and
+the jolting, the jolting that took our breaths! Why, Berthe, what more
+would you have? Hélas, to be over so quickly! And here we are, left
+alone in our coach, robbers gone, rescuers gone! Berthe, do you know, I
+believe they compared notes and decided we weren't worth it. But I
+_should_ have thought," she went on in mock bitterness, "I should
+indeed, that at least our Fra Diavolo would have been more gallant, even
+if----"
+
+"Even if?" prompted Berthe, then bit her lip.
+
+"Even--Oh Berthe, _fi donc_, to catch me so because I was
+wandering!--even if one could expect no such gallantry from the
+Chevalier de Missour-_i_. There now, do you tell Tobie to drive
+on----"
+
+"But mademoiselle----"
+
+"Say 'Jeanne'," the marchioness commanded, stamping her foot.
+
+"My lady," the girl persisted, but added with affectionate earnestness,
+"and my only friend, I was simply going to say that we are not deserted
+after all."
+
+"But didn't I see him riding away?"
+
+"_Him_, yes, but look out of the window. See, he's left six or
+eight--O--oh----"
+
+It was a joyful cry, which got smothered at once in confusion. Turning
+quickly, Jacqueline beheld a little Bretonne with eyes cast down and
+cheeks aflame. Yet even then Berthe gave a cosy sigh of relief. There
+was cannonading not far away. They had just been taken by brigands, and
+as suddenly left alone on the road. Thus Jacqueline's company ever cost
+her many a tremor. Yet somehow one of those chevaliers de
+Missour-_i_ needed only to appear, and she felt as secure as a
+kitten on the hearth rug. A chevalier de Missour-_i_ had but now
+ridden up to the coach door.
+
+"Berthe!" whispered Jacqueline severely, so that the girl thought her
+dress was awry. "Quick, tuck your heart away in your pocket. It's right
+there on your sleeve." Whereat Berthe employed the sleeve to hide her
+higher mantling color.
+
+Jacqueline turned on the chevalier at the window, and surveyed
+_his_ sleeve. It was covered with dust, but Jacqueline's big eyes
+could see through dust. She felt about her a subtle atmosphere that made
+her an outsider.
+
+"Ah, Monsieur le Troubadour?" came her bantering recognition.
+
+Mr. Boone's French crowded pleasantly to his tongue tip. "Mademoiselle,"
+he returned, "and," he added, with an odd glance toward Berthe, "Madame
+l'Imperatrice, uh--how goes it?"
+
+Jacqueline's lashes raised inquiringly, until she remembered how the
+lank gentleman before her, with the tender heart of a Quixote, had
+mistaken Berthe for the Empress, months before at the Córdova
+plantation. She liked him somehow better now for persisting in it.
+
+"Her Imperial Highness," she explained, very soberly, "may deign
+presently to observe that you are here, monsieur, though, as you see,
+her thoughts are far away. However, if you can possibly give your own to
+a humbler person, to myself, dear Troubadour, I should very much like to
+know what is to happen next. Use fine words, if you must; even put it
+into verse, only tell me----" With an impulsive shove she flung open the
+door and stepped into the road. She could still see Driscoll's troop, or
+rather the cloud of dust, speeding toward Querétaro, but her arm swept
+the horizon impersonally. "Only tell me," she demanded, "what's
+happening now, over yonder?"
+
+"Pressing business, ma'am--mademoiselle, and," Daniel lied promptly,
+"Colonel Driscoll wished me to make you his excuses."
+
+"The minstrels of old, sir," said Jacqueline, "usually accompanied their
+more gallant fibs with a harp."
+
+Her vivacity was rising fast, and for some reason, Berthe darted an
+angry look of warning on Mr. Boone. But the poor fellow was blind to
+Jacqueline's jealousy of a distant conflict, and he blundered further.
+
+"Jack Driscoll's just that way," he apologized for his friend
+cheerfully. "_Abundat dulcibus vitiis_--he's chuck full of pleasant
+faults. When there's a clash of arms around, let the most alluring Peri
+that ever wore sweet jessamine glide by, and--she can just glide. While
+with me----"
+
+"I see. _You_ have stayed. But I, too, like battles, monsieur.
+Tobie, get back up there with the driver. There's no admission charge, I
+imagine, to this battle?"
+
+Boone gladly offered to take them for a nearer view, but he saw
+Berthe--his eyes were never elsewhere--shrink involuntarily.
+
+"Stop, arretaz! Hey there!" he ordered, and the driver stopped.
+
+Jacqueline's pretty jaw fell in wonder. The natural order of things was
+prevailing over the artificial. Social status to the contrary
+notwithstanding, it was Berthe who commanded here, and not Mlle. la
+Marquise. But Jacqueline was happy in it, and perhaps a little envious
+too. Ah, those _Missouriens_! This one, who would rather stay than
+fight! And that other, who was now fighting for quite the opposite
+reason! They had a capacity for variety, those _Missouriens_!
+
+It was much later, after a lunch from Jacqueline's hampers under the
+nearest trees, and after the distant fusillades had quieted to an
+occasional angry spat, that the ladies' escort of Gringo Grays, bearing
+a flag of truce, set out with their charge toward the town. Daniel rode
+beside the coach window, and the flaps of the old hacienda conveyance
+were drawn aside. He wondered how it happened that the hours had passed
+so quickly. He would not believe that his comrades had been fighting,
+that many of them had died, so blissfully fleeting were those hours to
+himself.
+
+"It's all according," he mused profoundly.
+
+And he could not help singing. He hummed the forlorn chanson of Joe
+Bowers of the State of Pike, which Bledsoe, then lying cold and stiff
+under a mountain howitzer, had so often bellowed forth.
+
+  "It said that Sal was false to me,
+    Her love for me had fled,
+  She's got married to a butcher--
+    The butcher's hair was red."
+
+But he sung it as a plaint, yet not hopelessly, and Mademoiselle Berthe
+was the maid entreated of his melody.
+
+The sharpshooters on both sides paused as the coach drove into the
+little sweet-scented wood that was called the Alameda, and the
+Missourians, with sabres at salute, transferred their charge to the
+Imperialists crowding around. Among the latter were some of Jacqueline's
+own countrymen, and those, in starvation and defeat, were as debonair as
+the cadets of Gascogne.
+
+"A rose, mademoiselle," said one, bowing low. He had an arm bandaged,
+and his sword was broken. "An early merciful bullet plucked it for you,
+so that it fell unhurt, though the petals of all the others are
+scattered everywhere among the leaves, among the fallen branches, among
+the shattered statues of our classic grove here. See, like the rose I
+tender, you come among us poor broken soldiers of fortune. I think, dear
+lady, there will be those above to bless you for it."
+
+Jacqueline smiled behind her tears. "Always a Frenchman, eh, mon
+lieutenant?" she said.
+
+The fragrance of the place was smothered under gunpowder and sluggish
+fumes. The pleasant drives, the grass, the flowers, were trampled by
+gaunt soldiers bearing their wounded, but the young officer murmured on
+in the speech of the Alameda's one time fashionable promenade.
+
+"Who is that?" she interrupted.
+
+She pointed over the heads around her to a man bearing someone off the
+late bloody field, and that moment staggering across the trenches into
+the Alameda. It was an act that moved her, for the rescuer was a richly
+uniformed officer, and the other but a common soldier. With Berthe close
+behind, she alighted from the coach and hurried forward to help. The
+wounded soldier's face lay on the officer's breast, and she saw only his
+hair, matted and very white, from which a rusty brown wig had partly
+fallen. But more to the purpose she saw that he was bleeding, and the
+callous warriors there knew that the angels of the siege had come at
+last.
+
+"Lay him in my carriage--but carefully, you!" she said, and was obeyed,
+while Berthe deftly fixed cloaks and blankets around the withered form.
+Someone mounted with Toby and the driver, and the coach rolled slowly
+away to the hospital, leaving behind the two girls staring at the richly
+uniformed officer, and the officer staring tenfold harder at them. He
+was a large man, with big hands and feet, and for a Mexican he had a
+mongrel floridness of skin. His cap was in his hand, and his hair was
+red and thin. Amazement and a startled prying anxiety choked his
+utterance.
+
+"Now then, Colonel Lopez," Jacqueline addressed him calmly, "may I ask
+you the way? I have come to speak with Maximilian."
+
+"La Señorita d-d'Aumerle!" he stuttered.
+
+"Faith, no other, who is awaiting your pleasure, señor."
+
+"You come from, from--Mexico?"
+
+"But hardly to chat with you all the afternoon, caballero."
+
+"From Mexico! From the capital!" he kept repeating. The man's finger
+nails cracked disagreeably, and his features worked in an extreme of
+agitation. He tried to fix his shifting blue eyes upon first one and
+then the other of the two girls, as though to ferret out what they must
+know. "You do bring news from there?" he said huskily. "What of Marquez?
+Is he coming? Shall we have the aid he went for? When----"
+
+"Ah, the medal for military valor!" observed Jacqueline. "Indeed, mi
+coronel, all must acclaim your bravery, as well as--your loyalty. But
+take me to your beloved Prince Max, for I do assure you, señor, my news
+goes not without myself."
+
+"He visits the hospital every day," Lopez advised reluctantly. "Perhaps
+if I should take Your Mercy there first----"
+
+Passing on through the ravaged Alameda, they entered the streets of
+Querétaro.
+
+"Hear!" Jacqueline exclaimed. "Such a quantity of vivas and clarins and
+national hymns and triumphant dianas, one would imagine, for example,
+that there had been a great victory?"
+
+"Eh? Oh yes, or a hearty breakfast, señorita."
+
+Which was more essential. And why not? Hope's bright hue blotted out
+emaciation. They had broken through to food that day. Bueno, could they
+not do it again? Old croons had returned to their stalls and accustomed
+corners in the market place, and as in days of peace were already
+squatted before corn or beans heaped on the stone pavement in portions
+for a quartilla, a media, or a real, as though the pyramids were not so
+pitifully little, as though the wholesale purchase were not made just
+that morning in heavy terms of blood.
+
+Behind the ponderous Assyrian-like church of Santa Rosa, in the old,
+half ruined monastery and garden, was the hospital of the besieged. A
+stifling, fetid odor, far worse than of drugs merely, sickened the two
+girls as a foul breath when they passed with their guide between thick
+walls into the large, overcrowded rooms. Military medical service was
+not yet become an institution in Mexico, and this place was like some
+horrible antechamber of the grave. Every cot had its ghastly transient,
+and so had the benches, brought here from the different plazas. More and
+more wounded were arriving constantly, and those found to be still alive
+were laid on the flagstones wherever space for a blanket remained. But
+in spite of the morning's fight, in spite of almost daily skirmishes for
+weeks past, the sick outnumbered all others; and those who did come with
+wounds, and survived them, stayed on to swell the longer list. Men
+tossed in fever, craving what they might not have, a cooling draught, a
+proper food, and effective medicine, until, with waking, they craved an
+easier boon, and died. But the hospital fever, the calenturas, the
+gangrene, were not to be all. Out of the diseased air, mid the fumes of
+pious tapers, the spectre of epidemic was taking hideous shape over the
+many, many upturned faces. The spectre was the tifo, a plague more
+dreaded in high altitudes than black vomit in the low.
+
+Jacqueline found Maximilian bending over a stricken cavalry officer. The
+Emperor was far from a well man, and his fair skin more than ever
+contrasted as something foreign and lonely among the swarthy faces on
+every side. His ostentation was now simplicity, as befitted a monarch in
+camp. He wore neither sword nor star. His garb was plain charro, in
+which he often walked among citizens and soldiers, inquiring about
+rations, or requesting a light for his cigar, never minding if a shell
+burst and kicked dust over him, and always affable, always ready to
+smile and praise. It was a rôle that came naturally to his gentle soul.
+One would like to believe--if one could, alas!--that he had in mind no
+kingly precedent.
+
+Pausing unseen, Jacqueline noted tears in the blue eyes as he pinned
+some decoration on the officer's bloodstained shirt. A good heart, she
+thought, yet ever the prince. In his divine right was he even here,
+presuming to send a dying subject to the Sovereign in Heaven with a
+"character," with a recommendation for service faithfully done. His
+hands trembled from haste, for he would have the soldier appear before
+that dread Throne above as a Caballero of the Mexican Eagle. In pity for
+them both, Jacqueline asked herself what precedence awaited the new
+Caballero of the Mexican Eagle in a Court, not Imperial, but Divine.
+
+Jacqueline had not journeyed her perilous way out of simple friendship
+for a desolate prince, but could she have foreseen how his eyes lighted
+with gladness to behold one friend who remembered, in sweet charity she
+would almost have come for that alone.
+
+"When Your Highness has finished here," she said, glancing at the
+inquisitive Lopez near her, "or whenever I can speak with Your Highness
+in private----"
+
+There was beseeching in Maximilian's quick scrutiny of her face, as
+though the helpless messenger had aught of power over her tidings.
+"In--in a moment, mademoiselle," he said tremulously. "I always see
+the--new ones, before I go."
+
+The "new ones" were still being brought in, until any first aid from the
+distracted surgeons was of the most casual--the ripping of bandaged
+cloth, a knot tied, and so on to the next. Followed by Lopez, the two
+girls, and several officers of the hospital staff, Maximilian passed
+from ward to ward. But Jacqueline's hand seemed always to be threading a
+needle, or holding a ligature, or lightly touching a hot forehead, and
+in every case the surgeon would nod quickly, gratefully, as to a fellow
+craftsman. Berthe the while gazed in tender wonder on her calm mistress,
+and nerved herself someway to help also.
+
+And so they came to the withered form in brave red coat, and green
+pantaloon whom Lopez had carried off the field. One of the nurses had
+placed a handkerchief over his face, because of the stinging flies, but
+Jacqueline recognized the thin white hair and the twisted wig as of the
+old man whom she had sent ahead in her coach. At first he seemed to be
+dead, for he lay very still on the floor, though a surgeon was probing
+his wound, and his blood was fast filling the bowl held by the nurse.
+But now and again, the straining cords in his emaciated wrist twitched
+with the protest of life. Maximilian stooped to raise the handkerchief.
+Lopez made a movement to prevent, but restrained the impulse as useless.
+And then Maximilian revealed the gaunt, leaden features of Anastasio
+Murguía, the father of María de la Luz.
+
+Jacqueline fell back with bloodless lips. The father of that dead
+girl--and Maximilian! They were face to face, these two! But the
+Emperor's expression was of pity only. He sank to his knees, the better
+to make the wounded man understand the words of comfort on his lips. For
+Jacqueline, the horror of it chilled her. Surely, surely, she thought,
+the hidden tragedy must now unmask; because of its very awfulness, it
+must! That the prince should be thus oblivious of such a knowledge, and
+yet kneeling there, made the scene ghastly beyond words.
+
+"I remember him," said Maximilian softly, looking up to the others. "One
+of your orderlies, Colonel Lopez, I believe? Of course I remember him,
+for I see him often. He is always near me. Even to-day, on the llano,
+during the thickest of the battle, there he was at my stirrup, and there
+he must have fallen, in humble, unquestioning loyalty."
+
+Jacqueline drew back in relief, and she imagined that Lopez did also.
+Maximilian had forgotten the hacendado utterly.
+
+With a grunt of satisfaction the surgeon drew forth his forceps from the
+wound and dropped a bullet to the floor. Next he gently rolled the
+patient over on his back, and then it was that Jacqueline saw in
+Murguía's hand, in the hand that had been under him, a little ivory
+cross. Fainting, unconscious, he still clutched it, from Driscoll's
+leaving him on the battlefield until the present moment. By now the
+stains of his child's blood were washed away in his own. Jacqueline's
+quick eyes caught an inscription on the gold mounting, and leaning close
+she read the dead girl's name, "María de la Luz."
+
+With the gripping of the bullet and its extraction, or possibly at the
+sound of a voice--Maximilian's--the old man's eyes opened, and held the
+Emperor's in a deathly stare. Jacqueline watched the piercing beads grow
+smaller and smaller in their cavernous sockets, and all the while they
+seemed to concentrate their intense fire. The others, except Lopez,
+thought it delirium, but Jacqueline would have named it the very
+blackest hate. "This man will live!" she said to herself, and shuddered.
+
+Maximilian, seeing consciousness returned, spoke cheerily. "Ah, doctor,
+you will have him well and sound within a week, I know? Look to it, sir;
+a heroic veteran like this cannot be spared."
+
+A strange distortion wrapped the visage of suffering. "Could that be a
+smile?" Jacqueline wondered. But the Imperial party took its leave, and
+the tragedy lurking beneath was not revealed, as yet.
+
+Through the throng waiting outside the hospital to acclaim him again as
+a prince victorious, Maximilian led the two girls to their coach, and
+went with them to the convent of Santa Clara, where he asked that they
+be received as guests by the sisters. Here, in the comfortless
+_parloir_ of the retreat, he learned the reason of Jacqueline's
+daring journey from the capital.
+
+"I bring Your Highness," said she, "the most spiteful news my feeble sex
+can ever bring."
+
+Again the involuntary plea for fair tidings swept his face.
+
+"And, and that is, mademoiselle?"
+
+"'I told you so.'"
+
+Maximilan's cheeks paled to the marble whiteness of his brow. He had
+just heard the answer to the one question, to the one hope, of all
+Querétaro.
+
+"You, you mean Marquez?"
+
+"Yes." And then she told him, and seeing how stricken he was, her
+exasperation at his vain incapacity changed to pity for his breaking
+pride--which may be called his breaking heart.
+
+"But mademoiselle, I gave my empire into his keeping," he protested, as
+though such trust in a man of itself proved that man's constancy. But
+the messenger, but Truth, would not recant.
+
+"Then," moaned the Emperor suddenly, "Marquez is not coming back?"
+
+"Nor ever meant to, sire. Listen, Your Highness made him lieutenant of
+the Empire, and sent him to the capital for aid. Bien, he turned out the
+ministers. He broke into homes, and pillaged even the stanchest
+Imperialists. He heard that Puebla was besieged by a Liberal general,
+Porfirio Diaz, so instead of coming here, Marquez marches all his army
+down there. You will observe, sire, that he wanted the road kept open to
+Vera Cruz."
+
+"But why? Tell me!"
+
+"Ma foi, to sell the capital more easily. In any case to be able to save
+himself."
+
+"Sell the capital?"
+
+"Just a little patience, sire. Now what did Diaz do, but take Puebla by
+assault before Marquez could arrive? Then he turned on Marquez, and
+Marquez turned and ran. Oui, oui, sire, he _ran_, ran like the
+little ugly, skulking Leopard that he is. To cross a creek, he filled it
+with all the ammunition, and kept on running, leaving his army
+defenseless behind him. Groan if you must, sire; others have died in
+groans. But the Leopard had done this kind of thing before, it should
+have been remembered. He got back safely though, and squandered the army
+that might have relieved Querétaro to do it. Mon Dieu, what that panic
+must have been! One entire battalion surrendered to fifty guerrillas.
+Yet the Austrian cavalry, the Hungarians, and some others fought, fought
+with their sabres, and won victories too. Hélas, they only proved what
+might have been. They only proved how Marquez, if he had not hesitated,
+might perhaps have saved Puebla and destroyed the Liberals. As it was,
+they could only retreat, and hardly two thousand of them, ragged and
+bleeding and filthy, straggled back into Mexico during the next few
+days. Now they are besieged there. Oui, oui, _besieged_, by Diaz,
+by the army of the East, by twelve thousand Republicans, formerly called
+brigands. And inside is the Leopard, snarling as ever with his regency
+of terror. Oh no, he will not come to Querétaro. Bonté divine, he
+cannot. Nor would he. He still holds the capital--for sale."
+
+"No, no, mademoiselle, there you wrong him, surely. Or tell me, then,
+who would buy?"
+
+"Probably no one. At least not Santa Anna. The buyer must have an army."
+
+"My friend, this is a cruel jest."
+
+"Earnest enough, parbleu, to make the Leopard forget Querétaro, once he
+was safely away."
+
+"Then why doesn't he sell out to Diaz?"
+
+Jacqueline's eyes snapped contemptuously. "Young Diaz," she replied, "is
+not a fighter to buy what he can take. It's only a question of a few
+weeks."
+
+"Then by all that's mysterious, _who_ would buy? I cannot."
+
+"Of course you cannot. That is why Marquez wants you out of the way,
+sire. So he left you here. The Liberals will attend to that for him."
+
+"Then who will buy? Who? Who?"
+
+The blood shot into the girl's cheeks, and one small hand clenched
+tightly.
+
+"France--possibly," she said.
+
+The Emperor started as from an acute shock. His thoughts raced backward,
+then forward, gathering the whole heinous truth about the perfidy of
+Marquez.
+
+"And I," Jacqueline added calmly, though she was still flushed, "I have
+forwarded his offer to Napoleon."
+
+"You, mademoiselle? You, an accessory?"
+
+"To Your Imperial Highness's downfall? Ah no, sire! Your Highness is no
+longer a factor. Your August Majesty will be eliminated absolutely
+before Napoleon can reply to my despatch. As I said, the Liberals around
+Querétaro will attend to that. Your Highness has merely delayed the
+profit my country might have had from his abdication. Meantime Your
+Highness himself has made his own ruin inevitable. But I, sire, I would
+not see Marquez, nor receive a word from him, until we were actually
+besieged in the capital, and he beyond the hope of coming to Your
+Highness here. Now then, if Marquez only holds out until the army of
+France returns----"
+
+A deep sigh interrupted her. "No longer a factor," murmured the Emperor.
+Thus quickly, then, could the world take up its affairs again after his
+elimination!
+
+"Mademoiselle," he cried suddenly, generously, "you are--superb! Dear
+little Frenchwoman, you are, you are!"
+
+"Poof!" said Jacqueline. "But don't you see, sire," she hurried on
+eagerly, "that we will have to fight the Americans? Yes, yes, then they
+can no longer say they _drove_ us out."
+
+"Indeed they cannot. And I, among the first, and the most heartily, do
+wish you a warlike answer from that firebrand of a Napoleon. But tell
+me, why do you come to Querétaro? How did you come?"
+
+"How? Easily. All the guerrilla bands--except one, which I escaped--are
+concentrated either here or with Diaz."
+
+"And Marquez let you come, you who are so important to him now?"
+
+"As though he could help it, parbleu! My message to Napoleon was in my
+own cipher, and after he had sent it by a scout to Vera Cruz, I informed
+him that in it I had directed Napoleon to send his answer to me at
+Querétaro. Otherwise Marquez would have kept me in prison rather than
+let me go. But as it was, he assisted me through the Republican lines by
+a secret way he has arranged for his own escape, if need be. So----"
+
+"But why did you wish to come at all?"
+
+"Ma foi, as if I knew! A matter of conscience, I suppose."
+
+"Matters of conscience are usually riddles."
+
+"Like this one? Bien, I am still trying to get Your Highness to leave
+the country. But this time, sire, it is to save you."
+
+"To save me?"
+
+"Of course, on account of France."
+
+"Oh, on account of France?"
+
+"Why else? If--if anything happens to Maximilian, France will be blamed.
+Oh why, why did you not escape this morning, while the road was open?"
+
+For the first time during the interview the fire of high resolve leaped
+into the prince's eyes. "But could I, in honor?" he demanded sternly.
+"Think of the townspeople, abandoned to the Liberal fury. Their Emperor,
+mademoiselle, means to face the end with them, here, in Querétaro."
+
+The dignity of his catastrophe was already beginning to appeal to him,
+to exalt him, even as the vision of a Hapsburg winning his empire had so
+often done before.
+
+"But," protested the girl, "if they capture Your Highness, if they--if
+they hold you for trial?"
+
+She stopped, for Maximilian was laughing, and laughing heartily. The
+idea of hands laid on him, an Archduke of Austria--ha, he was grateful
+to her. Its very absurdity had given him the first relaxation of a laugh
+in months.
+
+"Nevertheless," persisted Jacqueline, whose heritage of a revolution was
+an obstinate bundle of these same absurdities, "nevertheless, I had
+hoped to save Your Highness with my news, since it is news that leaves
+no hope. Why not, then, escape? Treat for terms, do anything, only save
+your followers and--yourself, sire?"
+
+But she found it impossible to sway him from this, his latest conceit.
+His new rôle, the more desperate it looked, only ensnared him as the
+more worthy. He contemplated the end serenely. As a military captain he
+was culling laurels against theatric odds. His heroic loyalty to a lost
+cause, with perhaps a little martyrdom (of personal inconvenience), how
+these would count and be not denied when he should return to his destiny
+in Europe!
+
+His was even a mood to consort with lofty traits in others, and in a
+kind of poetic ecstasy he thought of Jacqueline's steadfast devotion to
+her country's glory. And he was moved again by the vague, chivalrous
+longing to bend the knee, to do her some knightly service. But--yes, he
+seemed to remember, there _was_ such a service to be done, yet and
+yet--no, he had forgotten.
+
+Then quite curiously, yet still without remembering, he dwelt in reverie
+on that man named Driscoll who had so filled the morning with valiant
+deeds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+VENDETTA'S HALF SISTER, BETTER BORN
+
+
+  "When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will
+  be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen."
+                                                        --_Emerson_.
+
+
+Just outside Driscoll's tent, under the stars, a fragrant steak was
+broiling. The colonel's mozo had learned the magic of the forked stick,
+and he manipulated his wand with a conscious pride, so that the low
+sizzling of flesh and flame was as the mystic voice in some witch's
+brew. There were many other tents on the plain, a blurred city of
+whitish shadows against the night, and there were many other glowing
+coals to mark where the earth lay under the stars, and the witching
+murmur, the tantalizing charm of each was--supper. In this wise, and
+thinking themselves very patient, men were waiting for other men to
+starve to death. The besieged had tried, but they had not again cut
+through to food.
+
+In Driscoll's tent there was a galaxy of woolen-shirted warriors, a
+constellation of quiescent Berserkers. For they were Missouri colonels,
+except one, who being a Kansan, required no title. They were
+tobacco-chewing giants, famous for expectoration. Except Meagre Shanks,
+who tilted his inevitable black cigar now toward one eye, now toward the
+other. Except the Storm Centre, who fondly closed his palm over his cob
+meerschaum and felt its warmth and seemed far away, a dangerous poet.
+Except Old Brothers and Sisters, most austere of Wesleyans, who had
+neither pipe nor quid. He was cleaning his pistols. They were men hewn
+for mighty deeds, but--cringe must we all before the irony that neither
+life nor romance may dodge--it was not a mighty deed which that night
+was to exact of them, which yet they were brave enough to do, though
+sorry the figures they thought they made.
+
+Politics was their theme, since men, though busy with war and death,
+must yet relieve their statesmen, especially after supper, and neatly
+arrange the Tariff, Resumption, or whatever else. Like oracles the
+ex-Confederates held forth that the Yankees had only driven out the
+French to march in themselves, and so tutor the Mexicans in
+self-government. To which the Kansan ventured a minority opinion, though
+being thus a judge of the bench, as it were, he had no need of the oaths
+he took.
+
+"Why God help me and to thunder with you, the United States ain't aiming
+at any protectorate. You unreconstructed Rebs simply cain't and won't
+see good faith in the Federal government!"
+
+"Carpet bags?" Driscoll murmured sweetly. It was the majority opinion.
+
+"Yes sir'ee," and Daniel took the cue as a bit in the mouth, "there's
+blood on the face of the moon up there, _acerrima proximorum odia_,
+by God sir! Look at the troops at our elections! Look at the Drake Test
+Oath! Look at----" Mr. Boone was fast getting vitriolic, in heavy
+editorial fashion, when a famished face, a wolfish face, appeared
+between the flaps of the tent. "Look at--_that!_"
+
+Politics vanished, war and death resumed their own.
+
+The whole mess stared.
+
+"Sth-hunderation, it's an Imperialist!" lisped Crittenden of Nodaway. He
+pointed at the newcomer's uniform, which was of the Batallon del
+Emperador.
+
+"Well, bring him on in," said Driscoll to the pickets gripping the man
+by either arm.
+
+"He was trying to pass through our lines," one explained. "And when we
+stopped him, he begged hard to be brought to the Coronel Gringo, that
+is, to you, señor."
+
+The mess turned curiously on Driscoll. Why a half dead soldier of the
+Batallon del Emperador should have a preference as to his jailer was
+beyond them. But they were yet more puzzled to hear Driscoll address the
+prisoner by name.
+
+"See here, Murgie," he said, "is this the occasion Rodrigo meant when he
+talked about my meeting you soon? Is it? Come, crawl out of the grass.
+Show us what you're up to. No, wait, feed first. There's plenty left."
+
+But the old man had not once glanced toward the table. Whatever the
+pangs of hunger, another torment was uppermost.
+
+"What do you mean by this," Boone demanded, as though personally
+offended, "you've got the hospital color, dull lead on yellow? Here,
+take a drink. Yes, I know, it's mescal, out-and-out embalmed deviltry
+that no self-respecting drunkard would touch, but Lord A'mighty, man,
+you need _something!_"
+
+Murguía shook his head irritably. Offers of what his body craved were
+annoying hindrances before the craving of his soul. He twitched himself
+free of the sentinels, and limped painfully to where Driscoll sat. He
+wore no coat, but his green pantaloons with their crimson stripes were
+rolled to the knee, and the white calzoncillos beneath flapped against
+his skeleton ankles. His feet were bare, the better for an errand of
+stealth in the night. He was a pitiful spectacle, yet a repulsive, and
+the Americans despised themselves for the strange impulse they had to
+kick him out like a dog. They watched him wonderingly as he tried to
+speak. He panted from his late rough handling by the sentry, and his
+half-closed wound gave excruciating pain. The muscles of his face jerked
+horribly, but his will was tremendous, merciless, and at last the cords
+of the jaw knotted and hardened.
+
+"To-morrow morn--morning," he began, "the Emperor will fight. It is
+arranged for--for daybreak, señores. To to fight--to break
+through--to--to ESCAPE!"
+
+"W'y then," exclaimed Harry Collins, the Kansan, "_good_ for him!"
+
+The parson snatched off his brass-bowed spectacles, and his brow lowered
+fiercely over his cherubic eyes.
+
+"And so _you_ had to come and tell us?" he demanded.
+
+But the traitorous old man had not the smallest thought of his shame,
+nor could have.
+
+"You--you will let him _escape?_" he challenged them in frantic
+anger.
+
+The mess stole abashed glances at one another. They would, they knew
+well enough, have to act on this information. But they were men for a
+fair fight, and they had no stomach to rob the besieged of a last
+desperate chance. For a moment they were enraged against the informer.
+
+"We'll just keep him here," said one.
+
+"Yes, till morning. Then he'll tell no one else, and _we_ won't.
+Poor old Maxie!"
+
+"Sure," ejaculated Collins, "give Golden Whiskers a show!"
+
+The wolfish light in the sunken eyes quickened to a flash. Lust for
+Maximilian's capture turned to chagrin.
+
+"Señores, señores mios," he whined, "you do not know yet, you do not
+know, that if Maximilian is not taken----"
+
+"Ah, here now," growled Clay of Carroll, "you needn't worry so much.
+He'll be driven back into the town all right, I reckon."
+
+"And what then, señor? No, you do not know. Your general,
+señores--General Escobedo--has orders to--to raise the siege."
+
+"_What?_"
+
+"Si señor, to _raise_ the siege! The orders are from San Luis, from
+the Señor Presidente there. He--he thinks the siege has lasted long
+enough."
+
+"Great Scot!"
+
+"Precisamente. Yes, it would look like--defeat. It would, if--you don't
+capture Maximilian by daybreak."
+
+Meagre Shanks brought his boot soles wrathfully to the ground, kicking
+the stool back of him. His whole mien exuded a newspaper man's contempt
+for faking. "Now then, young fellow," and he shook a long finger at the
+ancient Mexican, "here you know all that Maximilian knows. And here
+again you know all that the Presidente knows. All right, s'pose you just
+tell us now more or less about how mighty little you _do_ know?"
+
+"It's--it's like a message from El Chaparrito," the parson demurred.
+
+"From Shorty?" Daniel almost roared. "Oh come, Clem, don't you go to
+mixing up the unseen and all-seeing guardian of the República with this
+dried-up, wild-eyed specimen of a dried-up--of, of an old rascal. No one
+ever hears from El Chaparrito 'less there's a crisis on, and is there
+one on now? You know there ain't. If there was, someone would be hearing
+from Shorty--Driscoll there, prob'bly. But there ain't. Shucks, this old
+codger is only plum' daft. Aren't you now"--he appealed querulously to
+Murguía, "aren't you just crazy--_say?_"
+
+But even as the Americans breathed easier, they stared aghast at the old
+man.
+
+"Crazy?" he repeated. "Crazy?" he fairly shrieked, clutching Boone by
+the sleeve. "No, I am not! Señor, say that I am not! No, no, no, I am
+not crazy, not yet--not--not before it is done, not--before----"
+
+"God!" Boone half whispered. "Look at his eyes now!"
+
+The old man checked himself in trembling. No help for him lay in human
+testimony. But there was his own will, which had driven his frail body.
+Now as a demon it gripped his mind and held it from the brink.
+
+"Go, out of here, all of you!" he burst on them. "Go, I have more to
+tell--more, more, more, do you understand?--but I'll tell it to no one,
+to no one, unless to Mister Dreescol."
+
+A raving maniac or not, canards or not, there might be in all this what
+was vital. The Americans stirred uneasily, in a kind of awe, and at a
+nod from Driscoll they left the tent.
+
+Murguía grew quieter at once. His faculties tightened on the effort
+before him. He was alone with the man who would understand, so he
+thought; who had the same reason to understand, so he thought.
+
+Driscoll had shared nothing of the late emotions. He had smoked
+impassively. His interest was of the coldest. Only his eyes, narrowed
+fixedly on the Mexican, betrayed the heed he gave. When the others were
+gone, he uncrossed his legs, and crossed them the other way, and thrust
+the corncob into his pocket.
+
+"Sit down!"
+
+Murguía dropped to the nearest camp stool.
+
+"Now then, you with your dirty little affairs, why do you come to me?"
+
+Murguía leaned forward over the table between them, his bony arms among
+candles and a litter of earthen plates. The odor of meat assailed his
+nostrils. But the hunger in his leer had no scent for food.
+
+"This _is_ the time I meant, señor, when Rodrigo told you that you
+would see me."
+
+"About the ivory cross? But I gave you that a month ago."
+
+"A month ago--a month, wasted! How much sooner I would have come, only
+another had to be--persuaded--first."
+
+"Oh, had he? Then it's not about the cross? And this other? Suppose I
+guess? He was--he was the red-haired puppy, my old friend the Dragoon,
+who carried you off wounded that day? Humph, the very first guess, too!"
+
+Murguía darted at him a look of uneasy admiration.
+
+"I would have told Your Mercy, anyway," he said, half cringing. "Yes, he
+is Colonel Lopez."
+
+"And you 'persuaded' him?"
+
+"Events did. Since the siege began I've tried, I've worked, to convince
+him that these same events would happen. Ugh, the dull fool, he had to
+wait for them."
+
+"I can almost guess again," said Driscoll, as though it were some
+curious game, "but if you'd just as soon explain----"
+
+"Listen! You remember two years ago at my hacienda, when Lopez sentenced
+you to death? But why did he sentence you to death, why, señor?"
+
+"That's an easy one. It was because he didn't want my offer of
+Confederate aid to reach Maximilian."
+
+"But why not? I will tell you. It was because he was trying even then to
+buy the Republic's good will, in case--in case anything should happen.
+But he was _afraid_ to change, the coward! He must first
+_know_ which side would win. I am his orderly--_he_ knows why
+I am--and I've tried to drive it into his thick wits that the Empire is
+damned and has been, but he still doubted, even when we were starving
+again, even when every crumb was gathered into the common store, even
+when it was useless to shoot men for not declaring hidden corn, even
+when forced loans were vain, since money could no longer buy. No señor,
+even with proofs like these, Miguel Lopez was stubborn."
+
+"I'd prob'bly guess he was a loyal scoundrel, after all."
+
+"More yet, he has fought bravely, making himself a marked man in the
+Republic's eyes."
+
+"Then why----"
+
+"Because so long as the Empire had a chance, or he thought it had, he
+hoped for more coddling. You see, señor, he thought Marquez was coming
+back with relief. There was that--that Frenchwoman you know of--who
+brought news from the capital. But Maximilian dared not make the news
+public. He forged a letter instead, a letter from Marquez, and he had
+its contents proclaimed. Marquez had been delayed, so all Querétaro
+read, but he had at last destroyed the Liberals in his path, and was
+then hurrying here with his victorious army. This false hope blinded
+Lopez with the others in there. But when Marquez did not come, when
+utter demoralization set in, when we were a starving town against
+thirty-five thousand outside, when there were scores of deserters every
+day, when any man who talked of surrender was executed, and still no
+Marquez, then Lopez began----"
+
+"I see, he began to be persuaded?"
+
+"Still, he wanted to be a general. But the other generals forced
+Maximilian not to promote him."
+
+"So he was disappointed?"
+
+"And persuaded, señor. The sally was already planned for this morning,
+but Lopez argued obstacles, and so got it postponed until to-morrow
+morning. He wanted to--to act on his--persuasion. And that is why,"
+Murguía got to his feet and limped around the table to Driscoll, "and
+that is why," he ended in a croaking whisper, "why I am here!"
+
+"And the red puppy, how near here did _he_ come with you?"
+
+Again Murguía darted at his questioner that uneasy glance of admiration.
+
+"Lopez is waiting between the lines," he replied. "As to our own lines,
+we passed them easily, since Lopez commands the reserve brigade and
+places the sentinels himself around La Cruz monastery."
+
+"Oh, does he?" Driscoll whistled softly. "But what's your plan?" He put
+the question sympathetically, which disturbed Don Anastasio vastly more
+than the American's peremptory tone in the beginning. "What's your
+plan?" he asked again, gently coaxing.
+
+Murguía hesitated. This polite drawing-room interest was the most
+ironical of encouragement for villainy. Driscoll frowned impatiently,
+but at once he was smiling again. He placidly filled his corncob, and a
+moment later, his gaze piercing the tobacco smoke, he said, "Then I'll
+tell you. You're here to make a dicker, you and your tool between the
+lines. The monastery of La Cruz on top of the bluff is the citadel of
+Querétaro. Maximilian has his quarters there. The troops there are the
+reserve brigade. This puppy, this mongrel, commands the reserve brigade.
+He places the sentinels. And you are his orderly.--Oh, I haven't
+forgotten how he let you off that time he condemned me!--So now you are
+his orderly, for your own reasons and his. And here you are, talking
+mysteriously about _capturing_ Maximilian. But you don't mean that,
+snake. You are here to _sell_ him! Howsoever," and smiling a little
+at the stilted phrasing, Driscoll paused and delicately rammed the
+tobacco tighter in the bowl, "howsoever, Murgie, you've come to the
+wrong market. No, there's no demand for Maximilians just now, not in
+this booth. But why in blazes didn't you go to Escobedo? With his
+Shylock beard, I reckon _he'd_ take a flyer in human flesh."
+
+"I was going to him, but I came to you first, to take us there, to take
+Lopez and myself, I--I thought you would manage it all, because
+you--Your Mercy is the strongest, the most resourceful----"
+
+"Resourceful enough, eh, to dodge the bullets you had fixed up for me
+once? Thanks, Murgie, but I liked your attentions then better than your
+slimy advances now. By the way, how are you going to get to Escobedo?"
+
+The tone was honey itself.
+
+Murguía gasped, yet not so much to find himself a prisoner, as to find
+himself mistaken in the American.
+
+"Now maybe," Driscoll suggested, "maybe you'll be wondering yourself why
+you bring your dirty little affairs to me? Lopez may be an open book,
+but you seem to've read _me_ wrong. Prob'bly the language is
+foreign."
+
+Murguía's jaw dropped, and he gaped as one who beholds the collapse of
+high towering walls. It was his system of life, of motives calculated,
+of humanity weighed. It was the whole fabric of hate and passions which
+quivered and crashed and flattened in a chaos of dust before his wildly
+staring eyes.
+
+"You mean, señor, you mean you do not want--as well, as _I!_--to
+bring to his end this libertine, this thief of girlhood, this prince who
+scatters death, who scatters shame, this--this----"
+
+"Man alive, you're screaming! Stop it!"
+
+With his nails the old man combed the froth from his lips.
+
+"But you too have cause," he cried, "cause not so heavy, but cause
+enough, as well as I! There was my daughter, my little girl! With you
+there is that French wo----"
+
+He stopped, for he thought he heard the sharp click of teeth. But
+Driscoll was only grave.
+
+"Well, go on," he said. "But--speak for your daughter only."
+
+"I can't go on. I won't go on," Murguía burst out desperately, and flung
+up his arms. "If you don't understand already, then I can't make you.
+It's useless. A book? You're a stone! But any other, who had a heart for
+suffering, in your place would----"
+
+"Oh shut up, Murgie!" cried Driscoll wearily, but in something akin to
+supplication.
+
+With the serpent's wisdom, the tempter struck no more on that side. His
+fangs were not for the blighted lover. What, though, of the soldier?
+
+"No one doubts, señor," he whined unctuously, "that Your Mercy is loyal
+to the Republic. So it cannot be that Y'r Mercy knows----"
+
+"See here, Murgie, I'm getting sleepy. But I'll find you a comfortable
+tent, with plenty to eat, and a polite guard----"
+
+"Señor," stormed the old man, "I tell you you don't know what this means
+to the Republic. Maximilian will escape, no matter the cost. At daybreak
+there is to be a concentrated attack on some point in your lines; but
+where, nobody knows except Miramon. Then Maximilian will cut through
+with the cavalry. The infantry will follow, if it can. And after them,
+the artillery. You Republicans may not even know it until too late,
+because meantime you will be fighting the townspeople, thinking you are
+fighting the whole army."
+
+Driscoll roused himself suddenly. "The townspeople?"
+
+"Si señor, they are to be a decoy. Some volunteered, the rest were
+drafted. They have been armed, but they are only to be killed, they are
+only to draw the Republican strength, while the Emperor and the army
+escape."
+
+Driscoll sprang from his seat, in an agitation that was Murguía's first
+hope.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me," he demanded, "that this Maximilian who makes
+speeches about not deserting intends now to sacrifice these poor
+helpless devils? Prove it!"
+
+Murguía had touched neither lover nor soldier. But what man was here, in
+boots and woolen shirt, puffing angrily at a corncob, yet sitting in
+judgment supreme on the proud Hapsburg himself? Blindly stumbling,
+Murguía had touched the inexplicable man who was of stone, and the
+baffled fiend that was in him leaped up with a cry of glee.
+
+"To prove it?" he cried, "Ai, then Lopez shall walk with you in our
+outer trenches. For in them you shall see the doomed townsmen
+themselves, a thousand townsmen, sleeping there until the dawn.
+Afterward, when Maximilian is safe, they who are still alive will be
+free to surrender."
+
+"And then----" But Driscoll knew the temper of the siege. What with the
+chief prize lost, there would be scant mercy for surrendered townsmen.
+
+"God in heaven," he muttered fervently, "if there's any to suffer, it
+might as well be the guilty one, and a thousand times better one than
+one thousand! A man's a man, or alleged to be!--Murgie, you wait here,
+I'm going to call the others."
+
+The others came, and heard. It was the court en banc, five Missourians
+and a Kansan. And the culprit was a Cæsar. But they hewed forth their
+Justice as rugged and huge, and as true, as would the outlaw, Michel
+Angelo. Like him, they were their own law. Nor were they nice gentlemen,
+these Homeric men who spat tobacco. Finding their goddess pandered to by
+those who were nice gentlemen, and finding the gift of these a pretty
+scarf over her eye, they roughly tore it away. For them she was not that
+kind of a woman.
+
+"W'y, this prince is no Christian," Crittenden announced in querulous
+discovery.
+
+"One thousand loyally dying for their sovereign," Daniel mused, his
+romantic soul wavering. "Sho!" he cried the instant after, "that thing's
+out-dated!"
+
+"And the prince there----" began the Kansan angrily.
+
+"May just go--to--the--devil!"
+
+All swung round on one of their number. It was the parson himself who
+had pronounced sentence.
+
+Then they set out under the stars to attend to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+UNDER A SPANISH CLOAK
+
+
+  "What misadventure is so early up,
+  That calls our person from our morning's rest?"
+                                --_Romeo and Juliet_.
+
+
+Just within their own bivouac four Missourians waited with eight horses.
+Driscoll and Boone, and the small limping shadow of Murguía between
+them, went on outside the sentry line toward the Alameda. When they
+returned, a stranger accompanied them, a little distance apart.
+
+"It's true," Driscoll whispered to those who had staid. "The trenches
+are filled with townsmen. _He_ took me."
+
+The Americans glanced once the stranger's way, and grunted. He was a
+large man, hidden to the eyes in a Spanish cloak. For all the charity of
+darkness, he seemed ill at ease, and held himself from them, a marked
+figure, alone. A leprosy in himself tainted his every thought. He would
+not willingly come near any man. He understood English, unhappily now
+for him, and Boone's warning as they mounted seared like vitriol. "Look
+out, Harry, don't touch the filthy skut! It'll take the rotting of death
+to clean your fingers." After that, even Murguía drew involuntarily away
+from the stranger.
+
+They circled the town widely, having only Republican challenges to
+quiet, and they dismounted under the trees which shade the valley to the
+northeast, between the Sangremal, or mound of La Cruz, and the
+besiegers' range of hills. Here, under La Cruz's steep bluff, the
+Republican general-in-chief had his quarters, and here he kept a hawk's
+jealous watch on the walls above, where slept his country's invader.
+
+Open battle is clear honor, so reckoned; but it takes a brave man to
+dive for a pearl in slime. Driscoll was the one to conduct Murguía and
+his gloomy companion into the presence of General Escobedo. When he
+rejoined the other five outside the tent, he was alone.
+
+"Well, come on," he said as he mounted under the trees. "We needn't stay
+for the rest of it, thank God."
+
+For a while they rode in silence back toward their camp. They passed
+under the aqueduct and entered the open plain. Then the parson stretched
+out his hand to the pommel of Driscoll's saddle.
+
+"Well?" he ventured softly.
+
+"Well, Clem, it's done."
+
+The others crowded their horses nearer.
+
+"I want to tell you all," Driscoll abruptly began again. "I want to tell
+you that I've just seen the strangest thing of my whole life, right back
+there in that tent. I--well, it's simply flattened me out!"
+
+"You mean Lopez, Din?" one asked tentatively.
+
+"Lopez? No, no, there's nothing strange in him. Any low hound will sell
+out to save his hide. No, Dan, I mean the other. I mean the old man.
+He's the one who used to run the blockade off Mobile, and a
+whiter-livered, more contemptible old grandmother I never hope to see
+anywhere, no, never! Yet not a month ago, the day of that Cimatario
+scrimmage, I found him on the battlefield, and he had been wounded. But
+he didn't seem to know it. He didn't even seem to know that the shells
+were still banging all around him."
+
+"An _old_ coward, too!" someone muttered.
+
+"But wait. He used to be one thing worse, one thing more, than a coward.
+He was a miser, and such a miser that he _made_ himself face
+danger. You should have seen him running a blockade, with the Yankees
+chasing behind. He trembled--I tell you, he trembled like a withered
+cottonwood leaf on a broken stem. Yet he whined against stoking with
+turpentine, because it cost a little more. I'd 'a' thought, I did then,
+that the miser was in his bones until the last trumpet. But to-night,
+back in that tent just now----"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, he _refused_ money! He refused _gold_! He didn't seem
+to know what it was, any more than he did bullets a month ago. Escobedo
+asked him his price, and shoved a glittering heap across the table at
+him. You saw how he acted when we offered him something to eat? Well, he
+looked the same way at the gold. He acted impatient. He didn't want to
+see anything except Lopez. But you'd have called it a miser's eagerness,
+the way he watched that Lopez. Only a miser don't exult when it's
+someone else who pockets the money."
+
+"Maybe they'll divide?"
+
+"Not much, because Murgie could have had his share over and above. No,
+it wasn't that. It wasn't the gold. He was greedy--for a soul! He wanted
+to see Lopez _bought_, and no hitch. And when it was done, he wet
+those catfish lips of his with his tongue. I believe the devil in hell
+must look just that way when he gets some poor sinner. But to think of
+that old skinflint, to think of that old feeble cowardly shark not
+_knowing_ danger, not _knowing_ money----"
+
+"Come, Din," the parson's blessed, cheery voice interrupted, "let's
+hurry back and wash our hands. Then we'll _all_ feel better."
+
+While the six Americans rode gloomily away from what they had done, and
+from their own thoughts as they best could, a stealthy company was
+forming under the trees among the tents of the Republican general. After
+a time the seeming spectres began to move in unison, an undulating wave
+that spread as the grayish shadow of a low hanging cloud. The dim
+figures slowly swept the little space of valley, on toward the steep
+slope of La Cruz, and soon they were climbing, silently creeping, nearer
+and nearer the dark walls above.
+
+Two seemed the leaders, and the third limped close behind. But one of
+the first two held a pistol ever near the heart of his companion, who
+was wrapped to the eyes in a Spanish cloak.
+
+"Who goes----" cried an Imperialist sentry.
+
+"Your colonel, fool!" he of the cloak stopped him short. "I, Miguel
+Lopez. I am changing the guard. Return now to your barracks and get what
+sleep you can before morning. One of these men with me will take your
+place."
+
+In like manner each later challenge was satisfied, and so on to a
+cannon-battered crevice in the wall. The spectres passed through the gap
+there into a field of graves on the mound's level summit. The earth had
+an uncanny softness under their tread. The plots were mostly fresh, of
+slain Imperialists still keeping their rank according to battalion. But
+the living, the Reserve Brigade, were here as well, sleeping over the
+dead. They stirred and grumbled at being disturbed, but thought then no
+more of the intruders. The secret plans for the daybreak attack
+explained everything. Their colonel, whose voice they knew, was shifting
+forces in preparation. But when the dawn came, they awoke to find their
+weapons gone, and themselves defenseless prisoners.
+
+Many of the spectral troop fell away to hold the cemetery, but the rest
+kept on, and entered the monastery garden. Here there was a battery of
+one gun, whose muzzle pointed the way to the Republican camp. Without a
+sound the Imperialist gunners were replaced by Republicans. The cannon
+was one captured during the Cimatario fight. It was called "La
+Tempestad," and bore an inscription, "The Last Argument of Nations." Its
+new possessors turned the muzzle squarely on the monastery, not fifty
+yards away, where Maximilian lay then asleep.
+
+The shadowy host did not linger in the monastery itself. They swept
+through hastily, in at the garden entrance, along the corridor, and out
+by the great portico door upon La Cruz Plaza. They had passed the
+citadel. The town lay before them. But in the Plaza were more cannon,
+which had been taken from the trenches and massed for the supreme
+effort. They lay silent, under the silent bells of the church. They lay
+under the giant Cross of the Apparition, which was adorned by the
+Inditos with garlands in vague memory of pagan rites on that very spot.
+They lay under the splendid Arabian palms. They lay among defenders. To
+take them was like prowling with a torch among broken casks of
+gunpowder. Not a shot must be fired until the thing was done. Otherwise,
+a quick second shot was to find the heart of Lopez. So Lopez was
+exceedingly cautious. However, he commanded here. He was the Emperor's
+favorite. Squad after squad, the drowsy Imperialists moved off, letting
+the strangers relieve them. So the critical work was achieved, even as
+day appeared over the eastern hills. Then he who had kept so close to
+Lopez put his revolver away.
+
+"Your bargain is fulfilled, señor," he said. "Accordingly, here's the
+paper I was to give you. It is your safe conduct throughout the
+Republic. You are free. Go!"
+
+Lopez clutched the thing that meant his life, but as his fingers
+tightened over it, his first greed vanished. He stared about him
+uncertainly. The Plaza swarmed with men. They were the gray battalion he
+had led there. In the dawning light they were still gray. They were the
+Supremos Poderes de la República. De la República? Yes, of the enemy,
+and he had brought them. But it was as though he had just awakened, and
+found them there. The enemy? The enemy was in La Cruz! With a sharp cry,
+he turned and ran back into the monastery. He brushed aside the hateful
+gray uniforms. He ran panting up the stone steps. In the dark hall above
+he stopped at a cell door, and pounded, and tugged frantically at its
+latch.
+
+"Señor, awake! Hurry! We are betrayed! Hurry! Escape--escape----"
+
+Within came a startled sleepy voice, "What, what's--" which changed at
+once to reproving dignity. "Can it be?--Lopez!"
+
+"But señor--sire--the Chinacos, the Republicans, they are here already!"
+
+"Colonel Lopez!" In its shocked surprise the voice was edged with
+rebuke. "Man, man, where are your years of training near my person? One
+would think you some boorish night-watchman."
+
+Lopez outside the door dropped his hands, and fell abjectedly silent, as
+servilely abashed in his lapse of etiquette as though he stood the
+traitor unmasked.
+
+"Now then, Miguel," spoke the Emperor more kindly, "go to General Mejía
+and the others. Let them have the goodness to attend me here."
+
+Lopez turned on down the corridor, stopped at the doors of Generals
+Mejía and Castillo, and the Prince Salm-Salm. At each he tapped lightly,
+as one dazed, and announced that the enemy surrounded them. Then,
+remembering, he fled.
+
+Within the thick walls that narrowed his state into a friar's cell,
+Maximilian rose from his iron couch. "So," he sighed, almost in relief,
+"Destiny means it to end in this way." He was calm, and he attired
+himself carefully. He chose his general's uniform, with its rich dark
+blue, and scarlet cordon. Nor did he forget the star of some royal
+order, which to common men seemed a cotillion favor. When he should step
+forth that morning, it was to play a world rôle. The prince must be
+serene in the moment of trial. The nations must know that Destiny had
+him in hand. And musing thus, he parted his golden beard with dainty
+precision. Within a month Europe would acclaim him reverently. He noted
+that his high boots glistened. Mejía and the other two, hurrying to him,
+fell back in admiration to behold how placid he was.
+
+"Gentlemen," said he, "to leave here, or die! There's nothing else."
+
+He noticed a soft heap at the door, and picked it up.
+
+"Lopez's cloak, a disguise!" he exclaimed. "God bless the poor fellow,
+he left it for me."
+
+He wrapped the garment about him, took his pistols, and led the way. In
+the dark corridor down stairs a Republican sentry mistook the cool,
+commanding figure for one of his own generals, and presented arms.
+Maximilian gravely saluted, and with his three companions passed out.
+
+The Plaza was a blurred scene of confusion. Men were awakening to find
+their arms gone, and themselves covered by muskets. Shots had been
+fired. Curses abounded. Entire companies were being marched away as
+prisoners. Republican officers either thought that Maximilian was Lopez,
+from his cloak and height, or were too distracted to notice. It is
+possible, too, that the victors would have had him escape, that they
+might not have the trouble of his disposal, and that they preferred that
+he should not thrust it on them. At any rate, he and the three behind
+pushed their way undisturbed through cannon and brown stolid men in
+gray, and reached the spot where the Plaza narrows into a street that
+gently slopes down into the town. But here a guard was posted.
+
+"Pues, hombre, they're civilians, let them pass."
+
+Maximilian turned on him who spoke, and beheld the blackmailer, scout,
+deserter, Don Tiburcio. He wore now the uniform of a Republican
+explorador. His crossed eye gleamed so humorously up at the Emperor, it
+might have been insolence, but it was only the proffered sharing of a
+jest. His matter-of-fact tone prevailed, and the guard stood aside. The
+four passed on down the street. In comical melancholy Don Tiburcio
+looked after them, and then he perceived that a fifth had slipped by the
+guard and was following closely behind.
+
+"The saints help us--help _him_, it's Murguía!" Tiburcio muttered
+in horror. He recalled the night when María de la Luz was found dead.
+
+The old man, coatless, barefoot, in his pantaloons of Imperial green,
+limped desperately to keep pace with the great strides of the four
+ahead. The broad crimson stripe down each pant leg would break,
+straighten, break again, in bizarre accord, with every painful step. It
+was a lope, and he more like a starved wolf, a lean, persistent shadow,
+ever ready for the chance to spring.
+
+By hastening down into the town, Maximilian thought to rally what forces
+were there for a last stand; or, to be more exact, for a last tableau.
+The end of his empire must have éclat. He found the town panic-stricken,
+since all could see the Republic's standard over the towers of La Cruz.
+Dumfounded officers had gotten to housetops, and were using their
+glasses. They beheld the enemy as busy as scurrying ants on the
+surrounding hills. Clouds of men from every point were sweeping across
+the llano toward the town. The advance were already in the narrow
+streets. Killing, looting, had begun. Clanging bells, hoof beats, yells,
+musketry, and in the distance deep-voiced cannon! The Emperor and his
+three companions, with the malignant shadow hovering ever near,
+quickened their course through the town. They paused only to dispatch
+couriers. Miramon, when found, was to come at all speed with every
+possible man to the Cerro de las Campanas. They gained the adobe suburbs
+on the western edge, leaving behind the fearsome rising tide of human
+sound. An officer forced the Emperor to mount his horse. Many joined
+their flight. They crossed broken fields, and reached the summit of the
+wedge-shaped rock called las Campanas. Close behind, emerging from the
+town, were the first pursuers, who quickly grew to a thick black fringe
+around the hill. Shells were falling. The heavens seemed to flower
+vengefully, with the Campanas knoll as the one focus. The adobe stockade
+crowning the top was soon packed with fugitives, until those within,
+like shipwrecked creatures on a raft, barred out those still coming. The
+whisper spread that in the town Miramon had been taken shot through the
+cheek after shooting many others. The panic grew. Men knew themselves at
+bay. They recognized the deathtrap. On the outlying heights the cannon
+had their range. Grenades, bombs, grape, and canister, fell as hail.
+
+The Emperor turned to General Mejía.
+
+"Could we cut our way out?" he asked.
+
+Mejía put down his glasses. He paused, then shook his head.
+
+Straightway an orderly with a white flag was sent down the hill. But the
+firing did not cease for that. Maximilian, seeing that he could make no
+terms for those around him, seeing them fall by scores instead, himself
+followed the orderly; and following him, was the ever faithful shadow.
+
+From out the dark fringe a man on a white horse, a black bearded man
+with monstrous flapping ears, General Escobedo, rode forth to meet the
+Hapsburg. Then Maximilian forgot the eyes of the world, and thought of
+her who had suffered with him, who had suffered more than he, to hazard
+this, their dream.
+
+"It is our throne, Charlotte," he murmured, and gave up his sword.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+EL CHAPARRITO
+
+
+  "Meagre were his looks,
+  Sharp misery had worn him to the bones."
+                          --_Romeo and Juliet._
+
+
+A few days later Jacqueline and Berthe attended a performance at the
+Teatro de Iturbide. It was the first held there since the beginning of
+the siege, and to the place late foes were thronging eagerly in what
+seemed a most inordinate thirst for amusement. The playhouse was without
+a roof. Its metal covering had been widely sown in the shape of bullets,
+and only a canvas overhead kept out the sun. But the broiling pit was
+filled, as well as circling tier over tier of loges, and in the street a
+great crowd jostled and surged, like people who stare at the dead walls
+of a jail because a man is being hanged inside. If the curious cannot
+have both Time and Space to their liking, then the more ghoulish will
+gorge themselves on the coincidence of Time alone. "Now," they whisper
+awesomely, "his hands and feet are being strapped! What _must_ he
+be thinking this very instant, and we standing here?" So those outside
+the Teatro de Iturbide sweated patiently. In all evidence it was not an
+ordinary performance scheduled for that day.
+
+"Buzzards?" said Jacqueline, looking up and seeing their outspread wings
+shadowed on the canvas roof, "Fi donc, _that_ effect is long since
+shabby!" But it chilled her, nevertheless.
+
+The curtain was up. A drop, showing fields in green and a receding road
+in brown, filled the back. The actors seemed actors solely, and this
+idea persisted with the Frenchwoman, as with many another, throughout.
+Seven military characters arranged themselves in a kind of state on the
+unpainted, slanting stage. They might have been supernumeraries, like
+the "senators" in "Othello." At least their severe demeanor became them
+awkwardly. They wore uniforms, but not of appalling rank. He who
+presided was only a lieutenant colonel, the other six were captains.
+Before them, each on a square stool, sat two generals, one with a
+bandaged cheek. There were legal gentlemen in plain black, while guards
+at stiff attention here and there completed the grouping. Beyond any
+doubt, it was a trial scene. And to confirm the surmise, one of the
+legal gentlemen, a very peaceable appearing youth, arose and in the
+Republic's name demanded the lives of Miguel Miramon and Tomas
+Mejía--here he indicated the two generals--and with impressive cadence,
+also in the Republic's name, demanded likewise the life of Fernando
+Maximiliano de Hapsburgo. The lieutenant colonel and the captains
+knitted their seven tawny brows portentously, but they were not in the
+least astounded at such a very extraordinary request.
+
+There was no need of a theatrical production at all. Other Imperialists
+had not been so unnecessarily distinguished, as for instance, General
+Mendez, that ancient enemy of Régules and executioner of Republicans
+under the Black Decree. Caught the day Querétaro fell, he was shot in
+the back as a traitor. Yet he met a legal death. Taken in armed defiance
+of the Republic, identity established, the hollow square and shooting
+squad, such was the routine prescribed. But the lesser official relics
+of the Empire, six hundred in all, escaped generally with a few months
+of prison. The rank and file of the betrayed army had already melted
+away. But for the three arch-culprits a trial was deemed requisite, and
+President Juarez, in San Luis Potosi, so ordered. Hence the stage
+setting as above described.
+
+Maximilian was at first surprised. He had said to Escobedo, "I am ready
+to go whenever you can favor me with an escort to the coast, but first I
+require assurance that my loyal followers shall not suffer." But the
+Republican chief had smiled oddly, and locked him up. Later, however,
+Maximilian had seemed content. A trial for his life, that would add the
+last needed glamour to the prestige of his return to Europe. So he
+affably humored his captors, and was rewarded with humiliation--his
+judges could hardly be more obscure. So as he was genuinely sick abed,
+he got himself excused from playing his part in the Teatro Iturbide.
+
+The soi-disant Emperor had four conscientious defenders, chosen from
+Republican jurists, two of whom were then in San Luis to do what they
+might before Juarez. The other two spent eloquence and acumen on the
+court's seven tawny brows. Their first point came from Maximilian
+himself. It was complacent, this point. The naïveté of it was superb.
+
+"I am no longer Emperor," so the defense ran, "nor was I during the
+siege; because, before leaving the capital, I drew up my abdication,
+which was then countersigned by my ministers. However, it was not to
+take effect until I should fall prisoner."
+
+When the Republic recovered her breath, she felt in her amusement a
+wounded pride. This prince must think her very simple. So, she was to
+recognize the usurper's abdication after she had fought and suffered to
+take the usurper? A captured thief draws from his pockets a quit-claim
+deed to the plunder he has stolen, and giving it to the court, would
+therefore go free! The tragedy changed for a spell to comic opera. And
+matters were not helped greatly when next were invoked "the immunities
+and privileges which pertain under any and all circumstances to an
+archduke of Austria."
+
+Though handicapped by their client's arrogance, counsel yet did their
+utmost. They argued law and humanity, with tremulo effects. They prayed
+that "the greatest of victories be crowned by the greatest of pardons."
+But it was of no use. The bloodthirsty stripling persisted in the
+Republic's name. This Maximiliano was a Mexican. In many beautiful
+speeches the said Maximiliano had said so. Hence he could not evade
+responsibility to the laws of his adopted country. And there was, for
+instance, the law of 1862 concerning treason.
+
+Well, in a word, the three accused were straightway sentenced to death;
+and Escobedo, approving, named Sunday, June 16th, for the execution. It
+might be mentioned of this Escobedo that on two former occasions, when
+the circumstances were exactly reversed, Mejía had each time saved his
+life. Since Querétaro, there have been comments on the vigor of
+Escobedo's memory.
+
+"Poor pliant Prince Max," sighed Jacqueline, "he is still being
+influenced to stay in Mexico! Come, Berthe, we must make all speed to
+San Luis and see the Presidente."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the long hall of the Palacio Munícipal at San Luis Potosi, before the
+old-fashioned desk there, sat an Indian. He was low and squat and
+pock-marked, and there was an ugly scar, livid against yellow, across
+the upper lip. He had a large mouth, high cheek-bones, and swarthy skin
+with a copperish tinge. He was a pure-blooded Indian. At twelve he did
+not know a word of Spanish. His race, the Zapotecas of Oaxaca, had all
+but been extinguished by the Conquest. Except for the ungainly black he
+wore--excepting, too, his character--he might have been a peon, or still
+the servant he once had been. But the homely, heavy features of his
+round head did not, in any sense, repel. On the contrary, the
+countenance was frank, though yet inscrutable. The piercing black eyes
+were good eyes, and indomitable, like his muscled jaw. The flat, square
+forehead made one aware of intellect, and of force. So short and thick,
+he looked a sluggish man, but it was the phlegm of a rock, the calm of
+strength, and whatever the peril, almost inanimate. His country called
+him Benemérito de América, a title the noblest and rarest in its Spartan
+hint of civic virtue.
+
+The Indian's desk was littered with messages from the princes of the
+earth. Like his expiring race, he had fought their order, and they had
+made of him a wandering fugitive. But now they were imploring him for
+one of their number, whose surrendered sword that moment lay across
+their petitions. Two of the letters, but not from princes, he had read
+with deep consideration. One was from the President of the United
+States, the other from Victor Hugo. But these also he shoved from him,
+though regretfully, and now he was gazing out over the Plaza, the line
+of his jaw as inflexible as ever.
+
+But they were not many, the moments this man had to himself, and it was
+not long before a gendarme in coarse blue, serving as an orderly,
+disturbed him.
+
+"Well, show her in then," he said, frowning at the card laid on his
+desk, nor did he rise when an unusually beautiful but very grave young
+woman entered the room.
+
+"At your orders, Señorita de--d'Aumerle. You come, I suppose, to save
+him?--But," he added with the austerity of a parent, "it is not
+difficult to imagine why _you_ are interested."
+
+"No, Señor Presidente," he heard himself quietly contradicted, "Your
+Excellency can not imagine."
+
+He looked up, into a pair of honest gray eyes. But her tone had already
+told him enough. He rose to his feet in rugged courtesy. The Indian was
+a wise man, and he knew now that other men had whispered falsely about
+one exquisite Parisienne.
+
+"Pardon me, child," he said gently. "No, I cannot imagine."
+
+Impulsively Jacqueline leaned over the desk and gave him her hand.
+"Thank you," she said, in a voice that trembled unexpectedly. From that
+moment, too, she abandoned tactics. The wiles of courts would avail
+nothing against the primitive straightforwardness of the man before her.
+It seemed, moreover, good and homely, to cast them aside. She took a
+seat near the window, since he remained standing until she did, and
+waited. He should speak first, and afterward, she would accept. For
+there was nothing, she felt, that she could say. O rare tongue of woman,
+to so respect the leash of intuitions!
+
+As for Don Benito Juarez, he had not meant to speak at all. But knowing
+her now to be not what he had thought, he spoke as he had not to any
+plenipotentiary of any crowned head.
+
+"You are a Frenchwoman, señorita," he began. "Tell me, your coming must
+be explained by that?"
+
+"Now," said Jacqueline, smiling on him cordially, "Your Excellency's
+imagination is getting better."
+
+"And you wish to save Maximilian," the Presidente stated, rather than
+questioned, "because he is a victim of France."
+
+"Because he will be considered so."
+
+The old Roman smiled. "My dear young lady," he said, "an answer to
+France is the least of my obligations. Yet you expect it, and ask for
+clemency, though I deny all the great nations?"
+
+"Oh señor, what's the use? Let him go!"
+
+The keen black eyes regarded her quizzically. "Do you know," he said,
+"this is the second time I've heard that question to-day? One of our
+American officers had himself put in command of the escort for
+Maximilian's two lawyers here, and now I believe he did it simply
+because he too wanted to know, 'What's the use?' It was anti-climax, and
+a wet blanket over the fervid eloquence of the two lawyers. But
+nevertheless, he hit the one argument."
+
+"Yes, yes!"
+
+"In a word, why not brush aside our archduke? He's harmless, now, he's
+insignificant? Why not take from him the only dignity left, that of
+dying?"
+
+"Of course, Señor Juarez! Of course!"
+
+"And at the same time win bright renown for ourselves, instead of what
+will be called harsh cruelty?"
+
+"Surely!"
+
+The smile vanished. The large mouth closed tightly.
+
+"No," spoke the judge of iron. "He dies! That is the truest mercy, a
+mercy to those who might otherwise follow him here. And we, señorita, we
+have already suffered enough from Europe."
+
+"But the other two?" pleaded Jacqueline. "They are Mexicans."
+
+"They are that, por Dios, and they make me proud of my race. Miramon,
+Mejía, they are the leaven. They redeem Lopez, they redeem Marquez, they
+redeem the deserters who now so largely form my armies, who before had
+deserted me for the French invasion. By the signal example of these two
+men to die to-morrow, the world shall know that Mexicans are not all
+traitors. And as we grow, we Mexicans, we may grow beyond the empty
+loyalty of glowing Spanish words. Remembering such an example, we may
+come to be, in our very hearts, breathing things of honor. We have been
+shackled because of infamy during the last centuries. Can you wonder,
+then, that we use the treacherous weapon of the Conquistadores?--But
+that's apart. The loyalty of Miramon and Mejía has been loyalty to an
+invader, a wrong their country will not forgive. But our cultured
+gentleman of Europe, our vain fool who would regenerate the poor Indito,
+he will perhaps not feel so ashamed of us, not when he has two such
+companions in death, and not when he learns, though painfully, that the
+rod of Mexican justice respects neither immunity nor privilege of birth.
+There, señorita, I've had to talk more about this one individual than
+about the hundreds of others who have been punished for much less than
+he."
+
+"But it must be terrible to die, señor. And _he_ doesn't realize,
+while a delay of only a few days----"
+
+"Would suffice for his escape?"
+
+Jacqueline reddened guiltily. "No, to prepare for his end," she said.
+
+The Presidente smiled tolerantly. "Never fear," he answered first her
+confusion, "our justice stands committed, and to wink at escape now
+would be cowardly. Yet, whether you meant it or not, you are right, and
+the execution stands postponed until the nineteenth. A doomed man may
+learn much in three days to comfort him--on his way. But the criminal of
+all is lacking."
+
+"Marquez, you mean?"
+
+"U'm, him also. But I was thinking of Louis Napoleon, _and_ his
+wife."
+
+The order of postponement, being openly telegraphed to Escobedo at
+Querétaro, was known at once in San Luis, and caused a fury of
+excitement. For none doubted but that it meant eventual pardon. The
+tender hearted rejoiced. The rabid ones muttered. The wise shook dubious
+heads. And even as Jacqueline and Berthe were hurrying back to Querétaro
+in the canvas-covered coach, another caller was admitted roundly on the
+president's privacy, without so much as being announced. Juarez wondered
+if his orderly had gone crazy, for the newcomer thus obsequiously
+presented looked to be a species of ancient vagabond.
+
+"Well, what is it?" the President asked, frowning heavily. He was
+curiously irritated. "Stay," he interposed, "those dusty, muddy rags you
+have on, that green and red, that's not a Republican uniform?"
+
+"It's of the Batallon del Emperador," replied the stranger, unabashed.
+
+"Bless me the saints! Well, well, well, I suppose you, too, want to save
+your Maximilian. But how does it happen that you're not under guard
+yourself?"
+
+For answer the old man came nearer. He limped feebly, and the while he
+unbuttoned his coarse red jacket. Juarez watched him sluggishly, but
+with a hand upon a revolver under the papers on his desk. The stranger,
+however, drew forth nothing more sensational than five or six square
+bits of parchment. Yet these aroused the President more than a weapon
+could have done. They were blank, except at the bottom, and there the
+President read his own signature, "Benito Juarez, Libertad y Reforma."
+
+"Your--Your Excellency remembers?"
+
+"How well!" The admission came involuntarily. Juarez was laboring under
+an emotion that he could not at first control. He stared at his visitor
+in a new wonder. So gaunt, so hollow, so utterly insignificant! The
+President's wonder grew.
+
+"You--you gained entrance here by one of these slips?" he questioned
+sharply. The old man nodded. "And it was countersigned by----"
+
+"Si señor, by El Chaparrito. The slip said, 'Admit bearer at once.'"
+
+"Then I cannot blame my orderly! But who are you?"
+
+"Anastasio Murguía, to serve Your Mercy."
+
+"Bien, Señor Murguía, and now will you explain what no other messenger
+from our unknown friend has done? Who--who is El Chaparrito?"
+
+But, like the wretched messengers who had gone before, Anastasio Murguía
+only shrugged his shoulders blankly. "Your Excellency does not know El
+Chaparrito?" he asked. "And yet you trusted him, a stranger, with your
+signature?"
+
+There was a crafty stress on his words.
+
+"Ah, señor," Juarez placidly inquired, "what if a chief magistrate did
+not know when to trust? You are to be informed, then, that one year ago
+last October, at Chihuahua, I was saved from a French flying column by
+an Indito. The poor wretch had run across the desert with his warning.
+But he could prove nothing. He couldn't even tell who sent him, except
+that it was a short gentleman, a señor chaparro. Yet it was well for the
+Republic that I took his word and fled. Later, when I reached the Rio
+Grande, and he wanted my signature to some blank squares of parchment,
+which he was to take back to his señor chaparro--well, señor, I trusted
+again. That Indito in breech-clout obtained my autograph some twenty
+times over."
+
+The President, however, might have added that every Republican officer
+was advised first to test any warning on any bit of parchment signed
+"Benito Juarez." Yet, as a matter of fact, there came to be such magic
+in the name of El Chaparrito that the name of Juarez thereto was only
+needed as a guarantee that the lesser name was genuine.
+
+"Now, then, Señor Emissary," said the President, "what danger hangs over
+our Republic this time?"
+
+"None, señor. I return the parchment squares left over. El--El
+Chaparrito has no more thoughts for the Republic. He thinks," and
+Murguía ground his knuckles into the desk top, "he thinks of no one, of
+no one--except Maximilian! And he has never thought of aught else. The
+Republic? Bah, the Republic was only his tool, Señor Presidente. Only
+his tool, but the tool needed sharpening. They say that's the way with
+the guillotine, eh, Señor Presidente?"
+
+"But hombre--No, our unseen friend of the Republic, our Chaparrito,
+would not ask for Maximilian's pardon?"
+
+"_Pardon!_"--It was fairly a cry of rage--"Yet you, Señor
+Presidente, _you_ postpone the execution! _You_ mean to pardon
+him!"
+
+"Indeed?"
+
+"Yes, I--I think so. But you shall not, Señor Presidente. I come to,
+to----"
+
+"Now that's curious. Possibly I, too, am to be sharpened into a kind of
+guillotine, eh, señor?"
+
+"All the others were," Murguía returned stubbornly. "That is, all except
+one."
+
+"Ha, then El Chaparrito found one man who was incorruptible?"
+
+"Yes. But still Your Excellency is mistaken. El Chaparrito did not use
+money to win his agents. That, señor, is the unsafest way of all."
+
+"You would tell me, señor, that El Chaparrito had a safe way?"
+
+"Yes, and it was absolute. He awakened memory, the memory, Señor
+Presidente, of wrongs. For example, there was Your Excellency's savior
+in breech-clout. He once lived in a forest village down in the Huasteca.
+One night Dupin came and burned the huts, and the Indito's family
+perished with other women and children there. That village alone gave
+the Chaparrito many another messenger or spy, but memories left by the
+Empire were plentiful enough everywhere, and cheap. The Chaparrito
+simply drafted them, that was all. But once his system failed. Yet--well
+the man in that case was an American, and _they_ are liable to be
+exceptions to any rule, to any passion. But in the end he was safe
+enough too, though something else, that I can't understand, made him
+so."
+
+"And what did he do, this American?"
+
+"He took me to Escobedo."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I took Lopez. That same night Querétaro fell."
+
+"_You?_ Now--now to what particular wrong in _your_ case,
+señor, does the Republic stand thus indebted?"
+
+Juarez put the question lightly, even patronizingly. But his steadfast
+gaze had not once left his gaunt and battered visitor. By design, too,
+he had not asked a second time who the Chaparrito was, because he saw,
+or felt, that the old man knew, though former emissaries from that
+mysterious source had not known. And Juarez meant to possess the secret.
+But with his casual irony he never looked for any such kindling of
+memory as then flashed deep in the cavernous sockets opposite him. The
+eyes of the aged man glowed and darkened, glowed and darkened, and
+seemed the very breathing of some famished beast. It was a thing to
+startle even Benito Juarez, who during many, many years had learned the
+meaning of civil war. The President leaped to his feet, pointing a
+finger.
+
+"You are," he cried, "yes, _you_ are the Chaparrito!--No?--Yes! Ha,
+I've struck, I've struck!"
+
+He had indeed. The colossal guile and intellect and will, the giant whom
+men in awe called El Chaparrito, was only old, withered Anastasio
+Murguía. But the astute Juarez _knew_ that he was right. He knew it
+in that one look of consuming, conquering hate. He knew the giant in
+that hate. The feeble flesh, Anastasio Murguía, was an incident. Yet
+even so, only the President's tenacity held him to where his instinct
+had leapt. For under discovery Murguía was changed to a huddled, abject
+creature, stammering denial. Yet it must be true, it must. The
+strangest, the most weird of contrasts in the same soul and body--yet it
+must, it _was_ true!
+
+And Murguía? He might have asked for reward, and had it. But his was
+rankest despair. His work was not finished, his goal not attained. And
+now his most potent instrument of all, the Chaparrito, was miserably
+identified in his own self, was taken from him.
+
+Juarez rose and touched his shoulder, "Come," he said, "there's much too
+much tension here. Now then, sit down, so. Let me see, you said your
+name was--yes, Murguía. But--why, Dios mio, that's the Huasteca miser!
+Well, well, well, and so you are that rich old hacendado who never gave
+even a fanega of corn to Republic or French either, unless frightened
+into it? But hombre, we've had _big_ sums from the Chaparrito, and
+all unasked!"
+
+And yet must it still be true, yet must even this contrast accord. El
+Chaparrito had indeed given munificently. But in each case it was to
+bridge a crisis. As the shrewdest general he knew a vital campaign, and
+aided, if need be. But on a useless one the Republic's soldiers might
+starve, might freeze, might bleed and die, without ever the most
+niggardly solace ever reaching them from El Chaparrito. Economy was
+applied to vengeance, and made it unspeakably grim.
+
+"Once though," Juarez pursued, "you all but lost your Maximilian? I mean
+last fall when he started for the coast. He could have escaped to
+Europe."
+
+"I know," said Murguía quietly, "but I was near him. If he had not
+turned back, I would have done it myself."
+
+"It?"
+
+"The justice which Your Excellency has just postponed three days."
+
+"Dios mio, but our Chaparrito is a dangerous person! He'd have to be
+locked up if Maximilian were pardoned."
+
+"But--but Your Excellency will not pardon him!"
+
+"To be sure, I had forgotten. I am to be given a memory. Well?"
+
+"Your Excellency remembers, he remembers Zacatecas?"
+
+"Last February? Certainly I do. Miramon came, but a warning from El
+Chaparrito, from you, came first, and a last time I escaped. As it was,
+I was reported captured, and I sometimes wonder what Maximilian would
+have done had that report been true."
+
+"If I should tell you, señor?"
+
+"Ah, that is beyond even you, since Maximilian has never had the chance
+to decide my fate."
+
+"But he did decide, señor. He got word that you were taken at Zacatecas,
+and at once he sent orders to Miramon as to your treatment. But Miramon
+was already defeated, already fleeing to Querétaro."
+
+"And the orders, the orders from Maximilian?"
+
+"They never arrived. They were intercepted. They--yes, here they are,
+but before reading them, will Your Excellency promise to imagine himself
+in Miramon's power?"
+
+"I would, naturally. Come, señor, hand them over."
+
+It made curious reading, that weather-blotched dispatch. For Don Benito
+Juarez it was reading as curious as a man may ever expect to come by. In
+the handwriting of his prisoner, he read his own death sentence.
+
+"Your--Your Excellency sees?" Murguía stammered hungrily.
+
+"H'm, what, for example?"
+
+"Why, that--that Maximilian would not have pardoned?"
+
+"On the contrary, señor mio, that is precisely what the generous
+Maximilian did intend. Listen--Miramon was 'to delay execution until His
+Majesty should pass upon it.'"
+
+"No--no, Your Excellency, he would not have----"
+
+"O ho, so you think you've missed your last stroke! You think that there
+is no memory for me in this dispatch! But don't whine so, because, man,
+there is, there is! It may not be the memory of my intended death, but
+it is the memory of--intended insult. Oh, what a patriot he must have
+thought me, this good, regenerating prince! He had already offered to
+make me chief justice. But this time he would have saved me from his own
+Black Decree. And I would have been touched by his clemency? I would
+have accepted, the grateful tears streaming from my eyes? And thus I
+would be regenerated? It sounds beautiful. It sounds like the chivalrous
+Middle Ages, when there were Black Princes along with the Black Decrees.
+My liege lord _he_ would have been, but my liege Patria, what of
+her?--Well, well, well, he has three days in which to understand me
+better, and to think of his own regeneration a little."
+
+"Then," cried Murgía, limping gleefully toward him, "then there will be
+no pardon?"
+
+"I see," said Juarez, suddenly cold and very calm, "I am now corrupted.
+I am now safe, like the others. Take that chair, wait!"
+
+Saying which the Presidente left his desk, clapped his hands for the
+orderly, and seated himself near the window. To the orderly he said, "Go
+to the diligence office across the Plaza. Ask for Colonel Driscoll, the
+American officer who commands the escort of the two lawyers. Say that I
+wish to see him here at once."
+
+When Driscoll appeared, Juarez put to him this question, "Colonel--I'll
+say 'General' whenever you decide to be a citizen among us--Colonel, can
+you reach Querétaro early to-morrow morning by riding all night?"
+
+"Not with my own horse, sir. He's getting old, and deserves better."
+
+"Then it's all right, señor. You will take any horse you want. I have
+telegraphed to stop the execution, but there's been no reply. You must
+therefore see General Escobedo yourself. Look on my desk. Do you find a
+packet there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Sealed? Well, break it open. Now read the contents to my visitor here."
+
+Driscoll unfolded a long sheet of foolscap, and began to read. Murguía
+the while fidgeted in an agony, but listening further, his limbs grew
+tense, and a hideous joy overspread his face.
+
+"'But at sunrise of the nineteenth you will execute the sentence already
+approved.'"
+
+The prisoners were not to be deceived by false hopes. There would be no
+further appeal. The last, the final decision, had been made.
+
+"I have signed it, I believe, Colonel Driscoll?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then seal it again, and hurry! Good-bye, sir, good-bye."
+
+When Driscoll was gone, the Benemérito of America turned to the grinning
+hyena-like old man who was his visitor. His own dark features were
+passionless, impenetrable.
+
+"You observe, señor," he said, "that Justice does not require
+corrupting, nor even a memory. So let El Chaparrito add this to his
+philosophy, that he need not boast again of an infallible spur to civic
+loyalty, for he will never find it, nor I. And yet--there is
+patriotism."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+IN ARTICULO MORTIS
+
+
+  "The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty
+  of the soul.... Man cannot be happy and strong until he lives
+  in the present."--_Emerson._
+
+
+For Maximilian it was the eve of execution. The soul feels that there is
+much to decide at such a time, but under the nettling merciless load the
+soul will either flounder pitifully and decide nothing, else lie numb
+and in a half death vaingloriously believe that it has decided
+everything. So may the condemned be open-eyed or blind. Or, according to
+the police reporter, be either coward or stoic. But it really depends in
+large measure on whether realization be dulled, or no.
+
+Maximilian had too late come to understand that his anointed flesh was
+violable at all. He learned it only when the death watch was actually
+set on his each remaining breath. And now he was _en capilla_, in
+the chapel of the doomed; he, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of
+Austria, Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, Count of Hapsburg, Prince of
+Lorraine, Emperor of Mexico, even He!
+
+They had given him the tower room of Querétaro's old Capuchin church,
+and against the wall was an improvised altar. But the sacrament waited.
+The tapers on the snow-white cloth were as yet unlighted. Instead the
+Most Serene Archduke--Emperor no longer--read from a battered volume of
+Universal History, which, with a book's queer vagaries, had strayed into
+his cell. He read how Charles of England had died, then he paused,
+blinking at the two candles on the rough table. They were vague shapes,
+they were horrors, which he now began to see, as the visions of Truth so
+often are when hazily perceived.
+
+He bitterly envied that unhappy Stuart, who, before his palace window,
+among Cavaliers and Roundheads, had died in majesty, the bright central
+figure in a tragedy of august magnitude. But for the Hapsburg how
+sordid, how mean, it all would be! He could see already the gaping,
+yellow faces, sympathetic in their stupidity. _They_ would not
+really know that a prince was dying. The very guard with shouldered
+bayonet outside his door was a deserter, and it was this man, more than
+aught else, that gave him to chafe against his ignoble lot. The fellow
+never uttered a word, indeed; but he had a heavy, malignant eye, and
+each time he passed the large inner window that opened on the corridor
+he would look into the cell, as though to locate his prisoner. Then
+Maximilian could feel the insolent, mocking gleam upon himself, until
+for rage he clenched his fist.
+
+Thus the Most Serene Archduke's first perception of calamity was not
+that royal blood was to flow, but that it was to flow obscurely. Even
+the ancient raven curse, the curse of the Habicht which had given his
+House its very name, was now fulfilled by unclean buzzards. He saw them
+each day, perched on the neighboring roofs.
+
+He sighed and turned to his book. Universal History? Yes, but for
+hundreds and hundreds of years that history of millions and millions of
+people was no more than the record of his own little family group. Such
+a course of reading for such a man held a terrible grandeur, and it must
+have been a unique sensation of pride that touched the golden-bearded,
+ultra-refined viking prince. A spoilt child he was, and though so
+cruelly reproved by Life, he yet could learn no lesson in the passing
+footnote that _he_ would add to that family record. He could not
+see that the light which made the printed characters so dazzling, yet
+distorted them. He could not know that the commonest man of the millions
+and millions might read that Universal History by quite a different and
+a calmer light. But he was aware of the sentinel's tread back of him,
+and aware too of the fellow's coarse, familiar leer.
+
+One consolation he felt he might have had, and this was the dignity of
+martyrdom. But no one, alas, seemed to regard him as a martyr at all. He
+had begged that he alone should suffer. But the play at knightly
+generosity was too shallow. For at the time Maximilian believed that he
+would not suffer in any case. Later, though, when he knew that he must
+die, then with simple earnestness he had pleaded for Miramon and Mejía,
+and forgot himself altogether. But Juarez had hardly more than
+acknowledged the telegram, and now in the cell next him Miramon was
+confessing, and in the cell on his other side Mejía waited. Each of
+these two men would leave a wife and child.
+
+Someone knocked. "No, father, not yet," Maximilian answered gently,
+although his mood was impatience. The confessor sighed in protest
+against the waste of precious time, but he did not move away, as he had
+already twice before during the night. Instead he came and stood at the
+corridor window. His lip trembled pityingly. There was news, he said.
+
+Maximilian pushed back the book, and was on his feet. The priest meeting
+his eager look, shook his head sadly.
+
+"It comes from--from Miramar."
+
+Maximilian fell back. One hand groped out involuntarily, as in appeal
+before a blow. "News of Charlotte?" he asked faintly.
+
+Charlotte was dead, the priest told him.
+
+During a long time, after the priest had gone, his head lay on his arms,
+between the two candles. He heard no more the sentry challenges, nor
+sensed the menace in every slightest sound of the dark night outside.
+There was something else. "Death?" At first he did not consciously
+strive for an answer. But the question kept falling, and falling again,
+as a lash. The vulgar hands which plied the scourge, the stupid yellow
+faces, these no longer mattered. He felt the blows themselves, only the
+blows.
+
+She had died, the poor maniac! She had died, a thing for the lowliest
+pity. And this was true of the haughty child of Orleans because she had
+wanted a throne. Slowly her husband raised his head; and staring at the
+wall, his tear-dimmed eyes opened wider and wider. Because she had
+wanted a throne? Because she had wanted a dais above the meek and lowly,
+above those who now pitied her! His eyes fell on the Universal
+History--the family record, and there grew in his eyes a look of
+detestation. Groaning suddenly, he buried his head again in his arms.
+
+At dawn he too was to die, and because he too had craved a sceptre. Yet,
+and yet, he had meant to be an instrument of good. Born of kings,
+anointed by the Vicar of Christ, he had come as agent from the Almighty.
+But God had failed to sustain him, God had--again the blue eyes raised,
+but dry now, and stark in terror. "Yes, yes, yes," so his reeling soul
+cried to him, "there _is_ a God! There is, there is!" One sharp
+breath, and the mortal fear passed. In ghastly panic he crept back from
+the brink, either of the atheist's despair or of the madman's chaos. But
+the cost was heavy. Since God did exist, and God yet had failed him,
+then it was the man's Divine Right that must be false. He, only a man,
+had mistaken his Destiny. Nay, had he a Destiny? Or why, more than
+another man? Here, then, was the cost. To keep his hope of Heaven, he
+stepped down among the millions and millions. His Divine Right,
+crumbling under the grandeur of partition among the millions, became for
+himself the most infinitesimal of shares, neither greater nor less than
+that of any other human being. But glorified now by the holy alchemy of
+Charity, the tiny grain became divine indeed, and he beheld it as a
+glowing spark, his own inalienable share in the rights of man. So, for a
+moment, the poet prince knew again his old-time exultation. Even Truth,
+he now perceived, had her sublimities.
+
+But the pall of horror fell again. To-morrow he was to die. He was to
+die because his life long he had sought to rob others of the tiny grain,
+of their God-given dignity as men, and that too, even as they were
+awaking to its possession. The vanity, the presumptuous, inconsistent
+vanity of it all! Under the dark mediæval cloak he had planned
+enlightenment, he, who had tried to rule without parliament, without
+constitution! He would have made a people believe in God's injustice, in
+God's choice of a man like them to be a demigod over them. Hence the
+blasphemous demigod had now to answer to human law. And it was meet and
+right. Purgatory was beginning on the eve of his death.
+
+He, the torch of Progress! Maximilian smiled scornfully on himself. He
+was only a clod of grit caught in the world's great wheels. The foreign
+substance had wrought a discordant screech for a moment, and then was
+mercilessly ground into powder and thrust out of the bearings. He
+pondered on the first days of the Family Group, when there was
+extenuation; more, when there was necessity, for a king. At any rate the
+monarch then earned, or could earn, his pomp and state by services
+actually rendered. And now? The Hapsburg decided that there was not a
+more contemptible parasite on the body politic. The crowned head was
+simply the first among paupers. He had his bowl of porridge, which was
+the civil list.
+
+The doomed prince sank to a depth of shame that may not be conceived. He
+was humanity's puny infant. He had dawdled among men centuries older
+than himself. His whole being was out of harmony with the universe. Fate
+had held his soul fast during those Dark Ages when he might have striven
+nobly, and now had cast it forth, an anachronism. It was a soul
+misplaced in eternity. The dire realization grew and grew, and with it
+the tragic agony, until with a sudden and the bitterest of cries he
+flung up his arms and fell heavily across the table.
+
+"My life!" he moaned in piteous begging for something he might not have.
+"My life, to live my life over again!"
+
+In the first light of morning Escobedo came. The Republican general
+unfolded a paper, and began to read. But instead of the death sentence,
+it was reprieve. President Juarez had postponed execution for three
+days.
+
+"Three days?" Maximilian repeated, wearily shaking his head. "If your
+Republic could give me as many centuries, but three days!--Three days,
+in which to _live_ my life!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+KNIGHTHOOD'S BELATED FLOWER
+
+
+  "Trusting to shew, in wordès few,
+  That men have an ill use
+  (To their own shame) women to blame,
+  And causeless them accuse."
+                  --_The Nut-Brown Maid._
+
+
+Later the same morning there sounded the ineffable swish of silken
+petticoats along the corridor and the clinking of high heels on the
+tiles. La Señorita Marquesa d'Aumerle had obtained permission to visit
+His Most Serene Highness. The sentinel of the evening before was again
+on duty, and his evil crossed eye seemed to lighten with vast humor as
+he presented arms for the lady to pass. She met his insolence with a
+searching, level gaze.
+
+Maximilian hastened to the door of his bare cell, and took both her
+hands in his. "I am beginning to recognize my friends," he said simply.
+"I know, I know," he added, "you come to tell me that you failed to get
+the pardon. But you do bring reprieve."
+
+He would have her believe that he valued that.
+
+Jacqueline regarded steadily the tall, slight figure in black, with the
+pinioned sheep of the Golden Fleece about his neck, and she sighed. She
+was disappointed in him. She had thought that pride of race, if nothing
+more, would give him character during these last moments. She allowed,
+too, for the grief, and the remorse, in the blow of Charlotte's death.
+But she was not prepared for the roving eyes, the disordered mind, the
+feverish unrest of the condemned prince. Had his soul, then, been a
+cringing one throughout the night just past? It was the first time she
+had seen him, except at a distance, since the day she arrived in
+Querétaro, for she had chosen, and perhaps maliciously, to disconcert
+the tongue of slander. Hence she could not picture the ravages of
+sickness and anxiety, until now when she beheld his haggard face. It was
+one to bring a pang. The cheeks were hollow, the lines sharply drawn,
+and the skin was white, so very white, with never a fleck of pink
+remaining. And staring from the wasted flesh were the eyes, large and
+round and faded blue, and in them an appealing, a haunted look. But they
+softened at sight of her, as though comforted already.
+
+"A reprieve is best," he said. "You cannot think that I want a pardon,
+now that, that _she_ is dead!"
+
+"But sire----"
+
+"'Sire'? Ah, my lady, you are a little late, by something like a few
+hundred years. You see our American was right after all; a letter no
+longer makes a king."
+
+It was a bon mot that Maximilian had always enjoyed, it being his own,
+but this time he was most zealously in earnest.
+
+"Monsieur, then," she said, in no mood for reforms of etiquette. "Only,
+let me talk! We have three days, three days which are to be used. Your
+Highness must escape!"
+
+But now she understood him less than before, for he only smiled wearily.
+It was, then, something else than fear that had broken him so.
+
+Escape? And that guard in the corridor? Passing, ever passing, the
+diabolical humorist seemed to chuckle inwardly, as though to stand
+death-watch were the most exquisite of jokes.
+
+"That man?" whispered Jacqueline. "Why, that's Don Tiburcio. He was
+driven out of the Imperialist ranks by Father Fischer. But from his
+lips, this very night, Your Highness will hear that the road is open to
+Vera Cruz. Ah sire--monsieur--we have been working, we others. There
+will be horses ready, there will be a long ride, and then, you will
+safely board an Austrian ship waiting for you."
+
+Maximilian slowly shook his head. "No," he said, "I am ready to die,
+as--as ready as I shall ever be."
+
+"But the remaining years of your natural life, Your Highness counts them
+as nothing! Yet you might live twice your present age!"
+
+"My life--over again," he murmured dreamily.
+
+"Of course, why not?"
+
+"One year to redeem each year that has gone."
+
+"Years of Destiny!" she cried, thinking to touch him there.
+
+"No!" he exclaimed, so harshly and quick that it startled her. "But for
+me they will be years of dearest mercy. Wait, tell me first, Miramon and
+Mejía----"
+
+"Yes, yes, we will save them too. Only, the risk is greater."
+
+"Bien!" He had almost accepted, but he smothered the word, and starting
+up, began to pace the room. At last he stopped. "The risk must be
+lessened, for them," he said. "_I_ will remain."
+
+"H'm'n," the girl ejaculated, "Hamlet declines? Then there will be no
+play at all, at all."
+
+Maximilian knew how stubborn she could be; and so, reluctantly, he
+joined the plot.
+
+"I have deserved Marquez and Fischer and Lopez," he sighed. "But why
+there should be friends, even now, that I cannot understand."
+
+Yet she told him bluntly why she wanted his safety. It was on France's
+account. Still, his gratitude was no less profound. She who would give
+life to others, what was her life to be henceforth? The mellowing
+sorrow, which her vivacity could not hide, smote him again, as it had
+that evening in Mexico when he came to her for counsel. He remembered.
+Out of a useless ambition for her country she had squandered her name,
+blighted her future. He remembered how, looking on her saddened face, he
+had been exalted to a pure devotion, and had burned with knightly fervor
+to do her some impossible service. But what was the service? There his
+memory failed, and he despised the chivalrous ardor which could be
+quenched with feeding on itself. After the fearful vigil of the night
+before, he had found a suit of armor beside him. In a word, he had
+forgotten self. Simple compassion was enough. That service? that
+service? If he could only remember. But he must. And in hot anger he
+strode back and forth, while Jacqueline sat and gazed in wonder. Once,
+turning from the corridor window, he paused. The guard had stopped a
+man, who now was evidently waiting until the prisoner should be
+unoccupied. Unseen himself, Maximilian recognized in the man the
+American named Driscoll. And then he remembered. He remembered
+Jacqueline's secret, betrayed to him that evening in Mexico. He
+remembered that her happiness was lost in the loss of this man's
+respect. Here, at last, lay the impossible service!
+
+Maximilian glanced toward her stealthily. No, from where she sat she
+could not see the corridor, could not see the waiting American. A moment
+later Maximilian stood behind her; and when he spoke, she thought it odd
+that he should change from French to halting English.
+
+"Miss d'Aumerle," he began, in distinct if nervous phrasing, "yes, it
+was for France, all, all of which you haf done. Therefore is it that you
+haf come to this country, and here to Querétaro, whatever is to the
+contrary said."
+
+"De grace," she laughed, rising abruptly, "there's enough to do to-day
+without discussing----"
+
+But he intercepted her even as she opened the door.
+
+"Will Your Highness kindly let me pass?"
+
+"And I know, I alone, that nefer haf you toward myself once felt, once
+shown, that which----"
+
+A sharp, indignant cry escaped her. Following her gaze he saw the
+American pass on down the corridor and out of hearing.
+
+"Now who," exclaimed the chagrined prince, "would ever have imagined
+such delicacy of breeding!"
+
+"And don't ever again," cried Jacqueline furiously, "imagine that
+_I_ stand in need of being righted!" Wherewith she too was gone,
+leaving her clumsy knight staring blankly after her.
+
+A few moments later Driscoll knocked.
+
+It was the first meeting of these two men since the memorable afternoon
+at Cuernavaca, when Driscoll had surprised Jacqueline listening to
+royalty's shameless suit. Now he beheld Fatality's retribution for that
+day's bitterness. Retribution, yes. But it was not restitution. The girl
+he loved had just passed him in the corridor with a slight casual nod,
+and he would not, could not, stretch forth a hand to stop her. Instead,
+the smile so ironical of Fate had touched his lips.
+
+"I was sent by Señor Juarez, sir," he addressed the archduke in the tone
+of military business. "The President is afraid your three days of
+reprieve will be misunderstood. He sent for me as I was leaving San Luis
+yesterday, and I--I was to tell you----"
+
+"You need not hesitate, colonel."
+
+"Well, that you must not hope for pardon, for the sentence will
+positively be carried out day after to-morrow. That--I believe that is
+all."
+
+"But--" Maximilian called, staying him. "Dios mio, such news merits a
+longer telling. It seems to me too, Señor Americano, that you should
+enjoy it the more, since it was partly you who brought me to this."
+
+"I don't know as I'd thought of that. How?"
+
+"You ask how? Do you forget how you took the traitor Lopez to Escobedo,
+the night I was betrayed?"
+
+Driscoll swung bluntly round on his questioner. "No I don't," he
+replied. "But you see, there was such a lot of bloodshed scheduled for
+the next day?"
+
+"Isn't that rather a curious reproof from a soldier? Loyal hearts would
+have bled, yes, and gladly. Noble fellows, they would have saved their
+Emperor!"
+
+Driscoll half snorted, and turned on his heel. But he stopped, his lips
+pressed to a clean, hard line. "What of those townsmen in the trenches?"
+he demanded. "It wasn't their fight."
+
+Maximilian's eyes opened very wide, and slowly his expression changed.
+The thick lower lip drooped and quivered. Suddenly he came nearer the
+American, a trembling hand outstretched.
+
+"I was saved that," he murmured earnestly.
+
+"They were," the grim trooper corrected him.
+
+"The townsmen, yes. But I--I was kept from murder. God in heaven, I
+would have murdered them! Ah, señor, if I could put to my account a
+night's work such as yours, that night, when you used the traitor! I
+could almost thank Lopez. I do thank you."
+
+Still Driscoll failed to notice the proffered hand. He might have, had
+he seen his suppliant's face, and the tense anguish there.
+
+"Those innocent non-combatants, then," Maximilian went on, "so they
+counted more than a prince with you?"
+
+"Of course, there were a thousand of 'em."
+
+The other's haggard look gave way to a smile, half sad, half amused, and
+taking the American by the shoulder in a grip almost affectionate, he
+said, "Colonel, did you ever happen to know of one Don Quixote of La
+Mancha? Well, lately I've begun to think that he was the truest of
+gentlemen, though now I believe I could name another who----"
+
+"And," interrupted Driscoll, "did you ever try to locate the most
+dignified animal that walks, bipeds not excepted? Well, sir, it's the
+donkey. Take him impartially, and you'll say so too."
+
+The strain was over. Maximilian laughed. "If Don Quixote had only had
+your sanity!" he began; "or rather," he added, charmed with the conceit,
+"if knighthood had had it, then the poor don would never have been
+needed to be born at all."
+
+Ignoring the sincerity of the Hapsburg's new philosophy, and how
+tragically it was grounded, Driscoll only smiled in a very peculiar way.
+Knighthood? The word was supercilious cant, and irritated him. During
+that very moment, while listening to Chivalry's devotee, the young
+trooper thought of a little ivory cross in his pocket, a cross which was
+stained with a girl's blood. Murguía had given it to him, to give to
+Maximilian on the eve of execution. But Driscoll had not promised, and
+yet Murguía had implored him to take it, even without promising. The old
+man held faith in vengeance as a spring to drive all souls alike, and if
+Maximilian's last earthly moment could be embittered with sight of a
+cross, then, he firmly believed, the American needed only to be tempted
+with the means to do it. Moreover, in a sudden impulse, Driscoll had
+taken the holy symbol, "to do with as he chose." There was no message,
+Murguía had explained. The Señor Emperador would read the graven name,
+"Maria de la Luz," and that would suffice.
+
+Looking now on the cultured gentleman caressing his beard, Driscoll
+thought again how hellishly distorted was the sign of salvation then in
+his pocket. But he left it there. He, too, had a king's pride, incapable
+of low spite. Charity alone, though, would have held him, if he had but
+known that Maximilian was ignorant of the dead girl's fate.
+
+The archduke for his part had been amiable and conciliatory, because
+there was a certain delicate question he wished to ask.
+
+"Oh by the way, mi coronel," he said abruptly, "I must extend my excuses
+for keeping you waiting in the corridor just now. But there was another
+visitor here. And as we happened to be talking of--well, of a rather
+personal matter, not intended for outside ears----"
+
+"Do not worry. When you raised your voice, I turned and left."
+
+"But perhaps," said Maximilian slowly, "it would have been better if you
+had overheard, either you or another knowing the cruel rumors
+which--which link my recent visitor's name with my own. Then the truth
+would have been made known. That truth, señor," he hastened to add,
+despite a hardening frown between the American's eyes, "means first that
+I have been honored, indeed, in my visitor's----"
+
+He got no further. A broad hand closed over his mouth.
+
+"Another word of that, and I'll--I'll----"
+
+The threat was left unfinished. Gasping in the chair where he had
+fallen, Maximilian found himself alone. He was vaguely nonplussed. There
+had been so many revelations of late that he thought this one simply a
+further re-adjusting of himself to the modern world of men. The present
+instance had to do with the critical juncture where the woman enters.
+But he had learned something else, too. The American loved her, and that
+was important. Yet lovers were very contrary beings, he mused
+lugubriously.
+
+"Still, I shall try again," he decided. "One humble success against my
+career of distinguished failures should not be too much to expect."
+
+The night that followed, a black, favorable night, was the time planned
+for escape. Horses ready saddled waited outside the town under the
+aqueduct. Certain guards were bribed, among them Don Tiburcio. The
+humorous rascal had driven a hard bargain, but only because the money
+was to be had. He would have sold himself as briskly for the cream of
+the jest.
+
+Late the same night there came a frantic pounding at Driscoll's door,
+where he was quartered in the sacristy of the old Capuchin church.
+"Well?" he muttered, alert already.
+
+"Hurry, mi coronel!" a cracked voice blended with the knocking. "Hurry,
+you are wanted!"
+
+"Murgie!" Driscoll exclaimed, flinging wide the door. "Back from San
+Luis, and prowling round here as usual, eh? Well, what's the matter?"
+
+"Quick, señor! Maximilian is sick. Go, go to him!"
+
+Partly dressed, bootless, unarmed, Driscoll shoved the old man aside,
+and sped through the church, hopping over half awakened soldiers as he
+went. Once in the street, he glanced up at the tower room, which was
+Maximilian's, and thought it odd that no light streamed through the
+narrow slits there. The sentinels, too, were gone. But he ran up the
+steps and darted along the corridor, only to strike his head against a
+heavy wooden door that was ajar. He rushed inside the cell, and with
+arms outspread quickly covered the space of it, in the utter dark
+smashing a chair, crashing over a table, cursing a mishap to his toe.
+But he found no one.
+
+"This here's a jail-break," he mumbled under his breath. "Dam' that
+Murgie, he's roped me in to stop 'em!" Whereat, all unconsciously, he
+smiled again at Fatality.
+
+Groping his way back to the corridor, he felt rather than saw three dim
+figures steal past the door. Silently, swiftly, he gave pursuit. He
+heard a fervent whisper just ahead.
+
+"Hasten, dear friends, and may God----"
+
+The next second he was grappling with someone. But his unknown captive
+did not resist.
+
+"There, señor, loosen your fingers. I am not escaping. I am returning to
+my cell. But I had to make the other two think that I was with them."
+
+The voice was Maximilian's.
+
+"Hark! Ah, poor souls, they have failed!"
+
+The prince spoke truly. A fierce "Alto ahí!" sounded below. Then there
+were musket shots and the confusion of many scrambling feet. Murguía had
+routed out the church barracks. And when torches were brought, the
+soldiers discovered that they had hands on Miramon and Mejía. But the
+false sentinels were gone! In leaving the road clear they had used it
+themselves, already.
+
+"You fools!" suddenly a half crazed wail arose. "Fools, _he_ has
+escaped! He----"
+
+"Oh dry up, Murgie," said Driscoll, coming down the steps. "He's gone
+back to his room, I reckon."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE TITLE OF NOBILITY
+
+
+  "Hear, therefore, O ye kings, and understand."
+                       --_Wisdom of Solomon._
+
+
+One more sunset, one more sunrise! And then?...
+
+Maximilian again confronted the ghostly enumeration. But this time his
+last day should be the day of a man's work, in simple-hearted humility.
+He no more searched the skies to find a supernal finger there. He let
+Destiny alone, and did his best instead. For a man's best is Destiny's
+peer.
+
+The fiery June sun was dying in its larger shell of bronze over the
+western sierras, and the self-same blue that vaults beautiful Tuscany was
+taking on its richer, darker hue, when a foreigner in the land, Din
+Driscoll, walked under the Alameda trees, his pipe cold in his mouth, he
+perplexed before his heavy spirits. For he no longer had war to
+distract, to engross.
+
+Maximilian's physician, an Austrian, found him in his reverie. Would the
+Herr Americano at once repair to His Highness attend? The señor's
+presence would a favor be esteemed, in reason that a witness was greatly
+necessitated.
+
+Wondering not a little, Driscoll hastened back into the town. As the
+physician did not follow, he arrived alone. But in the door of the
+archduke's cell he stopped, angry and embarrassed. For his eyes
+encountered a second pair, which were no less angry, which moreover,
+were Jacqueline's. Maximilian and Padre Soria, the father confessor,
+were also there, but Driscoll at first saw no one but Jacqueline. As
+with him, she had been vaguely summoned, without knowing why. A last
+testament was to be signed, she imagined, but in his choice of witnesses
+she thought that Maximilian might at least have shown more delicacy. As
+to cruelty also, she would not confess, but cruelty it was,
+nevertheless. To see again this American was to know memory quickened
+into torture, and days afterward there would still be with her, vividly,
+hatefully, the beloved awkwardness of his strong frame, the splendid,
+roguish head, now so forbidding, and more than all, the way he smiled of
+late. It was a smile so cold, so cheerless, a something so changed in
+him since the old, piquant days of their first acquaintance. Despise
+herself as she might, Jacqueline knew how the sight of the man halted
+there would leave her whole woman's being athirst and panting.
+
+Maximilian's thin white face lighted eagerly when he perceived that
+Driscoll had come. The haggard despair of two days before had given way
+to a serene calm, like that which soothes a dying man when the pain is
+no longer felt. In a gentleness of command that would not be denied, he
+rose and brought the American into the room.
+
+"Colonel Driscoll," he began, "you know, of course, that a witness is
+the world's deputy. He is named to learn a certain truth, but afterward
+he must champion that truth, even against the world. So you find
+yourself here, but first I wish to thank----"
+
+"Please don't mention it," Driscoll interposed. "I'm willing to do
+anything I can."
+
+"Then remember," said Maximilian, "that you are a witness, and a witness
+only. Can you bear that in mind, señor, no matter what you may hear?"
+
+Driscoll nodded, but the very first words all but made him a violent
+actor as well. Maximilian had turned to Jacqueline. For a moment he
+paused, then with a grave dignity spoke.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "reverently, prayerfully, I ask your hand in
+marriage."
+
+She gasped, and so sharp and quick that certainly she was the most
+dumbfounded there. Her utter stupefaction amazed Driscoll as much again
+as the question itself. He stiffened as though struck. If this were a
+revelation? If it could be--if it could be that she really knew no
+reason why she should marry Maximilian?
+
+The archduke observed them both, and his eyes shone with kindliness. But
+making a gesture for patience, he hurried on. "Father Soria here," he
+said, "will come in the morning, just before the--the execution, to
+perform the ceremony. A judge of the Republic will come too, for the
+civil marriage. As to the banns----"
+
+"But why--_why_, parbleu?"
+
+Jacqueline stood before him, stung from her speechless trance by fury.
+Behind narrowed lids the gray eyes hardened as points of steel.
+
+"You shall know, mademoiselle," he answered softly. "It is a boon I ask
+of you, the greatest, and the only one before I go----"
+
+"Why? Tell me why!"
+
+"Because it is _the_ boon a true knight may crave. It is to right
+before the world the noblest woman a knight can ever know----"
+
+"Sire!"
+
+The word was rage and supplication both. It was a hurt cry, piteous to
+hear. Then the glint dying from her eyes blazed to tempestuous life in
+those of the Missourian. But the priest's hand touched his arm, and the
+priest's voice, low and gentle, stayed him.
+
+Maximilian, though, had seen the outburst. "Ah yes, señor, I remember,"
+he said, and smiled, "one may be slapped upon the mouth, yes, yes, for
+even breathing my lady's name when one talks of rumor."
+
+Jacqueline darted at them a puzzled glance. She did not understand at
+first. Then she divined. And then, wide and gloriously, her eyes opened
+on Driscoll, her defender. But in the instant they sought a safer
+quarter. She could not, and would not, forgive him for being there at
+all.
+
+"However," the obdurate prince continued, "our witness must bear with me
+this time, for I will--_will_, I tell each of you--speak plainly.
+The false scandal does exist. Deny it, dear lady, if you can.--Nay,
+señor, _you_ believe it, or did. So, now, as the world's deputy
+here, you must be armed to foil those venomous tongues. But there is
+only one way. You shall tell them that they talk of Maximilian's
+widow----"
+
+"But----"
+
+Jacqueline, Driscoll, both spoke at once. But the girl flashed on the
+man an angry command for silence.
+
+"Enough, enough!" she cried, "Let me speak, then end it. Whatever others
+may think, Your Highness extends me his respect? Bien, but that gives me
+a certain right, which is the right to consider just one thing in
+answering the question of Your Highness--just one lone, little thing."
+
+"And that?"
+
+"Is--is whether or not I have the honor to love Your Highness. Oh, the
+shame in such sacrifice, the shame you put on me! You should have known
+my answer already."
+
+Her answer? Driscoll stirred uneasily. What, indeed, was her answer?
+
+"Yet later, mademoiselle," pursued her inflexible suitor, "when others
+aspire to your hand, there might come one for whom your answer would be
+favorable. How then, if this suitor, when pausing to hear what the world
+says of you----"
+
+"He'd choke it down the world's throat!" Driscoll burst forth. "He alone
+need know it's a lie."
+
+Jacqueline started as she heard him speak, but the glad and unintended
+look she gave him changed as quick as thought to haughty resentment.
+After all, he was still there.
+
+"But how else," Maximilian persisted, "can such a man know so much?"
+
+Then, a captive absolute to his lofty idea, the poet prince pleaded for
+it as one inspired. All things worked, as by Heaven's own will, to
+sanction what he proposed. There was Charlotte's death. There was his
+own. Dying, he was still a Mexican, and might wed in any station he
+chose. While if he lived, as an archduke of Austria he could not. But he
+detested life. With it he had bettered no one. Yet by his death he hoped
+to save more than life to another. This other was the girl before him.
+He had wrecked her dearest ambition. For France's sake she would have
+lured him from peril. For that, and that alone, she had sacrificed her
+name. Such accounted for their interview at Cuernavaca. Such accounted
+for her coming to Querétaro. Yet through his own blind weakness she had
+failed. France had lost Mexico, he his life, and she--her happiness. But
+the last could yet be restored. And why not purchase it with his death,
+since he must have died in any case?
+
+"Must have," Driscoll interrupted, "must have died in any case?"
+
+The American had listened perplexed, now with a quick, eager start, now
+with crinkled brows. First of all the old mystery and its anguish had
+assailed him. The hideous, gloomy tangle would wound him round again.
+Did Jacqueline care for this prince? Surely, because he had seen the
+evidence. But why had she intrigued against his Empire, why had she
+turned Confederate aid from him?
+
+Then, as the ruined monarch spoke, the other man saw. He saw the truth.
+Truth that reconciled all contradictions. That explained what even the
+theory of her wanton heart had only half satisfied before. Explained
+everything by that heart of purest gold. The lover knew now why she had
+delivered him to Lopez and the Tiger, two years ago, though with the act
+so perversely confessing her love for him. He knew why, at Boone's
+Córdova plantation, she had tempted him to hold her for his own, though
+even then she was returning to the capital, to Maximilian. No, it was
+not wanton sport. It was not contradiction. But it was conflict. In the
+contemplation of that conflict he stood unnerved. It was the conflict
+between a wild yet altogether French scheme of patriotic endeavor and
+her own good woman's love. His eyes wandered to her, half afraid, and
+the chill of months about his heart was gone, as some great berg of ice
+sinks in the warmth of sunny waters. From siren alluring flesh whose
+touch was woe, she was become a sceptred angel, far, far away, so
+tantalizingly far away!
+
+Thus Driscoll listened on, happy in his soul of a man, yet abashed as a
+boy. But listening, at the last he was perplexed anew, though for
+another reason.
+
+"Must have died, sir?" he repeated again. "But that wasn't what you
+thought last night. No sir, last night you thought you could escape. But
+just the same you turned back. You chose to die!"
+
+"His Highness," spoke the gray-haired priest, "returned for the
+señorita's answer."
+
+"My answer?" cried Jacqueline. "You mean, father, for my sake?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Driscoll started violently, perplexed no longer. "By God, sir," he
+swore, and clapped Maximilian on the shoulder, "but you are a man!"
+
+The prince recoiled, his instincts of breeding in arms against the
+savage equality. But then, slowly, a smile that was almost beatific
+touched his lips, and without knowing it, he straightened proudly, as
+majesty would.
+
+"A man?" he murmured, breathing exaltation. "Then am I, at my last
+moment, come into harmony with God's own ordering of the universe. For
+he made man on the sixth day, not a Hapsburg. Man, and after His Own
+Image--Oh, but that is the title the hardest of all to win! You--you
+don't think, señor, that you would like to take it back?"
+
+Driscoll reddened inexplicably. Murguía's ivory cross was still in his
+pocket.
+
+"No!" he blurted out with sudden defiance. "It's the truth!"
+
+"Then," said Maximilian solemnly, "on your word I stake my faith.
+To-morrow, at the judgment-seat, I shall hope to hear myself called so."
+
+"Your Highness," questioned Jacqueline in a kind of daze, "Your Highness
+did not _intend_ to escape last night?"
+
+"No, he did not," Driscoll answered for him. "He got Miramon and Mejía
+started all right, and then, without knowing that your plot had failed,
+he turned back to this cell here, alone."
+
+"Your Highness, you did that for--for----"
+
+Her voice broke, and she stopped abruptly and went to the narrow window.
+With her back to them, she groped for the dainty bit of cambric that was
+her handkerchief.
+
+"So you see, my daughter," said the priest, drawing near her, "what he
+would have given, what, before Heaven, he has given, to tell you what
+you so hotly resent. Do you resent it now?"
+
+The beautiful head shook slowly. She was touching her eyes with her
+handkerchief.
+
+"Then you will not let his sacrifice be in vain? You will marry him?"
+
+Impetuously she turned, and faced them. There were blinding drops, clear
+as diamonds, on the long lashes. "Oh Your Highness, Your--Oh, there is
+something you can tell me that is--that is inexpressibly better?"
+
+"Let me know what it is."
+
+"It is if--if you can forgive me.--Mon Dieu, why did you need to heap
+this terrible sacrifice on me? Why could you not remember that I tried
+to drive you from your empire? That I plotted against you? That----"
+
+"Hush, you would have saved me."
+
+"Oh, only incidentally, and you knew it. Yet you must----"
+
+"Don't! There's nothing to forgive.--But wait, we will grant that there
+really is, but only that I may exact my price of forgiveness."
+
+"The price? Name it."
+
+"That you will marry me, here, to-morrow morning, before I die."
+
+Jacqueline raised her head. "Has Your Highness," she demanded, smiling
+shyly behind her tears, "has he forgotten the woman's, rather my
+consideration, before such a question?"
+
+Driscoll straightened, squared his shoulders to take a blow. To his
+blindness her manner looked like awakening love for the other man--and
+for the man himself, not for the prince! His sense of loss, his agony,
+were extreme. But of the old bitterness he now knew nothing. His rival
+was putting the question. "And according to that consideration,
+mademoiselle?"
+
+Driscoll did not see her swift glance toward himself. He was hurrying
+out lest he might hear her answer. And she let him go--till he reached
+the door. But there, like one frozen, he halted rigidly.
+
+"Hélas, I do not love you, sire," Jacqueline had answered, very quietly.
+
+Maximilian, however, did not seem heart broken.
+
+His attention was all for the mere witness. He saw the effect on that
+witness. In Driscoll's glad face he read his own triumph, his own
+purpose achieved. Jacqueline was righted at last.
+
+"No," he agreed, "I could not hope for so much.--But another might."
+
+Then apropos of nothing, he went and flung his arms about Driscoll. The
+astounded trooper could only grip his hand, just once, without a word.
+Then he was gone.
+
+Maximilian watched him go. The priest turned to Jacqueline. She, too,
+stood poised so long as his spurs rang through the corridor. At last
+silence fell on them. For a moment she hesitated. Then, trembling, her
+eyes moist, she held out her hand. "Good-bye," she whispered. But,
+impulsively, she raised her arm and touched the doomed man's forehead
+lightly with her finger tips, making a blurred sign of the cross. And,
+not daring an instant longer, she too fled.
+
+Maximilian was alone with the priest. The room was growing dark. It was
+the last night.
+
+"Now, father, light the tapers, there on the altar. Yes, I am ready.
+Ready? Blessed Mother in Heaven, it is more than I had thought to be!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE ABBEY OF MOUNT REGRET
+
+
+  "O, here
+  Will I set up my everlasting rest,
+  And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
+  From this world-wearied flesh."
+                       --_Romeo and Juliet_.
+
+
+It is curious and humiliating, how Nature does not vex herself in the
+least for the dying of a man. And yet, to the man, the event is so very
+important! Each breath of spaceless night, each twinkle from the
+firmament, though but the phantom of a ray quenched ages before,
+everything, he teases into anxious commentary on his own puny end. There
+could not be more ado if the Universe were in the throes, writhing
+against a reconquering Chaos. Harassed creature, what ails him is only
+the pathetic fallacy, which is a soothing melody and stimulating to
+mortal pride. But the lapses into healthier realization are very, very
+hard to bear.
+
+How cold it was, when Maximilian awoke! The chill seemed creeping nearer
+his heart, nearer the citadel. And how black the night, before the dawn!
+But where, now, were his matches? He had the same monotonous trouble of
+any other morning in getting one to light. Then the two candles guttered
+fitfully, sordidly, just as they had always done. The white cloths of
+the last communion seemed a ghostly intrusion on what was of every day.
+Maximilian drew his cloak about him. The chill was simply of the
+plateau, of the night, not the portent of death. The world without was
+dark and desolate, but that had no reference to the tomb. The world was
+merely taking its normal sleep. The heavy cloak ought to answer--but, it
+did not.
+
+He took up the snuffers, coaxing the yellow flames to brighter promise,
+then set the candles before him on the table. A piece of dripping tallow
+fell upon his hand, and the hand jerked back. The man pondered. So, even
+his flesh was part of Nature too, and heeded trivial pain, with no
+thought of the bullets to drive through it shortly.
+
+He wrote two or three letters yet remaining, to friends, to his brother,
+the Emperor of Austria. He penned words of farewell, yet even as the
+tears welled in his eyes, he needed to stop and make sure that he had
+indeed not more than three hours yet to live. It was difficult, though,
+with the candles spluttering there, in the ordinary, every-day fashion.
+He signed the last letter, to his mother. He gazed at the signature, of
+characters squarely formed. He might have written it yesterday, or the
+year before. It looked the same. But the pen he had just dropped had
+dropped forever. No, no, that should not be! And he snatched it up
+again, and wrote, scribbled, covered paper, fearing to stop. But at last
+he did stop, with a shivering laugh. He must face this thing, he
+decided. And over and over again he told himself, "I have written my
+last. Yes, my last!" and steadfastly resisted the taunting, airy quill
+lying there. So, what was harder than farewell to loved ones, he nerved
+himself to end the small actions of his daily existence.
+
+Maximilian had his life long been a dreamer, ever gazing wide-eyed as a
+child on the wonderful fantasies that came, whether entrancing or
+dreadful. But the child's fantasies are kindred with man's philosophies.
+Often, as he lay awaiting sleep, there was one particular thought that
+would bring him quickly, stark, staring awake. And this thought was, how
+certain things always came to pass. No matter how far away, nor how very
+slow their approach, making vague the hope or horror of them, yet the
+actual, present hour of their happening always struck at last. There was
+the eve of the day when he should be of age. Oh, but he had longed for
+that day! He had longed until he craftily suspected it never would
+arrive. And yet, despite those leaden-footed oxen, the minutes, arrive
+it did, in very fact. The eve of that day was a happy bed-time; but over
+his ardent reveries, over the vista of future achievements, there
+suddenly, darkly loomed another thought, a foretoken and clammy shroud,
+which smote the young prince with trembling. For would not the day of
+his death, however far away also, sometime be the present, passing
+moment, as surely, just as surely, as this anniversary of his birth?
+Here was a terrifying glimpse of mortality.
+
+When, not fifteen years later, Maximilian opened his eyes in the black
+Capuchin cell, and comprehension grew on him of the present day's
+meaning, he recalled how the fantasy of a morning of death had first
+come to him. He was a boy, and he was to go on a voyage. The boy had
+awakened when there was scarcely light as yet, and heard his mother at
+the door. "It is time, dear." She spoke low, not liking to break his
+slumber. But in the silence of all the world her voice was clear, and
+very sweet, and the words stood forth against his memory ever afterward.
+He was to be gone from her for a time, and this was in her mind as she
+called him. The boy, though, could think of nothing except that his
+little excursion among new and strange adventures was to begin, actually
+to begin. But then, quite unaccountably, there fell over his eagerness
+a chilling gloom. The delightful sprite named Expectation, who had
+whispered so piquantly of this same eventful morn, had basely changed
+herself into a hideous vampire, and she muttered at him, in frightful,
+raucous tones. Yet the hag's snarls were true promises. There was
+to come, surely, inexorably, a certain other eventful morn, and
+he would awake, and without his mother's calling him, he would
+know--_know_--that it was time!
+
+Back in that childhood hour he had lain for a while quite inconsolable,
+until his mother came again, and rested her hand on his head, and told
+him--"Why, one would think the little goose was going away forever!" It
+was broad daylight by now, too; and wholly comforted, he had sprung up,
+joyfully alive. Eternity did not worry him any more for a week.
+
+But the awakening of this later morning, in a Mexican prison! And when
+he understood that the old familiar fantasy was become a fact! When he
+remembered how once he had been consoled in his boyhood! For a moment
+the sense of loss and of helplessness was stifling, and he
+yearned--yearned frantically, as he never had as a boy--for the touch of
+his mother's hand, for her voice, so low and sweet. The horrid cruelty
+he could not, during that moment, bear. He felt that he must cry out for
+her, like a very child. And though he wept, it was the man, and the
+man's despair that his was not now the boy's need of comfort.
+
+But when they came in the first dawn and knocked at his door, they found
+him serene, untroubled, and only the wonted shade of melancholy on his
+brow. He greeted them courteously, and was desirous that they should
+have no unnecessary difficulties on his account. Being dressed already,
+punctiliously, and in black, he himself went to call Miramon and Mejía,
+and brought them to his own cell, where they received the last sacrament
+together.
+
+Later the three condemned were at breakfast--bread, chicken, a little
+wine and a cup of coffee--when horses' hoofs rang abruptly in the street
+below, and as abruptly ceased under their window. There was a command,
+and sabres rasped against their scabbards to gain the light. Maximilian
+raised eyes filled with pity to his two companions. Mejía, an Indian
+thoroughly, made a gesture of impatience. The handsome Miramon, of
+French blood, shrugged his shoulders. Then both glanced timidly in their
+turn at Maximilian, and each finding a hand stretched forth, grasped it
+silently. But the priests of the condemned, who were waiting apart, felt
+their blood turn to icy beads. For them the quick metallic gust of
+strident life down in the street had the merciless quality of hammering
+upon a coffin lid.
+
+Troops filed up the stairs, and along the corridor. They halted, faced
+the door, grounded arms. An officer stepped out, fumbled with a
+document, and read the death sentence. Maximilian gently released
+himself from one and another of those present, and turning to the
+Austrian physician, handed him his wedding ring. "You will give it to my
+mother," he said. Father Soria's eyes filled with tears, one plump fist
+clenched pathetically. Maximilian passed an arm over the good man's
+shoulder, and with him walked out among the soldiers. He nodded to them
+encouragingly, and so started on his little journey.
+
+Three ramshackle public hacks, set high over wabbling wheels, and drawn
+by mules, waited at the door. Maximilian smiled an apology as he
+motioned Father Soria to precede him into the first. The troops used
+their spurs. A whip cracked. The springs jolted. Everywhere, on the
+curbs, in windows, on housetops, there were people. The archduke had the
+impression of breath tensely held, and of eyes, eyes strained, curious,
+and awed, like those of children who witness suffering and cannot
+understand.
+
+Passing the convent of Santa Clara, Maximilian peered upward at the
+windows; and, as he hoped, he saw Jacqueline. She was leaning far out,
+and tremulously poised. Tender compassion was in every line of her tense
+body, but as their gaze met she tried to smile, bravely and cheerfully,
+and until the hack swung round the corner, there was her hand waving him
+farewell. The little journey might have been, a fête, and somehow, he
+was comforted.
+
+"I wonder," he mused, "if I've done very much for her, after all. Or for
+that American, named Driscoll? Will she--" He shook his head, and
+sighed. "No, she is not the lass to have him, not after my little scene
+of last night. But, the choice does rest with her, now. And for a girl,
+that is everything.--Alas, poor young man!"
+
+His rueful prophecies were that moment interrupted by a woman's scream.
+It rose piercingly over the clatter of their march. Maximilian put out
+his head and looked back. The woman was running beside Mejía's hack,
+panting, stumbling through the dust, her black hair streaming. She held
+a babe in her rebosa, but with her free hand she clutched weakly at the
+spokes. To the clumsy, pitying soldiers who would force her away, she
+cried again, "Mercy ... Mercy ... Mercy...." A low murmuring grew on
+every side. Maximilian flung open his cab door. But the same instant it
+was slammed against him. He sank to his seat, with a stare of dumb pain
+in his eyes that the priest beside him never afterward forgot. The woman
+back there was Mejía's wife. And Maximilian had had one glimpse of the
+husband's face. It was a face stretched to agony, deadened to the color
+of lead.
+
+"May I, may I--_pay_ for this!" moaned the one-time Emperor. "O
+God, grant Thou that I do pay for this, hereafter!"
+
+Beyond the last hovels of the suburbs, at the foot of the Cerro de las
+Campanas, the condemned were told to alight. Here again there was a
+throng, hundreds and hundreds of swarthy faces, blank in awed pity. One
+gaping fellow pointed wonderingly.
+
+"Look, there they are! There--los muertos!"
+
+Maximilian overheard, and a cold shiver crossed his spine. To be
+identified already as "the dead one!"
+
+Then he beheld his coffin, there, the longest of the three being borne
+up the hill. They were boxes of cheap wood, unpainted inside, smeared
+with black on the outside. A wavy streak of carmine simulated the
+drooping cord and golden tassels of richer caskets. It was the pomp and
+circumstance that pertains to the humblest peon clay.
+
+Four thousand serried bayonets squared the base of the hill, and made a
+compact, bristling hedge to hold back the common people. Through it
+marched the doomed Imperialists, each with his confessor and a platoon
+of guards, and so toiled on up the slope. The archduke looked about him.
+There were many privileged spectators within the cordon, but nowhere did
+he see a former friend. All, all, had kept away, and in his heart he
+knew that it was better so. He could not ask that much of them. But
+stay--yes, a remembered figure caught his attention; a shriveled
+decrepit figure. Here, too, mid every color Republican, he beheld in the
+man's garb a last surviving uniform of the vanished Empire. It was,
+however, scarcely to be distinguished as such. The red coat was
+threadbare, and soiled with dust. The ragged green pantaloons, held by a
+knotted rope, were grotesquely faded. Yet the prince, who had once
+gloried in dashing regimentals and mistook them for power, was deeply
+touched. He recognized a lone unit of what had been none other than the
+Batallon del Emperador. He paused, to have a word with the miserable
+derelict.
+
+"So, you would be near me, even now?" he said. "Ah, ever faithful little
+old man, but are you brave enough for the horror of it? Are you?"
+
+Red eyeballs rolled upward in their sockets, and for a space met the
+archduke's kindly gaze. Then the steady repellant hate in them seemed
+disconcerted, and the withered form cowered under the touch of the pale
+white hand. Inaudible words rattled in the old man's throat, and he
+trembled, as though to turn and run. Maximilian regarded him
+benevolently, thinking it a crisis of emotion.
+
+"There, there," he said, "go if you wish. It's not well, you see, to
+think of me so much. But you must not imagine that I am ungrateful. When
+you believed yourself unseen, certainly when you had no hope of reward,
+throughout my misfortunes, you have always hovered near me, on the
+battlefield, and more lately under my prison window. Yes, yes, I have
+seen. And now, and now I thank you." The bloodshot eyes roved the
+ground, but did not lift again. "As humble, as loyal as a dog,"
+Maximilian murmured as he turned away.
+
+They indicated to him that he should take his place before a wall of
+adobe blocks which had been piled together near the crest of the hill,
+only a little lower than those very fortifications built by the
+Imperialists themselves. With a gesture of assent, he complied. The
+priests fell sorrowfully back behind the soldiers, and he and Miramon
+and Mejía were alone together, three tragic isolated figures in a little
+oblong patch of bare rocky hillside. One end of the oblong was the adobe
+shield. The other three sides were walls of living men, massed shoulder
+to shoulder, with bayonets pointed outward against the jostling peering
+crowd. The three who were to die could now see no human being beyond the
+dense, double row of soldiery. The remainder of earth for them was the
+hollow square, bounded by the slouching backs clothed in blue, by the
+white flats of the képis, by the line of light playing over the thorns
+of steel. Beyond was the early morning sun; above, the mystery of space.
+
+Through the gap of an instant the shooting squads tramped in, nearer and
+nearer, until they halted opposite the condemned. Maximilian then
+perceived which squad was to be his own. It numbered seven tiradores and
+a yellow, beardless officer. The seven were low, cumbersome, tawny, and
+they shuffled awkwardly. Their stripling chief thrust out his stomach,
+and he handled his large sword with an unaccustomed flourish. The
+pompous severity was, after all, only insolence. He had need to keep
+guard on his importance; he did not wish to hear the pounding of his
+heart. Yet his muscles twitched unbecomingly, which jerked his mouth,
+and sometimes his head.
+
+Maximilian stepped forward and addressed them. To each he gave a gold
+piece bearing his effigy. It was his last expenditure in that coin. He
+requested them earnestly, gently, to aim at his body, not at his head.
+He was thinking of his mother. He would not have her see him with
+mangled features. Then with a final reassuring word, he turned back to
+the wall.
+
+They were going to place him between the other two, but with a smile and
+shake of the head, he would not have it so. His last act was for
+precedence. Affectionately he drew Miramon to the place of honor, so
+that Mejía was on the right, and himself on the left.
+
+Then the _fiscal_ of the Republic appeared, and read the military
+law. For any who should ask the lives of the condemned, death was
+prescribed. But if there was anything the condemned themselves wished to
+say....
+
+Maximilian removed his hat. "Mexicans," he said, "may my blood be the
+last to be spilled for this country's welfare. Long live Independence!
+Long live Mexico!"
+
+He spoke the words calmly, gravely, and having concluded, he carefully
+adjusted a large handkerchief, so that his beard might not be burned by
+the powder. Then he crossed his arms on his breast, and gazed steadily
+into the barrels of the leveled muskets, waiting.
+
+A wave of motion, of tendons stiffening, passed along the thick wall of
+flesh. Against it the tide without swelled higher, stronger. Tension
+strained upward to the supreme crash. The quiet of a multitude is pain.
+
+But the other two Imperialists had not spoken yet. Mejía shook his head
+passionately. He saw only his young wife with her babe, panting,
+stumbling through the dust. He held a crucifix, and would not take it
+from his lips. Miramon, however, raised his voice to protest against the
+charge of treason. Of that crime he died innocent. But he pardoned, as
+he hoped for pardon. Then he cried, "Long live Mexico! Long live the
+Emperor!"
+
+Maximilian started. These were the words that he thought he should like
+to hear. But now they grated. They recalled the mistake he had lived,
+the anachronism of his life. They were scorpions. They stung like the
+needle in an ulcer. He turned sharply, in tearful reproach. But a sword
+flashed, the volley came, and the three men fell, as under a crushing
+rock, one against the wall; his head broken over upon his breast. The
+pert young officer pointed his blade at three convulsive bodies, and
+through each a last bullet sped, burying itself in the earth beneath.
+The crowd pressed, surged, stood on tiptoe.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was one other among the spectators, but keeping himself hidden,
+whom Maximilian would have been concerned to see there. He was Driscoll.
+He came to watch the shriveled derelict, Murguía. He came to stand guard
+over a soul, Maximilian's. What peace that soul had found should not be
+destroyed. And so he screened himself in the crowd, holding ready to
+crush a viper whose fangs were heavy with poison. When Maximilian paused
+and spoke to the old man, Driscoll was very near, near enough to hear,
+and to strike. But the old man had only wheezed and mumbled. Though why
+that old man did not utter a first word, though why he could not, will
+never be explained. But this much is true, that the ambushed soul,
+moving so calmly toward eternity, then stepping so near the coiled
+serpent, was yet its own guardian, unwittingly.
+
+Until the very end Driscoll staid there alert. The old man, baffled,
+insatiate, might yet cry out what he knew. Driscoll's gaze never
+relaxed. He felt as though he watched a murderer while the murder was
+being done. But the old man only listened. Unable to see within the
+hollow square, he listened, and waited. His lower jaw hung open, and
+over his lip a white froth grew and grew, until it broke and trickled
+down his chin. The red eyeballs gleamed ravenously, as still he waited.
+
+"When this is over," Driscoll said to himself, "he'll plump down in a
+fit and blow out. Else he'll go raving crazy. Lord, that look!"
+
+When it _was_ over, Driscoll went to him. He had but to reach forth
+a hand and fasten on his shoulder. He held him against a scurrying of
+spectators, whom the tragedy's close had that instant brought to life.
+
+"Here, Murgie, here's something that belongs to you," he said. "Well,
+what's the matter? Take it, I don't want it."
+
+The old man looked up. An ivory cross was dangling from the other's
+fingers. The cross still showed bloodstains; no later flowing of blood
+had washed _them_ away. But the father of María de la Luz stared,
+stared vacantly at the trinket. The masterful, consuming rage of two
+years past was gone out of his eyes. Instead they were watery and
+senile. The brows, and even the lashes, had turned as white as the thin
+strands of hair, and contrasted gruesomely against the yellow, mottled
+skin, which stretched like clouded parchment over the bony death's head.
+At last the old man put out his hand and took the cross, not
+comprehending.
+
+"No, I didn't give it to him," Driscoll explained bluntly. "I told you I
+wouldn't."
+
+Yet no spasm of chagrin distorted the weazen face.
+
+"This chain here, it's--it's _gold_!" the old man cried.
+
+Then he sputtered, choked. What had he betrayed? Would the strange donor
+reclaim the gift, knowing it was gold? He leered craftily at Driscoll,
+and with a hungry, gloating secrecy--his old slimy way of handling
+money--he smuggled the holy symbol under his jacket. But from cunning
+the leer changed to suspicion and quick alarm. He delved into his
+pockets, one after another. He searched greedily, wildly, until the last
+coin on him lay in his palm. Quaking in every feeble bone, he counted
+his poor wealth again and again. There was very little left. He glared
+at Driscoll. He glared at townsmen, officers, blanketed Inditos, all
+swarming past to gaze on the three corpses. He cried "Thief!" first at
+one unheeding passer-by, then at another.
+
+"I had more than this!" he whined. "More--more than this! There was my
+hacienda, my peons, my cotton, my mills, my canvas bags. There was my
+blockade runner. She was Clyde-built, she was named _La Luz_, she
+cost twenty thousand English gold pieces. Who has taken these things
+from me? Who--where----Curse you, do _you_ know?"
+
+Dissipating his hoards, sacrificing his last chattel, all that was now a
+blank. But his hoards, his chattels, were all that were now worth while,
+and the miser clamored for them, and them only. Vengeance, however, is
+an ironical bargainer. Vengeance kept her pay, and "abhorred Styx, the
+flood of deadly hate," had dried and left a stranded soul, parched by
+avarice. Driscoll was moved by a pity half ashamed.
+
+"Look here, Murgie," he threatened terribly, "Do you say _I_ stole
+your----By the Great Horn Spoon, I'll----" He flung his hand to his
+revolver.
+
+The counter-irritant had instant effect. All moisture died out of the
+rat eyes, leaving them two little horrible beads. The miser shrank,
+groveled, in mortal terror of some physical hurt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE CONTRARINESS OF JACQUELINE
+
+
+  "Much adoe there was, God wot;
+  He wold love, and she wold not."
+         _--Ballad of Phillida and Corydon._
+
+
+Maximiliano I. of Mexico was dead. His dynasty and his Empire were the
+frippery of a past time. Yet there was his capital, still holding out
+against the Republic. Leonardo Marquez, the Leopard, spitefully refused
+to capitulate. But why he would not, no one knew, neither the starving
+City, nor the patient besieger outside. No one, unless it was
+Jacqueline. The very day of the triple execution she called on Escobedo,
+commander in chief at Querétaro. She desired to return to the capital,
+and she wanted a pass through the Republic's lines there. She mentioned,
+in case it were any inducement, that the place would fall within
+twenty-four hours after her arrival. Jacqueline had difficulty to speak
+at all. She could not endure the general's monstrous flaps of ears, his
+rabbinical beard, his cruel black eyes.
+
+"María purísima," he exclaimed, "you cannot mean, señorita, that you,
+all alone, will deliver the City of Mexico into our hands?"
+
+"It will certainly be an incident of my stay there," she replied.
+
+The hard, Jewish features lighted cunningly. "Then, por Dios, you are as
+wonderful as I've always heard! But may--may one be allowed a little
+curiosity?"
+
+"I _might_ say," and Jacqueline forthwith said it, "that I have
+just had a cipher telegram from Louis Napoleon."
+
+"Which," breathlessly demanded the other, "will interest Marquez, eh?
+Will disappoint him? Will cause him to surrender?"
+
+"Your Excellency is of course entitled to his own conjectures."
+
+But the commander-in-chief was satisfied. "We must hasten your going by
+every means," he declared. "You shall have an escort. You----"
+
+"Then I choose the Gray Troop--because," she added carefully, "they're
+the best."
+
+Now, why, by all that's feminine, was she surprised next morning when
+the Gray Troop gathered round her coach, as though that were a
+coincidence? At least she arched her brows, and lifted one shoulder
+petulantly, and unmistakably showed that she expected a tedious time of
+it. The sunburned colonel of the Grays beamed so with happiness too, as
+he drew rein to report to her. They met for the first time since
+Maximilian's embarrassing little scene for their express benefit.
+Driscoll noted her disdain, and it is likely that he only grinned. He
+did that because he knew how helpless he was, and how merciless she
+could be. For she was not only beautiful, she was pretty--a demure,
+sweet, and very pretty girl. Some vague instinct of self-defense guided
+him. His broad smile was exasperating in the last degree, and it was not
+she, but the other young woman in the coach, whom he addressed.
+
+"I got some side saddles, Miss Burt," he announced, "and a few extra
+mustangs, whenever anybody gets tired of traveling behind curtains."
+Curiously enough, both girls wore riding habits. "Oh, by the way," he
+inquired suddenly, "how's Miss Jack'leen this morning? Is she well
+and--docile?"
+
+Jacqueline's chin dropped in astonishment. She seized the old canvas
+window flap and jerked it down. But at once she raised it again, and
+thoughtfully contemplated the trooper.
+
+"I wonder," she mused aloud, in that quaint accenting of the English
+which cannot be described, "when is it that you are going to grow up,
+_ever_?"
+
+"I did start to," Driscoll informed her soberly, "but it got tiresome as
+all creation, and I reckon I've backslided just since"--a world of
+earnestness came into his lowered voice--"well, just since we had that
+talk with poor Maximilian."
+
+The old canvas curtain fell for good then, and very abruptly.
+
+A moment later, however, she was avenging her flushed cheeks on Mr.
+Daniel Boone, who rode at the other side, also sunburned, also effulgent
+with happiness.
+
+"If it isn't the _animal disputans_!" she exclaimed. "Look Berthe,
+and rejoice; our sighing Monsieur le Troubadour!"
+
+Driscoll hovered near a moment, then reluctantly rode ahead of his
+battered dusty warriors. So he and the wilful maid from France began a
+second journey together, yet far, far apart. But only after many
+torturing hours did his first joy consent to perceive the distance
+between them.
+
+Now and then, though rarely, and never when he hoped for such a thing,
+she would ride with him. And then he usually stirred up hostilities
+before he knew it, and notwithstanding all that was tender and humble
+which he meant to tell her. There was, however, cause enough for
+savagery. She made him the least of the troop, though he arranged each
+detail of speed and comfort, laid out tempting noon-day spreads,
+improvised cheer in the cheerless hostelries, and all with a forethought
+showing pathetically how his every thought was of her. But if she
+divined the inwardness of this, which of course she did, outwardly she
+contrived to be oblivious. She thanked him sincerely and simply, the
+while that he craved repayment, as the heart repays. He yearned for only
+a chance to speak his mind, and to force hers. But now craftily she
+would bring the others flocking round, to decide for her if they did not
+think monsieur absurdly mistaken in this or that! The same instant she
+would conjure up the most trivial of arguments, and be vastly shocked
+over the ridiculous contentions which she herself assigned to Driscoll.
+
+She grew honestly fond of the other Missouri colonels, with their ranger
+uniforms, and brawn scarred by weather and battle, and they and the
+marchioness became great friends. She was a dainty flower among them,
+but they were prime comrades, and she, the mad-cap tomboy her life long,
+took to them in the impulse that here were her own kind. Driscoll was
+proud to see it, without need of being generous. She gathered Berthe, as
+a soberer sister, into the merry communion, and she rode with Clay of
+Carroll, with Carroll of Clay, with Reub Marmaduke, with Crittenden,
+with cherubic Old Brothers and Sisters, with Hanks the bugler, and she
+mocked Meagre Shanks, that disputatious animal, because he tried to
+monopolize Berthe and would not dispute at all. She asked them
+questions. She asked Harry Collins if his tribe were the same as that of
+ces Missouriens-là, and the Kansan confessed that the two tribes had
+been a bit hostile of late, but what with raiding, razing, and
+murdering, he guessed they'd laid the foundation for a mutual
+self-respect, as behooved valiant redskins. So she often got strange
+answers for her inquisitiveness, but she had grown wary among
+Westerners, and she usually paid them back. They were a happy party. But
+Driscoll wanted a more definite focusing of the joy. And at times,
+indeed, yielding to temptation herself, she permitted him to lose his
+heart deliciously over again. Shadows were lifted now, and she was just
+a lovable girl, just sweet Jacqueline. And he loved her with the boy's
+young strength of adoration and diffident awe. Precisely in which state
+she made him suffer exquisitely. No one could be more contrary and
+capricious than the lovable girl of a moment before. Whereat storms
+brewed within him.
+
+There was one of the rare times when the Missourian and the maid rode up
+and down the winding white ribbon of a Mexican highway, and for awhile
+both were quiet. This once they dared the risk--she did, rather--which
+lurks in the silence that requires no words. For him it brought the old
+time, and the rides of that time, when he wondered what was the matter
+with him, and she knew all along. And he thought how during the hard
+winter in the Michoacan mountains and swamps, he had caught himself
+almost crying aloud, that he wanted her, that he wanted her--wanted
+again the subtle comradeship of those silences which require no words.
+And here, at last, here she was, riding beside him!
+
+He looked at her furtively. She was in profile. He looked again, to be
+sure that it was not memory, but the breathing girl herself. Yes, for a
+fact, it was the girl herself. And here was her own queenly head, here
+its regal poise, here the superb line of the neck to the shoulder.
+Reverence grew on admiration, for as he gazed he beheld her character
+revealed, of lines as stately, as womanly, and withal as flexible, too,
+before the cheery glow of each moment's life. He stirred, and was
+vaguely restive, and perhaps a little frightened also, because of the
+deep mystery of something within himself which he could not understand.
+The classic outline of her features was softened now in the warmth of
+flesh. Her vivacity was off guard, in the forgetfulness of reverie. The
+pure white of the little tip of ear was tinged with pink. Her eyes were
+lowered to the saddle horn. They were melting. They were almost blue.
+
+"Jack'leen!" He burst out fervently, before he thought, with an arm half
+lifted toward her.
+
+The drooping lashes raised. The eyes were gray again. She regarded him
+for awhile without speaking.
+
+"Why don't you quarrel?" she asked finally.
+
+The spell was broken. Her pounding heart had vent in a nervous laugh of
+raillery. She touched her horse with the riding crop in her gauntleted
+hand. Somehow she would not leave that dumb brute, the horse, in peace.
+Driscoll's old Demijohn, however, was used to the game by now. He
+pointed his ears, and checkmated that last move by bringing his master
+once more to the lady's side.
+
+"You used to," she went on, as though there had been no interruption,
+"nicely. You were of an interest then. In fact, I reck-_on_--I know
+no one that I had rather have quarreled with."
+
+But still he would not, though that "reckon" from her lips was most
+alluring. She stole a mischievous glance at his face, but the fixed look
+there made her lift _her_ hand toward _him_. Perhaps, if he
+had seen and had spoken then--But he did see.
+
+"Eh bien, since monsieur won't fight, won't, _won't_," she cried,
+"then it's more fun to----"
+
+Evidently to seek livelier company. For she wheeled the mustang, swerved
+from a grasp at her bridle, and went galloping back to the coach. He
+twisted in his saddle, pushed his sombrero higher on his head, and
+dubiously watched her flying from him, a lithe, trim figure in snug
+Hungarian jacket, the burnished tendrils fluttering on the nape of her
+neck, the soft white veil trailing like a fleecy cloud from her black
+_amazona_ hat. He bent a perplexed gaze to the road. "It's 'way,
+'way beyond me," he told himself. Then he grew aware of a sense of
+warmth on his forearm. Yes, he remembered. For an instant she had laid a
+hand on his sleeve, and he had thrilled to the ineffable token of
+nestling. He was never immune from her tantalizing contradictions. He
+felt this one yet.
+
+Hoofs pounded behind, and Mr. Boone drew up alongside. "She came back,
+and made me get away from the coach," he announced. "Prob'bly she wanted
+to cry some; she looked it."
+
+Yet another of her contradictions!
+
+"Then why in the nation," Driscoll demanded, "do you keep hanging round
+that coach for? Look here Shanks, you make me plum' weary. The idea of
+you falling in----"
+
+"No more'n you, you innocent gamboling lamb of an ol' blatherskite." But
+Daniel's steel blue eyes had softened to their gentlest. "Say Jack," he
+added, "she's going back to Paris."
+
+"Don't I know it? Lord A'mighty!"
+
+"Go on, never mind me," said Mr. Boone. "Groan out loud, if you want to.
+For she sho'ly is, yes, back to Paris. Now Buh'the"--The Troubadour's
+_r's_ always liquefied dreamily with that name--"Buh'the has been
+telling me a few things, and I'm sure reporter enough to scout out the
+rest of the story, and it's just this--Jack, she's fair broken-hearted."
+
+"Miss Burt?"
+
+"No, no, the marchioness. She staked out a campaign over here, and it's
+panned out all wrong, and it wasn't her fault either. Poor girl, no
+wonder she might like to cry a little. She's lavished everything she had
+on it too, ancestral château, and all that."
+
+"But," said Driscoll quickly "she'll not suffer. There's her title----"
+
+"Title?" exclaimed Daniel. "W'y, she's going to give that up too, not
+having any château any more, and she'll trip blithely down among the
+people again, where she says it's more comfortable anyhow. Title? Well,
+you've suhtinly noticed that she always did take that humorously. Her
+grandfather--Buh'the says--was right considerable of a jurist, used
+scissors and paste, and helped make a scrap-book called the Napoleonic
+code, and Nap the First changed him into a picayunish duke. But wasn't
+the nobility of intellect there already? Sho'ly! Miss Jacqueline,
+though, likes the father of her grandfather the best. He never was
+noble, technically I mean. His was the nobility of heart, and he'd have
+scorned to be tagged. He just baked bread, and fed most half of Saint
+Antoine for nothing at times, while the Dauphin at Versailles was
+throwing cakes to the swans. Howsoever," Mr. Boone added hastily, as sop
+to his softness for princes, "I reckon that there Dauphin was noble too.
+Both of 'em fed the hungry mouths that were nearest."
+
+"But," demanded Driscoll, "doesn't her title carry some sort of a--a
+compensation?"
+
+"Not a red sou. The majorat--that's the male line--died out with her
+father, which means that the annuity died out too."
+
+"W'y, Great Scot, she's----"
+
+"She's tired and disheartened, that's what she is, and she's going back
+to Paris, and you--" Boone paused, and glared at his companion, "--and
+you mean to let her!"
+
+Old Demijohn felt a spur kicked against his flank, and he lifted his
+fore feet and sped as the wind. It was fully an hour later when Meagre
+Shanks caught up with horse and rider again. Rather, he met them coming
+back. His conversation was guileless, at first.
+
+"Do you know, Din," he began, "those two girls are only half educated?
+Yes sir, gastronomically, they are positively illiterate, and it's a
+shame! W'y, they don't know hot biscuits and molasses. They don't know
+buttermilk. They don't know yams. Nor paw-paws, nor persimmons. They
+don't even know watermelon. Now isn't France a backward place?"
+
+"Don't, Shanks!" Driscoll begged. "You'll have me heading for Missouri
+in a minute. You didn't, uh, mention peach cobbler?"
+
+"_And_ peach cobbler, big as an acre covered with snow. And just
+think, it's roastin' ea'ah time up there now, _now_!" How Daniel's
+voice did mellow under a tender sentiment! "And to think," he went on,
+"of the marchioness living on in such ignorance! It's a thing that's
+just got to be remedied, Jack."
+
+"Then suppose you take her to Missouri," growled his friend, "and let me
+alone."
+
+"_I_ take _her_? Oh come now, Din, I see I've got to tell you
+something which is--" The Troubadour's accents grew low and fond, and
+the other man respected them, with something between a smile and a sigh
+for his own case. "Which is--well, nobody's noticed it, but the fact is
+that Buh'the, that Miss Buh'the----"
+
+"Dan," interrupted Driscoll severely, "you're not going to tell me any
+secret. You mean that you weren't mistaken when you mistook her for a
+queen."
+
+"That--that's it!" ejaculated Daniel. "Of coh'se," he added soothingly,
+"the other one is a--a mighty nice girl, but----"
+
+"Oh, _is_ she? But Miss Burt is _the_ one you want to take to
+Missouri? Well Dan, why don't you?"
+
+"Because," was the doleful reply, "those two are just like orphan
+sisters together, and--well, she won't desert. She _is_ a queen, by
+God, sir! Miss Jacqueline might make her, but I haven't got the heart to
+ask it. Now, uh, if--if you would just bring along the other one?"
+
+So, here was the goal of all of Daniel's manoeuvering!
+
+Driscoll cast a leg over the pommel of his saddle, and faced Boone
+squarely. "Shanks," he demanded with tense vehemence, "do you suppose I
+need your woes for a prod? Don't you know how much--Lord A'mighty, how
+much!--I'd like to oblige you? But--she won't let me--even speak.
+There's, there's something the matter."
+
+Boone's lank jaw fell. "What, I wonder?"
+
+"And don't I wonder too?" Driscoll muttered savagely. "But it's
+_something_."
+
+From which moment until the end of the journey, and afterward, there
+were two men who pondered on what could be the trouble with Jacqueline.
+But while one pondered gloomily and fiercely and with a semi-comic grin
+under the lash, the other let perplexity delve and ferret into the
+mystery. For Mr. Boone had grown aware that an enormous heap of
+happiness for four depended on himself alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE JOURNALISTIC SAGACITY OF A DANIEL
+
+
+  "Ah, my Belovèd, fill the cup that clears
+  To-day of past Regret and future Fears."
+                                      _--Omar._
+
+
+At last Jacqueline stabbed a dot after the word "Finis," and so rounded
+out her chapter on "Failure." Beyond doubt that tiny punctuation point
+saved many lives. The besiegers were waxing impatient to assault, and
+within the City famine mobs ran the streets, crying, "Corn and wood!
+Corn and wood!" Those who could fled to the Republican camp. The
+Austrians practically mutinied. Starving and dying thousands clamored
+for surrender. Yet the ugly, revolting pigmy who was lieutenant of the
+Empire held them back in the terror of his heartless cruelty.
+
+Then the angel of mercy came. From her Marquez the tyrant learned that
+his speculation in treachery had collapsed. Louis Napoleon wanted no
+more of that stock. Besides, every French bayonet was needed in France.
+The rabid Leopard heard, and that night meanly crept away to save his
+own loathsome pelt. Bombs had begun to fall into the City, when a
+Mexican general worthier of the name took upon himself the heroic shame
+of unconditional surrender. The Oaxacans outside marched in, led by
+their young chief, Porfirio Diaz, and they fed the people, and of
+"traitors" shot only a moderate few.
+
+Renovation became the order of the days that followed. The President of
+the Republic was to be welcomed back to his capital. The stubborn old
+patriot's heart must be gladdened by every contrast to the dreary, rainy
+night years before when he fled into exile. Mexico would honor herself
+in honoring the Benemérito of America. So bunting was spread over every
+façade, along every cornice, green, white, and red, a festival lichen of
+magic growth. Flags cracked and snapped aloft, and lace curtains decked
+the outside of windows. Soldiers put on shoes and canvased their brown
+hands in white cotton gloves, and military bands rehearsed tirelessly.
+
+Din Driscoll sat on a bench in the shady Zócalo, and contemplated the
+Palacio Nacional and the Cathedral in process of changing sides from
+Empire to Republic. Innumerable lanterns being hung along their massive
+outlines were for incense to a goddess restored. The Mexican eagle had
+prevailed over monarchial griffins, and held her serpent safely in the
+way of being throttled. The blunt homely visage of Don Benito Juarez,
+luxuriously framed, looked out from over the Palace entrance. It was a
+huge portrait, surrounded by the national standards. Among the emblems
+there was one other, the Stars and Stripes. The gaze of the
+ex-Confederate was fixed. It was fixed steadily on the Stars and
+Stripes. Now and then he felt a rising in his throat, which he had
+difficulty to swallow down again.
+
+"Well, Jack?"
+
+Boone stood over him. Driscoll's eyes were oddly troubled as they turned
+from that flag opposite.
+
+"Sure it's hard," said Boone quietly, "mighty hard, to forgive our
+enemies the good they do."
+
+"What enemies?"
+
+"W'y, them," and Daniel pointed to a flag as to a nation. "Yes sir, the
+Yanks have kept faith. Do you see a single one of their uniforms down
+here? Do you notice anywheres that Yankee protectorate we were
+predicting? No sir, you do not! The Yanks--" But the term was damning to
+eloquence. Mr. Boone found another. "The _Americans_, I repeat,
+have hurled back the European invader. They have given Mexico to the
+Mexicans. They have endowed a people with nationality. But they have not
+gobbled up one solitary foot of territory. Which is finer, grander, than
+your Napoleonic glory! And yet it's selfish, of coh'se it is. But listen
+here, there'll never be any Utopia, Altruria, Millennium, or what not,
+that don't coincide with self-interest. And first among the races of the
+earth, the Americans have _made_ 'em coincide, and I want to know
+right now if the Americans are not the hope of the world!"
+
+The orator paused for breath. He had to. And then surprise the most
+lugubrious unexpectedly clouded his lank features. "Darn it, Jack," he
+exclaimed in alarm, "if I ain't getting Reconstructed, right while I am
+standing here!"
+
+"_Talked_ yourself into it," Driscoll observed scornfully. "But
+Dan, you can just put the South along with your Americans. The French
+laughed at the North alone, but later, when--Well, just maybe it's a
+good thing we did get licked."
+
+Mr. Boone gasped. Sparks of indignation darted from his steel blue eyes.
+The recoil needed a full minute to spend itself. Then a greater horror
+appalled him, a horror of himself. "The Lawd help me," he burst forth,
+"but you're right, Din Driscoll! You are! It _was_ for the best.
+But don't you ever think I'm going to admit it again, to nary a living
+mortal soul, myself included. W'y, it would, it would knock my editorial
+usefulness--all _to_ smash. There," he added, "that's decided,
+we're going back. The colonels want their mamas. They've been men long
+enough, and they're plum' homesick. All the old grudges up there must be
+about paid off by now, so's an ex-Reb can live in Missouri without train
+robbing. _Libertas et natale solum_--It's our surrender, _at_
+last."
+
+Driscoll rose abruptly. "Lay down your pen, Shanks," he said. "You're
+only trying to convert the converted. Of course I'm going too. That
+there flag, being down here, did it. And don't you suppose _I've_
+had letters from home too?"
+
+Meagre Shanks jumped with relief. He straightened throughout his spare
+length. As the smell of battle to the war charger, the pungent odor of
+printer's ink wet on galley proofs assailed his nostrils. There were
+visions, of double-leaded, unterrified thunderbolts crashing from the
+old Gutenberg, back in Booneville.
+
+"Missouri," he breathed in fire, "Missouri will sho'ly stay Democratic."
+
+Both men glowed. They were buoyant, happy. But these two could not so
+soon be quit of the enervating Land of Roses. A pair of countenances
+fell together. Daniel voiced their mutual thought.
+
+"And Miss Jacqueline?" he queried boldly, with the air of meaning to
+persist, no matter what happened.
+
+Driscoll showed weariness, anger.
+
+"And Miss Burt?" he parried.
+
+"She won't desert, I told you once."
+
+"You mean that she's going to Paris too? I say, Shanks, they're leaving
+to-morrow."
+
+Shanks knew that much, quite well enough.
+
+"Have you _tried_ to stop her?" he demanded sternly.
+
+Driscoll only looked disgusted.
+
+"But have you--_asked_ her?"
+
+Driscoll's head jerked a nod, of wrath ascending.
+
+The inquisitor wisely swerved. What her answer had been was, to say the
+least, palpable. But her reason for it was _the_ question with
+Daniel.
+
+"Is it," he pursued, "is it because she hasn't any dot? You know, Jack,
+that in France, when a young lady----"
+
+"No, it's not that. I know it's not."
+
+"Oh ho," said Daniel, "so you've been guessing too! And how many guesses
+did she give you? No, let me try just a few more. It ain't because,
+because she's an aristocrat?"
+
+"But I _want_ an aristocrat," cried the young Missourian, "one to
+her finger tips, enough of one to be above aristocracy. And _she_
+is."
+
+"Then," said his friend in despair, "it's because she don't, just simply
+don't care for you?"
+
+"You're a long time finding that out."
+
+"What! You don't mean----"
+
+"Fact," said Driscoll. "Even I guessed it at last. I told her I had been
+reckoning that she----"
+
+"Cared, yes?"
+
+Driscoll made a wry face. "And she said I mustn't jump at conclusions, I
+might scare 'em."
+
+The Troubadour chuckled heartlessly. Neither was Driscoll's sense of
+humor entirely gone.
+
+"'Oh, awful goddess! ever dreadful maid!'" Mr. Boone quoted.
+
+"She's sure a wonder," the other owned gloomily.
+
+"And you are a blind dunce, Jack."
+
+"Don't talk axioms at me," said Driscoll, with a warning light in his
+eye. "I don't need 'em."
+
+"Well, now," drawled Mr. Boone, "I can't help it if I associate with you
+any longer, so I'll just mosey round to the flower market. As they leave
+to-morrow, they'll be wanting some violets."
+
+And he went, and Din Driscoll sat down again and hated him.
+
+Daniel wended his way slowly, an attenuated ranger in gray mid carriages
+and blanketed forms. "Sho'", he mused, "that girl's heart is fair
+bleeding for him, can't _I_ see! Her eye-lashes, they're
+_wet_, every now _and_ then. And whatever the matter with her
+is, it's nothing. But nothing is the very darndest thing to overcome in
+a girl. There's got to be strong measures. It's got to be _jolted_
+out of her. _Archimagnífico, there's_ the point!"
+
+Mr. Boone drew out a black cigar, and mangled it between his teeth. He
+pondered and pondered, absent-mindedly kicking at natives he bumped
+into. "Kidnap 'em!" he cried at length. "N-o," he reflected, "they go in
+the public stage, and what with the escort, somebody'd get hurt. We
+don't want any dead men at this wedding. Old Brothers and Sisters would
+balk anyhow, and our ecclesiastical officiator is the boy we _do_
+need. Now what the everlasting----"
+
+He meant what salutary jolt he _could_ invent, barring holdups, but
+in the same breath he meant also a most startling scene which revealed
+itself as he turned the corner.
+
+A deafening crash of musketry was the first thing, and he looked up. He
+had come into a small plaza before a church, and against the church's
+blank wall a scene was taking place before an awe-stricken throng. He
+understood. Another proscribed "traitor" had just been caught; and
+executed, naturally. But no, not executed! For as the officer of the
+shooting squad approached to give the stroke of mercy, the prostrate
+victim raised himself by one hand and knocked aside the pistol at his
+head. Then he laughed in the officer's face, the most diabolical and
+unearthly mirth any there had ever heard. There was not a stain of blood
+on him. He had dropped in the breath of eternity before the bullets
+spattered past. But his uplifted face, with chin tilted back, was
+swollen, black, distorted, corded by pulsing veins, and one of the
+eyes--a crossed eye--bulged round and purple out of its socket, and
+_gleamed_. The demon of pain was tearing at the man's tissue of
+life, but by grip of will unspeakable the agony in that grimace changed
+to a smile.
+
+"Yes, poison! Vitriol!" he chattered at them hideously. "Adios,
+imbeciles. It's my last--jest!"
+
+Whereat he fell, writhing as the acid burned to his soul. Before the
+astounded officer could shoot, he had grown entirely quiet.
+
+Boone strained and pushed against the crowd until he reached the spot.
+The cadaver was in tight charro garb of raw leather. His sombrero lay
+near, on which was worked a Roman sword, meaning "Woe to the conquered!"
+Boone turned inquiringly to the officer. The man, who was pallid,
+touched his thumb to his cap, recognizing the uniform of the Grays.
+
+"You should know him, mi coronel," he explained. "His name was Tiburcio.
+He deserted from the Imperialistas at Querétaro, but afterward he joined
+the plot for Maximilian's escape. We had his description, and I found
+him. He wanted to take me to Marquez and Fischer, whom we would also
+like to find. He said that he risked himself here, to spy on them, and
+that he knew where they had fled, the Leopard disguised in the padre's
+cloak. But of course I paid no attention. I did not delay even to tie
+his hands. As Your Mercy observes, I had the honor to do my duty, at
+once."
+
+"I see," replied Boone dryly. "Lawd, this _is_ a jolt!"
+
+Then he got himself away from there.
+
+"A jolt," he muttered to himself again. "But shucks, it can't--Yes, it
+can," he decided fervently, "it can be used. We've got to have something
+terrifying, and poor cock-eyed Don Tibby won't care. He'd appreciate it.
+And anyhow, I don't seem to be able to stir up inspirations to-day, and
+this is the only thing."
+
+He was as pallid as the shooting squad he had just left.
+
+"No matter," he reflected, "I'll need just this ghastly state of mind.
+But here, goodness gracious, I've got to be in a sweat," with which he
+began to run, a lank knight in gray dented armor.
+
+"Worse luck," his thought pounded along with him, "this here's the first
+time I've ever faked. And it's a heap the hottest story I've ever
+handled, too. Our little Parisienne will get a frisson all right, all
+right, and such a one she'll not be wanting any of again very soon.
+Dixie Land, I mustn't smoke, I'm to be too excited."
+
+He came into the Zócalo, and drew up before Driscoll, who was still
+there and still ruminating.
+
+"Listen here," Boone panted, "here's your cue.--In ten minutes--to the
+second--arrive--knock at her door--appear!"
+
+"With violets?" inquired Driscoll.
+
+"Oh shut up!--Quit, don't stop me, I'm getting cooled off!--Only do what
+I say.--In just ten minutes--that is--if you want the girl."
+
+And Daniel was off again, "with high and haughty steps" towering along.
+
+"That Meagre Shanks, there, isn't a fool," Driscoll mentally recorded,
+and he took out his watch.
+
+The two girls were stopping at a hotel in Plateros Street, for
+Jacqueline had returned to find her beautiful residence, salon and all,
+ruthlessly dismantled, looted, robbed by Marquez while she was in
+Querétaro, which was a manner of levying contributions not unfamiliar to
+the Lieutenant of the Empire.
+
+In the balcony room of their hotel suite the two girls strove valiantly.
+Crisp gowns and dainty allied mysteries lay spread over the upholstery.
+They were vanishing into cavernous trunks, with crushing indifference if
+Jacqueline seized on a garment, but gently when Berthe rescued it, which
+she always did. Through the double glass doors of the balcony the street
+sounds below rose to their ears, clarion notes and vivas, hurrying feet
+and prancing hoofs, and the National hymn a few blocks away in the
+Zócalo.
+
+Suddenly a grim apparition loomed before the glass doors on the balcony.
+Berthe half screamed, in dismay clutching at ruffles and laces to hide
+them, when into the sweet-scented confusion strode Mr. Daniel Boone. He
+was the grim apparition. Jacqueline withheld her opinion, but she had
+one. The intruder's spurs were iconoclastic of carpeting, his abrupt
+presence of feminine sensibilities. But the lean, perspiring face drove
+away all thought of the conventions. Jacqueline snatched up a fleecy
+bank of petticoats, making room for him on the sofa. Daniel stared
+vacantly. The two girls looked very pretty. They were just flurried
+enough, and they wore white lawn, with sleeves short to the elbow. His
+fingers groped, and soon they closed over a small, instinctive hand. He
+kept hold upon that hand for strength, at the same time collapsing on
+the sofa.
+
+"Now, if you please," said Jacqueline calmly, "what----"
+
+"O Lawd!" Boone gulped, fighting for breath. "It don't matter
+much--maybe--to you all, but--O Lawd, I got to tell somebody!"
+
+"Tell us, tell us!" cried she of the captured hand.
+
+Daniel had sufficient presence of mind to retain it.
+
+"You know that--that poor devil Tiburcio?" he gasped.
+
+"Yes, yes!" But what anti-climax was here?
+
+"Well, he--he's dead. I saw him.--Lawd!"
+
+"Oh!" It was a little cry of relief.
+
+"But some were--were killed--taking him." Boone noted Jacqueline's
+intake of breath, her first tremor of alarm. "He fought like a--a
+wildcat. He had a knife--and a machete--and a pistol--and----"
+
+"_Who_ was killed? Monsieur--Oh, mon Dieu, what _can_ you have
+to tell me?"
+
+Daniel almost repented, there was that in her gray eyes.
+
+"Among them was my--" He nerved himself to it, some way--"my best
+friend, that peerless----"
+
+"Who?" Her command was imperious, her white teeth were set.
+
+"Din Driscoll!"
+
+The man blurted it out like a whipped schoolboy. He could not look up.
+He could only feel that she stood there, stricken, suffering.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+He could not believe that this was her voice. It was hardened, tearless,
+without emotion.
+
+"Monsieur--where is he?"
+
+The girl at his side sprang up with a sharp cry to her who questioned.
+Then he raised his eyes. Jacqueline was unaware of the sobbing girl who
+clung to her. Her face was changed to marble, her body as rigid.
+
+"Take me to him," she spoke again, still with that deathly authority of
+the grave.
+
+The man stammered before what he had done. The great beads stood out on
+his forehead. "You would not--you must not--you----"
+
+"He is mine," she said simply. "Wait, I shall be ready, at once." She
+passed into an inner room, the portières falling after her.
+
+"She's--she's getting on her hat," Boone muttered inanely. "Buh'the,
+she's got to be stopped! She's--God, why don't he come? It's shuah ten
+minutes. It's--What's that?"
+
+Someone had knocked. In the instant Boone had the hall door ajar.
+
+"Round to the balcony window, hurry!" he whispered.
+
+Then he turned, caught Berthe by the hand, and drew her quickly out into
+the hall. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the portières
+rustle, but he dared not look back.
+
+Jacqueline stepped into the room, and her hat was upon her head. It was
+of straw, with a drooping brim. She had thrown a long cloak over her
+thin dress. There was ice in her veins on this tropical June day. She
+paused, for she saw that the room was deserted. But no--there was a
+shadow between her and the balcony door. She stared at it, and her eyes
+grew big. The cloak slipped to the floor, and her fingers worked in the
+tapestry behind her. She fluttered weakly, like a wounded dove on the
+ground. Her knees trembled under her. And the man there? He was gazing
+about him in a puzzled way, for the glare outside still blinded him.
+Then he saw. He reached her, and caught her as she sank. He felt two
+soft arms, but icy cold, drop as lead around his neck. The white form he
+held was rigid, and he thought of shrouds and the chilled death sweat.
+With savage despair he crushed her to him. After a time her body slowly
+began to relax.
+
+"Oh, oh, my lad, my lad!" he heard her crying faintly, in a kind of
+hysteria.
+
+He touched her hair dazedly, with unutterable tenderness.
+
+"There, there--sweetheart!"
+
+The word came, though he had never used it before.
+
+Blood awoke, and coursed, sluggishly at first, through her being, until
+her heart tripped and throbbed and pounded against his own. Her head lay
+on his breast, the hat hanging by its ribbons over her back, and with
+the pulsing life the head and her whole body nestled closer. The soft
+arms grew warm against his neck, and tightened fiercely, to hold and
+keep him. Gently he forced up her chin, and her eyes, wet with hottest
+tears, opened under his. He bent and kissed the long lashes. But a small
+moist hand flattened against his brow and pushed back his head, and she
+raised on tiptoe. He understood, and--their lips met.
+
+"Tu sais," she murmured deliriously--nothing but her own dear French
+would answer now--"tu sais, que--oh, mon coeur, que je--que je
+_t'aime_!"
+
+The oddest contrasts fall over life's most sacred moments. The tone of
+her words thrilled him, set every fibre tingling, yet he thought of dry
+conjugations and declensions, conned over and over again in school, and
+he was conscious of vague wonderment that those things really, actually,
+had a meaning. Meaning? He believed now that no words in English could
+tell so much. He did not have to understand them. They bore the flesh
+and blood, the passion and the soul, of a woman who told him that she
+loved him.
+
+With a hesitant gentleness which bespoke the deep and reverent awe in
+his yearning, he pressed her head back against its resting place. A man
+can do without words of any kind. She grew very quiet there. The tense
+quivering ceased, and she crept closer, and at last she sighed,
+purringly, contentedly.
+
+But of course there was more which she simply had to say. And this time,
+when she raised her eyes, they were calm and earnest, and her beautiful
+forehead was white and very grave. "Do you know, dear," she said, "I
+should not care to live, I would not have lived, if what he said
+were--were--" But the eyes filled with tears, and angry with herself,
+she planted her fists against him to be free, and as impulsively crying,
+"Oh, my--my own dear lad!" she flung her arms about his neck again. "Oh,
+oh," she moaned, "he said that you were dead!"
+
+For the first time it dawned on Driscoll that all this must have had a
+cause, and for the first time since entering the room he remembered
+Boone.
+
+"_He_ told you--He----"
+
+But Driscoll did not finish. Putting her from him he sprang to the door
+and flung it open. There he waited. Boone was outside, and Boone walked
+expectantly in. Without a word Driscoll raised his fist, drew it back,
+his cruel arm muscled to kill. Jacqueline saw his anger for her,
+terrible in murder. She threw herself upon him, got hold of the knotted
+fist, got it to her lips. Another woman, too, had darted between him and
+the other man, and she faced him. The gentle Berthe was become a little
+tigress.
+
+"Not that, not that!" It was Jacqueline's voice. "Listen, mon cheri,
+I--I thank him. Au contraire, I do! And--and you must, too!"
+
+Driscoll stared at all three, first at one, then at another. He
+floundered, stupefied. Here was this loving girl, clinging to him as
+though he might vanish, and he had left her that morning a disdainful
+beauty. Then here was this Meagre Shanks with his mysterious ten
+minutes, and here was this dumfounding product of those ten minutes.
+Driscoll put forth an open hand.
+
+"Dan," he muttered incoherently, "you're a--a wonder, too!"
+
+Boone clenched the proffered hand in his own. "I never once thought,
+Jack," he said earnestly, contritely, "never once, that she cared so
+ever-_lastingly_ much."
+
+"Well," said Driscoll, "don't do it again."
+
+"Not unless," ventured Boone, "not unless she should ever want a little
+antidote for ennui. By the way, mademoiselle, do you thank me for the
+quaver of emotion, for the frisson?"
+
+"Frisson?" she repeated scornfully, with loathing. For once she had been
+unaware of the prized knife-like tremor. In the fear of losing one dear
+she had lost consciousness of self. She had _lived_ the tremor, the
+agony, and it was too dreadful, "No, monsieur," she said, "I want no
+more of art. I--I want to _live_!"
+
+"You needed something, though," said Berthe, "to make you find it out."
+
+Driscoll looked curiously at the two girls.
+
+"Yes, J-Jack'leen"--how quaintly awkward he was, trying her old tomboy
+nickname without the "Miss!"--"Yes, what was the matter with you,
+anyhow?"
+
+"Parbleu, I forgot!" cried Jacqueline in dismay. "I was not to have
+monsieur, no!" And Jacqueline's chin, tilting back with elaborate
+hauteur, was meant to indicate that she was in her first mind about it.
+
+Berthe laughed outright, and softly clapped her hands.
+
+"Sho'," declared Mr. Boone, "the matter was nothing, nothing _at_
+all!"
+
+But before feminine caprices and scruples it is wiser to bow low into
+the dust. Jacqueline turned on the editorial personage with vast
+indignation. "You leave the room, Seigneur Troubadour," she commanded,
+"and Berthe, you march with him. Haste, both of you!"
+
+They went, meekly. Their attempt to hide content over the dismissal
+together was extreme, but transparent.
+
+"What was it?" Driscoll insisted, when he and Jacqueline were alone once
+more.
+
+"You mean," she exclaimed, "that you are going to quarrel--now?"
+
+"Jack'leen, what was it?"
+
+"I reck-on," she observed demurely, "that the animal disputans was--was
+right, after all. It was nothing, I--reck-on."
+
+He noted mockery, defiance. There was much too much independence after
+her late surrender. He went up to her and deliberately reassumed the
+mastery. He held her, by force. "Mon chevalier," she murmured softly. So
+she confessed his strength.
+
+"Tell me," he said.
+
+"And you did not guess? You--Oh, how I hated you! How I never wanted to
+see you, never again! Not after, not after--Mon Dieu, you were two
+exasperating idiots, you and poor Prince Max! He virtually _threw_
+me into your arms. But I, monsieur, am not a person to be thrown. That
+is, unless--unless I do it myself, which--I did, hélas!"
+
+The trooper's grip tightened on her arms. "Then you," he said earnestly,
+"would have let me lose you?"
+
+She laughed merrily at him.
+
+"And would not you have followed after me?"
+
+"W'y, little girl, I reckon I certainly would of."
+
+"Don't," she gasped. "Let me come--closer. Oh dear, how can the bon Dieu
+let people be so happy--s-o happy!"
+
+
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Missourian, by Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle</title>
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+<body>
+<h1 class="pg">The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Missourian, by Eugene P. (Eugene Percy)
+Lyle, Illustrated by Ernest Haskell</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Missourian</p>
+<p>Author: Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle</p>
+<p>Release Date: December 7, 2009  [eBook #30623]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MISSOURIAN***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3 class="center">E-text prepared by Roger Frank<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class='tp' style=''>THE MISSOURIAN</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<a id='ill_1'></a>
+<img src='images/illus-fpc.jpg' id="img001" alt='' />
+<p class='center caption'>
+&#8220;JACQUELINE&#8221;<br />&#8220;She was the spirit of the enigma, the very personification<br />of the Napoleonic sphinx&#8221;
+</p></div>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:2em;margin-bottom:20px;'>The Missourian</p>
+<p class='tp' style=''>By</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.3em;margin-bottom:10px;'>EUGENE P. LYLE, Jr.</p>
+
+<div style='margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;text-align:center; padding:10px; margin:4px auto; width:270px;'>
+<p class='tp' style='text-align: left;'>&#8220;In my predestin&#8217;d Plot of Dust and Soul.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='tp' style='text-align:right; margin-bottom:20px;'>&#8211;<i>Omar</i></p>
+</div>
+<p class='tp' style='margin-bottom:40px;'><i>Illustrated by Ernest Haskell</i></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class='tp' style=''>New York</p>
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:larger;'>Doubleday, Page &amp; Company</p>
+<p class='tp' style=''>1905</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<p class='tp' style=''>Copyright, 1905, by</p>
+<p class='tp' style=''>Doubleday, Page &amp; Company</p>
+<p class='tp' style='margin-bottom:20px;'>Published, August, 1905</p>
+<p class='tp' style=''><i>All rights reserved, including that of translation
+into<br />foreign languages, including the Scandinavian</i></p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<p class='tp' style=''>To</p>
+<p class='tp' style=''>MY TWO BEST FRIENDS</p>
+<p class='tp' style=''>My Father and my Mother</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<table summary='TOC'>
+<tr><td colspan='3' style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em;padding-bottom:20px'>CONTENTS</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan='3' style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em;padding-bottom:10px;'>PART I. The Thorn in the Land of Roses</td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>I.</td><td class='c2'>A Wilful Maid Arrives</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_1'>3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>II.</td><td class='c2'>A Fra Diavolo in the Land of Roses</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_2'>11</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>III.</td><td class='c2'>The Violent End of a Terrible Bandit</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_3'>18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>IV.</td><td class='c2'><i>La Luz</i>, Blockade Runner</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_4'>27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>V.</td><td class='c2'>The Storm Centre</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_5'>34</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>VI.</td><td class='c2'>A Bruising of Arms for Jacqueline</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_6'>45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>VII.</td><td class='c2'>Swordsmanship in the Dark</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_7'>55</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>VIII.</td><td class='c2'>The Thoughts of Youth May Be Prodigiously Long Thoughts</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_8'>64</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>IX.</td><td class='c2'>Toll-Taking in the Huasteca</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_9'>69</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>X.</td><td class='c2'>The Brigand Chief</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_10'>80</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XI.</td><td class='c2'>The Cossacks and Their Tiger Colonel</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_11'>89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XII.</td><td class='c2'>Pastime Passing Excellent</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_12'>98</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XIII.</td><td class='c2'>Unregistered in Any Studbook</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_13'>108</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XIV.</td><td class='c2'>The Herald of the Fair God</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_14'>114</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XV.</td><td class='c2'>The Ritual</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_15'>122</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XVI.</td><td class='c2'>He of the Debonair Sceptre</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_16'>131</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XVII.</td><td class='c2'>Rather a Small Man</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_17'>140</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XVIII.</td><td class='c2'>Little Monarchs, Big Mistakes</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_18'>149</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XIX.</td><td class='c2'>A Tartar, <i>and</i> a Tartar</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_19'>156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XX.</td><td class='c2'>In the Wake of Princely Cavalcades</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_20'>164</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXI.</td><td class='c2'>The Red Mongrel</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_21'>173</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXII.</td><td class='c2'>&#8220;Equidad en la Justicia&#8221;</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_22'>182</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXIII.</td><td class='c2'>A Curious Pagan Rite</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_23'>188</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXIV.</td><td class='c2'>The Man Who Did Not Want to be Shot</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_24'>193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXV.</td><td class='c2'>The Person on the Other Horse</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_25'>200</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXVI.</td><td class='c2'>The Strangest Avowal of Love</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_26'>209</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXVII.</td><td class='c2'>Berthe</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_27'>219</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXVIII.</td><td class='c2'>&#8220;Mike&#8221;</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_28'>228</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXIX.</td><td class='c2'>The Whisper of the Sphinx</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_29'>238</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXX.</td><td class='c2'>The Ambassador</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_30'>242</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXXI.</td><td class='c2'>Carlota</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_31'>253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXXII.</td><td class='c2'>The Woman Who Did Not Hesitate</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_32'>258</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXXIII.</td><td class='c2'>A Sponsor to the Fat Padre</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_33'>266</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan='3' style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; padding-top:30px;padding-bottom:20px;'>PART II. The Rose That Was a Thorn in the Land of Roses</td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>I.</td><td class='c2'>Meagre Shanks</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_34'>273</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>II.</td><td class='c2'>The Black Decree</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_35'>284</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>III.</td><td class='c2'>As Between Women</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_36'>293</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>IV.</td><td class='c2'>The Lacking Coincidence</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_37'>298</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>V.</td><td class='c2'>The Missourians</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_38'>306</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>VI.</td><td class='c2'>If a Kiss Were All</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_39'>315</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>VII.</td><td class='c2'>A Crop of Colonels</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_40'>324</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>VIII.</td><td class='c2'>Royal Resolution</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_41'>335</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>IX.</td><td class='c2'>Interpreter to the Almighty</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_42'>344</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>X.</td><td class='c2'>Alone Among His Loving Subjects</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_43'>351</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XI.</td><td class='c2'>Fatality and the Missourian</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_44'>359</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XII.</td><td class='c2'>The Rendezvous of the Republic</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_45'>369</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XIII.</td><td class='c2'>A Buccaneer and a Battle</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_46'>380</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XIV.</td><td class='c2'>Blood and Noise&#8211;What Else?</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_47'>391</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XV.</td><td class='c2'>Of All News the Most Spiteful</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_48'>406</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XVI.</td><td class='c2'>Vendetta&#8217;s Half Sister, Better Born</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_49'>422</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XVII.</td><td class='c2'>Under a Spanish Cloak</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_50'>434</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XVIII.</td><td class='c2'>El Chaparrito</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_51'>443</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XIX.</td><td class='c2'>In Articulo Mortis</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_52'>459</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XX.</td><td class='c2'>Knighthood&#8217;s Belated Flower</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_53'>465</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXI.</td><td class='c2'>The Title of Nobility</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_54'>475</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXII.</td><td class='c2'>The Abbey of Mount Regret</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_55'>484</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXIII.</td><td class='c2'>The Contrariness of Jacqueline</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_56'>496</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class='c1'>XXIV.</td><td class='c2'>The Journalistic Sagacity of a Daniel</td><td class='c3'><a href='#link_57'>506</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:larger;margin-bottom:20px;'>THE PEOPLE OF THE STORY</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Missourian</span>, known in every
+fight as the Storm Centre. His real name is John D. Driscoll, familiarly
+shortened to Din Driscoll. At the close of the Civil War he finds himself a
+lieutenant-colonel in General Joe Shelby&#8217;s brigade of Confederate
+daredevils, sent by his comrades as emissary to the Emperor Maximilian of
+Mexico.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Jacqueline</span>, who is the Marquise
+Jeanne d&#8217;Aumerle, on a mission of high politics from Napoleon III. to the Court
+of Mexico.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Berthe</span>, her maid.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Maximilían</span>, archduke of Austria,
+occupant of the New World throne created for him.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Charlotte of Orleans</span>, the
+Empress.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Anastasio Murguía</span>, a Mexican
+hacendado, who acquires riches by running Federal blockades into Southern ports.
+He is both a coward and a miser.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>María de La Luz</span>, his
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Rodrigo Galán</span>, brigand and
+guerrilla.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Tiburcio</span>, blackmailer of the
+highway, scout, and &#8220;loyal Imperialist.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Augustin Fischer</span>, &#8220;the Fat
+Padre,&#8221; a renegade priest of subtle parts.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Michel Ney</span>, grandson of the
+&#8220;Bravest of the Brave.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Marshal Bazaine</span>,
+commander-in-chief of the French Army of Occupation in Mexico.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Madame la Marechale</span>, his
+bride.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Colonel Dupin</span>, the &#8220;Tiger
+of the Tropics,&#8221; chief of the Contra Guerrillas.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Miguel Lopez</span>, colonel of
+Dragoons, a favorite of the Emperor.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Monsieur Éloin</span>, the
+Emperor&#8217;s secretary.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Marquez</span>, <span
+style='font-variant:small-caps'>Miramon</span>, <span
+style='font-variant:small-caps'>Mejía</span>, <span
+style='font-variant:small-caps'>Mendez</span>, Imperialist officers.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Régules, Escobedo</span>, Republican
+officers.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Daniel Boone</span>, first scout among
+the Missourians, one-time editor and editor yet to be.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'>&#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Old Brothers and
+Sisters</span>,&#8221; &#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Tall
+Mose</span>&#8221; <span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Bledsoe, of The County
+of Pike</span>, and yet more of the Missouri colonels.</p>
+
+<p style='margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; margin-bottom:.5ex;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Benito Juarez</span>, president of the
+Mexican Republic.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<p class='tp' style='font-size:1.2em;margin-bottom:20px;'>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</p>
+
+<table summary='loi'>
+<tr><td>
+<p style='margin-left:2em;text-indent:-2em;text-align:left;'>&#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Jacqueline</span>&#8221;<br />
+&#8220;She was the spirit of the enigma, the very personification of the Napoleonic sphinx&#8221;</p>
+</td>
+<td style='vertical-align:top; text-align:right;'><a href='#ill_1'><i>Frontispiece</i></a>
+</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&#160;</td><td><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Facing page</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><p style='margin-left:2em;text-indent:-2em;text-align:left;'>&#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Murguía</span>&#8221;<br />
+    &#8220;He
+had evidently passed through salty spray, had braved the deep, this shrinking
+old man in frayed black&#8221;</p></td>
+<td style='vertical-align:top; text-align:right;'><a href='#ill_16'>16</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><p style='margin-left:2em;text-indent:-2em;text-align:left;'>&#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Rodrigo Galán</span>&#8221;<br />
+&#8220;The fierce stranger, however, seemed undecided. His brow furrowed, and
+for the moment he only stared&#8221;</p></td>
+<td style='vertical-align:top; text-align:right;'><a href='#ill_18'>18</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><p style='margin-left:2em;text-indent:-2em;text-align:left;'>&#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>John Dinwiddie Driscoll, the
+Missourian</span>&#8221;<br />&#8220;His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight and
+hard and brown from the weathering of sun and blizzard&#8221;</p></td>
+<td style='vertical-align:top; text-align:right;'><a href='#ill_38'>38</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><p style='margin-left:2em;text-indent:-2em;text-align:left;'>&#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Colonel Dupin</span>&#8221;<br />
+&#8220;The Tiger of the Tropics ... the chief of Contra Guerrillas&#8221;</p></td>
+<td style='vertical-align:top; text-align:right;'><a href='#ill_94'>94</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><p style='margin-left:2em;text-indent:-2em;text-align:left;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Emperor Maximilian</span></p></td>
+<td style='vertical-align:top; text-align:right;'><a href='#ill_134'>134</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><p style='margin-left:2em;text-indent:-2em;text-align:left;'>&#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>María de la Luz</span>&#8221;<br />
+&#8220;The tapestry behind them parted and fell&#8221;</p></td>
+<td style='vertical-align:top; text-align:right;'><a href='#ill_146'>146</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><p style='margin-left:2em;text-indent:-2em;text-align:left;'>&#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Berthe</span>&#8221;<br />&#8220;...
+brought down the ponderous knocker so terrifically that it abashed her, for all
+her present agitation&#8221;</p></td>
+<td style='vertical-align:top; text-align:right;'><a href='#ill_220'>220</a></td></tr>
+
+</table>
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<h1>PART FIRST<br /><span style='font-size:smaller;'>THE THORN IN THE LAND OF ROSES</span></h1>
+
+<table summary='poetry' style='width:22em'><tr>
+<td class='left'>
+&#8220;Array you, lordyngs, one and all,<br />
+For here begins no peace.&#8221;
+</td></tr>
+<tr><td class='right'>&#8211;
+<i>The Ballad of the Battle of Otterburn</i>
+</td>
+</tr></table>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_3'></a>3</span><a id='link_1'></a>CHAPTER I<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>A Wilful Maid Arrives from France</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll tell thee, it is the stubbornest young fellow of France, full of ambition.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>As You Like It.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Jacqueline was a gentlewoman of France. But there was usually mischief in her
+handsome head, for all its queenly poise. Just now, she was running away from
+the ship. Captain and officers of the <i>Impératrice Eugénie</i>, Imperial red
+pantaloons, gilt Imperial eagles, such tokens of awe were yet not awful enough
+to hold Jacqueline. So, with the humility of limp things in that sticky air, the
+sailors shoved closer in the small boat and made place for the adjustment of
+crisp skirts. With the lady went her gentle little Breton maid, who trembled
+with the trembling of every plank in those norther-rocked waters. The high sun,
+just showing himself after the late gale, was sucking a gummy moisture out upon
+all surfaces, and the perspiring men felt mean and base before the starchy
+freshness of the two girls.</p>
+
+<p>No one was pleased that Jacqueline was going, except Jacqueline herself. But
+she was keen for it. She had been impervious to their flustered anxiety, also to
+the tributes to her importance betrayed therein. In vain they argued no fewer
+than two emperors to dissuade her. She meant to have a walk on the shore
+and&#8211;a demure Parisian shrug settled it.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline rested a high-heeled boot on a coil of rope and blithely hummed an
+old song&#8211;&#8220;Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!&#8221; Oh, how she had
+wearied of bumping, heaving, bumping! At first she had enjoyed the storm. It was
+a new <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_4'></a>4</span>kind of play, and
+the mise-en-scène was quite adequate. But ennui had surged in again long before
+danger had surged out. And now she considered that some later sensation was due
+her, just as supper after an evening of fasting. In such a way, her life long,
+Jacqueline had sustained existence. Her nourishment was ever the latest
+&#8220;frisson,&#8221; to use her own word. She craved thrills of emotion,
+ecstatic thrills. Naturally, then, three weeks of ocean had fretted the restless
+lass as intolerable, tyrannical.</p>
+
+<p>During the norther&#8217;s blinding fury, the liner of the Compagnie
+Trans-Atlantique had groped widely out of her course, to find herself off
+Tampico when the storm abated. But the skipper saw in his ill-luck a chance for
+fresh meat, and he decided to communicate with the port before going on to Vera
+Cruz. And when Jacqueline found that out, she decided to communicate with the
+port too.</p>
+
+<p>Little enough harm in that, truly; if only it were any one else but
+Jacqueline. In her case, though, all concerned would have felt easier to keep
+her on board. Then, when the ship sailed, they were sure to have her there.
+Otherwise, they assuredly were not. For they knew well her startling capacity
+for whims. But never, never, could they know the startling next way a whim of
+hers might jump. Yet did she give herself the small pains of wheedling? Not she.
+The mystery of her august guardianship, of no less than two emperors, and the
+responsibility falling on captain, crew, red trousers, and gilt eagles&#8211;Hé
+bien, what then? Neither were they cunning with their dark warnings of outlawry
+and violence. Dreadfulest horrors might lurk in the motley Gulf town held by
+force against bloodthirsty Mexicans. But croaking like that only gave brighter
+promise of the ecstatic shiver. So, parbleu, she went!</p>
+
+<p>The brunt of anxiety fell on poor Sergeant Ney. Here was a young soldier whom
+a month before Louis Napoleon had <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_5'></a>5</span>summoned to the Tuileries, to charge him with the
+lady&#8217;s safe return to Maximilian&#8217;s court in the City of Mexico,
+where she was First Dame of Honor about the Empress Charlotte. The order was not
+a military one, else it must have fallen to an officer of rank. It was not even
+official. But no doubt it enfolded more of weight for that very reason. Napoleon
+III. believed that in the unofficial, in littleness and dark gliding, lay the
+way to govern a state. Michel Ney regarded his task as a complete enigma. He had
+only to see a girl to the end of her journey. He was a slow-thinking, even a
+non-thinking agent, but in a contingency he could fight, still without
+thinking.</p>
+
+<p>The girl under his escort, however, was another sort of agent entirely. She
+was the spirit of the enigma, the very personification of the Napoleonic sphinx.
+She was the Imperial Secret flung a thousand leagues, there to work itself out
+alone in a new land of empire. Two months ago Louis Napoleon had recalled her
+from the Mexican court to her old circle, to the Tuileries, to St. Cloud, to
+Compiègne, and almost at once he had sent her back again. This time she came
+with the sphinx&#8217;s purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Getting himself into the small boat, Ney stole a glance at the gray eyes
+opposite him&#8211;for the moment they were gray, as well as treacherously
+innocent and pensive&#8211;and he reflected woefully that she had quite too much
+spirit altogether for an Egyptian dame of stone. She was making it very hard for
+him. What caprice might not possess her while on shore, and the ship to sail
+within a few hours? It was not a predicament for sabre play. And he made the
+mistake of trying to wield his wits a little.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I should take it as an honor, mademoiselle,&#8221; he faltered,
+&#8220;I should, truly, if you&#8217;d only believe that I would impose my
+escort for the pleasure it gives me, as well as&#8211;as well
+as&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But she did not seem to notice that he stumbled. Her <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_6'></a>6</span>eyes were intent on the green water, which
+the oars transmuted into eddying crystals. He would go on, she knew, and lay
+more exposed the place where she meant to strike. She had coquetted with him,
+old play fellow that he was, for just a little during the voyage, as with others
+too, for that matter. But she had tired of it, as she had also of the chagrin of
+wives and sweethearts on board, or as she had of Hugo&#8217;s &#8220;Napoleon le
+Petit,&#8221; which she read purely out of contrariness to the censorship laid
+on the exiled poet. Michel Ney, however, and this she noted carefully, now kept
+close within his soldier&#8217;s shell. He had that unofficial duty to think on,
+which was enough and over.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8211;&#8211;as well as,&#8221; he finished desperately, &#8220;as a duty
+to an authority over us both. If you would believe that,
+mademoiselle?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then she struck. A word sufficed. &#8220;Oh, Monsieur the Sergeant!&#8221;
+she exclaimed. Her tone was deprecating, but she lingered wickedly on the title.
+The young Frenchman looked down on his natty uniform. No other cut or cloth in
+the whole imperial army of France was more dashing than the sky-blue of a
+Chasseur d&#8217;Afrique, but none of that filled Michel&#8217;s eyes. For him there
+were only the worsted stripes. He colored and winced.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Forgive me,&#8221; she said meekly, &#8220;I should have said,
+&#8216;Monsieur the Duke.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Chasseur flushed like a boy. &#8220;Why <i>will</i> you harp on what a
+grandfather made me?&#8221; he blurted out. &#8220;And what&#8217;s a
+duke&#8211;&#8211;?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And a prince?&#8211;the Prince of Moskowa!&#8221; She courtesied from
+her slender waist.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Alas for my blunders,&#8221; she sighed, &#8220;for it <i>was</i> more
+delicate after all to call you sergeant. In that I congratulate you yourself,
+Michel, and never a grandfather.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ney frowned unhappily. &#8220;The first prince of Moskowa <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_7'></a>7</span>was once a sergeant,&#8221;
+he murmured, &#8220;and why shouldn&#8217;t I, in this new
+country&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,&#8221; she sang, and smiled on
+him.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes flashed, and because of the voice his heart quickened. He had heard
+of &#8220;this new country.&#8221; It was &#8220;a gold mine in a bed of
+roses,&#8221; but with a thorn, to say nothing of a bayonet, for every bud, and
+like many another young Frenchman he hoped to win renown in the romantic Mexican
+Empire, sprung like Minerva from the brain of his own emperor. And now here was
+a girl humming the war song of his fathers and of his race, and flaunting his
+warrior&#8217;s ambition in it.</p>
+
+<div class='poetry'>
+<p>&#8220;My Sergeant has gone to the wars,<br />
+Far off to war in Flanders.<br />
+He&#8217;s a bold prince of commanders,<br />
+With a fame like Alexander&#8217;s&#8211;<br />
+Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!<br />
+&#160;<br />
+&#8220;Mon Sergot s&#8217;en va t-en guerre&#8211;<br />
+Ne sais quand reviendra.<br />
+Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!&#8221;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Having thus ousted the crusading hero of the song, and put the slang for
+&#8220;sergeant&#8221; in his stead, Jacqueline leaned back on the gunwale quite
+contented. She fell to gazing on the transparent emerald of the inshore, and
+plunged in her hand. The soft, plump wrist turned baby pink under the riffles.
+Of a sudden Berthe her maid half screamed, whereat with a delighted little gasp
+of fright, she jerked out the hand. But she put it back again, to tempt the
+watchful shark out there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>My</i> grandfather was only a duke,&#8221; she mused aloud, very
+humbly. But she peeped up at Ney in the most exasperating manner. He could just
+see the gray eyes behind the edge of lace that fell from the slanting brim of
+her hat. He would not, though, meet the challenge. He kept to sincerity as the
+safer ground.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_8'></a>8</span>&#8220;Like mine,
+mademoiselle, yours made himself one, under Napoleon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The <i>great</i> Napoleon,&#8221; she corrected him gently.</p>
+
+<p>Michel assented with a sad little nod. Then he raised his head bravely.
+&#8220;And why not do things <i>without</i> a <i>great</i> Napoleon, and, after
+all, isn&#8217;t he <i>a</i> Napoleon, and one who&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is lucky enough to bear a name that means seven million votes.
+<i>I</i> should rather be a &#8216;sergeant&#8217; and congratulate none but myself on
+it, Monsieur the&#8211;Duke.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again, with the wisdom of a slow intelligence, the Chasseur held back from
+her subtleties. If only he might betray her into frankness&#8211;a compliment
+she paid to few men and to a woman never&#8211;then, just possibly, he might
+make her tractable as to their prompt return to the ship.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Still, it <i>is</i> a name to rally to,&#8221; he persisted,
+acknowledging in spite of himself the magic that had swayed the Old Guard.</p>
+
+<p>For once she left the poor shark in peace.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A name, a name?&#8221; she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Isn&#8217;t &#8216;France&#8217; enough of a name for your rallying,
+monsieur?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the honest mood could not last. In the same breath she hastened on,
+&#8220;Yes, yes, France, the beloved of us proud grandchildren of original
+dukes. Of myself, sir, with a château in the Bourbonnais, whose floors are as
+well watered as the vineyards outside. And your France too, Michel, giving you
+only your clean linen to disguise the sergeant and remind us of the marshal of
+the First Empire. Of course,&#8221; she added kindly, &#8220;there is the
+bravery. I had forgotten that, O grandson of the &#8216;brave des braves.&#8217; But
+then?&#8211;Bonté divine, there&#8217;s no rank in courage, mon ami! It&#8217;s
+not the epaulette of a French uniform&#8211;it&#8217;s the merest
+lining.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And that,&#8221; the youth cried doggedly, &#8220;is still enough
+to&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To do things for France, eh petit piou-piou?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_9'></a>9</span>&#8220;Hélas! our
+France can&#8217;t expect much from me. But you, mademoiselle, you will do
+things for her!&#8221; It was a spontaneous tribute, just that, without thought
+of prying into the secret of her mission, &#8220;While I,&#8221; he ended
+dismally, &#8220;can only fight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you forget,&#8221; she answered gravely, &#8220;that after all a
+woman can only give.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That cynicism of life which had become a part of the young girl was yet
+gaiety itself. Youth and health and beauty would not have even cynicism
+otherwise. But now, as she spoke, the irony was bitter, and worn, as of age. And
+behind it was a woman&#8217;s reluctance before some abhorred sacrifice, a
+sacrifice which would entail the woman&#8217;s power to give.</p>
+
+<p>Ney stared at her uncomprehendingly. Here lay a clue to her mysterious errand
+in Mexico. But he was not thinking of her as the Napoleonic enigma personified.
+It was of herself he thought, an enigma apart. She was a flower of France. Yet
+many, many flowers blossom there. She might be a grande dame, of nobility of
+womanhood as well as of family. Or again, she might be only an alluring,
+heartless witch, that helped to make tempting, and damnable, the brilliant
+Second Empire. But in any case, Jacqueline was truly as dainty as a flower.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It has already cost us enough to gain this New World,&#8221; ventured
+the Chasseur, waving a hand toward the desolate shore, &#8220;and we made
+Maximilian emperor, but now they say that, that he would&#8211;they say so in
+Paris, mademoiselle&#8211;that he would rob us of it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Indeed, monsieur?&#8221; There was warning in the look she gave
+him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; he plunged on boldly, &#8220;our soldiers still hold it,
+that is, until, until someone shall win it for us for our very own, absolutely.
+Ducal grandfathers never did more than that for France.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_10'></a>10</span>&#8220;Where
+<i>are</i> you leading, Michel? Please take me with you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To a question. Don&#8217;t you think &#8216;someone&#8217; is risking a
+great deal for a little walk on shore?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Before she answered he knew that she had seen through all his blundering
+wiles.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Are there guerrillas there?&#8221; she asked pensively.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>You</i> should know. But they say, that out of Tampico
+especially&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She was gazing toward the land, sandy and flat. Once she looked back with
+lively distaste at the rocking ship. Now she interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It would be fun traveling overland&#8211;and
+<i>such</i> excitement!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ney&#8217;s shoulders went up in despair.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, my poor guardian!&#8221; she exclaimed contritely. &#8220;But why
+aren&#8217;t you a reader of the poets? Then you would find something to say to
+make me feel&#8211;sorry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>You</i> say it then.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, for example, you might call all the stored vengeance of heaven
+right down on my ungrateful top.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The soldier gazed at the ungrateful top. It was of burnished copper. A
+rebellious lock was then blowing in the wind, and there was a wide, rakish crown
+of rice-white straw. There was also a soft skin of creamy satin, lips blood red,
+a velvet patch near a dimple, and two gray eyes that danced behind the
+hat&#8217;s filmy curtain. An ungrateful top, out of all mercy!</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_11'></a>11</span><a id='link_2'></a>CHAPTER II<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>A Fra Diavolo in the Land of Roses</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;A haunter of marshes, a holder of moors.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Beowulf.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The torpid, sordid and sun-baked port of Tampico gave little promise of aught
+so romantic and rare and exotic as the young French woman&#8217;s coveted thrill
+of ecstasy. There was first the sand bar, which kept ships from coming up the
+deep Pánuco to the town. Beyond there were lagoons and swamps mottling the flat,
+dreary, moisture-sodden, fever-scourged land. There were solemn pelicans, and
+such kind of grotesque bird as use only one leg, it being long enough for two,
+and never that to walk upon, so far as anybody had ever noticed. Such an old
+fellow would outline himself against the yellow loneliness, like a lump of
+pessimistic philosopher impaled on the end of his own hobbling crutch. Tarpons
+and sharks and sword-fish, monstrous, sinister, moved slothfully in the viscid
+waters. From scrubby growth on the banks a hundred or a hundred thousand crows
+had much ado with rebuking the invaders of their solitude.</p>
+
+<p>Next, clusters of thatch roofs appeared, and in an hour the party from the
+<i>Impératrice Eugénie</i> gained the wharf of the port. The sailors managed to
+steer through a tangle of shipping and dugout scows, the latter heaped high with
+fruits and flowers of many colors, or hides or fish of many aromas. Before the
+small boat could touch the worm-eaten quay, Jacqueline had poised herself on its
+edge, caught her skirts, and hopped lightly over the <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_12'></a>12</span> stretch of water yet remaining. Then she
+gazed curiously around on Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>And Mexico was there in various forms to greet her, though in no form
+animated. Sluggish creatures under peaked sombreros of muddied straw seemed to
+be growing against the foreground of wharf and dingy warehouses, and fastened to
+the background of sallow blazing streets and sallow reflecting walls there were
+still the same human barnacles. But no creature seemed ever to move. They all
+looked a part of the decay, of putrefying vegetable and flesh and fish
+everywhere, which grew so rank in life that in death their rotting could never
+keep pace.</p>
+
+<p>A lazy town stretched up a lazy street. On a hill farther up the river a
+fortress basked in peace, and had no desire to be disturbed. In the town the
+buildings were of warped timber, and a few of stone. Parasitic tumors, like
+loathsome black ulcers, swelled abundantly on the roofs. They were the buzzards,
+the only form of life held sacred. To clean up nature&#8217;s and man&#8217;s
+spendthrift killing was a blessed service in Tampico. It saved exertion.</p>
+
+<p>A strange region, by all odds! But at least one could walk thereon, and
+Jacqueline thought it droll. An outlandish corner of the earth such as this was
+something never experienced before. But as to that, the outlandish corner might
+have said the same about Jacqueline. Men stared like dazed sheep on the
+astounding apparition of a lady. Some among them were entirely clothed, in
+sun-yellowed white. There was a merchant or so, a coffee exporter or so, a
+ranchero or so, and hacendados from the interior. But they were all hard,
+typical, and often darkly scowling, which seemed an habitual expression inspired
+by the thought of a foreign Hapsburg emperor so mighty and proud, far off in
+their capital. There was not an officer among them; nor, quite likely, a
+gentleman. Never a bit of red was to be seen from the garrison on the hill. The
+French <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_13'></a>13</span>invaders up
+there, with pardonable taste, kept to themselves. Their policing ended with the
+smothering of revolt. So against the stain of tainted mankind, the vision of
+delicate femininity contrasted as a fleck of spotless white on a besmeared
+palette. But crows, scavengers, men, they were all so many
+&#8220;creatures&#8221; to Jacqueline&#8211;the setting of a very novel scene,
+and she would not have had it otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>She turned to her maid, who shrank hesitating in the boat. &#8220;Berthe, you
+pitiful little ninny, are you coming? Then do, and do not forget the
+satchel.&#8221; For a promenade of an hour the inhabitants of two imperial
+courts must needs have a satchel, filled of course with mysteries of the toilet.
+The maid obeyed, and followed her mistress up the lazy ascending street. They
+passed through the Alameda of dense cypresses, an inky blot as on glaring manila
+paper, while the shade overhead was profane with jackdaws. The lady tripped on,
+and into the street again. Ney and a sailor hurried to overtake her. The other
+sailors meantime went on their errand for fresh meat, but Michel had said to the
+steward in charge, &#8220;If there should be any need, I&#8217;ll send this man
+to you. Then you come, all of you, quick!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline pushed on her voyage of discovery, and her retinue trooped behind,
+single file, over the narrow, burning sidewalks of patched flagstone. The word
+&#8220;Café&#8221; on a corner building caught her eye. It was a native fonda,
+overflowing with straw-bottomed chairs and rusty iron tables half-way across the
+street, making carts and burros find their way round. Mexico&#8217;s outward
+signs at least were being done over into French. Hence the dignity of
+&#8220;Café.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here is Paris,&#8221; the explorer announced. &#8220;And this is the
+Boulevard.&#8221; She seated herself before one of the iron tables that rocked
+on the egg-like cobblestones. She made Ney sit down also, and included Berthe
+and the sailor. An olive barefoot boy took their order for black coffee.
+Jacqueline&#8217;s <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_14'></a>14</span>elbows were on the table and her chin on two finger
+tips, and she disposed herself placidly, as though this were the Maison Dorée
+and Tout Paris sauntering by. The town was beginning to stretch after its
+siesta. That is to say, divers natives manifested symptoms of going to move in
+the course of time.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Look!&#8221; exclaimed Jacqueline. &#8220;Only give yourself the
+trouble to look!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She was pointing to a man, of course. The Chasseur stirred uneasily. One
+could never see to the end of Jacqueline&#8217;s slender finger. &#8220;There,
+Berthe,&#8221; she cried, &#8220;it&#8217;s Fra Diavolo, just strayed from the
+Opéra.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The stranger she meant was talking darkly to another man in the door of the
+Café. If a Fra Diavolo, he was at least not disguised in his monk&#8217;s cowl,
+either because the April day was too hot or because he had never owned one. But
+he stood appareled in his banditti rôle, very picturesque and barbaric and
+malevolent. And though he posed heavily, he yet had that Satanic fascination
+which the beautiful of the masculine and the sinister of the devil cannot help
+having. His battered magnificence of a charro garb fitted well the diabolic
+character which Jacqueline assigned him. Spurs as bright as dollars jangled on
+high russet heels. His breeches closed to the flesh like a glove, so that his
+limbs were as sleek as some glossy forest animal&#8217;s. The cloth was of
+Robin-Hood green, foxed over in bright yellow leather. From hip to ankle
+undulated a seam of silver clasps. More silver, in braided scrolls, adorned his
+jacket, and wrapped twice around the waist was a red banda. Jacqueline would
+have preferred the ends dangling, like a Neapolitan&#8217;s. The ranchero, for
+such he appeared, wore two belts. One was a vibora, or serpent, for carrying
+money; the other held his weapons, a long hunting knife and a revolver, each in
+a scabbard of stamped leather embroidered with gold thread. His sombrero was
+high pointed and heavy, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_15'></a>15</span>of chocolate-colored beaver encircled by a silver rope
+as thick as a garden hose.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now there&#8217;s realism in those properties,&#8221; Jacqueline noted
+with an artist&#8217;s critical eye. &#8220;See, there&#8217;s dry mud on his
+shoes, and his bright colors are faded by weather. That man sleeps among the
+rocks, I&#8217;ll wager, and he&#8217;s in the saddle almost constantly too. My
+faith, our Fra Diavolo is exquisite!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The other of the two men was a withered, diminutive, gaunt and hollow old
+Mexican. He quailed like a frightened miser before Fra Diavolo.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The risk? Coming to this town a risk!&#8221; Fra Diavolo was echoing
+the ancient man. &#8220;Bah, Murguía, you would haggle over a little risk as
+though it were some poor Confederate&#8217;s last bale of cotton. But
+I&#8211;por Dios, I get tired of the mountains. And then I come to Tampico. Yet
+you ask why I come? Bien, señor mio, this is why.&#8221; A gesture explained.
+Fra Diavolo unctuously rubbed his thumb over his fingers. The meaning of the
+gesture was, &#8220;Money!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The old man recognized the pantomime and shivered. He shrank into his long
+black coat as though right willingly he would shrink away altogether. His
+parsimony extended even to speech. He pursued his fugitive voice into the depths
+of the voluminous coat and there clutched it as a coin in a chest. Then he paid
+it out as though it were a coin indeed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; he stammered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No buts,&#8221; the fierce ranchero growled thunderously. &#8220;Not
+one, Don Anastasio, not while our country bleeds under the Austrian
+tyrant&#8217;s heel, not while there yet breathes a patriot to scorn peril and
+death, so only that he get the sinews of war.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The curiously unctuous gesture grew menacing, brutal. Don Anastasio twitched
+and trembled before it. Under the towering and prismatic Fra Diavolo he cowered,
+an insignificant figure. The unrelieved black of his attire accorded with his
+meagre frame. It was secretive, miserly. A black stock <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_16'></a>16</span>covered a withered collar. A dingy silk
+tile was tightly packed over a rusted black wig. Boots hid their tops under the
+skirts of his coat, and the coat in turn was partly concealed under a black
+shawl. But there was one incongruous item. Boots, coat, hat and all were crusted
+with brine. He had evidently passed through salty spray, had braved the deep,
+this shrinking old man in frayed black. Just now his eyes, normally moist and
+avaricious, were parched dry by fear, as though a flame had passed over them.
+They might have rattled in their gaping sockets. Fear also helped him clutch his
+voice, which he paid out regardless of expense.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know, Don&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; But Fra Diavolo scowled, and the name
+died on his lips. &#8220;You know,&#8221; he went on, &#8220;why you
+haven&#8217;t seen me for so long. It&#8217;s the blockade up there. It&#8217;s
+closer than ever now. This time I waited many nights for a chance to run in, and
+as many more to run out again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you squeezed the poor devils all the harder for your weevily corn
+and shoddy boots?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline, who could not hear a word, told her companions with a
+child&#8217;s expectancy only to wait and they would see Fra Diavolo eat up the
+poor little crow.</p>
+
+<p>The crow, meantime, was trying to oust the notion that had alighted in the
+brain of Fra Diavolo. &#8220;Of course I ought to ask the Confederates higher
+prices as the risks increase,&#8221; he said, then paused and shook his head and
+wig and hat like a mournful pendulum. &#8220;But how can I? The South hardly
+grows any more cotton. It cannot pay high, and&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And that&#8217;s not my affair, but&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Again the business
+of thumb and fingers&#8211;&#8220;but this is. Quick now!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Señor, I&#8211;Your Mercy knows that I always pay at&#8211;at the
+usual place&#8211;near the forest.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class='figcenter'>
+    <a id='ill_16'></a>
+<img src='images/illus-016.jpg' id="img002" alt='' />
+<p class='center caption'>
+&#8220;MURGUÍA&#8221;<br />&#8220;He had evidently passed through salty spray, had<br />braved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black&#8221;
+</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_17'></a>17</span>&#8220;You mean
+that you won&#8217;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&#8217;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!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So saying he drew a reed whistle from his jacket. It was no thicker than a
+pencil, and not half so long.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía gripped his arm. &#8220;My daughter?&#8221; he cried. &#8220;It has
+been weeks since I&#8211;but you must have seen her lately. Oh tell me, señor,
+there is no bad news of her?&#8221; He had forgotten the threatened extortion.
+His voice was open too, generous in its anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;News of her, yes. But it is vague news. There&#8217;s a mystery about
+your daughter, Don Anastasio.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s hand slipped from his arm, and Don Anastasio
+himself began to slip away.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stop!&#8221; roared Fra Diavolo. &#8220;No, go ahead. Wait at the
+mesón, though, until I come. Wait until I give you your passports.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then he turned again to stare at the girl who all unconsciously had wrought
+the poor little crow&#8217;s release.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_18'></a>18</span><a id='link_3'></a>CHAPTER III<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Violent End of a Terrible Bandit</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Come listen to me, you gallants so free,<br />
+All you that love mirth for to hear,<br />
+And I will tell you of a bold outlaw.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Robin Hood.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, oh, now he&#8217;s coming to eat <i>us</i>!&#8221; Jacqueline
+gasped.</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8220;properties,&#8221; 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!</p>
+
+<div class='figcenter'>
+    <a id='ill_18'></a>
+<img src='images/illus-018.jpg' id="img003" alt='' />
+<p class='center caption'>
+&#8220;RODRIGO GALÁN&#8221;<br />&#8220;The fierce stranger, however, seemed undecided.<br />His brow furrowed, and for the moment he only stared&#8221;
+</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_19'></a>19</span>Now when
+Jacqueline peeped&#8211;there was something irresistible about it&#8211;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&#8211;Tampico was not a drawing
+room&#8211;but still he hesitated. There was a certain hauteur in the set of the
+demoiselle&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>Michel Ney leaned nearer over the table. &#8220;In all conscience,
+mademoiselle, your Fra Diavolo is bizarre enough,&#8221; he said, &#8220;but
+please don&#8217;t let us stir him up. Think, if anything should happen to you,
+why Mexico, why France would&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You flatter!&#8221; she mocked him. &#8220;Only two empires to keep me
+out of a flirtation? It&#8217;s not enough, Michel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A shadow fell over them. &#8220;My apologies,&#8221; spoke a deep voice,
+&#8220;but the señorita, she is going to the City, to the Capital,
+perhaps?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The syllables fell one by one, distinct and heavy. The Spanish was
+elaborately cermonious, but the accent was Mexican and almost gutteral.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;L&#8217;impertinent!&#8221; 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. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_20'></a>20</span>He was supremely happy too, and as mad as a Gaul can
+be. &#8220;L&#8217;impertinent!&#8221; he repeated, coaxingly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now don&#8217;t be ridiculous, Michel,&#8221; said Jacqueline.
+&#8220;He can&#8217;t understand you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How, little Soldier-Boy Blue?&#8221; he inquired with cumbrous
+pleasantry.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Alas, señor,&#8221; said Jacqueline, &#8220;he&#8217;s quite a little
+brother to dragons.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What are you talking about?&#8221; Michel demanded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am keeping you from being eaten up, young sire, but,&#8221; and
+Jacqueline&#8217;s tone changed, &#8220;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.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Michel heaved a sigh and&#8211;sat down. He was no longer on familiar ground.
+Then Fra Diavolo proceeded to verify mademoiselle&#8217;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&#8211;an officer of His Most
+Peace-loving Majesty&#8217;s Contra Guerrillas. And thus to a conclusion,
+impressively, laboriously.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;Aumerle.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_21'></a>21</span>He started at the
+name, and her eyes sparkled to note the effect. &#8220;The Marquesa Juana de
+Aumerle!&#8221; he repeated.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jeanne d&#8217;Aumerle, no other, sir,&#8221; she assured him, but she
+watched him quizzically, for she knew that another name was hovering on his
+lips.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Surely not&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; he began.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si señor,&#8221; and she smiled good humoredly, &#8220;I
+am&#8211;&#8216;Jacqueline.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a name that had sifted from the court down into distant plebeian
+corners of the Mexican Empire, and it was tinged&#8211;let us say so at
+once&#8211;with the unpleasing hue of notoriety.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His Ever Considerate Majesty Maximiliano would be furious if any harm
+should befall Your Ladyship,&#8221; Fra Diavolo observed, &#8220;though,&#8221;
+he added to himself, &#8220;the empress would possibly survive it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>With knowledge of her identity, the project that was building in the
+stranger&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Going on by water?&#8221; he protested. &#8220;But Señorita de
+Aumerle, we are in the season for northers. Look, those mean another
+storm,&#8221; and he pointed overhead, to harmless little cotton bunches of
+clouds scurrying away to the horizon.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_22'></a>22</span>&#8220;Éh
+bien,&#8221; returned the señorita, &#8220;what would you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You really are not thinking, mademoiselle&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; he
+interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And why not, pray?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why not? Why&#8211;uh&#8211;the bandits, of course.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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,
+&#8220;&#8211;&#8211;and who is none other than the Capitan Don Rodrigo
+Galán.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who&#8217;s he?&#8221; Ney inquired, willing enough to have any
+scarecrow whatever for Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is it possible?&#8211;Your Mercy does not know?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ney pleaded that he had never been in the country before.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But surely,&#8221; the Mexican objected, &#8220;Don Rodrigo is a
+household word throughout Europe?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_23'></a>23</span>&#8220;He has
+certainly been heard of in Mexico,&#8221; said Jacqueline, whereat Fra Diavolo
+turned to her gratefully. &#8220;But,&#8221; she added, &#8220;Monsieur Ney will
+now find in him another objection to my journeying overland.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The ardor of the bandit&#8217;s eulogist faltered. &#8220;The señor might
+indeed,&#8221; he confessed, &#8220;only,&#8221; and here he hesitated like a
+man contemplating suicide, &#8220;only, Don Rodrigo has been&#8211;yes,
+he&#8217;s been shot, from ambush; and his band&#8211;yes, his band is scattered
+forever.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We do,&#8221; said the Mexican, again like a reluctant suicide,
+&#8220;because I killed him myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But how are we to know, sir,&#8221; Ney persisted, &#8220;that you are
+so terrible on your own account?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My identification, you mean? Bueno, it is only just. Here, this may
+do,&#8221; 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&#8217;s Contra Guerrillas.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Colonel Dupin?&#8221; Jacqueline repeated with a wry mouth. Dupin, the
+Contra-Guerrilla chief, was a brave Frenchman. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_24'></a>24</span>But the quality of his mercy had made his name a
+shudder on the lips of all men, his own countrymen included.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; said Fra Diavolo between his teeth, &#8220;Mi Coronel
+Dupin&#8211;the Tiger.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So he is called, I know,&#8221; said Jacqueline. &#8220;And you, it
+appears, are Captain Maurel&#8211;Maurel, but that is French?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The way it is spelled on the paper, yes. But my Coronel, being French,
+made a mistake. He should have written it &#8216;Morel.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No matter,&#8221; said Jacqueline, &#8220;for you are only a trite,
+conventional officer, after all. But how much merrier it would be if you
+were&#8211;were&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; and suddenly she leaned over the paper and placed
+an impetuous finger on the bandit&#8217;s name. &#8220;So,&#8221; she continued
+wistfully, &#8220;there is no danger. We ride, we take a stage. It is tame. I
+say it is tame, monsieur!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s party could travel with his friend&#8217;s caravan as far
+as the stage.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Voilá!&#8221; cried Jacqueline. &#8220;It is arranged!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Diable, it is not!&#8221; Michel was on his feet again.</p>
+
+<p>His wayward charge looked him over reflectively. &#8220;Our Mars in his baby
+clothes again,&#8221; said she, as a fond, despairing mother with an
+incorrigible child.</p>
+
+<p>The Mexican had shown himself hostile and ready. But seeing
+Jacqueline&#8217;s coolness he melted out of his somewhat theatrical bristling,
+lest her sarcasm veer toward himself.</p>
+
+<p>The tempestuous Mars, however, was beyond the range of scorn. He kept one
+stubborn purpose before him. &#8220;We go back to the ship, or&#8221;&#8211;he
+took breath where he meant to put a handsome
+oath&#8211;&#8220;or&#8211;it&#8217;s a fight!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_25'></a>25</span>&#8220;There,
+there,&#8221; said Jacqueline gently. &#8220;Besides, are you not to go with me
+just the same?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ney turned to the stranger. &#8220;I ask you to withdraw, sir, both yourself
+and your offers, because you&#8217;re only meddling here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The intruder grew rigid straightway. &#8220;<i>I</i> am not one to take back
+an offer,&#8221; 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. &#8220;And I,
+Monsieur Ney,&#8221; she said, &#8220;have decided to accept,&#8221; though she
+had not really, until that very moment.</p>
+
+<p>Ney turned to the one sailor with him. &#8220;Run like fury!&#8221; he
+whispered. &#8220;Bring the others!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, very well,&#8221; said the Mexican.</p>
+
+<p>As he doubtless intended, Fra Diavolo&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s infernal Fra Diavolo was surveying him from the closed door
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_26'></a>26</span>of 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. &#8220;His
+Exceeding Christian Majesty&#8217;s most valiant contra guerrillas,&#8221; he
+explained.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Almost at once the burly French sailors appeared, but Fra Diavolo&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One of you out there,&#8221; he shouted in French, &#8220;quick, go to
+the fort. Bring the soldiers!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Mexicans did not understand, and before they could prevent, a sailor had
+taken to his heels.</p>
+
+<p>Then Fra Diavolo comprehended. &#8220;You idiots!&#8221; he bellowed.
+&#8220;You&#8211;Pedro! Catch him! Faster!&#8211;Catch him, I say!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A little demon darted away in pursuit of the sailor. Obviously, the situation
+hung on the swifter in the race.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_27'></a>27</span><a id='link_4'></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>La Luz, Blockade Runner</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Romeo and Juliet.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mesón&#8221; 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
+&#8220;hotels,&#8221; which distinguish a man from his beast, usually; though
+sometimes undeservedly. And so the word &#8220;mesòn&#8221; 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&#8217;s lodge at the
+entrance, the establishment&#8217;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?</p>
+
+<p>Don Anastasio&#8217;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&#8217;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 and <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_28'></a>28</span>horses were juggling into their mouths
+some final grains from the sacks over their noses. Peon servants stolidly busied
+themselves around charcoal braziers.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Murgie, are we projecting to start to-night?&#8221; the trooper
+inquired in English. &#8220;Eh?&#8211;What say?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>What Don Anastasio had said was nothing at all, but being thus urged, he
+mumbled a negative.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not starting to-night?&#8221; his questioner repeated. &#8220;Now, why
+don&#8217;t we?&#8211;What?&#8211;Lordsake, man, dive! Bring up that voice there
+for once!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía sank to the chin in his black coat. Glancing apprehensively at the
+cavalryman&#8217;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 made <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_29'></a>29</span>tyranny 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.</p>
+
+<p>By every rule governing man&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s owner
+a scullion and the intruder an admiral.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And why <i>don&#8217;t</i> we start to-night?&#8221; the complacent
+usurper demanded in that plaintive drawl which so irritated the other.
+&#8220;You went for your passports, didn&#8217;t you get &#8217;em?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si&#8211;si, señor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good! Then to-night it is, eh?&#8211;Can&#8217;t you speak out,
+<i>my</i> gracious!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>You</i> might go to-night,&#8221; the trader suggested timidly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Alone?&#8211;N-o, parting isn&#8217;t the sweet sorrow it&#8217;s
+cracked up to be. Besides, I don&#8217;t know the roads, but of course
+that&#8217;s nothing to losing a jovial old mate like you, Murgie.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Anastasio smirked at the pleasantry. &#8220;But <i>I</i> can&#8217;t go
+to-night, señor. I&#8211;I have to see&#8211;someone&#8211;first.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The trooper betrayed the least impatience. &#8220;Now look here&#8211;usurer,
+viper, blanketed thief, honorable sir, you <i>know</i> I&#8217;m in a
+hurry!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That his haste could be any concern of Murguía&#8217;s was preposterous, and
+Murguía would have liked nothing better than <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_30'></a>30</span>to 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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m sorry,&#8221; Don Anastasio paid out the hard-found words
+through his teeth, &#8220;but possibly we can leave to-morrow. Will, will that
+suit Your Mercy, Señor Coronel?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh perhaps. Anyhow, don&#8217;t go to forgetting, now, that I&#8217;m
+in a hurry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Anastasio breathed easier, and he even grew so bold as to recall a
+certain suspicion he had entertained. &#8220;Your errand down here must be of
+considerable importance, Señor Coronel?&#8221; he ventured.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There you are again&#8211;crawling again.&#8221; It was evident that
+the trooper&#8217;s normal condition was a great, hearty, calm good humor.</p>
+
+<p>But the Mexican&#8217;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 the <i>Impératrice Eugénie</i> off
+her course. Murguía&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wait there!&#8221; the horseman trumpeted through his hand.</p>
+
+<p>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 passenger <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_31'></a>31</span>through the blockade usually meant five hundred
+dollars in gold. He ordered the plank held for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They tell me&#8211;whoa, Demijohn!&#8211;you are going to
+Tampico?&#8221; hallooed the same voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ca-rai!&#8221; sneered the astonished Mexican, &#8220;one would think
+you&#8217;d just reached your own barnyard, señor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My own barnyard?&#8221; echoed the stranger bitterly. &#8220;I
+haven&#8217;t seen my own barnyard, or anything that is mine, during these four
+years past. But you were about to start?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not so fast, señor. Fare in advance, seven hundred dollars.&#8221;
+Murguía looked for the haggling to come next, but somehow the sniff he heard was
+not promising.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Usurer, viper, blanketed thief, benevolent old rascal,&#8221; the
+trooper enumerated as courteously as &#8220;Señor Don&#8221; or &#8220;Your
+Mercy,&#8221; &#8220;you don&#8217;t surprise me a bit, not when you charge us
+three thousand dollars gold for freight on a trunk of quinine!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;G-g-get back on your horse! G-get off this boat!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I reckon,&#8221; said the newcomer cheerily, &#8220;there&#8217;s no
+question of fare. Here, I&#8217;ve got a pass.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>By a lantern Murguía read the paper handed him. It was signed:
+&#8220;Jefferson Davis, President C. S. A.&#8221; 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&#8217;s
+destination.</p>
+
+<p>The peevish old man scowled, hesitated. He read the order <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_32'></a>32</span>again, hesitated again, and
+at last handed it back, his mind made up.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have the goodness, señor, to remove yourself from my boat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the lieutenant colonel placidly inquired, &#8220;Carry any government
+cotton this trip? No, I know you don&#8217;t. Then you&#8217;re in debt to the
+government? Correct. So I reckon you&#8217;ll carry me in place of the
+cotton.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The favor, señor! Or must I have you kicked off?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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 he <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_33'></a>33</span>had 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 was <i>La Luz</i>, 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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh I s&#8217;y, sir,&#8221; interrupted a voice in vigorous cockney,
+&#8220;this &#8217;ere tide ain&#8217;t in the &#8217;abit o&#8217; waitin&#8217;. If
+we go to-night, we go this minute, sir!&#8221; It was the skipper, and the
+skipper&#8217;s ultimatum.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y yes,&#8221; drawled the lieutenant colonel,
+&#8220;let&#8217;s be marching. I forgot to tell you, I&#8217;m in a hurry. Come
+on, Demijohn,&#8221; and man and horse went in search of beds.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía looked venomous, but the plank was drawn on board.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_34'></a>34</span><a id='link_5'></a>CHAPTER V<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Storm Centre</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;God forbid I should be so bold as to press to heaven in my young days.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Titus Andronicus.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The feathering buckets of the paddle wheels began to turn; and <i>La Luz</i>,
+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
+&#8220;Union color,&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>La
+Luz</i> had full speed on. Then, knifing the higher and higher waves, she made a
+dash for it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_35'></a>35</span>For 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.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the quartermaster touched the skipper&#8217;s arm under the shrouded
+binnacle. &#8220;I s&#8217;y sir,&#8221; he whispered excitedly,
+&#8220;they&#8217;re&#8211;<i>there!</i> There, anchored at the inshore station,
+just off the bar! My eye, but hain&#8217;t they beastly idiots? They&#8217;ll
+smash to pieces.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re expected, that&#8217;s gospel,&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now for a reception as &#8217;ull touch us to the quick, as Loo-ee Sixteenth
+said&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; The skipper cut himself short. &#8220;Aye, aye, sir,&#8221;
+he cried, &#8220;they&#8217;ve spied us!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They haven&#8217;t!&#8221; groaned Murguía. &#8220;How could
+they?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;T&#8217;aint important now, sir, how they could. There might be a gleam in
+our wake. But any&#8217;ow they &#8217;ave.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_36'></a>36</span>course. Hurriedly the <i>Luz&#8217;s</i> quartermaster
+sent up a rocket also, but in the opposite direction. It was useless. A third
+rocket from the signaling blockader contradicted him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re bein&#8217; chased,&#8221; announced the skipper.
+&#8220;One of &#8217;em &#8217;as slipped her chain and got off.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As <i>La Luz</i> had gained the open, the skipper let his quartermaster take
+the wheel. &#8220;&#8217;Old her to the wind, lad,&#8221; he cautioned. &#8220;A beam
+sea &#8217;ud swamp us.&#8221; Next he whistled down to the engine room. They were to
+stoke with turpentine and cotton. At once Murguía began to fidget. &#8220;It, it
+will make smoke,&#8221; he whined.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;An&#8217; steam. We&#8217;re seen a&#8217;ready, ain&#8217;t we,
+sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But it costs more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not if it clears us. Soft coal &#8217;ud seem bloomin&#8217; expensive, sir,
+if we got over&#8217;auled.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The race was on. In smooth water it would scarcely have been one. But the
+boiling fury cut knots from the steamer&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>When morning dawned thickly behind the leaden sky, the three men in the
+wheelhouse made out a top-gallant sail against the horizon. &#8220;By
+noon,&#8221; said the skipper, &#8220;the beggars &#8217;ull &#8217;ave us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 into <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_37'></a>37</span>his 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&#8217;s
+passion. He begrudged even the costlier fuel that was their hope of safety.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your non-payin&#8217; guest, sir,&#8221; said the skipper, pointing
+downward. &#8220;&#8217;Spose he wants to buy them &#8217;ere smokestacks?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The trooper had appeared on deck. He was clinging to a cleat in the rail with
+a landsman&#8217;s awkwardness and with the cunning object of proving to the
+ship that he wasn&#8217;t to be surprised off his feet another time. He swayed
+grandly, generously, for&#8217;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 the <i>Luz&#8217;s</i> two 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.</p>
+
+<p>A moment later the passenger climbed into the wheelhouse. &#8220;Look
+here&#8211;Mur&#8211;Murgie,&#8221; he said, &#8220;for a seven-hundred-dollar
+rate that was a toler&#8217;ble unsteady cabin I had last night; restless, sort of.
+It&#8217;s mighty curious, but something&#8217;s been acting up inside of me,
+and I can&#8217;t seem to make out <i>what</i> it is!&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. There <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_38'></a>38</span>was 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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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&#8211;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&#8211;in killing, alas!&#8211;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&#8211;of the
+gallantry and the heroism&#8211;as the prosiest blacksmith. He had grown into a
+man of dangerous fibre, but he was less aware of it than of his muscles.</p>
+
+<div class='figcenter'>
+    <a id='ill_38'></a>
+<img src='images/illus-038.jpg' id="img004" alt='' />
+<p class='center caption'>
+&#8220;JOHN DINWIDDIE DRISCOLL&#8211;THE MISSOURIAN&#8221;<br />&#8220;His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight and hard and<br />brown from the weathering of sun and blizzard&#8221;
+</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_39'></a>39</span>Various items on
+the <i>Luz</i> struck 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. &#8220;<i>Who</i> said life
+was all beer and skittles?&#8221; he demanded defiantly, and glared at Driscoll
+as though <i>he</i> had. But getting no answer, he seemed mollified, as though
+this proved that the man who <i>had</i> said 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&#8217;d have
+to begin throwing the cargo overboard.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No &#8217;elp for it, sir,&#8221; said the skipper, bridling like a bantam.
+&#8220;Didn&#8217;t I try to save <i>my</i> cargo, off Savannah, and didn&#8217;t
+I <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_40'></a>40</span> lose my sloop to
+boot? Didn&#8217;t I now, sir?&#8211;Poor old girl, mebby she&#8217;s our chaser
+out &#8217;ere this very minute.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Try&#8211;try more turpentine,&#8221; said Murguía weakly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, or salt bacon, sir, or cognac, or the woodwork, or any blarsted
+thing I see fit, sir!&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>The skipper came back, dripping with pray. &#8220;The wind&#8217;s
+changin&#8217;,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and that&#8217;ll beat down the sea
+some.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Reckon they&#8217;ll get us?&#8221; Driscoll asked.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía took the query as an aggravation of woe, and he turned wrathfully on
+the trooper. &#8220;Don&#8217;t you see we&#8217;re busy?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see you&#8217;re very damn sullen, <i>gra</i>-cious me!&#8211;Reckon
+they will, captain?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll be eatin&#8217; a United States of America supper,
+chained, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now look here,&#8221; said Driscoll plaintively,
+&#8220;<i>I</i> don&#8217;t want to get caught.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I hope as you&#8217;ll bide with us, sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Still, I was just thinking&#8211;now that smoke&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I&#8217;m a thinkin&#8217; you don&#8217;t see much smoke.
+We&#8217;re keepin&#8217; out o&#8217; sight as long as God&#8217;ll let
+us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, Captain, why not smoke up&#8211;big? Just wait now&#8211;this
+ain&#8217;t any of my regiment, I know that&#8211;but listen a minute anyway.
+Well, once or twice when we were in a fix, in camp, <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_41'></a>41</span>say, and we knew more visitors were coming
+than was convenient, w&#8217;y, we&#8217;d just light the campfires so they
+would smoke, and then&#8211;meantime&#8211;we&#8217;d light out too. Old Indian
+trick, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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. &#8220;Damme!&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Soft coal!&#8221; gasped Murguía with relief.</p>
+
+<p>It was pouring from the stacks in dense black clouds.</p>
+
+<p>The captain returned. &#8220;We&#8217;ll try to save the rest o&#8217; that
+&#8217;ere cotton, sir,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>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. The
+<i>Luz</i> swung 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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You soldiers, colonel,&#8221; he announced, &#8220;don&#8217;t &#8217;ave no
+monopoly on tricks and gammon, <i>I&#8217;m</i> a thinkin&#8217;. But I s&#8217;y, w&#8217;at
+if you and me go down to my cabin and have a <i>noggin</i>?&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr style='border:none; border-bottom:1px solid silver; height: 1px; width: 80%; text-align: center; margin: 10px auto;' />
+
+<p>Thus <i>La Luz</i> ran her last blockade, and came safely into port. She
+reached Tampico some two days before the <i>Impératrice Eugénie</i>. Whereupon
+Din Driscoll, as he was called anywhere off the muster roll, informed Don
+Anastasio that he <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_42'></a>42</span>
+would 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&#8217;s was the
+absurdest thing in all psychology.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How was it that, that <i>you</i> happened to be sent, señor?&#8221; he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well now,&#8221; observed the trooper, &#8220;there you go figuring it
+out that I was sent at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It must have been&#8211;uh, because you know Spanish. Are you
+a&#8211;a Texan, Señor Coronel?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They raised me in Missouri,&#8221; said the colonel. &#8220;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.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I thought,&#8221; said the old man suspiciously, &#8220;that perhaps
+you learned it with Slaughter&#8217;s army, along the Rio Grande. Slaughter,
+he&#8217;s near Brownsville yet, isn&#8217;t he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With about twenty-five thousand men?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lord, I&#8217;ve clean forgot, not having counted &#8217;em
+lately.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where did you come from then, when you came to Mobile?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, as I remember, from Sand Spring, Missouri, near the
+Arkansas line.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then you&#8211;Your Mercy,&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;belongs to
+Shelby&#8217;s Brigade?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_43'></a>43</span>The Missourian
+nodded curtly. His questioner was extraordinarily well informed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And, and how many men has Shelby at Sand Spring?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, millions. At least millions don&#8217;t appear to stop &#8217;em
+any.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But señor, how, how many Confederates are there altogether west of the
+Mississippi?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll, though, had had enough. &#8220;Look here Murgie,&#8221; he said,
+&#8220;if you keep on crawling, you&#8217;ll crawl up on a mongoose one of these
+days, and <i>those</i> things have teeth.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He might have gone further into natural history, but a sudden commotion down
+the street interrupted. &#8220;It&#8217;s a race!&#8221; he cried.
+&#8220;No&#8211;Lordsake, if they ain&#8217;t fighting!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s length, and the sweeps fell short, to the
+amazement and rage of his captive.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_44'></a>44</span>&#8220;You
+miserable little chocolate-hided galoot, why couldn&#8217;t you wait for
+me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s nostrils.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, here I&#8217;ve been wasting time on a smaller
+edition.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So saying, he flung aside his prisoner; and in another minute he was the
+centre of the main affair, and having an excellent time.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_45'></a>45</span><a id='link_6'></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><span class='h2fs'>A Bruising of Arms for Jacqueline</span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Then John bent up his long bende-bowe,<br />And fetteled him to shoote.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Robin Hood.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the row?&#8221; Driscoll inquired of Ney. But he was
+ignored. &#8220;Might answer,&#8221; he suggested insidiously, &#8220;for
+it&#8217;s only a toss-up anyhow which way I enlist. Look here, Sky-Blue, if you
+don&#8217;t understand Spanish, just say so, and tell me why you don&#8217;t
+start the game.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ney shoved him aside impatiently, but he calmly stepped back again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come now,&#8221; he argued plaintively, &#8220;let me in, don&#8217;t
+be selfish? But&#8211;goodness gracious, man, why don&#8217;t you draw your
+gun?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because, my good fellow, I haven&#8217;t any.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The mystery cleared at once, for now Driscoll understood the strategic
+outlay. Its key was Fra Diavolo, with a pistol at Ney&#8217;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 safety <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_46'></a>46</span>he 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, what&#8217;s the matter?&#8221; asked Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are trifling, man. That thing has no trigger.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Much as an artisan would explain the peculiarities of a favorite tool,
+Driscoll said, &#8220;Now look here, you strip it&#8211;this
+way&#8211;so.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And as he explained, he illustrated. He raised the hammer under his thumb, he
+released it on the cartridge, and Fra Diavolo&#8217;s sombrero flew off.</p>
+
+<p>Fra Diavolo threw up his hand involuntarily, and there was a second report.
+Fra Diavolo&#8217;s pistol twisted out of his grasp. The brace of navies had not
+gone higher than the American&#8217;s waist.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So,&#8221; Driscoll concluded.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;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 swirling <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_47'></a>47</span>round, with weird
+contortions and murderous eddies, but always its seething vortex was the lone
+trooper.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s revolver, and exhorted his men the while to the old, brilliant
+daring of Frenchmen.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+&#8220;If there isn&#8217;t a woman in it!&#8221; he muttered. He felt imposed
+upon. The game was a man&#8217;s game, and now its flavor was gone.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_48'></a>48</span>Jacqueline had
+seen nothing of the fray, but now she saw Fra Diavolo&#8217;s Contra Guerrillas
+skulking away and the sardonic captain himself fuming in ignoble soreness on his
+back. &#8220;Indeed,&#8221; with fine scorn she demanded of Ney, &#8220;and how
+did you manage it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Looks like the wrong side won out,&#8221; mused Driscoll, feeling a
+little uncomfortable.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Permit me to congratulate you&#8211;sergeant,&#8221; she went on.
+&#8220;It&#8217;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&#8211;Hélas! poor Prince Max!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll caught one word from her French. &#8220;What&#8217;s that about
+Maximilian?&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>But the pseudo mule driver moved squarely in front of her. He was embarrassed
+and respectful, but determined. Jacqueline lifted her brows. &#8220;My good man,
+this is effrontery!&#8221; 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, &#8220;What a round, wholesome voice
+these rustics sometimes have!&#8221; The one she heard possessed the full rich
+quality of an Irishman&#8217;s brogue, with the brogue worn off.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know Spanish, do you not, señorita?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mais&#8211;why, better than I thought,&#8221; she returned in English;
+and in English that was piquant because it could not <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_49'></a>49</span>help being just the least bit French as
+well. &#8220;Much better&#8211;because, I comprehend even yours, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Con-<i>grat</i>-ulate you,&#8221; Driscoll returned. &#8220;But
+what&#8217;s this about Maximilian?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>An eagerness in his manner caught her attention. But she answered with her
+old irony. &#8220;His Imperial Majesty seems to concern you profoundly,
+monsieur?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;H&#8217;m&#8217;m&#8211;oh no! Only it&#8217;s curious how he gets
+mixed up in this shindy of ours.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If&#8211;if you are asking about Maximilian, señor,&#8221; a heavy
+voice began. Fra Diavolo at least was not indifferent to the American&#8217;s
+questioning, and now he explained that the lady was the Marquesa d&#8217;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&#8217;s Contra Guerrillas, had offered her escort
+for the trip. But the French caballero had presumed to force her to continue by
+water.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;By water?&#8221; Driscoll repeated, glaring at Ney. &#8220;That poor
+little girl!&#8211;And make her sick again!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s chin tilted. &#8220;Ma foi, monsieur, I was not
+sick.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You say you are an officer,&#8221; he demanded of the ranchero,
+&#8220;but your Greaser clothes, that&#8217;s not a uniform?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Correct,&#8221; said Driscoll, and handed back the paper.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_50'></a>50</span>&#8220;Now
+then,&#8221; he added to Ney, &#8220;what do you say for yourself?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Unconsciously the French soldier replied as to a superior officer.
+&#8220;I&#8217;ve just been transferred to the service of His Excellency,
+Marshal Bazaine, in the City of Mexico, and am on my way there now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are in the French service?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course I am.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your rank?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sergeant.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here, in a caprice of kind heart, as well as of mischief, Jacqueline
+interposed. &#8220;Your sergeant, Monsieur the American, is the Duke of
+Elchingen.&#8221; But she might have called Ney a genus homo, for all the
+impression it made.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Too bad, sergeant,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;but a captain ranks
+first, you know, and&#8211;well, I reckon I&#8217;ll have to change sides. I
+know it&#8217;s tough,&#8221; and his brow knitted with droll perplexity,
+&#8220;but I&#8217;m afraid we&#8217;ll just have to do this thing all over
+again, unless&#8211;well, unless you give in, sergeant.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s authority, another joust was
+needed to correct the first. It all depended on whether Miss&#8211;Miss&#8211;if
+the señorita&#8211;still wished to go by land.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If monsieur will have the condescension,&#8221; returned
+Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_51'></a>51</span>Then out came the
+brace of navies once more, as naturally as the order book of the grocer&#8217;s
+clerk on your back porch. Involuntarily Ney reached for his cap.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now captain,&#8221; said Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>Fra Diavolo took the cue instantly. &#8220;A-i, mis muchachos!&#8221; he
+called, and the little demons came hurrying back, like a damned host with a new
+hope of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s game.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Michel Ney,&#8221; she commanded, &#8220;do you hear me; lower that
+pistol!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You, you wish me to surrender, mademoiselle?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know I don&#8217;t! If anyone even asks it, I will go back to the
+ship with you, at once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I, I don&#8217;t understand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You understand that I want your escort overland. Is it gallant, then,
+to disappoint me by getting yourself killed?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But all your trunks are on the ship.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>As he listened, Ney&#8217;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&#8217;s
+steward aside, apparently to instruct him about bringing the trunk. &#8220;And
+steward,&#8221; he whispered, &#8220;don&#8217;t forget to make it urgent. The
+skipper must land all <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_52'></a>52</span>the troops on board at once.&#8221; He decided that
+meantime he would stroll up to the fort on his own account, and bring down more
+aid from there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now then,&#8221; reflected the beaming young Gaul, &#8220;our
+<i>spirituelle</i> little marquise will find that one may have wits, and not read
+her dense old poets, either.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He opened the café door for her and both joined the maid Berthe, who was
+still clinging to sanctuary inside.</p>
+
+<p>The American lieutenant-colonel and the Mexican capitan looked at one
+another. They felt deserted. Fra Diavolo&#8217;s teeth bared. &#8220;Ai, que mal
+educados,&#8221; he observed. &#8220;They&#8217;re ill-bred, I say. They kick a
+gentleman in the stomach&#8211;in the stomach, señor!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8211;he had amused himself. &#8220;Well, adios, captain,&#8221; he said,
+and swung on his heel.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wait! Which direction, señor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To this mesón here, around the corner.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If Your Mercy is not in a hurry&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Looks like you were interested in His Resplendent Majesty,&#8221; Fra
+Diavolo began with weighty lightsomeness. &#8220;Mustn&#8217;t hurt his
+feelings, eh, caballero?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll laughed easily, &#8220;It was all on the girl&#8217;s
+account,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>The ranchero glanced at him quickly, sideways, a dark look of suspicion.
+&#8220;On her account, señor, not Maximilian&#8217;s?&#8221; he repeated.
+&#8220;Dios mio, caballero, I&#8217;ll wager you have forgotten <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_53'></a>53</span>her already.&#8221; Which,
+to tell the truth, was fairly exact.</p>
+
+<p>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, &#8220;You see I am waiting, as you wished. But on
+my, my daughter&#8217;s account, I&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So, captain,&#8221; Driscoll interrupted, &#8220;you&#8217;re the one
+that&#8217;s holding back Murgie! Just tell him, Murgie, that I am in a
+rush.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Fra Diavolo smiled and bade his American have patience, for he quite believed
+that the Señor Murguía would be starting in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si señor,&#8221; he went on in a different tone, when Driscoll had
+left him alone with the trader, &#8220;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.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía&#8217;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! &#8220;No, no, no!&#8221; he cried, and
+shuddered too.</p>
+
+<p>Trying to read a meaning behind the capitan&#8217;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!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hush, you fool!&#8221; growled Fra Diavolo. &#8220;The entire mesón
+will hear you, including that Gringo.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That Gringo? He, he is one of your friends?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Friend! For Dios, he nearly ruined my little plans for <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_54'></a>54</span>Jacqueline. Listen, he has
+business of some kind with Maximiliano.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes. And there&#8217;s a&#8211;a mystery in his
+business.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If I knew, would it be a mystery?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who is he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He won&#8217;t tell. I only know that he is a Confederate
+officer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A Confederate officer?&#8221; The capitan whistled low and softly.
+&#8220;Come to the Plaza, there you can tell me what you think.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And in the solitude of the Plaza they planned according to their
+suspicions.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_55'></a>55</span><a id='link_7'></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Swordsmanship in the Dark</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Cry &#8216;holla&#8217; to thy tongue, I prithee; it curvets unseasonably.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>As You Like It.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Strange there&#8217;s no motion,&#8221; thought Jacqueline the next
+morning, rubbing her eyes. &#8220;Why, what ails the old boat, I wonder?&#8221;
+Then she remembered. She was in the Tampico hotel which called itself a café,
+and the landlord&#8217;s wife was knocking on her door and calling &#8220;Niñ-a,
+niñ-a&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not a n-e-e-n-ya,&#8221; Jacqueline assured her drowsily,
+&#8220;and if I were, madame, why make a fête out of it this way in the middle
+of the night?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Niñ-a,&#8221; the unctuous nasal rose higher, &#8220;if Your Mercy
+goes with Don Anastasio, she must hurry. It is late. It is four o&#8217;clock,
+niña.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Four o&#8217;clock&#8211;late?&#8221; gasped the luxurious little
+marquise. &#8220;And how much difference, exactly, would your four
+o&#8217;clocks make on the planet Mars, my good woman?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But niña, there is Don Anastasio, he is ready to start.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And who is Don Anastasio, pray?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The trader, niña, at the mesón. He is to take Your Mercy to Valles, as
+Don&#8211;as the Capitan Morel told Your Mercy yesterday.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Capitan Morel, <i>pardi!</i> Faith, if any man had told <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_56'></a>56</span> me it meant rising at any
+such unholy hour. Oh well, I suppose it is the hour for larks, too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. &#8220;My trunk, señora, kindly have
+it sent up at once. No,&#8221; she added, catching a fluffy garment from a
+chair, &#8220;in five minutes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a brief silence, followed by positive lament. &#8220;Niña, it is
+not here. I believe, niñ-a, it is at the mesón, with Don Anastasio.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;F-flute!&#8221; cried Jacqueline. The word means nothing at all, but
+it may express a lass&#8217;s exasperation in a wardrobe crisis, and that is
+nothing except a catastrophe. &#8220;Now just possibly,&#8221; she soliloquized,
+&#8220;they permit themselves to imagine that one can wear a white frock two
+days together,&#8221; 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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I am, señora, I&#8217;m making fast haste,&#8221; and she sat
+three minutes longer, communing with her tragedy. &#8220;<i>Oh</i>, this bitten,
+biting country,&#8221; she cried, gazing ruefully at arms and shoulders, and
+fiery blotches on the soft white skin. &#8220;Still, if there&#8217;s a brigand
+for every mosquito, it may yet be worth <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_57'></a>57</span>while.&#8221; Hopefully she rose and called Berthe
+from the next room to help her dress.</p>
+
+<p>When the two girls came downstairs, the landlord&#8217;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&#8217;s
+caravan was forming, making a weird, stealthy scene of activity. Jacqueline
+picked up a lantern, and searched here and there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now where <i>can</i> it be?&#8221; she cried.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why did you let her go in there?&#8221; he cried. &#8220;She will wake
+the Gringo, she will wake the Gringo!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline reappeared. &#8220;No trunk,&#8221; she announced. &#8220;Do you
+know, Berthe, I do not believe it came at all?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The old man&#8217;s voice sounded at her elbow, faltering, placating.
+&#8220;With permission, señorita, we must be starting.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And similarly with permission, señor, who are you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Anastasio Murguía, the servant of Your Mercy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, the poor little crow? Perhaps you will tell me, sir, why neither
+the Señor Ney nor Fra&#8211;nor Captain Morel is here?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;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 out <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_58'></a>58</span>of Tampico&#8211;yes, precisamente, with a detachment
+of cavalry from the fort.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That poor Michel!&#8221; said Jacqueline. &#8220;He&#8217;s determined
+that I am to have a French escort. But Captain Morel, señor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía would not answer. He repeated the question to the Mexican woman, who
+took up explanations with a glib readiness. &#8220;Si, niña, I saw the capitan,
+not more than an hour ago. He was riding by the café, to meet his&#8211;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&#8211;yes, surely,
+before you had gone very far, niña.&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How, the señorita does not know?&#8221; asked Murguía.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Know what?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That the sailors did not come back from the ship?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not come back! Eh bien, I will not go a step.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At first Don Anastasio&#8217;s pinched face lighted with relief. But at once
+a conflicting anxiety, lest she might <i>not</i> go, seemed to possess him.
+&#8220;But señorita,&#8221; he protested, &#8220;what will Your Mercy do? The
+ship, yes, señorita, the ship has sailed already. It left last night for Vera
+Cruz.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And here am I,&#8221; Jacqueline exclaimed, tapping her foot,
+&#8220;with only one dress!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A long bubbling whistle sounded near a gendarme&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_59'></a>59</span>&#8220;Another
+quarter gone by!&#8221; Murguía exclaimed nervously. &#8220;Come, señoritas, if
+we are to reach the Valles stage by nightfall, we have no time to lose. There
+are your horses, I will&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A tremor cut short his words. Someone had just emerged from the mesón.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Gracious, Murgie, off so early?&#8221; the newcomer observed
+cheerily.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía scowled. He knew that tone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If I&#8217;m late, I apologize,&#8221; the other drawled gently, from
+behind the flare of a match over his pipe. &#8220;Howsoever, all my eyes
+weren&#8217;t shut, and you wouldn&#8217;t of left me. Pretty quiet about
+striking camp, though! Didn&#8217;t want to disturb me, maybe? Well, well, who
+made you so thoughtful? Not Captain Morel? Now I wonder!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I uh, why <i>should</i> I wake you, Mis-ter Driscoll? Have I asked you
+even to go?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;N-o, but you evidently asked old Demijohn there.&#8221; And Driscoll
+pointed to his horse, all saddled. &#8220;But cheer up, Convoluting Squirmer, of
+course I know you aren&#8217;t a horse thief. No, I just come out to say you
+forgot the blanket. I was sleeping on it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8220;Ma foi!&#8221; from Jacqueline answered him. As
+he supposed, she had not thought of him one way or another.</p>
+
+<p>But she deigned to say, that since the American <i>gentleman</i>&#8211;there
+was a lingering on the word, which opened wide the Storm Centre&#8217;s eyes
+with anticipation of battle&#8211;that since the American gentleman had broached
+the subject of his going <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_60'></a>60</span>(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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y miss,&#8221; he said, &#8220;it all comes of feeling my
+responsibility. I&#8217;m the cause of your going, and that&#8217;s why
+I&#8217;m going too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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. &#8220;I&#8217;ve often heard,&#8221; she thought
+to herself, &#8220;that an awkward swordsman is dangerous.&#8221; But she made
+no cry of &#8220;touchée!&#8221; Instead she caught at the point to turn the
+blade aside. &#8220;Responsibility? Truly sir, you <i>are</i> considerate. But
+permit me&#8211;my safety on this trip, what concern can that have for Your
+Mercy?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;None at all,&#8221; replied Driscoll, heartily.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s saddle in Tampico, but Jeanne d&#8217;Aumerle did not mind that. She,
+the marchioness, enjoyed the oddity of a pommel in lieu of horn. And the
+lady&#8217;s maid might have been on a dromedary, for all the consciousness the
+poor child had of it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Say,&#8221; Driscoll interrupted with cool obstinacy,
+&#8220;where&#8217;s our friend the captain and that sky-blue
+Frenchman?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8211;no, no, there could be no doubt of it! Yet
+her <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_61'></a>61</span>words faltered,
+and there was an appeal in them. But if she placed any hope in the strange
+American, she was quickly disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All right,&#8221; he said, as if the matter were of no further
+consequence. &#8220;Then I can make a nice comfortable report to
+Maximilian.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Report to Maximiliano?&#8221; exclaimed Murguía.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll nodded indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But Señor Coronel, when you do, you&#8211;you will remember that I
+said nothing to&#8211;that is, to persuade the señoritas to take this
+journey.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nor not to take it, Wriggler.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet you will say to His Majesty that I did suggest&#8211;yes, I do
+now&#8211;that they had better not&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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. &#8220;But,&#8221; he stammered, &#8220;there&#8211;oh what danger can
+there be in their going?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll shoved him aside and placed himself at the head of
+Jacqueline&#8217;s horse. &#8220;You had better risk the water, miss,&#8221; he
+said quietly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My good sir,&#8221; she replied, clear and cold, &#8220;I commend your
+prudence, in making certain, before you dared touch my bridle-rein, that neither
+of the two gentlemen were here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Din Driscoll swung on his heel. &#8220;Damned!&#8221; he murmured, and he
+pronounced the &#8220;n&#8221; and the &#8220;d&#8221; thoroughly, to make the
+word adequate if possible. &#8220;Lord, I believe I feel like a closed incident!
+And to think, Demijohn,&#8221; he went on as he busied himself about his horse,
+&#8220;to think that it&#8217;s the first and only time we&#8217;ve ever seen
+trouble coming and tried to keep out of it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the trouble might appear now, he had done what he could. The thought
+brightened him, and he patted his short <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_62'></a>62</span>ribs 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s attitude.
+&#8220;W&#8217;y, child,&#8221; he exclaimed,
+&#8220;what&#8217;s&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsi&#8211;señor,&#8221; she said hastily, in pathetic and pretty
+broken Spanish, &#8220;you, oh, you will not leave us! In the mercy of heaven,
+tell me that you will not! Ah, seigneur,&#8221; she sobbed, &#8220;mademoiselle
+will yet lead us to our death!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Berthe,&#8221; mademoiselle at that instant called, &#8220;oh you
+little ninny, are you coming ever?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The maid obeyed. &#8220;Just the same,&#8221; she sighed, &#8220;God bless
+her!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And did I,&#8221; Driscoll had begun angrily, but she was already
+gone, and he finished it to himself, &#8220;did I once intend to leave
+you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the American was as a solitary traveller leaving a town for the
+wilderness at the first touch of dawn. The road soon <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_63'></a>63</span>narrowed 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.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_64'></a>64</span><a id='link_8'></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Thoughts of Youth May Be Prodigiously Long Thoughts</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;And many a Knot unravell&#8217;d by the Road;<br />
+But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Omar.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 rather <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_65'></a>65</span>enjoyed the darts, if only
+to fling them back more dazzlingly tipped.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 reliable <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_66'></a>66</span>telling 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.</p>
+
+<p>In Jacqueline&#8217;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 &#8220;properties&#8221; was a monstrous green iguana with
+his prickly crest and horn and slimy eye, basking full five feet along a rotten
+log.</p>
+
+<p>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 were <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_67'></a>67</span>plumed 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&#8211;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8220;romance&#8221;! Jacqueline&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To think,&#8221; she half cried, &#8220;that we are losing
+this&#8211;all this! And yet we have won it! Mon Dieu, have we not won it? Yet
+for whom, alas? Maximilian?&#8211;Faw, an ungrateful puppet such as that, to
+have, to take from us, such as&#8211;this! Now suppose,&#8221; her lips formed
+the unuttered words, while her gray eyes closed to a narrowing cunning,
+&#8220;just suppose that we&#8211;that someone&#8211;reminds His Majesty how
+ingratitude falls short of courtesy between emperors.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The boy&#8217;s thoughts were of the country he had lost. Those of the
+resplendent and wayward butterfly were of an empire <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_68'></a>68</span>she 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.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_69'></a>69</span><a id='link_9'></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Toll-Taking in the Huasteca</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;And when he came bold Robin before,<br />
+Robin asked him courteously,<br />
+&#8216;O, hast thou any money to spare,<br />
+For my merry men and me?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Robin Hood.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For all his campaigner&#8217;s instincts, the first of Driscoll&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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 &#8220;T&#8221; on one side
+of the sugar loaf, an &#8220;M&#8221; on the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_70'></a>70</span>other 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.</p>
+
+<p>They lifted their sombreros, and he of the gorgeous one inquired if that were
+Don Anastasio&#8217;s outfit coming up behind. A civil answer was merest
+traveler&#8217;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&#8217;s mozos
+bring a bottle and glasses, he was completely reassured, and rested like the
+others of the caravan some little distance ahead.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía dismissed the mozo, himself poured the cognac, and begged the honor
+of drinking health and many pesetas to his two &#8220;friends.&#8221; They
+craved a like boon, and the clinking of the copitas followed ceremoniously.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I counted three hundred and sixty-eight half-bales,&#8221; said <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_71'></a>71</span>he 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.
+&#8220;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.&#8211;well, with your permission, we&#8217;ll call it two
+hundred flat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Anastasio manifested an itch for argument.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh leave all that,&#8221; he of the crimson serape broke in.
+&#8220;Why go over it again? We are loyal imperialists, and only our lasting
+friendship for you holds us from informing His Majesty&#8217;s Contras how you
+contribute to that arch rebel, Rodrigo Galán.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; weakly protested Murguía, &#8220;but who believes that Don
+Rodrigo turns any of it over to the Liberal&#8211;to the rebel cause?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A swollen-lunged patriot like your Don Rodrigo&#8211;of course he
+does, every cent,&#8221; and the cross-eye took on a jocular gleam.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, Señor Murguía,&#8221; he of the same eye continued, &#8220;the
+favor of your attention. See that &#8216;T&#8217; on my sombrero? That&#8217;s
+&#8216;Tiburcio.&#8217; See that &#8216;M&#8217;? That&#8217;s &#8216;Maximiliano.&#8217; And that
+sword? That&#8217;s &#8216;Woe to the Conquered,&#8217; at least the sombrero maker
+said so. Well, Don Anastasio&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; and he ended with a gesture that the
+poor trader saw even in his dreams, the unctuous rubbing of fingers on the
+thumb.</p>
+
+<p>Sadly Don Anastasio unstrapped a belt under his black vest, and counted out
+in French gold the equivalent of two hundred Mexican dollars.</p>
+
+<p>Don Tiburcio took the money, and observed, as in the nature of pleasant
+gossip, that Don Anastasio had quite an unusual outfit this time.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía took alarm immediately. &#8220;Not so large as usual, Don Tiburcio.
+The crops up there&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_72'></a>72</span>&#8220;Crops? No,
+I don&#8217;t mean your cotton. I mean fine linen and muslin, and silks, and
+laces&#8211;petticoats and stockings, Don Anastasio.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8211;they are Don Rodrigo&#8217;s affairs, not mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;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?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But Don Anastasio did not need to suppose. &#8220;How much?&#8221; he
+whimpered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, with the American&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fires of hell consume the American! Collect your tolls from him
+yourself. He&#8217;s no affair of anybody&#8217;s.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The vaqueros laughed. &#8220;We&#8217;ll throw in the American for
+nothing,&#8221; said Don Tiburcio generously. &#8220;Besides, to look at him, he
+may not be very&#8211;tollable. But delicate dress goods now, there&#8217;s a
+heavy duty on them. I should say a hundred apiece.&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. &#8220;What must you think of
+us, Don Anastasio?&#8221; he exclaimed contritely. &#8220;We haven&#8217;t
+offered you a drink yet.&#8221; Murguía dared not refuse, and he paused for the
+return of hospitality from his <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_73'></a>73</span>own bottle. At last he was on his horse, when Tiburcio
+again called.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I say, Don Anastasio, if you want a big return for your
+money&#8221;&#8211;Don Anastasio halted instantly&#8211;&#8220;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&#8211;look after your daughter! Look after her, Don
+Anastasio! We&#8217;ve just come from up there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+&#8220;You owe me two hundred dollars,&#8221; he cried. Thus his decent emotion
+concerning his daughter found vent. &#8220;Two hundred, I tell you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Will you,&#8221; asked Driscoll, &#8220;take &#8217;em now, or after
+you tell me what I owe &#8217;em for?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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. &#8220;Because&#8211;don&#8217;t you know, señor, that
+travelers here must pay toll? You don&#8217;t? But it&#8217;s true,
+and&#8211;and I&#8217;ve just paid out two hundred pesos on Your Mercy&#8217;s
+account.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The trooper&#8217;s brown eyes flashed. &#8220;Which way did those thieves
+go?&#8221; he demanded. &#8220;Quick! Which way?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía&#8217;s avarice changed to trembling. He feared to tell. Driscoll
+caught his bridle. &#8220;Which way, or by&#8211;by&#8211;Never mind,
+you&#8217;ll pay toll to me, too! I&#8217;ll just learn this toll-taking trade
+myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_74'></a>74</span>Murguía saw a
+six-shooter sliding out. &#8220;You also!&#8221; he cried.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Also?&#8221; laughed Driscoll. &#8220;There, I knew it, they were
+robbers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He wheeled and rode back with the fury of a cavalry charge, heedless of
+Murguía&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s a centaur, that country boy,&#8221; observed Jacqueline
+critically. &#8220;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!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I? Oh, mademoiselle, is there any danger?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Danger, child? Nonsense!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But what made him do that, that way?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Poor simple babe! That was a pose. Our mule driver knows he can ride,
+but we did not. And there you are.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the little monsieur, he looks like a ghost?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline laughed. &#8220;That, I admit, is not a pose. With the little
+monsieur, it&#8217;s become&#8211;constitutional.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s silk tile and poured into it from the slouch a
+shimmering stream of coin and a mass of crumpled paper.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_75'></a>75</span>&#8220;To be
+robbed while I&#8217;m along, now that makes me <i>mad</i>,&#8221; he said.
+&#8220;You won&#8217;t tell anybody, will you, Murgie?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Greenbacks, Confederate notes,&#8221; he mumbled. &#8220;Some
+I&#8217;ve paid before&#8211;only, lately, the rascals won&#8217;t take anything
+but coin.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why&#8217;s that, Murgie?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, because these green things are not worth much now, while these
+gray ones&#8221;&#8211;he fingered them contemptuously&#8211;&#8220;would not,
+would not buy a drunkard&#8217;s pardon from our cheapest magistrate.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The slur on Mexican justice only emphasized his scorn of the Confederate
+notes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Give &#8217;em here!&#8221; Driscoll snatched them from the yellow,
+desecrating fingers. &#8220;These here are promises,&#8221; he muttered,
+&#8220;and we&#8217;ve been fighting for four years to make them good. For four
+years, even the children and old men, and&#8211;yes, and the women folks back of
+us!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s hat.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Prob&#8217;bly my last blow for them promises,&#8221; he murmured to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>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
+&#8220;Ar-re!&#8221; and &#8220;Bur-ro!&#8221; 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 Driscoll <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_76'></a>76</span>and Murguía. So she had seen the exchange
+of money and she had heard. She looked thoughtfully at the trooper&#8217;s
+straight line of back and shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur the Chevalier,&#8221; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ai, ai, mi coronel,&#8221; he cackled, when they were gone out of
+hearing, &#8220;you talk of bandits! Ai, ai, Dios mio, <i>you</i> have robbed
+<i>them</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What the devil&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si señor, robbed <i>them</i>! A-di-o-dio-dios! here&#8217;s more than
+they took from me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;N-o?&#8221; said Driscoll in dismay. &#8220;Gracious, I hadn&#8217;t
+any time to count money when I searched &#8217;em!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You!&#8211;searched Don Tiburcio?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why not? Isn&#8217;t he a thief?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But&#8211;he permitted&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y yes, they both let me, I had the drop. But they got
+indignant and called me a thief&#8211;I believe they&#8217;d of called a
+policeman if there&#8217;d been one handy, or even&#8211;&#8211; Now what,&#8221; he
+exclaimed, &#8220;what ails the old bare-bones now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The senile mirth had left the trader&#8217;s face, and his olive skin was
+ashen. &#8220;Next time,&#8221; he moaned, &#8220;next time, Santa María, they
+will be in force and they&#8211;they will take the very horse from under
+me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tough luck,&#8221; Driscoll observed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_77'></a>77</span>Murguía 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. &#8220;Come,&#8221; he said, &#8220;own up. You
+knew we were going to meet those fellows?&#8221; Murguía said nothing. &#8220;Of
+course you knew. But why didn&#8217;t you change your route, seeing you&#8217;re
+too high-minded to fight?&#8211;What&#8217;s that?&#8211;Oh that voice! Dive for
+it, man!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I, I couldn&#8217;t change on account of my passport.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s that got to do with it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the passport I declare the route I take.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see, and you can&#8217;t change it afterward?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now look here, Murgie, have you got any more of these dates
+on?&#8211;Yes? No?&#8211;Murgie, if you don&#8217;t dive, by&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía dove, and denied with eagerness that he had any further toll-paying
+appointments. But Driscoll reckoned that he was lying. &#8220;And,&#8221; he
+added, &#8220;we are going to change our route, passport or no passport.
+We&#8217;ll take&#8211;let&#8217;s see&#8211;yes, we&#8217;ll take the very next
+crosstrail going in the same general direction.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía&#8217;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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>Don Rodrigo gave receipts, and his receipts were alleged guarantee against
+other molestation, since he controlled the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_78'></a>78</span>highway 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&#8217;s receipts, he
+whined. Then the robber chief had scowled with the brow of Jove, and hurled
+dreadful oaths. &#8220;You pay an Imperialista!&#8221; he stormed in lofty
+indignation. &#8220;You give funds to put down your struggling, starving
+compatriots! So, señor, this is the love you bear your country!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s black frown.</p>
+
+<p>It was this same Don Rodrigo who had been reported as slain by
+Jacqueline&#8217;s Fra Diavolo. But Driscoll, not having heard of his death, was
+quite ready to expect more brigands. He insisted, therefore, on changing
+trails.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Señor Coronel is most valiant,&#8221; sneered Murguía.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So darned much so, Murgie, that I want to dodge &#8217;em.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But his struggle against temptation was evident. He glanced back at the two
+women and again denounced the unfamiliar feminine element in men&#8217;s
+affairs. To avoid the brigandage encounter took more of manhood than Don
+Anastasio might imagine in a lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>But they had not followed their new route five minutes before Murguía was
+again at the trooper&#8217;s side. An &#8220;I-told-you-so&#8221; smirk hovered
+on his pinched visage. &#8220;Segundino has gone,&#8221; he announced.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So Segundino has gone?&#8221; Driscoll repeated. &#8220;Well, and
+who&#8217;s Segundino?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s one of my muleteers, but now I know he is a spy too. He
+will tell the bri&#8211;if there are brigands&#8211;where to meet us.&#8221;
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_79'></a>79</span>Murguía was thinking,
+too, of their reproachful increase on collection charges for the extra
+trouble.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;we&#8217;ll go back to our old
+trail,&#8221; which they did at once. Soon after he was not surprised to hear
+from Murguía that &#8220;this time it was Juan who had disappeared.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Didn&#8217;t I tell you to set a close watch?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Y-e-s, but what was the use? He slipped into the brush, and,&#8221;
+the trader complained, &#8220;I can&#8217;t spare any more drivers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t need to. We&#8217;ll just keep this trail now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_80'></a>80</span><a id='link_10'></a>CHAPTER X<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Brigand Chief</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='nbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Don Rodrigo de Vivar,<br />
+Rapaz, orgulloso, y vano.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>El Cid.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Imagine an abnormally virtuous urchin and an abnormally kindly farmer. The
+urchin resolutely turns his back on the farmer&#8217;s melon patch, though there
+is no end of opportunity. But the farmer catches him, brings him in by the ear,
+makes him choose a big one, and leaves him there, the sole judge of his own
+capacity. Driscoll had tried to dodge a fight, but Fate was his kindly
+farmer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Better fall back a little, Murgie,&#8221; he said. &#8220;You&#8217;d
+only scare &#8217;em, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He himself passed on ahead. But it was mid-afternoon before anything
+happened. Jacqueline meantime had shown some pettish ill-humor. Those who had
+fought to be her escort were now singularly indifferent. Driscoll was idly
+curious and quietly contemptuous, but he detected no fright in her manner.
+&#8220;Fretting for her silver-braided Greaser,&#8221; he said to himself.
+&#8220;A pretty scrape she&#8217;s got herself into, too! Now I wonder why a
+girl can&#8217;t have any sense.&#8221; But as the answer was going to take too
+long to find, he swerved back to the simpler matter of a possible fracas.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, well,&#8221; he exclaimed at last, rising in his stirrups,
+&#8220;if there isn&#8217;t her nickel-plated hero now!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A quarter of a mile ahead, mounted, waiting stock-still across the trail, was
+Fra Diavolo. The American put away <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_81'></a>81</span>his pipe and barely moved his spurred boot, yet the
+good buckskin&#8217;s ears pointed forward and he trotted ahead briskly. From
+old guerrilla habit, the cavalryman noted all things as he rode. To his left the
+blue of the mountain line, being nearer now, had deepened to black, and the
+Sierra seemed to hang over him, ominously. But the dark summits were still
+without detail, and midway down, where the solid color broke into deep green
+verdure and was mottled by patches of dry slabs of rock, there was yet that
+massive blur which told of distance. Foothills had rolled from the towering
+slide, and mounds had tumbled from the hills, and a tide of giant pebbles had
+swept down from the mounds. These rugged boulders had turned the trail, so that
+the American was riding beneath a kind of cliff. To his right, on the east of
+the trail, the boulders were smaller and scattered, like a handful of great
+marbles flung across the cactus plain. He may have glanced toward this side
+especially, at the clumps of spiny growth over the pradera, and caught glimpses
+behind the strewn rocks, but his look was casual, unstartled. He breathed
+deeply, though. The old familiar elation set him vaguely quivering and tingling,
+with nervous, subtle desire. The young animal&#8217;s excess of life surged into
+a pain, almost. Even the buckskin, knowing him, took his mood, and held high his
+nostrils.</p>
+
+<p>Fra Diavolo&#8217;s peaked beaver, his jacket, his breeches, his high
+pommeled saddle, his great box stirrups, the carabine case strapped behind, all
+be-scrolled with silver, danced hazily to the magic of rays slanting down from
+the lofty Sierra line. Like himself, his horse was a thing of spirited flesh,
+for glorious display. The glossy mane flowed luxuriantly. The tail curved to the
+ground. A mountain lion&#8217;s skin covered his flanks. He was large and sleek
+and black, with the metal and pride of an English strain. He was a carved
+war-charger. The man astride was rigid, stately. Man and horse had a heroic
+statue&#8217;s promise of instant, furious life.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_82'></a>82</span>&#8220;Oh, la
+beauté d&#8217;un homme!&#8221; cried Jacqueline, perceiving the majestic outline
+silhouetted against the rocks. &#8220;Why, why&#8211;it&#8217;s Fra
+Diavolo!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8211;it is!&#8221; confessed Murguía. There was dread, not
+surprise, in his exclamation. The waiting horseman, and a lonely hut there
+behind him&#8211;none other than a brigand
+&#8220;toll-station&#8221;&#8211;these were but too significant of an old and
+hated rendezvous. Don Anastasio got to his feet and nervously hurried his
+caravan back a short distance. Then he ran ahead again and overtook the two
+Frenchwomen. &#8220;Señoritas, wait! Neither of you need go. But I will&#8211;I
+must, but I can go alone, while you&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, what ails the man?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Back, señorita, back, before he sees you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline looked at the imploring eyes, at the palsied hand on her bridle.
+&#8220;Berthe,&#8221; she said, &#8220;here&#8217;s your little monsieur getting
+constitutional again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You <i>will</i> go, señorita?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Parbleu!&#8221; said the girl, and lashed her mustang.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dios, Dios,&#8221; gasped the little monsieur, hurrying after them,
+&#8220;when Maximiliano hears of this&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You should see Maximilian when he is angry,&#8221; Jacqueline called
+over her shoulder. &#8220;It is very droll.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Din Driscoll had vaulted to the ground in the instant of halting. Immediately
+he led his horse behind the solitary hut, which was a <i>jacal</i> of bamboo and
+thatch built under the cliff, and left him there. Demijohn was a seasoned
+campaigner, and he would not move until his trooper came for him. When Driscoll
+emerged again, his coat was over his left arm, and the pockets were bulging. Fra
+Diavolo had already saluted him, but gazed down the trail at the two women
+approaching.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How are you, captain?&#8221; Driscoll began cordially.</p>
+
+<p>Fra Diavolo looked down from his mighty seat. &#8220;Ai, mi coronel, I was
+expecting Your Mercy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_83'></a>83</span>&#8220;Honest,
+now? Or weren&#8217;t you worrying lest I&#8217;d got left back in
+Tampico?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One of the ranchero&#8217;s hands rose, palm out, deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But someone might have told you I didn&#8217;t get left at all,&#8221;
+Driscoll pursued. &#8220;Segundino maybe? Or was it Juan?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Or Don Tiburcio?&#8221; suggested the captain. He dismounted and
+doffed his big sombrero. &#8220;Good, I see you brought Her Ladyship
+safely.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Or I myself, rather,&#8221; said Jacqueline, reining in her pony at
+the moment, &#8220;Ah, the Señor Capitan as an escort knows how to make himself
+prized by much anticipation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Señorita!&#8221; The Mexican bent in heavy ceremony, the sombrero
+covering his breast. &#8220;I am honored, even in Your Mercy&#8217;s censure.
+Those who deserve it could not appreciate it more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Forward then, captain. On with the excuses, I promise to believe
+them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Those sailors, my lady, who fight with kicks. Ugh!&#8211;they attacked
+some of my men this morning in Tampico. I had to call at the fort for
+aid.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, but Maximilian shall hear of this!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I think he will,&#8221; and Fra Diavolo bowed again, hiding the gleam
+of a smile. &#8220;But I forget, your compatriot&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur Ney?&#8211;Yes?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He meant to help the sailors&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he was not hurt?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no, no! But he had to be held in the fort.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That poor Michel!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So,&#8221; the syllable fell weightily, as if to crush Ney out of her
+thoughts, &#8220;here I am at last, to claim the distinguished pleasure of
+seeing Your Ladyship to the stage at Valles.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Din Driscoll had been gazing far away at the mountains, his thumbs tucked in
+his belt. He stood so that the Mexican was between him and the scattered
+boulders on the right of the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_84'></a>84</span>trail. Now he addressed the mountains. &#8220;The
+stage at Valles? There is no stage at Valles&#8211;&#8211; And, captain,&#8221; he
+dropped Nature abruptly, and turned on the man, &#8220;who are you, hombre?
+Come, tell us!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If Fra Diavolo were a humbug, he was not nearly so dismayed as one might
+expect. For that matter, neither was Jacqueline. She inquired of Driscoll how he
+knew more about stage lines than the natives themselves. Because the natives
+themselves were not of one mind, he replied. For instance, Murgie&#8217;s
+muleteers had assured him fervidly that there was such a stage, whereas passing
+wayfarers had told him quite simply that there was not, nor ever had been.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s gray eyes, wide open and full lashed, turned on Fra
+Diavolo. &#8220;You are,&#8221; she exclaimed, noiselessly clapping her hands as
+at a play, &#8220;then you are&#8211;Oh, <i>who</i> are you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Mexican straightened pompously. &#8220;Who?&#8221; he repeated deep in
+his chest, &#8220;who, but one at Your Mercy&#8217;s feet! Who,
+but&#8211;Rodrigo Galán himself!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The <i>terrible</i> Rodrigo?&#8221; She wanted complete
+identification.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her quickly. The first darkening of a frown creased his brow.
+But still she was not alarmed. Berthe, however, proved more satisfying.
+&#8220;Oh, my dear lady!&#8221; she cried, reining in her horse closer to her
+mistress.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And who,&#8221; drawled the American at a quizzical pitch of inquiry,
+&#8220;may Don Rodrigo be?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What, señor,&#8221; thundered the robber, &#8220;you
+don&#8217;t&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; He stopped, catching sight of the timorous Murguía
+hovering near. &#8220;Then, look at that old man, for he at least knows that he
+is in the presence of Don Rodrigo. He is trembling.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But Jacqueline was&#8211;whistling. The bristling highwayman swung round full
+of anger. Driscoll stared at her amazed. Then he laughed outright. &#8220;Well,
+well, Honorable Mr. Buccaneer of the Sierras, now maybe&#8211;&#8211; Yes,
+that&#8217;s what I <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_85'></a>85</span>mean,&#8221; he added approvingly as Fra Diavolo
+leaped astride his charger and jerked forth two pistols from their holsters,
+&#8220;that&#8217;s it, get the game started!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s red lips were again pursed to whistle, but she changed and
+hummed the refrain instead:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll stared at her harder. The words were strange and meant nothing. But
+there was a familiarity to the tune. That at least needed no interpreter. The
+old ballad of troubadours, the French war song of old, the song of raillery, the
+song of Revolution, this that had been a folk song of the Crusader, a Basque
+rhyme of fairy lore, the air known in the desert tents of Happy Arabia, known to
+the Jews coming out of Egypt, known to the tribes in the days without history or
+fifes&#8211;why, if this wasn&#8217;t the rollicking, the defiant pæan of
+Americans! But how came she by it, and by what right?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;And we won&#8217;t go home till morning,&#8217;&#8221; he joined in,
+inquisitively.</p>
+
+<p>The girl paused, as explorers singing it have paused when savages never
+before seen by white men joined in with barbarian words. But she went on,
+letting the miracle be as it might.</p>
+
+<div class='bquote'>
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;The news I bear, fair lady&#8211;&#8211;&#8217;&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>she sang, and nodded at the bandit, to indicate that here was
+<i>his</i> line,</p>
+
+<div class='bquote'>
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;The news I bear, fair lady, Will cause your eyes to
+weep.&#8217;&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;&#8211;&#8211;Till daylight doth appear,&#8217;&#8221; Driscoll
+finished it with her. Then both looked up like two children, to the awful
+presence on horseback.</p>
+
+<p>Don Rodrigo was at some pains to recover himself. A helpless girl and one
+lone trooper were practising a duet under his very frown. Only a glance toward
+the boulders and cacti reassured him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_86'></a>86</span>&#8220;Well, what
+next?&#8221; Jacqueline demanded sweetly. &#8220;Is it to be the&#8211;the
+&#8216;game&#8217; at last?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One word,&#8221; said the Mexican solemnly. Straight in his saddle, he
+fixed them with keen eyes, keen, black eyes under shaggy brows. The syllables
+fell portentously. His voice deepened as far away thunder. &#8220;One word
+first,&#8221; growled the awakening lion. &#8220;You know now that I am Don
+Rodrigo Galán. Yes, I am he, the capitan of guerrillas, the rebel, the brigand,
+the hunted fugitive. Such names of ignominy a true patriot must bear because he
+dares to defy his poor country&#8217;s oppressors.&#8221; Here Fra Diavolo
+scowled; he was getting into form. &#8220;But to His Majesty in our own Mexican
+capital, to His Glorious Resplendent Most Christian, Most Catholic,
+priest-ridden, bloodthirsty, foppish, imbecile decree-making fool of a canting
+majesty&#8211;to this Austrian archduke who drove forth the incarnation of
+popular sovereignty by the brutal hand of the foreign invader&#8211;to him I
+will yet make it known that the love of liberty, that the loyalty to Liberal
+Reforms, to the Constitution, to Law and Order, to&#8211;uh&#8211;are not yet
+dead in these swamps and mountains of our Patria. And he will know it when
+he&#8211;when he hears my demand for your ransom, Señorita Marquesa. He will
+know it, too, when he learns that Captain Maurel&#8211;a Frenchman, señorita,
+not a Mexican&#8211;now lies stark in death in the brush near Tampico, where he
+came to take and to hang the steadfast patriot, Rodrigo Galán. But his
+Tender-Hearted Majesty will grieve less for that than for the loss of you,
+Señorita&#8211;Jacqueline. For is it not known that you, the first lady of honor
+to the Empress, that you are also His Majesty&#8217;s&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My faith,&#8221; said Jacqueline, &#8220;he speaks Spanish
+well!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thus she stopped the insult. Also she stopped an unforeseen champion at her
+side. Driscoll, with pistol half drawn, was willing to be checked. A shot just
+then, placed as they were, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_87'></a>87</span>would mean a bad ending to the game. That he knew. So
+he was thankful for Jacqueline&#8217;s hand on his wrist.</p>
+
+<p>Forked eloquence was silenced by now. Yet the patriot had been in earnest,
+under the spell of his own ardor. Don Anastasio, with head bowed, had listened
+in sullen sympathy. But both Mexicans started as though stung at
+Jacqueline&#8217;s applauding comment. Don Rodrigo purpled with rage. She only
+looked back at him, so provokingly demure, that something besides the ransom got
+into his veins. He wet his lips, baring the unpleasant gleam of teeth.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come!&#8221; he said thickly. &#8220;You and your maid go with
+me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll&#8217;s jaw dropped. &#8220;Diablos,&#8221; he exclaimed,
+bewildered, &#8220;you don&#8217;t mean&#8211;&#8211; Look, Don Roddy, you&#8217;re
+crazy! Such things&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I tell you it&#8217;s foolish. Such things do not happen, unless
+in melodrama.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For reply the guerrilla chief wheeled his charger and caught the bridles of
+the two horses that the girls rode. He pulled, so as to leave exposed the
+troublesome American behind them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Grands dieux,&#8221; exclaimed Jacqueline, &#8220;have the men in this
+country nothing to do except catch my bridle! But really, sir, this situation is
+forced. It is not artistic. As&#8211;as Monsieur the Chevalier says, it&#8217;s
+quite impossible.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She looked around for Monsieur the Chevalier to make it so, but to her
+dismay, to her disgust, he had taken to his heels. He was running away, as fast
+as he could go. Then her horse reared, for musket firing had suddenly,
+mysteriously begun on all sides of her. Many fierce pairs of eyes were bobbing
+up from behind the boulders on the right of the trail; yellow-brown faces, like
+a many-headed Hydra coiled in the cacti. They were shooting, not at her, but at
+the fleeing American. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_88'></a>88</span>She felt an object in her hand, which Driscoll had
+thrust there, and she remembered that he had whispered something, though she had
+forgotten what.</p>
+
+<p>Her captor was straining at the bridle. In his frenzy he leaned over, to lift
+her from the saddle, and then she struck him across the face with her whip. And
+then, with what the American had put in her other hand, she struck again. The
+weapon was Driscoll&#8217;s short hunting knife. The blade grazed
+Rodrigo&#8217;s shoulder. He loosed his hold, and before he could prevent, both
+she and Berthe were in the shack under the cliff. The maid sank to the floor.
+The mistress stood in the doorway. There was a glint in the gray eyes not
+lovable in man or woman, but in her it was superb.</p>
+
+<p>Fifty feet back up the trail she saw Driscoll scaling the cliff. That demon
+yelling, which is the first spasm of Mexican warfare, had not ceased, and each
+demon was shooting as fast as he could reload. She saw the white dust spurt out
+from the bullet peppered rock. But either the sun slanting down from the
+mountain line was in their eyes, or they were disconcerted at the
+American&#8217;s change in their plans; at any rate their laboriously ascending
+target did not drop. Up he climbed. Jacqueline wondered why he still clung to
+the jacket over his arm, as people will cling to absurd things in time of
+panic.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To go through that peril, and yet a coward!&#8221; she murmured.
+&#8220;It&#8217;s a waste&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The runaway gained the top of the embankment, and fell behind a rock. And now
+a half dozen of the little demons were coming across the trail to the
+shack&#8211;to take her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, the frisson, the ecstasy!&#8221; she cried. There was a certain
+poignant sense of enjoyment in it.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_89'></a>89</span><a id='link_11'></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Cossacks and Their Tiger Colonel</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, Captain, here goes for a fine-drawn bead;<br />
+There&#8217;s music around when my barrel&#8217;s in tune.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Song of the Fallen Dragoon.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Din Driscoll tumbled himself over among the rocks. &#8220;There, I&#8217;m
+fixed,&#8221; he grunted, as he squatted down behind his earthworks.
+&#8220;Plenty of material here&#8221;&#8211;he meant the cartridges which he
+poured from his coat pockets into his hat&#8211;&#8220;and plenty out there
+too&#8221;&#8211;indicating the Hydra heads&#8211;&#8220;and my
+pipe&#8211;I&#8217;ll have a nice time.&#8221; He got to work busily.</p>
+
+<p>In the door of the shack Jacqueline saw the campaign for her possession
+begin. Don Rodrigo had fled to the corner of the shack, taking his horse with
+him. The hut of bamboo and thatch was no protection against Driscoll&#8217;s
+fire, but the two girls, though inside the hut, were between and afforded a
+better screen. Jacqueline did not, however, hold that against her Fra Diavolo.
+To save himself behind a woman was quite in keeping with his sinister rôle. And
+she, as an artist, could not reproach him, and as a woman she did not care. But
+the American&#8217;s running away&#8211;now that was out of character, and it
+disappointed her.</p>
+
+<p>She heard Rodrigo bellowing forth an order, and she saw five or six
+guerrillas rise out of the cacti and spring toward her. But the constant shadow
+of self-introspection haunted her even then. In her despair, and worse, in her
+disgust, feeling already those filthy hands upon her, she yet appraised this
+jewel among ecstatic shudders, and she knew in her heart that she would not have
+had it otherwise.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_90'></a>90</span>&#8220;Oh, am I
+ever to <i>live</i>!&#8221; she moaned in startled wonderment at herself.
+&#8220;Always a spectator, always, even of myself!&#8211;God, dost thou know? It
+is a robbery of living!&#8221; And the vagabonds were twenty paces away!</p>
+
+<p>Something hurt her hand, she opened her clenched palm; it was the horn handle
+of Driscoll&#8217;s knife. Had she really thought to defend herself with that
+inadequate thing? &#8220;Poof!&#8221; She tossed it from her, vexed at her own
+unconscious heroics. Then two dark arms reached out, nearer and nearer, and ten
+hooked fingers blurred her vision. But the arms shot upward, the fingers
+stiffened, and a body splashed across the doorway at her feet with the sound of
+a board dropped on water.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ai, poor man!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She was on her knees, bending over him. But a second of the vermin lurched
+against her, and he too lay still. A pistol report from the cliff was
+simultaneous with each man&#8217;s fall. Both were dead. A third sank in the
+trail with a shattered hip, and another behind knew the agony of a broken leg.
+The marksman&#8217;s mercy was evidently tempered according to distance. For,
+having the matter now under control, he nonchalantly cracked only shin bones.
+Fra Diavolo from his shelter roared commands and curses, but not another imp
+would show himself. Crouched jealously, they chose rather to besiege their lone
+enemy on the cliff.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Must have howitzers,&#8221; muttered Driscoll. The soft lead, bigger
+than marbles, went &#8220;Splut! Splut!&#8221; against the rock on all sides of
+him, flattening with the windy puff of mud on a wall. But he was well
+intrenched, and as the guerrillas were also, he lighted his pipe and smoked
+reflectively. But after awhile he perceived a slight movement, supplemented by a
+carabine. One of the besiegers was working from boulder to boulder, parallel
+with the trail. He did it with infinite craft. At first the fellow crawled;
+then, when out of pistol range, he got to his feet and ran. Still running, he
+crossed the trail at <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_91'></a>91</span>a safe distance beyond the hut, and began working back
+again, this time along the cliff, and toward Driscoll. When about a hundred
+yards away, he disappeared; which is to say, he lowered himself into a little
+ravine that thousands of rainy seasons had worn through from the foothills. But
+almost at once his head and shoulders rose from the nearer bank, and Driscoll
+promptly fired. The shot fell short. A pistol would not carry so far; which was
+a tremendously important little fact, since the other fellow was aiming a rifle.
+The bullet from that rifle neatly clipped a prickly pear over Driscoll&#8217;s
+head. The strategist certainly knew his business. There was a familiar shimmer
+of silver about his high peaked hat. Yes surely, he was Don Tiburcio, the loyal
+Imperialist of the baleful eye. No doubt the malignant twinkle gleamed in that
+eye now, even as the blackmailer bit a cartridge for the next shot. A victim who
+had only pistols, and at rifle range, and with not a pebble for shelter from the
+flank bombardment&#8211;it was assuredly a situation to tickle Don Tiburcio.</p>
+
+<p>Now Driscoll&#8217;s point of view was less amusing. To change his position,
+he must expose himself to a fusilade from across the way. And if he tried to
+rush his friend of the gully, the brigands meantime would carry off the two
+girls. A gentleman&#8217;s part, therefore, was to stay where he was and be made
+a target of. But he varied it a little. At Don Tiburcio&#8217;s second shot, he
+lunged partly to his feet and fell forward as though mortally wounded. He lay
+quite still, and soon Don Tiburcio came creeping toward him. Don Tiburcio was
+thinking of his lost toll-moneys that should be on the corpse. Driscoll waited,
+his nerves alert, his pistols ready. But just beyond range, the blackmailer
+paused.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Go for the women, you idiots,&#8221; he yelled. &#8220;The
+Gringo&#8217;s dead.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The idiots verified the title straightway, for up they popped from behind
+their boulders and started for the shack.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_92'></a>92</span>&#8220;&#8217;Possuming&#8217;s no use,&#8221; Driscoll
+muttered, then fired. The guerrillas got back to cover quickly enough, and so
+did Don Tiburcio, grinning over his stratagem. In his arroyo again, he proposed
+to make the Gringo as a sieve. Each bullet from his carabine twanged lower and
+lower. &#8220;Ouch!&#8221; ejaculated Driscoll. One had furrowed his leg, and it
+hurt. He looked anxiously, to see if the Mexican were lowering his aim yet more.
+An inch meant such a great deal just then. But a tremendous surprise met him.
+For Don Tiburcio had changed his mind. The rascal was firing in another
+direction entirely, firing rapturously, firing at his very allies, at the little
+imps themselves among the boulders and nettles. And the little imps were
+positively leaping up to be shot. They ran frantically, but straight toward the
+traitor, and on past him up the trail. The Storm Centre could not shoot lunatics
+any more than he could babies. He only stared at them open mouthed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Los Cosacos!&#8211;El Tigre! Los Cosacos!&#8221; they yelled,
+scrambling out upon the road, bleeding, falling, praying, and kissing whatever
+greasy amulet or virgin&#8217;s picture they owned.</p>
+
+<p>Then there beat into Driscoll&#8217;s ears the furious clatter of hoofs. It
+deafened him, the familiar, glorious din of it. The blood raged in his veins
+like fiery needle points. To see them&#8211;the cavalry, the cavalry! Then they
+were gone&#8211;a flashing streak of centaurs, a streamer of red in a blur of
+dust, maniac oaths, and pistol shots, and sweeping sabres. Hacked bodies were
+sucked beneath the swarm as saplings under an avalanche. Driscoll sprang up and
+gazed. Through eddying swirls he still could see red sleeved arms reach out, and
+lightning rays of steel, and half-naked fleeting creatures go down, and never a
+jot of the curse&#8217;s speed abate.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lordy, but Old Joe should &#8217;a seen it!&#8221; he fairly shouted. He was
+thinking of Shelby, of the Old Brigade back in Missouri; daredevils, every one
+of them.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_93'></a>93</span>Don Tiburcio had
+sighted the vengeful horde from afar, and had recognized them, since he was, in
+fact, one of their scouts. They were the Contra Guerrillas, the Cossacks, the
+scourge wielded by the French Intervention and the Empire. And they were Don
+Tiburcio&#8217;s cue to loyalty. For seeing them, he began firing on his late
+friends, the brigands. Yet he spared their Capitan. At the first alarm Fra
+Diavolo had vaulted astride his black horse, and Tiburcio darting out, had
+caught his bridle, and turned him into the dry bed of the arroyo. Others of the
+fugitives tried to escape by this same route, but Tiburcio fought them off with
+clubbed rifle, and in such occupation was observed by him who led the Cossacks,
+who was a terrible old man, and a horseman to give the eye joy. At the gully he
+swerved to one side, and let the hurricane pass on by.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sacred name of thunder,&#8221; he cursed roundly, &#8220;a minute
+later and&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si, mi coronel,&#8221; the faithful Tiburcio acknowledged gratefully,
+&#8220;Your Excellency came just in time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The colonel of Contra Guerrillas frowned a grim approval for his
+scout&#8217;s handiwork of battered skulls. He was a man of frosted visage, a
+grisly Woden. The hard features were more stern for being ruggedly venerable.
+His beard was wiry, hoary gray, through whose billowy depth a long black cigar
+struck from clenched teeth. If eyes are windows of the soul, his were narrow,
+menacing slits, loopholes spiked by bristling brows. Two deep creases between
+the eyes furrowed their way up and were lost under an enormously wide sombrero.
+This sombrero was low crowned, like those worn farther to the south, and
+ornately flowered in silver. His chest was crossed with braid, cords of gold
+hung from the right shoulder to the collar, and the sleeves were as glorious as
+a bugler&#8217;s. His brick-red jacket fell open from the neck, exposing the
+whitest of linen. His boots were yellow, his spurs big Mexican <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_94'></a>94</span>discs. Altogether the blend
+in him of the precise military and the easy ranchero was curiously picturesque.
+But Colonel Dupin, the Tiger of the Tropics, was a curious and picturesque man.
+His medals were more than he could wear, and each was for splendid daring. But
+on a time they had been stripped from him. It happened in China. He had made a
+gallant assault on the Imperial Palace, but he had also satiated his barbarian
+soul in carnage and loaded his shoulders with buccaneering loot. And though he
+wondered at his own moderation, a court martial followed. However, Louis
+Napoleon gave him back his medals, and sent him to Mexico to stamp out savagery
+by counter savagery.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There were two accomplices in this business,&#8221; the Tiger was
+saying, &#8220;one a trader, Murguía&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Killed him my very first shot,&#8221; lied Tiburcio. He would save his
+golden goose of the golden eggs.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And the other, an American?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Got away with the others, señor.&#8221; Again Tiburcio&#8217;s reason
+was obvious. The American, if taken, might tell things.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And&#8221;&#8211;Dupin gripped his cigar hungrily&#8211;&#8220;and
+Rodrigo?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For answer the scout waved a hand vaguely up the trail.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;None went that way?&#8221; and the Colonel jerked his head toward the
+ravine.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, none. Your Mercy saw me driving them back.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quick, then, on your horse! We&#8217;re losing time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Tiburcio was reluctant. He had not yet recovered his money from
+the American. &#8220;But the women, mi coronel? They are there, in that shack.
+Hadn&#8217;t I better stay&#8211;&#8211;?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jacqueline, you mean? Of course the little minx is in trouble, the
+second she touches land. But you come with me. She shall have another
+protector.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio knew the Cossack chief. He obeyed, and both men galloped away after
+the chase.</p>
+
+<div class='figcenter'>
+    <a id='ill_94'></a>
+<img src='images/illus-094.jpg' id="img005" alt='' />
+<p class='center caption'>
+&#8220;COLONEL DUPIN&#8221;<br />&#8220;The Tiger of the Tropics ... the chief of Contra Guerrillas&#8221;
+</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_95'></a>95</span>They had not gone
+far when they passed Michel Ney swiftly returning. He was the protector Dupin
+had in mind. He had seen Jacqueline in the doorway of the hut as he stormed past
+with the Contra Guerrillas, but he had been too enthusiastic to stop just then.
+He was a Chasseur d&#8217;Afrique, and to be a Chasseur d&#8217;Afrique was to ride in a
+halo of mighty sabre sweeps. And Michel had fought Arabs too&#8211;but the good
+simplicity of his countenance was woefully ruffled as he turned back from that
+charge of the Cossacks.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Michel!&#8221; cried Jacqueline, stepping over the forms of men before
+the hut, and forgetting them. The natty youth was torn, rumpled, grimy. The
+sky-blue of his uniform was gray with dust. But to see him at all proved that he
+had escaped Fra Diavolo&#8217;s web in Tampico. And the relief! It made her
+almost gay. &#8220;Ah, Michel&#8211;le beau sabreur!&#8211;and did you enjoy it,
+mon ami?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He alighted at her feet, and raised her hand to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur,&#8221; she demanded quick as thought, &#8220;my
+trunk?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, I did well to bring myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You should have brought my trunk, sir, first of all. Deign to look at
+this frock! No, no, don&#8217;t, please don&#8217;t. But tell me everything.
+What could have happened to you last night? Why did you not meet me this
+morning?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His story was brief. Of his contemplated strategy at Tampico, there had been
+a most lugubrious botching. The night before, when he started to the fort for
+aid, Fra Diavolo&#8217;s little Mexicans had waylaid him, bound him, and dragged
+him back to the café, where Jacqueline that very moment reposed in slumber. And
+there, in a back room without a window, he had gritted his teeth until morning.
+As for the sailors, who were to return to the ship for her trunk; well, more
+little Mexicans had fired on them from the river bank. The small boat, riddled
+with shot, had sunk, and the sailors, splashing frantically to keep off the
+sharks, had gained the shore opposite. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_96'></a>96</span>But they could neither get word to the ship, nor cross
+back to Tampico.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet,&#8221; demanded Jacqueline, &#8220;how could you know all this,
+there in your prison room?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Am I saying I did, name of a name? Well, those poor sailors wandered
+about all night in the swamps across the river, and this morning they ran into
+Colonel Dupin and his Contras, and the colonel was frothing mad. He had only
+just stumbled on the bodies of Captain Maurel and some of his men, who had been
+ambushed and murdered. Poor Maurel was dangling from a tree among the vultures.
+Others were mutilated. Some had even been tortured. And all were stripped, and
+rotting naked. Mon Dieu, mon dieu, but it&#8217;s an inferno, this
+country!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes, but how did they find you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Colonel Dupin simply brought the sailors back to Tampico and searched
+that café, and got me out. The proprietor wasn&#8217;t thought to be any too
+good an Imperialist, anyway. They shot him, and then we came right along
+here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very nice of you, I am sure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not at all. Dupin isn&#8217;t thinking of anybody but your Fra
+Diavolo, who must have killed Captain Maurel.&#8211;Was he here?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who? Don Rodrigo?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don Rodrigo?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course. He&#8217;s the same as Fra Diavolo.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mean that bandit,&#8221; cried Ney, &#8220;that terrible Rodrigue?
+But he is dead, don&#8217;t you remember, Fra Diavolo said so?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stupid! Fra Diavolo is Don Rodrigo himself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not dead then? And I&#8217;ll meet him yet! But,&#8221; and his sudden
+hope as suddenly collapsed, &#8220;Dupin will get him first.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I think not, because Rodrigo did not take the trail.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then which way did he go? Quick, please, mademoiselle, which
+way?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_97'></a>97</span>&#8220;He turned
+off into that arroyo.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, what chance, what luck!&#8221; But the boy stopped with his foot
+in the stirrup. &#8220;No, mademoiselle, I can&#8217;t leave you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh yes you can. I daresay there&#8217;s another champion about.&#8221;
+She glanced up at the cliff. &#8220;And besides, all danger is past. The donkey
+caravan is still here, and for company, I have Berthe, of course.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Really, mademoiselle?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, Michel, really.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good, I&#8217;m off! But we will meet you at&#8211;Dupin just told
+me&#8211;at the next village on this same trail. Now I&#8217;m off!&#8221; He
+was indeed. &#8220;I say, mademoiselle,&#8221; he called back, &#8220;I&#8217;m
+glad we left the ship, aren&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline turned hastily her gaze from the cliff. He startled her,
+expressing her own secret thought.</p>
+
+<p>Chasseur and steed vanished in the ravine, and she smiled. &#8220;The God of
+pleasant fools go with him,&#8221; she murmured.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_98'></a>98</span><a id='link_12'></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Pastime Passing Excellent</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Il y a des offenses qui indignent les femmes sans les déplaire.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Emile Augier.</i></p> </div>
+
+<p>Like another Black Douglas, Din Driscoll rose among the crags, the dark tufts
+curling stubbornly on his bared head. He looked a sinewy, toughened Ajax. But he
+only spoiled it. For, raising his arms, he stretched himself, stretched long and
+luxuriously. His very animal revelling in the huge elongation of cramped limbs
+was exasperating. Next he clapped the slouch on his head, and clambered
+down.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline might have been surprised to see him. Her brows lifted. &#8220;Not
+killed?&#8221; she exclaimed. &#8220;But no, of course not. You gave yourself
+air, you ran away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll made no answer. He was thinking of what to do next. She knew that he
+had run because of her, and she was piqued because he would not admit it.
+&#8220;So,&#8221; she went on tauntingly, &#8220;monsieur counts his enemy by
+numbers then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Didn&#8217;t count them at all,&#8221; he murmured absently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; and she tapped her foot, &#8220;a Frenchman, he would have
+done it&#8211;not that way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She was talking in English, and the quaintness of it began to create in him a
+desire for more. &#8220;Done what, miss?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He would not have run&#8211;a Frenchman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Prob&#8217;bly not, &#8217;less he was pretty quick about it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She looked up angrily. Of course he must know that he had been splendid, up
+there behind the rocks. And now to <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_99'></a>99</span>be unconscious of it! But that was only a pose, she
+decided. Yet what made him so stupidly commonplace, and so dense? She hated to
+be robbed of her enthusiasm for an artistic bric-à-brac of emotion; and here he
+was, like some sordid mechanic who would not talk shop with a girl.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wager one thing,&#8221; she fretted, &#8220;and it is that when you
+bring men down to earth you have not even at all&#8211;how do you say?&#8211;the
+martial rage in your eyes?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, uh, not&#8217;s I know of. It might spoil good
+shooting.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And your pipe&#8221;&#8211;her lip curled and smiled at the same
+time&#8211;&#8220;the pipe does not, neither?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His mouth twitched at the corners. &#8220;N-o,&#8221; he decided soberly,
+&#8220;not in close range.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She gave him up, he had no pose. Still, she was out of patience with him.
+&#8220;Hélas! monsieur, all may see you are Ameri-can. But there, you have not
+to feel sorry. I forgive you, yes, because&#8211;it wasn&#8217;t
+dull.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hadn&#8217;t we better be&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now what,&#8221; she persisted, &#8220;kept you so long up there, for
+example?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll reddened. He had lingered behind the screen of rock to bandage his
+furrowed leg. &#8220;S&#8217;pose you don&#8217;t ask,&#8221; he said abruptly,
+&#8220;there&#8217;s plenty other things to be doing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He turned and invited the little Breton maid to come from the shack. She was
+white, and trembled a little yet. &#8220;I knew, I knew you would not leave us,
+monsieur,&#8221; she was trying to tell him. &#8220;But if you had&#8211;oh,
+what would madame&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now then,&#8221; the practical American interrupted,
+&#8220;where&#8217;s Murgie?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline pointed with the toe of her slipper. There were prostrate bodies
+around them, with teeth bared, insolent, silent, horrible. One couldn&#8217;t be
+sorry they were dead, but one didn&#8217;t like to see them. Jacqueline&#8217;s
+boot pointed to a <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_100'></a>100</span>man lying on his face. A silk hat was near by in the
+dust. A rusty black wig was loosened from his head. The girl invoked him
+solemnly. &#8220;Arise, Ancient Black Crow, and live another thousand
+years.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll lifted the shrunken bundle of a man, held him at arm&#8217;s length,
+looked him over, and stood him on his feet. The withered face was more than ever
+like a death&#8217;s head, and the eyes were glassy, senseless. But as to hurt
+or scratch, there was none. The beady orbs started slowly in their sockets,
+rolling from side to side. The lips opened, and formed words. &#8220;Killed?
+yes, I am killed. But I want&#8211;my cotton, my burros, my peons&#8211;I want
+them. I am dead, give them to me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re alive, you old maverick.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The gaze focused slowly on Driscoll, and slowly wakened to a crafty leer.
+Believe this Gringo?&#8211;not he!</p>
+
+<p>With an arm behind his shoulders Driscoll forced him down the trail to his
+caravan. Most of the animals were lying down, dozing under their packs.
+Murguía&#8217;s eyes grew watery when he saw them, but he was still dazed and
+his delusion was obstinate. The leer shot exultant gleams. &#8220;A rich man
+<i>can</i> enter heaven,&#8221; he chuckled with unholy glee.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh wake up, and give me two donkeys for the girls. Their horses got
+hit, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then the stunned old miser began to perceive that he was not in heaven. His
+tyrant&#8217;s voice! &#8220;You get my horses killed,&#8221; he whined,
+&#8220;and now you take my burros.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll said no more, but picked out two beasts and bound some cushioned
+sacking on their backs for saddles. Then with a brisk hearty word, he swept
+Berthe up on the first one.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Next,&#8221; he said, turning to Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p>But the marchioness drew back. Next&#8211;after her maid! It nettled her that
+this country boy, or any other, could not <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_101'></a>101</span>recognize in her that indefinable something which is
+supposed to distinguish quality.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter, now?&#8221; he asked. &#8220;Quick, please,
+I&#8217;m in a hurry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s too preposterous. I&#8217;ll not!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will,&#8221; he said quietly.</p>
+
+<p>Her gray eyes deepened to blue with amazement. She stood stock still,
+haughtily daring him. She even lifted her arms a little, leaving the girlish
+waist defenseless. Her slender figure was temptation, the pretty ducal fury was
+only added zest. Up among the rocks Driscoll had found himself whispering,
+&#8220;She&#8217;s game, that little girl!&#8221; But at the same time he had
+remembered Rodrigo&#8217;s innuendo, the linking of her name with
+Maximilian&#8217;s. She was so brave, and so headstrong, so lovably headstrong,
+and her beauty was so fresh and soft! Yet he could not but think of that taint
+in what nature had made so pure. Of a sudden there was a something wrong,
+something ugly and hideously wrong in life. And the country boy, the trooper,
+the man of blood-letting, what you will, was filled with helpless rage against
+it; and next against himself, because the girlish waist could thrill him so.
+&#8220;A silly little butterfly,&#8221; he argued inwardly. Before, he had been
+unaware of his own indifference. But now he angrily tried to summon it back. He
+set his mind on their situation, on what it exacted. It exacted haste, simple,
+impersonal haste. And keeping his mind on just that, he caught her up.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you boor!&#8221; she cried, pushing at him.</p>
+
+<p>His jaw hardened. His will was well nigh superhuman, for he battled against
+two furious little hands, against the dimple and the patch so near his lips,
+against the fragrance of her hair, against the subtle warmth of his burden.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no!&#8221; she panted. &#8220;Monsieur, do you hear me? I am not
+to be carried!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Maybe not,&#8221; said he, carrying her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_102'></a>102</span>A moment later
+she discovered herself planted squarely on the burro.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bonté divine!&#8221; she gasped. But she took care not to fall
+off.</p>
+
+<p>He drew a long breath.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now whip &#8217;em up,&#8221; he commanded.</p>
+
+<hr style='border:none; border-bottom:1px solid silver; height: 1px; width: 80%; text-align: center; margin: 10px auto;' />
+
+<p>The first village beyond, where Dupin had promised to meet Jacqueline, was a
+squatting group of thatched cones in a dense forest of Cyprus and eucalyptus.
+Its denizens were Huasteca Indians, living as they had before the Conquest,
+among themselves still talking their native dialect. The name of the hamlet was
+Culebra.</p>
+
+<p>The coy twilight waned quickly, and the caravan was still pushing on through
+the thick darkness of the wood, when a high tensioned yelping made the vast
+silence insignificant, ugly. But as the travelers filed into the clearing where
+the village was, the curs slunk away with coyote humility, their yellow points
+of eyes glowing back on the intruders.</p>
+
+<p>With a forager&#8217;s direct method, Driscoll roused the early slumbering
+village. He would not take alfafa, he declined rastrojo. It was human food,
+corn, that he bought for his horse. He housed his dumb friend under a human roof
+too. After which he prepared a habitation for the women. He swept the likeliest
+hut clean of ashes, brazier, and bits of pots and jars. He carpeted the earth
+floor in Spanish moss, as King Arthur&#8217;s knights once strewed their halls
+with rushes. It was luxury for a coroneted lass, if one went back a dozen
+centuries. There were chinks between the sooty saplings that formed the wall,
+but over these he hung matting, and he drove a stake for a candle.</p>
+
+<p>Supper followed. The trooper chose to change Don Anastasio from host to
+guest, and he exacted what he needed from the Inditos. They, for their part,
+were alert before his commands. None of them had been overlooked in his
+preliminary <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_103'></a>103</span>largesse of copper tlacos and they made the teaming
+wilderness contribute to his spread. Kneeling, with sleeves rolled from his hard
+forearms, he broiled a steak over hickory forks. The torches of gum tree knots
+lighted his banquet, and the faces of the two girls, rosy in the blaze and
+mysterious in the shadow, were piquant inspiration. Even the sharp features of
+Don Anastasio stirred him into a phase of whimsical benevolence. He knocked two
+chickens from their perch in a tree and baked them in a mould of clay. There was
+an armadilla too, which a Culebra boy and the dogs had run down during the day.
+Its dark flesh was rich and luscious, and the Missourian fondly called it
+&#8217;possum. Crisply toasted tortillas, or corn cakes, served for bread, and for
+spoons as well. But to Driscoll&#8217;s mind the real feast was
+coffee&#8211;actual coffee, which he made black, so very good and black, a
+riotous orgie of blackness and strength and fragrance. Here was a feast indeed
+for the poor trooper. He thought of the chickory, of the parched corn, of all
+those pitiful aggravations that Shelby&#8217;s Brigade had tried so hard to
+imagine into coffee during the late months of privation along the Arkansas
+line.</p>
+
+<p>And the Marquise d&#8217;Aumerle? Learning to eat roasting ears, which somehow just
+would leave a grain on her cheek with every bite, the dainty Marquise thought
+how much finer was this than the tedious bumping ship. How much more tempting
+than the ultra-belabored viands on white china that had to be latticed down!
+Here was angel&#8217;s bread in the wilderness. And the appetite that drove her
+to ask for more, that was the only sauce&#8211;an appetite that was a frisson. A
+new sensation, in itself!</p>
+
+<p>And later, sleep too became a passion, a passion new and sweet in its
+incantation out of the lost cravings of childhood. When the nearer freshness of
+the woods filled her nostrils, there from the live-oak moss in her night&#8217;s
+abode, she smiled on the grave young fellow who had left her at the door. And
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_104'></a>104</span>both girls laughing
+together over the masculine notions for their comfort, knew a certain happy
+tenderness in their gaiety.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Éh, but it&#8217;s deep, madame,&#8221; said one.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the politeness of the heart,&#8221; the other
+explained.</p>
+
+<p>Outside Driscoll spread his blanket across the doorway where his horse was
+sheltered, and wrapped in his great cape-coat, he stretched himself for a smoke.
+But Murguía came with cigars, of the Huasteca, gray and musty. Driscoll accepted
+one, waving aside the old man&#8217;s apologies. He puffed and waited.
+Conviviality in Don Anastasio meant something.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, amigo,&#8221; the thin voice cracked in a spasm of forced
+heartiness, &#8220;ah, it was a banquet! Si, si, a banquet! Only, if there were
+but a liqueur, a liqueur to give the after-cigar that last added relish, verdad,
+señor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll tapped his &#8220;after-cigar&#8221; till the ashes fell.
+&#8220;Well? he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ai de mi, caballero, but I am heavy with regrets. I can offer nothing.
+My poor cognac&#8211;no, not after such a feast. But whiskey&#8211;ah, whiskey
+is magnifico. It is American.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, with a genial rubbing of his bony hands. But his sad
+good-fellowship was transparent enough, and in the darkness his eyes were beads
+of malice. Driscoll half grunted. A long way round for a drink, he thought.
+&#8220;Here,&#8221; he said, getting out his flask, &#8220;have a pull at
+this.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía took it greedily. He had seen the flask before. The covering of
+leather was battered and peeled. &#8220;Perhaps a little&#8211;water?&#8221; he
+faltered. Driscoll nodded, and off the old Mexican ambled with the flask. When
+he returned, he had a glass, into which he had poured some of the liquor. The
+canteen he handed back to the trooper, who without a word replaced it in his
+pocket. Murguía lingered. He sipped his toddy absently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I, I wonder why the friends of the señoritas do not come?&#8221; he
+ventured.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_105'></a>105</span>&#8220;Want to
+get rid of them, eh, Murgie?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The old man shrugged his shoulders. &#8220;And why not? You may not believe
+me, señor, but should I not feel easier if they were&#8211;well, out of the
+reach of Don Rodrigo?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Out of&#8211;&#8211;Look here, where&#8217;s the danger now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ai, señor, don&#8217;t be too sure. Colonel Dupin still does not come,
+and it might be&#8211;because the guerrillas have stopped him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Man alive, he had &#8217;em running!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;H&#8217;m, yes, but there&#8217;s plenty more. This very village
+breeds them, feeds them, welcomes them home. Don Rodrigo can gather ten times
+what he had to-day. And if he does, and if, if he is looking for the señoritas
+again&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll shifted on his blanket. &#8220;I see,&#8221; he drawled. &#8220;F&#8217;r
+instance, if the señoritas vanish before he gets here, he won&#8217;t blame you?
+Oh no, you were asleep, you couldn&#8217;t know that I had up and carried
+&#8217;em off. Anyhow, you&#8217;d rather risk Rodrigo than Colonel
+Dupin&#8211;&#8211;Yes, I see.&#8221; He tucked his saddle under his head, and lay
+flat, blinking at the stars. &#8220;This trail go on to Valles?&#8221; he
+inquired drowsily.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía&#8217;s small eyes brightened over him. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; he said,
+eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Correct,&#8221; yawned the American, &#8220;I&#8217;ve already made
+sure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And if&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; But a snore floated up from the blanket.</p>
+
+<p>When Murguía was gone, the sleeper awoke. He carefully poured out all the
+remaining whiskey. &#8220;It may be what they call &#8216;fine Italian,&#8217;&#8221;
+he muttered, with a disgusted shake of the head, but he neglected to throw the
+flask away as well. Next he saddled Demijohn and two of the pack horses, then
+lay down and slept in earnest, as an old campaigner snatches at rest.</p>
+
+<p>The night was black, an hour before the dawn, when his eyes opened wide, and
+he sat up, listening. He heard it again, faint and far away, a feeble
+&#8220;pop-pop!&#8221; Then there were <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_106'></a>106</span>more, a sudden pigmy chorus of battle. He got to his
+feet, and ran to call the two women.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So,&#8221; said Jacqueline, appearing under the stars, &#8220;monsieur
+does not wish to be relieved of us? He will not wait for his friends?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Get on these horses! Here, I&#8217;ll help you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Soon they three were riding through the forest, in the trail toward Valles.
+Behind them the fairy popping swelled louder, yet louder, and the man glanced
+resentfully at his two companions. He was missing the game.</p>
+
+<p>Back in the village of Culebra a demon uproar hounded Don Anastasio out of
+serape and slumber. All about him were fleeing feet. They were shadows, bounding
+like frightened deer from the wood, across the clearing, and into the wood
+again. Some turned and fired as they ran. Screaming women and children hurried
+out of the <i>jacales</i>, and darted here and there. Dogs howled everywhere. A
+storm of crashing brush and a wild troop of horsemen, each among them a free
+lance of butchery, burst on the village. A second crashing storm, and they were
+in the forest again. They left quivering blots in their wake, and a moaning gave
+a lower and dreadfuller note to the wailing of women. Only the leader of the
+pursuers, with a few others, drew rein.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Death of an ox!&#8221; the French oath rang out, &#8220;We&#8217;re in
+their very nest. Quick, you loafers, the torch, the torch!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Flames began to crackle, and in the glare Murguía was seen frantically
+driving burros and peons to safety. The leader of the troop leaned over in his
+saddle and had him by the collar.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who the name of a name are you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Anastasio looked up. His captor was a great bearded man. &#8220;Colonel
+Dupin!&#8221; he groaned.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who are you?&#8211;But I should know. It&#8217;s the trader, the
+accomplice of Rodrigo. Sacré nom, tell me, where is she? We can&#8217;t find her
+here. Where is she?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_107'></a>107</span>&#8220;How can I
+know, señor? She&#8211;perhaps she is gone.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With Rodrigo&#8211;ha! But he&#8217;ll have no ransom&#8211;no, not if
+it breaks Maximilian&#8217;s heart.&#8211;Now, Señor Trader&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stopped and called to him his nearest men. Murguía sank limp.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he hasn&#8217;t got her! Rodrigo hasn&#8217;t got her!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who has then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The other one, the American.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Which way did they go?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If Your Mercy will not&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shoot him!&#8221; thundered the Tiger.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But if he will tell us?&#8221; someone interposed.</p>
+
+<p>It was Don Tiburcio, still the guardian angel of the golden goose.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bien,&#8221; growled the Tiger, &#8220;let him live then until we find
+the American.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Which way did they go?&#8221; Tiburcio whispered in Murguía&#8217;s
+ear.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To, to Valles,&#8221; came the reply.</p>
+
+<p>The blazing huts revealed a ghoulish joy on the miser&#8217;s face. The
+Gringo, not he, would now have to explain to the Tiger.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_108'></a>108</span><a id='link_13'></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Unregistered in Any Studbook</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;La belle chose que l&#8217;aristocratie quand on a le chance d&#8217;en être.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;&#8211;<i>Voltaire.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That garish daub which was sopped up from the burning homes of men and
+bespattered over the forest&#8217;s dark crest was already mellowing under the
+gentler touch of dawn, when the three travelers gained the open country.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Poor, dirty, little Inditos,&#8221; Jacqueline mused aloud. Berthe
+struck her pony in a tremor of fright. The American was riding ahead.
+&#8220;Fire and sword,&#8221; Jacqueline went on, and her voice lowered to
+intense scorn, &#8220;they make the final tableau, but&#8211;it&#8217;s gaudy,
+it&#8217;s cheap.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The trail had broadened into a high road, and now it wound among the hills
+like a soiled white ribbon. Driscoll turned in his saddle. &#8220;I
+shouldn&#8217;t wonder,&#8221; he observed in the full-toned drawl that was
+peculiar to him, &#8220;but what we&#8217;d better be projecting a change of
+venue. This route is too public, and publicity around here strikes me as sort of
+prejudiced. S&#8217;pose we just stir up an alibi?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A certain stately old judge back in Missouri would have smiled thus to hear
+the scion of his house. But the marchioness, confident in her mastery of
+English, thought it was the veriest jargon. What was the boy trying to say? His
+next words grew fairly intelligible. &#8220;We are now headed for Valles. Well,
+we&#8217;ve decided not to go to Valles.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps they had, but she at least had ceased deciding anything, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_109'></a>109</span>since the overruling of
+her veto in the matter of precedence when one is hoisted upon a burro.</p>
+
+<p>A narrow pony path crossed the road. &#8220;First trail to the left, after
+leaving the wood,&#8221; Driscoll said aloud, &#8220;and this must be it.&#8221;
+Campaigner in an unfamiliar country, he had informed himself, and it was with
+confidence that he led his little party into the bridlepath. But he looked
+anxiously at the forest behind. He did not doubt but that Rodrigo, if it were he
+back there, would terrify Murguía into betraying their destination, or their
+supposed destination, which was Valles.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Can&#8217;t you hurry &#8217;em up a bit?&#8221; he called back.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We do try,&#8221; protested Jacqueline, holding aloft a broken switch,
+&#8220;but they only smile at us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll got down and undid the spurs from his boots. One of the immense
+saw-like discs he adjusted to mademoiselle&#8217;s high heel, passing the strap
+twice around the silk-clad ankle. Jacqueline gazed down on the short-cropped,
+curly head, and she saw that the back of his neck was suddenly red. But the
+discovery awakened nothing of the coquette in her. Quite the contrary, there was
+something grateful, even gravely maternal, in the smile hovering on her lips for
+the rough trooper who took fright like a girl over a revealed instep. Still, the
+interest was not altogether maternal as she watched him doing the same service
+for Berthe. Perhaps he was too far away, or perhaps practice brought
+indifference, but at any rate, his neck was no longer tinged in that fiery
+way.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now dig &#8217;em!&#8221; said he. &#8220;We want to make that clump
+of mesquite yonder, now pretty quick.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The trees he pointed to were two or three miles away, but the travelers
+covered the distance at an easy lope. Driscoll kept an eye on the road they had
+just left, and once hidden by the mesquite he called a halt. As he expected, a
+number of horsemen appeared at a trot from the direction of the forest. They did
+not pause at the cross trail, however, but kept to the <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_110'></a>110</span>highway in the direction of Valles. The
+American and the two girls could now safely continue their journey along the
+bridlepath.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur,&#8221; Jacqueline questioned demurely, and in her most
+treacherous way, &#8220;how much longer do we yet follow you up and down
+mountains?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, uh&#8211;<i>I&#8217;m</i> going to the City of
+Mexico.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And we others, we may tag along, n&#8217;est-ce pas? But the city is far,
+far. And, to-night?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;if you should happen to know
+of a good hotel&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; He paused and gazed inquiringly over hills
+covered with banana and coffee to the frost line. He would not have tried a
+frailer temper so, but to provoke hers was incense to his own.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You others, the Americans,&#8221; she said tentatively, as though
+explaining him to herself, &#8220;you are so greedy of this New World! You
+won&#8217;t give us of it, no, not even a poor little answer of information.
+Alas, Monseigneur the American, I apologize for being on this side the ocean at
+all&#8211;in a tattered frock.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll looked, but he could see nothing wrong. She seemed as crisp and
+dainty as ever. If there were any disarray, it was a fetching sort, with a
+certain rakish effect.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh that&#8217;s all right,&#8221; he assured her heartily,
+&#8220;<i>you</i> can stay.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Really, and after you&#8217;ve been writing us notes from Washington
+to&#8211;to &#8216;get out&#8217;? We French people do not think that was
+polite.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I never wrote you any notes, and,&#8221; he added in a lowered tone,
+&#8220;the devil take Washington, since Lee didn&#8217;t!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s lips pursed suddenly like a cherry. &#8220;Oh pardon
+me,&#8221; she exclaimed. &#8220;I did not know. And so you are a&#8211;a
+Confederate? But,&#8221; and the gray eyes fastened upon him. She rode, too, so
+that she could see his face, just ahead <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_111'></a>111</span>of her, &#8220;but your faction, the&#8211;yes, the
+South&#8211;she is already vanquis&#8211;no!&#8211;whipped? I&#8211;I
+heard.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He did not reply, but his expression disturbed her unaccountably. She could
+almost note the whimsical daredeviltry fade from his face, as there came instead
+the grimmest and strangest locking of the jaws. She tried to imagine the French
+beaten and her feelings then, but it was difficult, for her countrymen were
+&#8220;the bravest of the world, the unconquered.&#8221; They had borne victory
+over four continents, into two hemispheres. But this American, what must he
+feel? He was thinking, in truth, of many things. Of his leave taking with his
+regiment, with those lusty young savages of Missourians whom perhaps he was
+never to see again. He was thinking of his ride through the South to Mobile, of
+the misery in stubborn heroism, of the suffering everywhere, matching that in
+the dreary fever camp of the Old Brigade. He was thinking of all the beautiful
+Southland torn and ravaged and of the lowering cloud of finality. Of the Army of
+Northern Virginia so hard pressed; of the doom of Surrender, a knell already
+sounded, perhaps. Never had Jacqueline seen such bitterness on a human face. It
+was a man&#8217;s bitterness. And almost a desperado&#8217;s. At least there was
+the making of a desperado in the youth of a moment before. She caught herself
+shuddering. There was something so like a lurking death astride the yellow horse
+in front of her.</p>
+
+<p>But over her also there came a change, and it grew as she saw and appreciated
+the man in him. Her caprices fell from her, and she was the shrewd woman of the
+world, a deft creature of courts, a cunning weaver of the delicate skeins of
+intrigue and politics. A glint of craft and purpose struck from the gray eyes,
+as in preparation for battle. Her mischievous bantering had really been fraught
+with design, and by it she had revealed to herself this man. But the change in
+her came when he proved an antagonist, as she now supposed him to be. For in the
+uncloaking he stood forth a Confederate. His cause was <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_112'></a>112</span>lost. He was in Mexico. He was on a
+mission, no doubt. One question remained, what could the mission be?</p>
+
+<p>Abrupt frankness, with its guileful calculation to surprise one into
+betrayal, was the subtlest diplomacy. &#8220;Let us see,&#8221; she mused aloud,
+&#8220;you, your comrades, monsieur, you have no country now? Bien, that
+accounts for your interest in Maximilian?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what is your interest, Miss&#8211;Jack-leen?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She staggered before the riposte. The &#8220;Jack-leen&#8221; was innocent
+blundering, she knew that. He had heard Rodrigo address her so, and he used it
+in all respect. But there was her own question turned on herself. By &#8220;her
+interest&#8221; he of course meant the interest she was showing in himself; he
+was not referring it to Maximilian. And yet the double meaning was there, just
+the same. He had struck back, that was certain, but because she could not tell
+where, nor even whether he had wounded, she was afraid to parry, much more to
+venture another thrust. Those who had sent the rustic evidently knew what they
+were about. He could shoot well, which was exhilarating. To redeem one&#8217;s
+country&#8217;s discredited bills, was quixotic. She rose to that, because she
+was French. But to fence with herself&#8211;well, that was quality. Instinctive,
+inbred, unconscious, and unregistered in any studbook of Burke or
+Gotha&#8211;but quality. And she recognized it, for there was deference in the
+silence which her baffled diplomacy now counseled.</p>
+
+<p>They passed many natives plodding on to Valles with market stuff, going at
+the Inditos&#8217; tireless foxtrot, now a man in loincloth stooped under a
+great bundle of straw or charcoal, or a family entire, including burro and dog.
+Of a gray-bearded patriarch with a chicken coop strapped to his back, Driscoll
+inquired the distance to an hacienda of the region which had the name of
+Moctezuma. &#8220;Probablemente, it will be ten leagues farther on,
+señor,&#8221; the Huastecan replied.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_113'></a>113</span>&#8220;We are
+going,&#8221; Driscoll now informed his companions, &#8220;to drop in on
+Murgie&#8211;the hospitable old anaconda.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They acquired a pineapple by purchase, and stopped for their morning coffee
+at a hut among numberless orange trees, and at another farther on for their
+midday lunch, where they learned that the Hacienda de Moctezuma was only just
+beyond the first hill, and only just beyond the first hill they learned that
+they had six leagues more to go. They covered three of these leagues, and were
+rewarded with the information that it was fully seven leagues yet. Geography in
+Mexico was clearly an elastic quantity. But towards three o&#8217;clock a young
+fellow on a towering stack of fagots waved his arm over the landscape, and said,
+&#8220;Why, señor, you are there now.&#8221; Yes, it was the hacienda, but how
+far was it to the hacienda house? Oh, that was still a few little leagues.</p>
+
+<p>In the end, after nightfall, they rode into a very wide valley, where two
+broad, shallow rivers joined and flowed on as one through the lowland. Here, on
+the brow of a slope, they perceived the walls and the church tower of what
+seemed to be a small town. But after one last inquiry, they learned that it was
+the seat of Anastasio Murguía&#8217;s baronial domain.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_114'></a>114</span><a id='link_14'></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Herald of the Fair God</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Les grenouilles se lassant<br />
+    De l&#8217;état démocratique,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Par leur clameurs firent tant<br />
+Que Jupin les soumit au pouvoir monarchique.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'><i>La Fontaine.</i></p> </div>
+
+<p>A wide country road swept up the slope of the hill, curved in toward the low
+outer wall of the little town on the brow, then swept down again. The portico of
+the hacienda house was set in the wall where the road almost touched, so that
+the traveler could alight at the very threshold of the venerable place. Mounting
+the half-dozen steps, Driscoll crossed a vast porch whose bare cement columns
+stood as sentinels the entire length of the high, one-storied façade, and on the
+heavy double doors he found a knocker. Visitors were infrequent there, but at
+last a surprised barefoot mozo answered the rapping, and in turn brought a short
+man of burly girth and charro tightness of breeches. This chubby person bowed
+many times and assured Their Mercies over and over again that here they had
+their house. Driscoll replied with thanks that in that case he thought that he
+and the other two Mercies would be taking possession, for the night at
+least.</p>
+
+<p>The man was Murguía&#8217;s administrador, or overseer. He took it for
+granted that the French señor (in those days Mexico called all foreigners
+French) and the French señoras were friends of his employer, and Driscoll did
+not undeceive him. The trooper&#8217;s habits were those of war, and war
+admitted quartering yourself on an enemy. He brought the news, too, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_115'></a>115</span>that Murguía had come
+safely through his last blockade run, which alone insured him a welcome without
+the fact that ranchero hospitality may be almost Arabian and akin to a
+sacrament.</p>
+
+<p>Plunging into apologies for every conceivable thing that could or might be
+amiss, Don Anastasio&#8217;s steward led them into the sala, a long front room,
+the hacendado&#8217;s hall of state. To all appearances it had not been so used
+in many years, but the old furnishing of some former Spanish owner still told
+the tale of coaches before the colonnade outside and of hidalgo guests within
+the great house. There was the stately sofa of honor flanked by throne-like
+armchairs, with high-backed ones next in line, all once of bright crimson satin
+and now frazzled and stained. The inevitable mirror leaned from its inevitable
+place over the sofa, but it was cracked and the gilt of the heavy frame had
+tarnished to red. At the other end of the sala, a considerable journey, there
+hung a token of the later and Mexican family in possession. The token was of
+course the Virgin of Guadelupe in her flame of gold, as she had gaudily
+emblazoned herself on the blanket, or serape, of a poor Indian. Murguía&#8217;s
+print was one of thousands of copies of that same revered serape.</p>
+
+<p>Urging them to be seated, clapping his hands for servants, giving orders,
+ever apologizing, the overseer finally got the travelers convinced that it was
+their house and that supper would be ready now directly. With a glance at his
+two companions, Driscoll inquired for the señoras of the family, whereupon a
+sudden embarrassment darkened the administrador&#8217;s fat amiable
+features.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Doña Luz, Your Mercy means? Ai, caballero, you are most kind. And you
+tell me that her father will come to-morrow, that he will&#8211;surely
+come?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Might we,&#8221; Jacqueline interposed, &#8220;pay our respects to
+Señor Murguía&#8217;s daughter?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_116'></a>116</span>The poor fellow
+begged Their Mercies&#8217; indulgence, but Doña Matilde, the señora aunt of
+Doña Luz, lay sick in the house. As for Doña Luz, yes, Doña Luz had gone to the
+chapel, as she often did of an evening lately, to pray for her aunt&#8217;s
+recovery. Doña Luz had vowed to wear sackcloth for six months if her dear patron
+saint, María de la Luz, would but hear her petition. Out of compassion,
+Jacqueline said no more.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning Driscoll was astir early. He wandered through a thick-walled
+labyrinth of corridors and patios, and came at last into a rankly luxuriant
+tropical garden, where the soft perfume of china-tree blossoms filled his
+nostrils. Keeping on he passed many of the hacienda buildings, a sugar mill, a
+cotton factory, warehouses, stables with corrals, and entered a tortuous street
+between adobes, where he found the hacienda store. Here the administrador was
+watching the clerks who sold and the peons who bought. The latter were mostly
+women, barefooted and scantily clothed. Their main want was corn, weevil-eaten
+corn, which they carried away in their aprons. They made tortillas of it for
+their men laboring in the hacienda fields, or on the hacienda coffee hills. The
+store was a curious epitome of thrift and improvidence. One wench grumbled
+boldly of short measure. She dared, because she was comely and buxom, and her
+chemise fell low on her full, olive breast. She counted her purchase of frijoles
+to the last grain, using her fingers, and glaring at the clerk half coaxingly,
+half resentfully. But an intensely scarlet percale caught her barbarian eye, and
+she took enough of it for a skirt. A dozen cigarettes followed, and by so much
+she increased her man&#8217;s debt to the hacienda.</p>
+
+<p>A shrunken and ancient laborer was expostulating earnestly with much
+gesturing of skeleton arms, while the administrador listened as one habituated
+and bored. The feeble peon protested that he could not work that day. He parted
+the yellow <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_117'></a>117</span>rags
+over one leg and revealed decaying flesh, sloughing away in the ravages of bone
+leprosy. He showed it without emotion, as some argument in the abstract. And he
+was arguing for a little corn, just a little, and he made his palm into a tiny
+cup to demonstrate. The administrador opened a limp account book, held his pudgy
+forefinger against a page for a second, then shut it decisively. &#8220;No, no,
+Pedro, not while you owe these twelve reales. Think, man, if you should die. You
+have no sons; we would lose.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, mi patron, there&#8217;s my nephew.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;True, and he has his own father&#8217;s debt waiting for
+him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just a wee little,&#8221; begged the man.</p>
+
+<p>The overseer shook his head. &#8220;When you&#8217;ve worked to-day, yes.
+Then you may have six cents&#8217; worth, and the other six cents of the
+day&#8217;s wages counted off your debt. There now, get along with you to the
+timber cutting.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The administrador brightened on perceiving Driscoll. &#8220;How was His Mercy? How
+had His Mercy passed the night? How&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where,&#8221; interposed Driscoll, &#8220;might one find the nearest
+stage to Mexico?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Almost nowhere, was the reply. What with the French intervention and
+guerrillas, the Compañia de Diligencias had about suspended its service
+altogether. &#8220;Then,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;could we hire some sort of
+a rig from you?&#8221; The administrador believed so, though he regretted
+continuously that Their Mercies must be leaving so soon.</p>
+
+<p>With a nod of thanks Driscoll turned curiously to the loaded shelves, and
+gazed at the bolts of manta, calico, and red flannel. &#8220;Jiminy
+crickets,&#8221; he burst forth, &#8220;is there anybody on this ranch who can
+sew?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Yes, the wife of one of the clerks was a passable seamstress. She did such
+work for the Doñas at the House.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_118'></a>118</span>&#8220;And can
+she do some to-day, and can you send it on to overtake me by
+to-morrow?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Most certainly.</p>
+
+<p>Then Driscoll invested in a number of varas of calico print. It was the best
+available. But the light blue flowering was modest enough, and there was even a
+cheery freshness about it that called up mellowing recollections of bright-eyed
+Missouri girls. Yet each time he thought of the costumes he had ordered, he
+blushed until his hair roots tingled.</p>
+
+<p>Intent once more on departure, Din Driscoll hastened back to the House. But
+he only learned that Jacqueline and Berthe were not up yet. He mumbled at such
+looseness in discipline, until he remembered that they were not troopers, but
+girls. And since girls are to be waited for, he did it in his own room. From his
+saddlebags he laid out shaving material. The Old Brigade had advised these
+things, while speculating with dry concern on what was correct among emperors.
+After much sharp snapping of eyes, for the razor pulled, the clean line of his
+jaw emerged from lather and stubble. &#8220;Just in case any emperor should
+happen in,&#8221; he tried to explain it, taking a transparently jocose manner
+with himself.</p>
+
+<p>Eight o&#8217;clock! Even civilized people do not stay abed that late! Yet he
+found only Berthe in the dining room. She had come on a foraging expedition. He
+watched the little Bretonne&#8217;s deft arranging of a battered tray, and
+offered droll suggestions until she began to suspect that he really did not mean
+them. Berthe was a nice girl with soft brown hair, and a serious, gentle way
+about her.</p>
+
+<p>The maid found mademoiselle not only still abed, but stretched on a rack of
+torture as well, her helpless gaze fixed on a Mexican woman with a hot iron. It
+was a flatiron, and it was being applied to Jacqueline&#8217;s poor rumpled
+frock. The dress was spread over a cloth on the floor, and the woman <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_119'></a>119</span>strove tantalizingly, and
+Jacqueline was trying to direct her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Madame is served,&#8221; Berthe announced.</p>
+
+<p>Madame raised herself on an elbow and looked at the tray, at the sorry
+chinaware, at the earthen supplements. &#8220;Served?&#8221; she repeated.
+&#8220;Berthe, exaggeration is a very bad habit. But child, what are you about?
+This is not a petit déjeuner!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I know, madame, but he told me to bring it. He said we&#8217;d be
+traveling, and there wouldn&#8217;t be time for a second breakfast.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>He?</i> Who in the world&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, the, the American monsieur. He said just coffee wasn&#8217;t
+enough, and for me to bring along the entire contest of marksmanship&#8211;the,
+the whole shooting match&#8211;and for madame to hurry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Berthe! one would say you thought him a prince.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8211;he is a kind of prince,&#8221; said the little Bretonne
+doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>Madame whistled softly. Still, she ate a hearty breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, outside two resplendent horsemen were galloping up the curving
+sweep of the wide road. Their haste smacked of vast importance, and the very
+dazzling flash of their brass helmets in the sunlight had a certain arrogance.
+The foremost jerked his horse&#8217;s bit with a cruel petulance and drew up
+before the hacienda house. Several natives were basking on the steps, and he cut
+at them sharply with his whip.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wake, you r-rats!&#8221; A Teutonic thickness of speech clogged his
+utterance, and he turned to his companion. &#8220;Tell this canaille,&#8221; he
+snarled in Flemish, &#8220;to go fetch their master here at once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The administrador came hurrying, and was overcome. His hospitable flow gushed
+and choked at its source before the splendor of the two cavaliers. They were
+Belgians. The first wore a long blue coat bedecked with golden leaves and belted
+with a sash. Crosses and stars dangled on his breast. <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_120'></a>120</span>His breeches were white doe, and his
+high glossy boots had wrinkles like a mousquetaire&#8217;s. Heavy tassels
+flapped from his sword hilt. A brass eagle was perched on his helmet.
+Altogether, here was a glittering bit of flotsam from the new Mexican Empire.
+But a narrowness between the man&#8217;s eyes affected one unpleasantly. It was
+a mean and a sour scowl, of a fellow lately come into authority. The other man
+graced the ornate uniform of an aide in Maximilian&#8217;s imperial
+household.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Mercy is&#8211;is the Emperor?&#8221; stammered the poor fat
+administrador.</p>
+
+<p>He had, indeed, heard rumors of Maximilian on one of his ostentatious
+voyages. The first Belgian, however, was in no way embarrassed at the question.
+It was a natural mistake, in his opinion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Explain to this imbecile,&#8221; he ordered, &#8220;since
+there&#8217;s no better here to receive us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The aide explained. His Imperial Majesty, Maximiliano, was returning to his
+capital. Fascinated by the beauty of the tropics, as well as ill of a cough, he
+had lingered for a week past at the adjoining hacienda of Las Palmas. He had
+also been deep in studies for the welfare of his people. But now the business of
+the Empire demanded that he relieve the Empress of her regency. Accordingly, His
+Majesty and His Majesty&#8217;s retinue had left Las Palmas that very morning,
+and would shortly pass by the hacienda of Moctezuma. His Majesty, when en
+voyage, always took a loving interest in his subjects, and a sincere ovation
+never failed to touch his heart. So Monsieur Éloin&#8211;here the aide glanced
+with some irony at the first Belgian&#8211;so Monsieur Éloin thought that the
+master of La Moctezuma would be grateful to know of His Majesty&#8217;s
+approach, in order to gather the peons from the fields to welcome him. It would
+be as well, perhaps, to reveal nothing to the Emperor of this thoughtful
+hint.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_121'></a>121</span>&#8220;To make
+it quite plain,&#8221; concluded the speaker, &#8220;can you assemble enough men
+within an hour to do a seeming and convincing reverence to your
+ruler?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And tell him,&#8221; interrupted Monsieur Éloin, &#8220;not to forget
+the green boughs waving in their hands. Make him understand that there will be
+consequences if it&#8217;s not spontaneous.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As they galloped back to rejoin Maximilian, the imperial aide was thoughtful.
+&#8220;I can&#8217;t help it,&#8221; he said aloud, &#8220;I feel sorry for him.
+How his blue eyes glisten&#8211;there are actually tears in them&#8211;when he
+talks to these Indians of freedom and a higher life! He thinks they love him!
+And all this elegance&#8211;no wonder they believe that the Fair God is come at
+last to right their sorrows.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The loathsome beasts!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I do feel sorry. He really believes that he will verify the
+tradition and be their savior. It&#8217;s his sincere goodness of heart. Man,
+how exalted he is!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But where&#8217;s the harm?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because, because the poor devils were fooled once before. And their
+new Messiah may deceive them as bitterly with unwise meddling as Cortez did with
+greed and cruelty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Messiah for these pigs!&#8221; Éloin sneered. &#8220;What pleasure it
+gives him, <i>I</i> can&#8217;t see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_122'></a>122</span><a id='link_15'></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Ritual</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;... a bearded man,<br />
+Pamper&#8217;d with rank luxuriousness and ease.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Dante.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Emperor was coming&#8211;elaborately, by august degrees.</p>
+
+<p>First, and far in advance, arrived a haughty pack liveried in the royal green
+of ancient Aztec dynasties. New tenants might have been moving on this bright
+May day, for the flunkies attended a small caravan of household stuff, which
+they crammed through the gaping doorway as nuts into a goose&#8217;s maw. The
+stuff was all royal, of royalty&#8217;s absolute necessities. There were soft
+rugs, and finely spun tapestries, and portiéres to smother a whisper. There was
+a high-backed chair, and a velvet-covered dais for the high-backed chair. There
+were brushes, whose stroke caressed gently and purringly the Hapsburg whisker.
+There was a Roman poet, fastidiously bound, and then&#8211;there was the
+Ritual.</p>
+
+<p>The Ritual was a massive tome, of glazed, gilt-edged paper, of print as big
+for the proclaiming of truth as the Family Bible, of weight to burden a strong
+man, of contents to stagger a giant brain, unless the giant brain had in it the
+convolution of a smile. Maximilian and Charlotte had reigned a year, and so far
+the Ritual was the supreme monument to the glory and usefulness of their Empire.
+It decreed, by Imperial dictation and signature, the etiquette that must and
+should be observed in the courtly circle. But alas, you can&#8217;t codify
+genuflections, nor yet a handshake.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_123'></a>123</span>The next degree
+in the imperial advent was the imperial courier, who proclaimed from a curveting
+steed what everybody suspected. &#8220;Our August Sovereign&#8221; was
+approaching.</p>
+
+<p>Several hundred peons stared with open mouths. Gathered before the house,
+they prattled to one another in childlike expectancy of the Señor Emperador.
+Most of them were learning for the first time that they had an emperor. Still,
+it sufficed to know this was an occasion for auto-inspiring vivas, like once
+when the Ilustrísimo Bishop came. They took new hold on the green boughs they
+were to wave. A handkerchief here and there fluttered from a bamboo pole. Down
+in an adobe village by the river junction, every gala scrap of calico print,
+whether shirt or skirt, pended from cords stretched across the street; and
+cotton curtains, some of crude drawn work, hung outside the windows. All the
+poor finery of the Indians was on exhibition to do honor to a gorgeous Old World
+court. But the fiesta air had already gotten into the susceptible native lungs,
+and that alone, with only a trumpet&#8217;s blare, would make for a hurrah in
+genuine fervor.</p>
+
+<p>The roomy porch of the old mansion was crowded with the chief people of the
+hacienda, clerks, foremen, house servants, besides the administrador and the
+chaplain. Behind a remote column were the three wanderers in the wilderness; the
+Storm Centre, the Marchioness, and the Maid. They were to have been gone by now,
+and yet it was not the coming of the emperor that had stopped them. The cause
+was nearer at hand. Smoking a long black cigar, &#8220;grizzled and fierce, as
+ornate in braid and decorations as a bullfighter,&#8221; Colonel Dupin had
+delayed them.</p>
+
+<p>His Cossacks thronged the colonnade. The brick-red of their raw leather
+jackets splotched every other color with rust. The Contra Guerrillas were many
+things. They were Frenchmen and Mexicans. They were Americans, Confederate
+deserters, Union deserters. They were Negroes and Arabs. <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_124'></a>124</span>They were the ruined of fortune, now
+soldiers of fortune. They were pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters,
+gamblers, swindlers. They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from
+the guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was not a
+softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity could lead
+them, could hold them.</p>
+
+<p>They surrounded the Missourian on the hacienda portico. If only for his
+debonnaire indifference, they knew him for a &#8220;bad man&#8221; such as none
+of them might ever hope to be. And they watched him like lynxes, though he was
+unarmed. Yet he did not look &#8220;bad.&#8221; He merely looked bored. He was a
+prisoner, but not the only one. Anastasio Murguía fidgetted among the Cossacks
+on his own porch. His restless eyes roved incessantly over the crowd, seeking
+his daughter, but they were steadily baffled.</p>
+
+<p>Down in the valley, where the Rio Moctezuma joined its course with the
+Pánuco, a dusty mist moved nearer along the old Spanish highway, and faintly
+there came the sound of clarions. An eager murmuring arose from the throng on
+the hillside. It swelled more confidently to a buzz as the far-away dust lifted
+at the ford and revealed the beaded stringing of a numerous company. The distant
+bugles rang clearer on the pure air. &#8220;Yes, he comes,&#8221; the people
+cried, &#8220;There! Seest thou, hombre?&#8211;<i>There!</i> Viva el Señor
+Emperador!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For Colonel Dupin the cloud of dust would shortly evolve into a staying hand
+of mercy, into the exasperating stupidity of mercy. He had captured the American
+not ten minutes before, and here was interference in a gauzy haze of dust. He
+signed to one of his men to follow with Murguía, and he himself placed a
+gauntleted hand on Driscoll&#8217;s shoulder. &#8220;Now,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>But a white figure of Mexican rebosa and silken instep moved swiftly from
+behind a column and touched the Tiger&#8217;s <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_125'></a>125</span>arm. Both Jacqueline and Berthe had been watching
+the Cossack chief rather than the spectacle in the valley. And as he turned on
+his prisoner, Berthe half screamed and clutched at the bosom of her dress. It
+was Jacqueline who gained his side. She addressed him sharply as one who hates
+to reopen a tedious argument.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur Dupin,&#8221; she cried, &#8220;have I not already permitted
+myself to tell you&#8211;yes, I repeat, you are mistaken. He is in no sense
+whatever an accomplice of Rodrigo Galán.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Tiger heard, no doubt, but he did not stop. He kept on toward the door,
+Driscoll beside him, and his men around him. He meant to pass through the house.
+Some secluded corral in the back would do for the execution. Driscoll seemed as
+indifferent as ever, though there was a lithe, alert spring in his step. Behind
+him Murguía was moaning, praying to see his daughter. Berthe followed,
+bewildered, and silently wringing her hands. But the death march was so
+business-like, and every one else was so intent on the approach of a royally
+born person, that the crowds shoved aside by the little group never once
+suspected that they had just brushed elbows with tragedy in the making.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline caught her breath, sucked it in rather, in a pang of angry
+despair; and plucking up her skirts she ran ahead until she could oppose her
+slender figure squarely in front of the burly Frenchman. If he were to move on,
+he must trample her down. Her eyes, usually so big and round and shading to a
+depth of blue with their lively mischief, were all but closed, and through the
+narrowed lashes they gleamed like white steel. Her voice, though, was clear and
+even, of a studied courtesy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, I know, Monsieur le Coronel, suspicion with you is quite enough.
+But,&#8221; she went on in contempt and feigned surprise at his dullness,
+&#8220;this rage of yours at being outwitted by Rodrigo Galán blinds you to
+something else.&#8211;Pardon, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_126'></a>126</span>monsieur, a Frenchman does not jostle a
+woman.&#8211;Thank you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the jostling by a woman&#8217;s tongue, mademoiselle.&#8211;Well,
+what is it? Have mercy, be brief, since I am not even to breathe while my lady
+talks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was thinking, dear monsieur, of the feelings of an artist, to which
+you are very, very blind.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Feelings, artist? Name of a name, mademoiselle!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Precisely, Maximilian&#8217;s feelings. You know how he abhors the
+sight of blood. Ma foi, and I agree with him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Go it, Miss Jack-leen!&#8221; Driscoll abetted her. Never a word of
+their French did he understand, but he knew that she had a power of speech.
+Dupin evidently knew it better yet, for though he laughed, he did not laugh
+easily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never fear,&#8221; he said, &#8220;His Majesty&#8217;s delicate
+prejudices are safe. It will be all underground before he comes, and no muss at
+all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you forget,&#8221; Jacqueline cried testily, &#8220;you forget the
+imagination of a poet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And he will imagine&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, because I shall tell him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sacré&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And possibly he would brace his feelings to a second æsthetic horror
+as a rebuke for the first. In a word, my colonel, there will be one more body to
+follow&#8211;underground. Now is this quite clear, or&#8211;do you require my
+promise on it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The savage old brow manifested the desire to make her a victim as well, but
+in this extra blood-thirst she knew that Driscoll was safe. &#8220;I understand,
+Mademoiselle la Marquise,&#8221; he said, laying on heavily the suave gallantry
+of a Frenchman. &#8220;Yes, I understand. Prince Max values Your
+Ladyship&#8217;s good taste so highly&#8211;&#8211; Pardi, I believe he would
+certainly shoot me if you told him to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Exactly,&#8221; Jacqueline coldly assented.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_127'></a>127</span>&#8220;And
+Monsieur l&#8217;Americain may congratulate himself on the influence of mademoiselle,
+the arbiter elegantiarum&#8211;with His Majesty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As Monsieur le Tigre may congratulate himself that the American does
+not understand this insult, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Behind her rose a dry hysterical cackle of renewed hope. &#8220;The Little
+Black Crow!&#8221; she exclaimed. &#8220;See, my colonel, he is not worth an
+execution all to himself, so do we all go back to contemplate Prince Max&#8217;s
+loving ovation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Emperor arrives!&#8221; she cried gayly, returning to the porch.
+With the others she was once more behind the remote column, an end of the rebosa
+hanging over her arm ready to be flung across her face. &#8220;But
+what&#8211;Hélas, I haven&#8217;t my Ritual with me.&#8221;&#8211;The Ritual
+classified every movement, every breath of the Court, as rigidly and with as
+little consciousness of humor as Linnæus did his flowers.&#8211;&#8220;It
+can&#8217;t be a Minor Palace Luncheon of the Third Class,&#8221; she mused,
+&#8220;and it isn&#8217;t Grand Court Mourning of the First Degree. Ha, I have
+it, He&#8211;that &#8216;H&#8217; is a capital, please, not as a sacrilege, but to be
+Ritualistic&#8211;He is out on a voyage of the Minor Class, Small Service of
+Honor, Lesser Cortège. Now then, all&#8217;s comfortable; no room for plebeian
+misconceptions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>On they came, each rigidly after his kind, a Noah&#8217;s procession of
+Dignitaries with the August Sovereign first of all. To bring on the majestic
+climax so early was illogical, of course, but dust having happened to be created
+before precedence, the Cortège was changed the other way round for a voyage, so
+that the First Category people breathed what the August Sovereign kicked up and
+kicked up some additional for the Second Category, and the Second did the same
+for the Third, and so on down to the Ninth, or &#8220;And all others,&#8221; who
+breathed the best they could and paid the bill.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing preceded the royal coach except the royal escort, and that by exactly
+two hundred paces, in which interval a <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_128'></a>128</span>canonical obligation was laid on the dust to settle.
+It was a particularly gallant royal escort. The Empress&#8217;s Own, or the
+Dragoons, or Lancers, or Guardsmen, or Hussars, or whatever they were, were
+picked Mexicans; and they were frankly proud of their rich crimson tunics; also,
+perhaps, of their heavily fringed standard worked by Carlota herself. A cavalry
+detachment in fur caps with a feather completed the body guard. Mexico is a hot
+country, but that was no reason why an Austrian regiment should sacrifice its
+furry identity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Belgians too!&#8221; exclaimed Jacqueline. &#8220;And the Mexican
+emigrés! They came back when we made it safe for them. But where, oh where, are
+the French?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Everywhere,&#8221; growled the Tiger, &#8220;in mountains and swamps,
+dying everywhere, fighting for this Austrian archduke. But he doesn&#8217;t like
+to be seen with them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Behind eight white mules of Spain, four abreast, rolled the coach of the
+Emperor, solitary and marked as majesty itself. There were postilions and
+outriders and footmen arrayed in the Imperial livery with the Imperial crown.
+And on the coach door flashed Maximilian&#8217;s escutcheon, his archducal arms
+grafted on the torso of his new imperial estate. There were the winged griffins
+with absurd scrolls for tails. They had voracious claws, had these droll beasts
+of prey, and they clutched at an oval frame ruthlessly, as though to shatter it
+and get at a certain bird within. Poor bird, his shelter looked very fragile,
+and he about to be smothered under an enormous diadem as under an extinguisher.
+He was none other than the Mexican eagle perched on his own native cactus, and
+he desired only peace and quiet while he throttled the snake of ignorance in his
+talons, which snake had been his worry ever since the Aztec hordes from the
+north had first caged him in. Beneath the Imperial arms was the motto,
+&#8220;Equidad en la Justicia,&#8221; but it seemed an idle promise.</p>
+
+<p>In the huge traveling coach, with a greyhound at his feet, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_129'></a>129</span>sat one lone man. He had
+a soft skin, rosy like a baby&#8217;s, and blue eyes, and what some called a
+beautiful golden beard. The huzzas swelled and surged from all sides, and he
+smiled on the people. But he gazed beyond them, and into the blue eyes came the
+light of exaltation such as is inspired by music that starts a heartstring in
+vague trembling.</p>
+
+<p>The Cortège followed in carriages one hundred paces apart. The first held the
+First Grand Dignitary, the only Dignitary of Third Category rank, and hence the
+only one who could stand near the throne after Highnesses, Grand Collars, and
+Ambassadors. He was the Grand Marshal of the Court and Minister of the Imperial
+Household. His privileges consisted of seeing &#8220;His Majesty when called
+for,&#8221; and of &#8220;communicating with Him in writing.&#8221; But he could
+not see Him when not called for. In reality the Grand Marshal was a quiet old
+Mexican gentleman who seemed ill at ease. He was General Almonte, one of those
+conservatives who had sought their country&#8217;s tranquillity in foreign
+intervention. But Maximilian had bespangled him into a Dignidad, and thus lost
+to himself an able politician&#8217;s usefulness. The real man of affairs was an
+obscure Belgian who openly and insolently despised everything Mexican. He also
+sang chansonettes. He was the sour-browed Monsieur Éloin already mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>Dignidades enough to make up the Lesser Cortège were not lacking. Riding
+alone was the Chief of the Military Household, who could return no salutes when
+near His Majesty except from First and Second Category personages. Under the
+circumstances, recognition of his own father would have been rank heresy. Then
+there was the Grand Physician, the Grand Chaplain, and Honorary Physicians and
+Chaplains, who could wear Grand Uniforms and a Cordon and eat at the Grand
+Marshal&#8217;s table; and there were Chamberlains and Secretaries of Ceremony
+and Aides. Many surreptitiously peeped into a monster volume as they <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_130'></a>130</span>rode. It was not a mass
+book nor a materia medica. It was the Ritual.</p>
+
+<p>The Sixth Grand Dignitary of Cabellerizo Mayor helped His Majesty to descend
+from His coach. He did it mid vociferous cheering and waving of boughs and
+agitation of handkerchiefs on bamboo poles. Aides and Deputy Dignitaries worked
+industriously driving back the simple Inditos.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;The General Aide de Camp,&#8217;&#8221; Jacqueline quoted reverently,
+&#8220;&#8216;will keep the people from the Imperial coach, but without maiming
+them.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_131'></a>131</span><a id='link_16'></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>He of the Debonair Sceptre</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;And let us make a name.</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8221;&#8211;<i>Genesis.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The flame of lofty resolve burned with a high, present heat in
+Maximilian&#8217;s dreamy eyes. But the thing was not statesmanship. The danger
+dial pointed to some latest darling phantasy.</p>
+
+<p>When the young prince&#8211;he was but thirty-three&#8211;descended from his
+carriage, he signed that the Cortège should not form as yet. And instead of
+mounting the colonnade steps, he turned and mingled with his humble subjects. A
+pleased murmur arose among the Indians. &#8220;Que simpático!&#8221; they
+breathed in little gasps of admiring awe.</p>
+
+<p>The unusually tall and very fair young man, in the simplicity of black, with
+only the grand cross of St. Stephen about his neck, moved about among the ragged
+peons. Now and again he spoke to one and another, questioning earnestly. Anxious
+orderlies were quick to brush aside the touch of an elbow, but to those outside
+the circle, watching what he would do, he seemed alone with his people. And in
+thought, he really was. There was a great pity upon his face, and it was the
+more poignant because these timorous children could not comprehend the
+wretchedness which so appealed to him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And thou?&#8221; he demanded of an aged man whose tatters hung heavy
+in filth.</p>
+
+<p>A look of poor simple craft came into the Indian&#8217;s face. &#8220;I,
+señor? María purísima, I am cursed of heaven. But the <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_132'></a>132</span>rich señor wishes to
+know&#8211;see!&#8221; and ere Monsieur Éloin could prevent, he bared a limb of
+rotting flesh. &#8220;If it were not for my leg, Your Mercy&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Animal</i>,&#8221; snarled Éloin in his ear, &#8220;can&#8217;t you
+say &#8216;Your Majesty&#8217;?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your&#8211;Majesty, or if I had children, I could make my
+debt&#8211;oh, grande, grande, twenty reales, maybe. And then, and then I should
+have a red and purple scrape, with a green eagle, like my nephew Felipe
+has.&#8211;He owes,&#8221; the man added in a kind of pride, &#8220;thirty
+reales, my nephew Felipe does.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But his wiles failed. The rich señor turned toward the colonnade, his
+sailor&#8217;s easy swing giving way to a tread of determination. Also, the pure
+flame burned consumingly.</p>
+
+<p>From the top of the steps, between files of dismounted Dragoons, Maximilian
+looked over the people, beyond, in some far away gaze of the spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline hid the golden gleam of her hair under the rebosa.
+&#8220;Silencium!&#8221; she whispered, laying a finger across her lips.
+&#8220;For now we&#8217;ll have the mountains to frisk, and the little hills to
+skip. In all the Orient there blooms no flower of eloquence like unto
+his.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The monarch&#8217;s inspired look promised as much. &#8220;Mexicans,&#8221;
+he began. The peons huddled closer, their responsive natures quickened. His
+sonorous voice was electrical, despite an accent, despite the German over-gush
+of stammering when words could not keep pace with the vast idea. But the one
+word of address gave the peons a dignity they had never suspected.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mexicans: you have desired me. Acceding to the spontaneous expression
+of your wishes, I have come to your noble country&#8211;our dear patria&#8211;to
+watch over and direct your destinies. And with me came one who feels for you all
+the tenderness of a mother, who is your Empress and my August Spouse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But not,&#8221; murmured the sententious lady of the rebosa, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_133'></a>133</span>&#8220;august enough to
+appear before Him unless He sends for Her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Proceeding, the speaker solemnly told them of his divine right as a Hapsburg,
+as one of the Cæsars, and of his anointment by the Vicar of God at Rome, so that
+to God alone was he responsible. As a Mexican he gloried with them in their
+liberties, in the True Liberty he brought, for had not the Holy Father said to
+him, &#8220;Great are the rights of a people, but greater and more sacred are
+the rights of the Church?&#8221; Hence he burned with Heaven-given fire to lift
+them, his subjects, into the vanguard of Nineteenth Century Progress.</p>
+
+<p>Here Maximilian paused mid cheers, and thinking on his next words, his
+delicate hand of a gentleman clenched.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mexicans,&#8221; he began again, now in the vibrant tone of an
+overpowering emotion. &#8220;I pray to fulfil the mission for which God has
+placed me here. There are six millions of you, a sober and industrious race.
+Cortez found you so, and you astounded him with your civilization. But the
+conditions that followed have enslaved you. Enslaved, I repeat, for you are
+bound by debt. Your hacendado master contrives that you cannot pay even his
+usurious interest. The food you eat, you must buy from him, at his prices, of
+the quality he prescribes. And if your debt be not sufficient, that is, if there
+seems a chance of your paying it off, then you must increase it to obtain your
+daily bread. Your very children are slaves at birth, since with their first
+birth they inherit your chains. And if you or your children run away, you or
+they may be brought back as runaway slaves. It is thus that I find you,
+Mexicans. And I find you awaiting a liberator, waiting vainly through the
+centuries. But now, at last, the reward of your suffering and your faith has
+come. In a word, which shall be formally recorded in the Journal Official, We
+this day decree&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I knew it,&#8221; exclaimed Jacqueline, &#8220;he always coins his
+inspirations.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_134'></a>134</span>&#8220;&#8211;&#8211;We this day decree your debts
+extinguished, and each and every peon in all our beautiful country&#8211;a free
+man!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet with not,&#8221; said Jacqueline, &#8220;a foot of land to be free
+on. But you know, messieurs, that Utopia is an asylum for the blind.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a spider on his ceiling,&#8221; muttered Colonel Dupin,
+touching his own head significantly.</p>
+
+<p>The emancipator&#8217;s face was beatific. He heard the peons acclaim him, as
+gradually they began to understand that there was to be no more unhappiness. But
+it was curious how far, far away the sweet music sounded, even when some belated
+&#8220;Viva el Señor Emperador!&#8221; cracked in ludicrous falsetto. For the
+poet-prince these human chords might have been the strings of a harp, softly
+touched. And as far away as posterity.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline fell to clapping her hands noiselessly. &#8220;Oh, lá-lá,&#8221;
+she cried, &#8220;if we are not to have an epic flight from Monsieur
+Éloin!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was true in a degree. Five minutes of stupendous history making had just
+elapsed, and some graceful tribute was due. The royal favorite had foreseen the
+need, and he was prepared; but whether by borrowing or originating, it is
+impossible to say.</p>
+
+<div class='bquote'>
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Vous l&#8217;avez relevé; votre main souveraine L&#8217;a rendu d&#8217;un seul coup à
+la famille humaine. De ce premier bienfait, Sire, soyez content: L&#8217;Indien fera
+de vous MAXIMILIEN LE GRAND!&#8217;&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Parbleu, why not?&#8221; demanded Jacqueline. &#8220;If only he were
+as great as his decrees, poor man!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian by this time remembered that he must be somebody&#8217;s guest.
+&#8220;Who receives Us here?&#8221; he asked. But none of his court knew. Even
+Monsieur Éloin could only point to the administrador. &#8220;Why is your master
+not present?&#8221; inquired General Almonte. The administrador opened his
+mouth, and it stayed open. Colonel Dupin had promised to shoot him if he
+breathed a word of Don Anastasio being a prisoner.</p>
+
+<div class='figcenter'>
+<a id='ill_134'></a>
+<img src='images/illus-134.jpg' id="img006" alt='' />
+<p class='center caption'>
+THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN
+</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_135'></a>135</span>But someone
+whispered something to a person on the outskirts of the entourage, who passed it
+on to the very centre till it came to the ear of Col. Miguel Lopez of Her
+Majesty&#8217;s Dragoons. The someone who initiated the message was Don
+Tiburcio, the watchful herder over one golden goose. As a result, an aide
+rescued Murguía from the claws of the Tiger.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian looked the weazened old man over in disappointment. Here, then,
+was the lord of Moctezuma, an hacendado, and hence one of the heavy timbers for
+his empire building. Don Anastasio scraped awkwardly and craved many pardons for
+not being on hand to welcome His Majesty. Overcoming a curious aversion to the
+man, the emperor straightway invested him with the newly created order of Civil
+Merit, and Don Anastasio, without a peon to till his fields or to oil his
+machinery, quaked under the honor of a copper medal.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And,&#8221; pursued the monarch, &#8220;We find a need of stout
+officials, for We have been grieved to learn of hacendados who secretly aid the
+prowling rebellious outlaws that infest our country.&#8211;And as We must have a
+prefect in this district of an integrity like your own, it pleases Us, dear
+caballero, to name you jefe político.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The new jefe&#8217;s greenish eyes contracted in terror. He thought of the
+brigands whom magistrates were supposed to discourage, and he tried to frame
+excuses.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Accept, you fool,&#8221; someone whispered. &#8220;Mexicans
+can&#8217;t refuse office&#8211;that&#8217;s decreed.&#8221; It was Don
+Tiburcio, his sombrero against his breast. To Murguía the Roman sword on the
+crown seemed more than ever emblematic of &#8220;Woe to the conquered.&#8221; In
+a veritable panic he accepted.</p>
+
+<p>As it was fitting that this day of a people&#8217;s emancipation <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_136'></a>136</span>should be commemorated by
+public praise to Almighty God, the Lesser Cortège formed, and careful of
+precedence, went to worship their Maker. The freedmen trooped after, waving
+jubilee branches.</p>
+
+<p>The little church of the hacienda stood on a barren knoll, mid chaparral and
+graves. The curate&#8217;s white adobe adjoining was the only near habitation. A
+stone walk as wide as the church itself approached for a hundred yards, sloping
+up from a pasture below. The one tower opened on four sides for the better ease
+of the bell ringers. Its bright mosaic peak rose peaceful and still in the clear
+air.</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor and suite arranged themselves within, and the Inditos gaped
+stolidly outside, to hear the Te Deum for their broken shackles. At the most
+solemn moment, the Grand Chaplain availed himself of his exclusive privilege,
+which was to present the Gospel to the royal lips. Assisting him in the general
+service was the hacienda curate. This curate, obscurely found in the Huasteca
+wilds and yet not a Mexican, was a large sleek man whose paunch bulged
+repulsively under the priestly surplice. His flabby jowls hung down, and gave
+his head the shape of a pea, in the top of which were the eyes set close
+together. They were restless fawning little eyes and they roved constantly. But
+more than aught else, they were adventurous; two bright, glowing beads of
+adventure. From the folds of dull yellow flesh they peered forth at the august
+worshipers. They hovered first over the Emperor before his cushioned
+<i>prie-dieu</i>. Then, in hungry search, they began to roam. They lingered with
+General Almonte for a moment, but darted on, unsatisfied. They fluttered yet
+longer over Miguel Lopez, the gorgeously uniformed colonel of Dragoons, and
+left him only reluctantly. But when they lighted on Monsieur Éloin, they
+gleamed. There was no longer uncertainty. They laid bare the man as the print of
+a mass-book, and found him profitable reading. After that, the <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_137'></a>137</span>adventurous orbs returned
+to their larger prey, the Emperor, and gorging themselves, scintillated more
+adventurously than ever.</p>
+
+<p>And such a feast as the unconscious Hapsburg afforded the ghoul of a priest!
+It was a loathsome surgery; greedy fingers trembling on the knife, the
+victim&#8217;s soul flayed, each nerve of a vanity, or tendon of an ambition, or
+full-throbbing vein of hope, each and all lifted one by one from the clotted
+mass and scrutinized exultantly. There was not a feature but held a revelation
+as sure as vivisection. The high, broad forehead of a gentle poet was often
+shaded by a dreamy melancholy, but never once did it furrow in either craft or
+cruelty. In that the priest knew his man for a devout mystic, knew him for a
+child confidingly looking to a Destiny to inspire his every footstep. Then there
+was the beard. It was too great a wealth of whisker, its satin, glossy flow of
+too dandified a precision. The delicate finger tips stroked it softly,
+affectionately, to the left; then softly, affectionately to the right; and
+always dreamily. But the most shameless traitor of all was the lower lip. It was
+the Hapsburg lower lip, heavy and thick and sensuous, and ill-fated. Hanging
+partly open under the silken drooping moustache, it revealed the spoiled child
+of royalty, who mistakes obstinacy for decision, and changes whims with despotic
+petulance. Maximilian believed in his star. But a lower lip is more potent than
+predestination. He need only have leaned close to his mirror. Then he might have
+seen what the priest saw so clearly.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian paused on coming out. The freedmen were just rising from their
+knees among the thorns and stones. Then it occurred to the liberator that their
+participation in the rejoicing was not exactly, ah&#8211;conspicuous.
+&#8220;Would you not think it well, father,&#8221; said he to the Grand
+Chaplain, &#8220;that these poor people partake of the holy communion on this
+day that has been so eventful for them? If you approve, let it be ordered
+that&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_138'></a>138</span>&#8220;But
+Sire&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian turned quickly, a pleased smile on his lips. The interruption came
+in his own tongue, in German. And he who had spoken was a German. It was the
+hacienda curate. His voice was soft, and purring with deference. He wished to
+say, with permission, that the holy sacrament for the Inditos was out of the
+question; scarcely one of them had been baptized.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not baptized!&#8221; Maximilian exclaimed. &#8220;And this, is this
+fulfilling your sacred obligations?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The curate bowed his head. He had found them thus, when he first came, a few
+weeks ago.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you came&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From Durango, sire, where as secretary I served His Señoría
+Ilustrísimo, the Bishop of the state.&#8221; But, as he meekly explained, he had
+sought the Lord&#8217;s service among the Huastecans. Pastors were said to be
+needed, yet never had he imagined&#8211;&#8211;He stopped short, in naïve
+embarrassment.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian appreciated his delicacy in not wishing to reflect on the Huasteca
+bishop. But from others he learned that neither baptism nor other spiritual
+office had been performed in the community for years and years, and that the
+bishop resided in the capitol, because among his flock he had neither comforts
+nor a befitting state.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why,&#8221; Maximilian demanded sternly, &#8220;have you not put
+to use the few weeks you have been here?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The curate&#8217;s small eyes leaped to adventure. But he lowered them
+hastily, and folded his hands over his rounded soutane. He had heard that His
+Majesty might come, he said, and he had presumed so far as to hope that His
+Majesty might deign to act as godfather for the poor Indians, and so he had
+waited.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could have pleased Maximilian more, and he looked at the good priest
+with an awakening favor. &#8220;Then <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_139'></a>139</span>let it be this afternoon,&#8221; he commanded.
+&#8220;I will stand their sponsor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8211;&#8211;Before God, who will bless Your Majesty,&#8221; murmured the
+priest.</p>
+
+<p>And to be brief, let it be recorded that they were baptized by the hundred,
+with hurried pomp&#8211;&#8220;pompes à incendie,&#8221; as the godfather
+himself described it.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_140'></a>140</span><a id='link_17'></a>CHAPTER XVII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Rather a Small Man</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Besides the queene, he dearly loved a fair and comely dame.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>The Ballad of Fair Rosamond.</i></p> </div>
+
+<p>Jacqueline was protesting to a worried personage in Grand Uniform. The
+personage was the Cerberus of the Emperor&#8217;s antechamber, and he barred her
+way. He was newly a personage, and did not know Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, Señor Oficial de Ordenes,&#8221; she insisted, &#8220;don&#8217;t
+you see that if I put my name in your old register there, the man will be shot
+while your Dignitaries are deciding to grant my audience!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shot?&#8221; vaguely repeated the monarchial flunkey. He was a
+Mexican, and took his unfamiliar responsibilities seriously. He turned to the
+Book of Court Etiquette on the centre table.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I tell you,&#8221; exclaimed the impatient girl, &#8220;you
+won&#8217;t find any precedence for shooting in that thing. A doomed man
+hasn&#8217;t any, take the word of the Dama Mayor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dama Mayor?&#8221; This was more tangible, and the Grand Uniform
+seized on it gratefully. &#8220;But,&#8221; and he quoted from the Ritual in
+triumph, &#8220;no Dama can present herself except on matters of
+service.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline hedged guilefully. &#8220;Of course not,&#8221; she agreed,
+&#8220;and it&#8217;s precisely that why I must see His Majesty. It&#8217;s
+about, about a piece of valencienne he wished me to bring the Empress from
+Europe.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Oficial de Ordenes hesitated. &#8220;But the man to be shot?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_141'></a>141</span>&#8220;No
+matter, the lace is my business.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With which assurance, the Grand Uniform presumed to announce la Señorita
+Marquesa d&#8217;Aumerle. He reappeared at once from the inner apartment. The
+Emperor&#8217;s order to admit her that instant rather disturbed his faith in
+the Ritual and the leisurely decorum it prescribed.</p>
+
+<p>Hardly had she stepped within the portières than someone caught her hand, and
+she saw Maximilian bending over it. There was an involuntary warmth in his
+formal courtier grace. The only other occupant of the hacienda sala was Bebello,
+the greyhound. He sprang up from a Hungarian bear rug, and frisked about her
+joyfully. Her greeting to him was equally sincere. Quietly releasing her hand,
+she patted him fondly, and cooed endearing French. &#8220;My little Tou-Tou!
+Pauvre petite bête!&#8221; Then, raising her head, she seemed to perceive His
+Majesty, &#8220;Isn&#8217;t a bit older, is he, sire?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle!&#8221; the man exclaimed reproachfully.</p>
+
+<p>All the time he was staring at her. He stared at the tempestuous ruffling of
+her petticoat, which had a wanton air that was most disturbing, at the rebosa
+tossed rakishly over her shoulder, with the waistline beneath as languorously
+suggested as though she were Spanish-born to rebosas, and lastly, at a freckle
+on the very tip of the creamy nose. He admired extravagantly, but he was no less
+amazed to see her at all. A moment before he had supposed her demurely breaking
+hearts at St. Cloud, and Paris under her feet. He knew how capable she was. It
+had happened to him. How he had sought her, before she left! And how maddening
+she was! He could recall nothing of encouragement, and yet, blind, susceptible
+fool, he had never ceased to be encouraged. She was a master craftsman, since
+her art was hidden. Then she had gone back to France; some said because of a
+note from Napoleon. But he was of the gloomy opinion that she had simply ceased
+to amuse herself. Yet for all that, here <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_142'></a>142</span>she was again, and the astonished prince was eager
+to suffer yet more, if it amused her still.</p>
+
+<p>She explained in a word, as though their meeting in the Huasteca were nothing
+extraordinary. Away from Mexico, she had discovered that she wanted to return to
+Mexico. The man left in Mexico would have augured much from this, but at her
+matter-of-fact tone the glad light faded from his eyes. Jacqueline, by the way,
+was a good manager. She reminded him that she had no mother nor father nor other
+relative in France&#8211;which disposed of France. Then, though he winced, she
+added that the experiment of a New World court was a novel spectacle and she
+enjoyed it more than the conventional affairs in Europe. Accordingly she would
+resume her place as first lady of honor. At Tampico she had wearied of ocean
+travel, and&#8211;well, that was all.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian shuddered. He imagined the terrors she must have encountered.
+&#8220;But, mademoiselle, the bandits? You did not come alone through that
+terrible coast country?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course not, sire. And that&#8217;s why I reveal myself to Your
+Majesty. You are to save the person that brought me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have mercy, mademoiselle. One must leap too far who hopes to
+understand you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But there&#8217;s nothing to understand. Your Majesty has only to keep
+Colonel Dupin from shooting him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian frowned heavily at the Frenchman&#8217;s name.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;On the porch just now,&#8221; Jacqueline explained, &#8220;when you
+finished speaking, he&#8211;the man I am speaking of&#8211;announced that he
+wanted to see you, but the Tiger drew his pistols to shoot him if he
+moved.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then naturally your friend did not move?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Majesty does not know him. But he stopped for me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Were you so afraid Dupin would lose his prisoner?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_143'></a>143</span>&#8220;I had no
+desire to see the prisoner commit suicide. But I had to promise him that he
+should see Your Majesty later.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To beg&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He is not one to whine for his life, sire. It is other business he
+means. But Your Majesty need not hear his business. Your Majesty need only
+<i>see</i> him. Besides, it would hardly be court usage, granting him an audience
+so informally, would it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;N-o, but if I am not to hear him, why should I see him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To save his life, parbleu!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And why, since he is not concerned about that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I am, sire, and I count on Your Majesty to help me repay an
+obligation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian was quick at clemency, but no one likes to have his weaknesses
+played upon.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle, who is this man? What has he done?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;An American, sire.&#8221; Maximilian frowned. &#8220;A Confederate, I
+believe.&#8221; The frown vanished. &#8220;And Colonel Dupin believes him to be
+an accomplice of Rodrigo Galán. But he is not. He fought Rodrigo Galán,
+in&#8211;in my behalf.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian frowned again. &#8220;And so,&#8221; he said, trying to do it
+lightly, &#8220;I have this unknown American to thank for the pleasure of seeing
+you, mademoiselle? Otherwise, I should not have known that you were here,
+and&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stopped. The gray eyes were laughing at him. Was his jealousy then so
+apparent? And was it jealousy? Evidently, since she had discovered it. And that
+vexed him, because he had supposed that he was hiding his pique under a great
+self control. Angrily he stepped toward her, but the saucy eyes only grew
+merrier. Then his mood changed. He resolved grimly on open fighting. He meant to
+have either decisive honors or a decisive repulse. For it was his tantalizing
+doubts of her that made her laugh at him. Yet, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_144'></a>144</span>when he spoke, he could not help the quaver of
+entreaty in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle, tell me, <i>why</i> have you returned?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The question was so abrupt and so stern, she thought in a flash that he must
+have penetrated that Napoleonic intrigue which had flung her back upon the
+Western shores. But Maximilian believed he knew another reason for her pallor,
+and was encouraged.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You have already given one answer, mademoiselle,&#8221; he hurried on,
+&#8220;and in too great a humility to dare hope it otherwise, I took you at your
+word. But now that you mock me&#8211;ah, you shall confess, you are back in
+Mexico on <i>my</i> account!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And would that merit this august displeasure, sire?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her words sprang from relief; he suspected nothing of her secret mission. So
+the color might flood to her cheeks again, the mischief to her eyes, and with it
+a most perilous daring.</p>
+
+<p>For the Hapsburg, it was coy surrender.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle&#8211;Jacqueline!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her name! The old nickname fondly given her in childhood, when she was a
+torment, and an anarchist to all law, and got innumerable scoldings, and basked
+unperturbed in love and adoration! Her name, that only Mexico had tainted! For
+the first time it passed his lips. But the sweet, quaint syllables had long been
+in his thoughts, with something, too, of the early worship in their
+bestowal.</p>
+
+<p>Curiously enough, a whimsical hardy figure in homespun gray took acute shape
+in her mind&#8217;s eye. The features were oddly sharp and clear. There was even
+the rough trooper&#8217;s disdain, which had been in his expression when first
+he saw her, but which she had not noticed at the time. She brushed the vision
+aside haughtily, as she would have done had the man himself intruded. But she
+could not stem so easily the wave of self disgust that swept her back from this
+other man, a prince of Europe. And when she smothered that self-abasement, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_145'></a>145</span>it was a matter of will.
+She recalled her interview with the Sphinx in the Tuileries. She recalled her
+country, and the empire she meant to win, a gift to France, worthy of Napoleon,
+of the Great Napoleon. Then her will became as a master outside of self, and
+horrid in its iron cruelty. She half lifted her hand, and allowed the royal
+prince to possess it.</p>
+
+<p>The tapestry behind them parted and fell. A light step crossing the room was
+suddenly arrested, and a low bewildered cry, half stifled in the utterance,
+arrested them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fernando!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor straightened and wheeled. Turning round, Jacqueline placidly
+surveyed a young girl, and her brows arched. She was not deceived. There was
+recognition in the startled gaze of the newcomer, and of Maximilian too. Only
+for Jacqueline did the situation hold aught that was amusing.</p>
+
+<p>She was Mexican, a beautiful Mexican. She might have been Spanish too, or
+Moorish even, or perhaps to say that she seemed a gentle, drooping Egyptian
+would give the better idea of her dark loveliness. Under her skin, under a
+faintest tinge of brown, the rich blood drove its color through, and blending
+with that other shade, made the cheeks a dusky ruby, and seemingly softer and
+warmer. Her figure had prettily rounded curves, and her wine-red dress and the
+filmy black shawl over her shoulders deepened the tender, trusting depths of two
+large black eyes. The long lashes were wet with tears. She looked once at the
+calm French woman, as though afraid of her, and then at Maximilian, and at
+Maximilian alone. Her gaze was vacant, groping, non-comprehending, yet with a
+something of heartbreak in the beginning of comprehension.</p>
+
+<p>To the Hapsburg came the dignity of proud generations, exalted above mere
+human scrutiny. He turned to Jacqueline, &#8220;As you see, mademoiselle,&#8221;
+he said coldly, &#8220;the stupid lackeys outside have admitted a second
+visitor. If you will excuse us&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_146'></a>146</span>&#8220;But
+Fernando&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This time the girl&#8217;s moan throbbed with questioning. She was as far
+from understanding as before. But she noted unconsciously his princely bearing,
+his European dress, and the luxury about him in the transformed hacienda sala.
+Her eyes, in spite of grief and doubts, shone with timid, admiring love.
+&#8220;Que elegante!&#8221; she breathed. &#8220;Oh, is he not, truly, a
+caballero!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fernando?&#8221; murmured Jacqueline. &#8220;Bonté divine, this
+<i>is</i> bucolic!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But Fernando,&#8221; the girl persisted, &#8220;who is there
+to&#8211;to admit me? I only come from my room.&#8221; With a tremulous gesture
+she indicated a door which the imperial scene shifters had covered with
+portières. Maximilian&#8217;s surprise at the existence of such a door was
+genuine. &#8220;And I find,&#8221; she cried, &#8220;I find you here, you,
+Fernando?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, there, señorita,&#8221; said Jacqueline kindly, &#8220;His
+Majesty, I imagine, can explain&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Majesty?&#8221; exclaimed the girl. &#8220;Don
+Fernando&#8211;Majesty?&#8221; Yet a third time she repeated it, as by rote;
+and, very slowly, understanding grew into the words, and with understanding,
+terror. The dark innocent eyes went appealingly from one to the other, and the
+lids began to flutter wildly in a kind of spasm. &#8220;Majesty? Majesty?&#8221;
+Then, suddenly, she flung both hands to her face, and a piteous shivering racked
+her body.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Catch her, stupid!&#8221; cried Jacqueline. &#8220;Don&#8217;t you
+see, the child is fainting!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But it was into Jacqueline&#8217;s readier arms that she fell, and it was
+Jacqueline who let her slip gently into the high-back chair that was the
+imperial throne en voyage, under the claws of the oaken Hapsburg griffins.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Get water! quick&#8211;Majesty, you&#8211;your cologne
+flasks!&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class='figcenter'>
+    <a id='ill_146'></a>
+<img src='images/illus-146.jpg' id="img007" alt='' />
+<p class='center caption'>
+&#8220;MARIA DE LA LUZ&#8221;<br />&#8220;The tapestry behind them parted and fell&#8221;
+</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_147'></a>147</span>A mist was in
+the prince&#8217;s eyes. &#8220;Pobrecita, pobrecita,&#8221; he muttered
+helplessly.</p>
+
+<p>On Jacqueline depended what was next to be done. She ran to the door by which
+the girl had entered. &#8220;See, there&#8217;s a corridor here,&#8221; she
+cried, &#8220;and that must be her room, there at the end, where the door is
+open. Help me carry her&#8211;unless,&#8221; and she deliberately punctuated her
+scorn, &#8220;unless Your Majesty desires to call for aid?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But His Majesty was so far from desiring anything of the kind that he nodded
+gratefully, impatiently. So to her own room they bore her between them, and laid
+her on the bed there. A pewter waiter with napkin and coffee service was on a
+little table. But the tiny loaf of pan de huevo lay untouched. Her thoughts
+rather than appetite had possessed the girl when she awoke that morning, and
+they had kept her until she emerged to stumble upon an emperor in her
+father&#8217;s house.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Out of here,&#8221; ordered Jacqueline. &#8220;I am going to call the
+servants.&#8221; She had no sympathy for his wistful, forlorn gazing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the end, the end of my idyl,&#8221; he murmured.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Are</i> you going?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He came nearer instead, and looked in profound melancholy at the girl. The
+ruby flush was no longer there, and the face was olive and waxen. The lips were
+parted, baring teeth that were marvelously white. The shawl had fallen to the
+floor, and an ivory cross on a chain about her neck caught his eye. He turned it
+over in his hand, and on the gold, where the chain was attached, he saw an
+inscription.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;María de la Luz,&#8221; he read. &#8220;So, that is her name. But I
+never asked it. Identity would have blighted the idyl.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sire,&#8221; Jacqueline protested angrily, &#8220;this poor child
+needs help. I shall&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_148'></a>148</span>&#8220;One
+moment, mademoiselle, I wish to say that I still do not know who she
+is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then, with a last sorrowful look, he turned back to his apartment of
+state.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s lip curled as she watched him go.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you wish me to find out who she is?&#8221; she apostrophized his
+back. &#8220;But I shall not tell you. And she&#8211;no, she is not the kind
+that would, knowing who <i>you</i> are.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_149'></a>149</span><a id='link_18'></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Little Monarchs, Big Mistakes</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='wbox'>
+<p>&#8220;How now, good fellow? wouldst thou speak with us?&#8221;<br />
+&#8220;Yea, forsooth, an your mistership be emperial.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Titus Andronicus.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For the moment, Colonel Dupin had established headquarters in the granary,
+which was a long, low adobe among the stables, with a pasture between it and the
+House. The pasture opened on the highway through a wide gap in the hacienda
+wall, and the coaches and steeds of the imperial party which had passed in that
+morning gave the old cow lot a gala air. The colonel was seated before a box,
+improvised into a desk, and his rusty jacketed Cossacks lounged everywhere.
+Tiburcio and other scouts were reporting on the dead and wounded of
+yesterday&#8217;s raid. A maimed enemy brought a chuckle deep in the
+Tiger&#8217;s throat, but any mishap to one of his own darlings got the
+recognition of a low-growled oath. He was busy over this inventory of profit and
+loss when Jacqueline appeared with the Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>Dupin arose and saluted after the grim manner of an old soldier. The
+half-dozen of obsequious courtiers he did not see at all, but to Jacqueline he
+bent from the waist with a duellist&#8217;s punctilio. His countrywoman was the
+one adversary whom he never thought of cursing.</p>
+
+<p>There was an opening innuendo. &#8220;No, Colonel Dupin,&#8221; Maximilian
+reproved him sternly, &#8220;I have not come to interfere with justice. I merely
+desire to see what prisoners you have here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_150'></a>150</span>Driscoll and
+Murguía were brought in. Maximilian stared dumfounded at his new magistrate in
+the rôle of criminal. Don Anastasio looked apologetic. They had locked him up in
+his own stable, bronze medal and all. Dupin explained. This Murguía, like many
+another hacendado, had long been suspected of aiding the guerrillas, and
+yesterday morning he had actually set him, Dupin, on a false trail. The Contras
+were tracking one of Rodrigo Galán&#8217;s accomplices in the abduction of
+Mademoiselle d&#8217;Aumerle. The accomplice was the other prisoner, the American,
+whom they had found at last taking refuge at Murguía&#8217;s own hacienda. Here
+he had had the effrontery to welcome them as mademoiselle&#8217;s rightful
+escort, had even seemed surprised when a dozen Contras pounced upon him from
+behind and disarmed him. Dupin added that mademoiselle herself was deceived by
+the American&#8217;s cunning, and he did not doubt but that she still persisted
+in his innocence. He might speak further of the fellow&#8217;s part in the
+ambush and murder of Captain Maurel near Tampico, but he confessed that that
+required further investigation.</p>
+
+<p>No one could say that Maximilian had so much as listened. Such tangles had
+long since become irksome, though he never ceased plunging into the mesh. To
+unravel details, and incidentally confuse them more, was a notorious mania with
+the poet-prince. But his thoughts now were all for a girl who had fainted.
+Murguía he would leave to a court martial. If guilty, the medal should be torn
+from his breast. Don Anastasio&#8217;s terrors, however, ran on the other
+penalties of court martial.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now you,&#8221; Maximilian turned to the American, &#8220;I understand
+that you wish to see me. But you must know that law prevails in Mexico at last,
+and that even the Emperor may not keep a man from trial.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll&#8217;s chin lifted eagerly. &#8220;Certainly not, but my business
+with you, sir&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_151'></a>151</span>&#8220;Not
+&#8216;sir,&#8217;&#8221; whispered Jacqueline. &#8220;You must call him
+&#8216;sire.&#8217;&#8221; Little she cared for etiquette, but she did not propose
+that Driscoll should broach his errand.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian overheard and smiled. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; he said, &#8220;one tiny
+letter added, and you change a man into a sovereign.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now Jacqueline, for her purposes, had thought to disconcert the man unused to
+courts. But it struck her at once that nothing of the kind would happen. His
+easy naturalness was too much a part of him, was the man himself. And she was
+glad of it. She was glad of the something distinguished which his earnestness
+gave to the clean-cut stamp of jaw and forehead. He had stopped and looked at
+them inquiringly, as an eager speaker will when interrupted. Then his brown eyes
+deepened, and there was a tugging at the corners of his mouth. He seemed to
+comprehend. If this was their humor, he would play to it. A diplomat must be all
+things to the people he is after.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Sire?&#8217; W&#8217;y,&#8221; and his drawl was exquisite,
+&#8220;that&#8217;s what we call the daddy of a horse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline turned quickly, clapping her hand over her mouth. Maximilian was
+always uneasy when Jacqueline did that.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To be sure,&#8221; he observed affably, &#8220;our American friend is
+not so far wrong. Listen, am I not the father of my people?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The entourage buzzed admiringly at the imperial cleverness; all except
+Jacqueline, who now that she should laugh and relieve the situation, obstinately
+pulled a long, blank face.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian&#8217;s tone changed. He meant to wound now, and did.
+&#8220;So,&#8221; he added, with chilling stress, &#8220;it&#8217;s
+&#8216;sire,&#8217; if you will be so good as to remember.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll flushed as though struck. He became aware that it was all some
+patronizing rebuke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There is one,&#8221; he answered gently, &#8220;who taught me manners
+at her knee, or tried to, and <i>she</i> never hurt a mortal human being by a
+word in her life, but that, that, sir, seems <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_152'></a>152</span> to be where <i>you</i> have missed it. Now look
+here,&#8221; he went on, kindling in spite of himself, &#8220;I respect any man
+who has grounds&#8211;discoverable grounds&#8211;for respecting himself, and if
+you are a man, then &#8216;sir&#8217; won&#8217;t overtop you any.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Lopez of the Dragoons nudged him anxiously. &#8220;Don&#8217;t say
+&#8216;you&#8217;; say &#8216;Your Majesty.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Better let him alone,&#8221; Maximilian interposed wearily. &#8220;He
+recognizes in me a man, and&#8211;it&#8217;s not unpleasant. But which,&#8221;
+he added, &#8220;gives me leave to hope that as a man himself he will not cringe
+before the drum-head.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;May I,&#8221; said Driscoll quietly, &#8220;have one minute with you
+alone? It&#8217;s not about myself, I promise you that. But for you, sir,
+it&#8217;s of the very greatest importance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Instantly all stirred with curiosity, except Maximilian. All there were
+keenly affected by the stranger&#8217;s mysterious business with the Emperor,
+except the Emperor himself. And each man&#8217;s wits were straightway alert,
+according to the hates and ambitions of each. Even Miguel Lopez, dense of
+understanding, had his suspicions. Murguía&#8217;s yellow features darkened
+malevolently. The hacienda priest whispered to M. Éloin, and M. Éloin, brushing
+the man of God aside as though he had been thinking of the very same thing
+himself, tried to get a word with Maximilian. But Jacqueline spoke first to the
+Emperor. She knew the susceptibility of the royal ear. Maximilian nodded at what
+she said, and Éloin bit his lip. Maximilian glanced at the American&#8217;s
+clothes. Homespun did not correspond with pressing business of state, to his
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My good man,&#8221; he said, caressing his beard, &#8220;it&#8217;s
+not regular, you know. Another time, perhaps, when you can have yourself
+inscribed by Our Grand Chamberlain and when your application for an
+audience&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But if these señores shoot me before then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian shrugged his shoulders. In any case, the Ritual would suffer no
+outrage.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_153'></a>153</span>&#8220;But I
+tell you,&#8221; cried the exasperated Missourian, &#8220;this thing is serious.
+And it can&#8217;t wait either, not if it&#8217;s to help you any. I may be too
+late now. I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s happened since I started down here
+three weeks ago. Richmond was in danger then. And the Army of Northern
+Virginia&#8211;General Lee&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have surrendered,&#8221; calmly interposed the Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll stiffened as he stood, his lips parted as his last word had left
+them. He wondered why these foreign, unsympathetic beings of Austria and France
+and Belgium and Germany and Mexico looked so blurred to him. He never imagined
+that there were tears in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is really true,&#8221; continued Maximilian, addressing them all.
+&#8220;A courier brought me the news this morning. Yes, my friends, the North is
+free at last to attack our Empire. But,&#8221; he added blandly, &#8220;let us
+not fear, not while we are sustained by the unconquered legions of
+France.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How he remembers us now!&#8221; thought Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p>She thought too of him who had sent the legions. The entire fabric of
+Napoleon&#8217;s dream of Mexican empire was builded on the dismemberment of the
+American Union. But, as the Southerners began so well by themselves, Napoleon
+had left them to do his work alone. He just failed of genius.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, mon petit, <i>bien</i> petit Napoleon,&#8221; she cried in her
+soul, &#8220;how terribly you have miscalculated!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The room had filled with murmurs, with awed whispering, with frightened
+questioning looks at one&#8217;s neighbor, with ambitions and hates gone
+panic-stricken. Driscoll came forward. The fellow of homespun held the Empire in
+his hand, if they but knew it. &#8220;Now let me deliver my message,&#8221; he
+said earnestly. &#8220;And, afterward, on with the drum-head, I&#8217;ll not
+complain.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, there,&#8221; spoke the unseeing monarch, though affected <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_154'></a>154</span>by the dignity of sorrow,
+&#8220;you shall have no cause. I came here, meaning to pardon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pardon?&#8221; came the Tiger&#8217;s growl. &#8220;Your Majesty saves
+so many enemies, does he fear that soon he will have none left?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perhaps, Colonel Dupin, since my imperial brother, Napoleon, sends me
+so efficient a bloodhound. But I thought the prisoners were already tried and
+condemned. That must come first, of course. Yet We are constrained to find
+another judge, one without preconceived notions of guilt, to hold the court
+martial. Ah yes, as Monsieur Éloin here suggests, I name Colonel
+Lopez.&#8211;Colonel Lopez, you will stay behind with a company of your own men.
+Finish the trial to-night, if you can, and overtake me before I reach the
+city.&#8211;Colonel Dupin, I have to request yourself and men as escort, to
+replace the Dragoons left with Colonel Lopez. And you, Mademoiselle d&#8217;Aumerle,
+shall have a carriage. We start this afternoon. You will be ready,
+mademoiselle?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is Your Majesty quite resolved,&#8221; Jacqueline asked in French,
+&#8220;that the American must be tried? He can easily be found guilty, I warn
+Your Majesty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And is that not reason enough?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Reason enough that he should not be tried, since he is not guilty. But
+perhaps Your Majesty has thought of sending him under guard to the frontier,
+back to his own country, where he would not longer be an annoyance?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My dear young lady,&#8221; returned the Emperor, &#8220;it seems that
+you expect me to blot out the processes of law simply because even I cannot make
+them infallible. But you do not answer my question. I offer you protection to
+the City?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He must stand trial then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes&#8211;but will you be ready to start this afternoon?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Majesty should know that I cannot accept.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Does this trial interest you so much, mademoiselle?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_155'></a>155</span>&#8220;Thanking
+Your Majesty,&#8221; said Jacqueline coldly, &#8220;I should rather not
+accompany him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian swung on his heel and called Lopez aside. &#8220;Mi
+coronel,&#8221; he said, &#8220;when you follow to-morrow, you will offer to
+bring the Señorita d&#8217;Aumerle, if she desires it.&#8211;And Lopez, you remember
+the young Mexican girl we used to meet near here, during the last few
+evenings?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When you and I, sire, would ride over from Las Palmas
+incognito?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes. She was able to&#8211;to tell me much about the peon life, and I
+should like to reward her in&#8211;in some way. Do you know, Miguel, I suspect
+she lives on this very ranch. It was at the church here that we would meet her,
+you know? And now, since I must leave, I wish you to find her. Induce her to
+come with mademoiselle to the City under your escort. Assure her that she shall
+have an honored place at court.&#8211;Jove, there&#8217;s my new order of San
+Carlos for women! She shall have that for&#8211;for aiding my researches among
+the peons. Now, Miguel mio, do your best!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With which words Maximilian turned back alone, and as he went, he thought how
+as a simple man he had won a maiden&#8217;s heart. He had been learning that a
+prince may miss one or two very dear things in life. &#8220;It&#8217;s ended,
+the little ranchero idyl,&#8221; he murmured. &#8220;But there&#8217;s been no
+harm. She shall not regret it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_156'></a>156</span><a id='link_19'></a>CHAPTER XIX<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>A Tartar <i>and</i> a Tartar</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;But all&#8217;s brave that youth mounts and folly guides.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>AsYou Like It.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As Maximilian crossed the pasture, he suddenly had to jump aside with
+considerable sprightliness. A brace of horsemen came swerving through the
+gateway from the highroad and tore down upon him as though the Day of Judgment
+galloped behind. They were abreast, ten feet apart, but the oddest thing was a
+lariat that dangled between them, from saddle-horn to saddle-horn.</p>
+
+<p>The thunder of hoofs brought Dragoons and Cossacks and Dignitaries, and
+emptied the granary. Even insane horsemen could see that the Empire was encamped
+over that cow lot. And as nearer they rushed, the two maniacs seemed to
+recognize the fact. One was straightway more anxious to arrive; a directly
+opposite effect was apparent in the other. And there was the rope between them,
+from saddle-horn to saddle-horn. Their opinions on destination, unexpectedly
+diverging, promised something. And since one wanted to stop and the other to
+hasten, the something was not long in happening.</p>
+
+<p>One of the horsemen&#8211;he wore a sombrero&#8211;leaned back frantically.
+The other&#8211;who wore a battered soldier cap&#8211;passed ahead like the
+wind. The lariat twanged, but held. Sombrero&#8217;s horse got its feet planted.
+The horse of Soldier Cap slowed to a standstill, and panted. Sombrero flung out
+his pistol, Soldier Cap his. They aimed at each other, the triggers snapped, no
+report. They looked amazed, embarrassed; <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_157'></a>157</span>and tried again. Same result. &#8220;Por
+Dios!&#8221; &#8220;Sacré nom!&#8221; They hurled the pistols, each at the
+other&#8217;s head. Both ducked. Sombrero wheeled, drove home the spurs, and
+headed for retreat. Soldier Cap and horse braced themselves against the shock.
+The spectators, running nearer, now perceived that the lariat was tied round
+each man&#8217;s waist as well as wrapped over his pommel. Soldier Cap weathered
+the jolt, next plunged suddenly closer, and in the instant of the slack, unwound
+the rope from his saddle and leaped to the ground. In two leaps more he had
+Sombrero about the neck. They fell together, rolling and fighting, while
+Sombrero&#8217;s horse reared and plowed the soil with them. Dragoons and
+Cossacks heaped themselves on all three. It was quite an energetic mystery
+altogether.</p>
+
+<p>Under the soldier cap, under dust and blood and scratches, Jacqueline caught
+glimpses of a happy face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh lá-lá, it&#8217;s&#8211;it&#8217;s Michel!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Rodrigo Galán!&#8221; roared the Tiger, in his turn recognizing
+Sombrero. &#8220;Here, up with him! Six of you, quick there, in line, shoot
+him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was near the sweetest moment of the old warrior&#8217;s life.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One moment, colonel!&#8221; someone spoke quietly. &#8220;Is it a
+Huastecan custom, by the way, to shoot a cavalier the instant
+he&#8211;ah&#8211;dismounts?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But this scoundrel is Rodrigo Galán, Your Majesty. And that black
+horse, sacré tonnerre, that is Maurel&#8217;s horse. Captain Maurel, sire, whom
+he murdered!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Rodrigo straightened pompously. &#8220;Your Most Opportune
+Majesty&#8211;&#8221; he began.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Also, Colonel Dupin,&#8221; Maximilian continued, &#8220;he waylaid
+the Belgian ambassador, sent by Leopold, brother to Our August
+Spouse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The more reason to shoot him, pardi!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Without doubt, monsieur. But his execution must have <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_158'></a>158</span>éclat. Europe must know
+that Mexican outlaws do not go unpunished.&#8211;Colonel Lopez, you will take
+charge of Our prisoner. Guard him well, and bring him with you to the City. He
+shall be tried there, with every ceremony.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Dupin, that policeman of the backwoods forced upon Mexico by
+Napoleon, could only grind his teeth, which he did.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now then,&#8221; said His Majesty, &#8220;let Us see this
+brigand-catcher who excels the redoubtable Contra Guerrillas.&#8211;As I live,
+the young man is a Chasseur d&#8217;Afrique! Step nearer, sir, and tell Us who you
+are.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Michel Ney, at Your Majesty&#8217;s service.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Prince of Moskowa!&#8221; exclaimed the Emperor. In his court, he
+was grateful for even a Napoleonic prince.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sergeant, Your Majesty.&#8221; It looked as though Ney were hinting to
+be made something else.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see,&#8221; said Maximilian. &#8220;And so Our Empire of romance is
+to hold a baton for another of the family of Ney. But to start more modestly,
+how would a lieutenancy suit, do you think?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your pardon, sire, but I report to His Excellency, Marshal
+Bazaine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian&#8217;s white brow clouded. The French occupation was ever a thorn
+in his side. He could never quite be Emperor in fact. He could not even promote
+a likely young man. He had to &#8220;recommend&#8221; to one Bazaine, who had
+carried a knapsack.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quite so,&#8221; he answered coldly. &#8220;I shall inform Our dear
+Marshal how well you deserve.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The fact is, Your Majesty,&#8221; said Ney in some confusion, &#8220;I
+did not&#8211;exactly&#8211;capture him. It was, uh, sort of mutual.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Everybody stared curiously. There was the rope, the unloaded pistols. It was
+a queer puzzle. How did it happen? Ney began with an apology. Would Mademoiselle
+d&#8217;Aumerle <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_159'></a>159</span>forgive
+him? But he had worried though! He should not have left her, day before
+yesterday!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because of a greater attraction?&#8221; the young woman suggested.</p>
+
+<p>Ney demurred so earnestly that Jacqueline laughed outright.
+&#8220;Don&#8217;t make it worse, Michel,&#8221; said she. &#8220;I know how you
+regretted the death of the terrible Rodrigo. Then you learned that he was alive.
+Oh no, I couldn&#8217;t have held you.&#8211;But go on. Did he prove
+interesting?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Frenchman told his story. It appeared that, on deserting mademoiselle two
+days before, he went at the best speed of his horse up the ravine she had so
+graciously indicated. He hoped to overtake the fugitive bandit, and after an
+hour, at a turn in the arroyo, did meet him, face to face. Both were equally
+astounded. Rodrigo was retracing his steps, having been blocked by a dried
+waterfall. Either man drew and covered the other. The Mexican did not fire.
+Seeing Ney, he supposed the Contras at no great distance, and a shot would bring
+them on his heels. But after a time the thing commenced to grow ridiculous, and
+Ney laughed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur Rodrigue,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I hope you will come along
+quietly.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Fra Diavolo mistook the Gallic humor for an assurance of armed backing near
+at hand. &#8220;Where to?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The devil take me if <i>I</i> know! Where would you suggest?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It dawned then on the puzzled brigand that the other knew nothing of the
+country, and accordingly they struck up an armistice; which, for the rest, the
+alert revolver of each made imperative. Their protocol&#8217;s chief clause
+required the prisoner to conduct his captor to some neutral point. Rodrigo
+suggested Anastasio Murguía&#8217;s ranch, and Ney agreed. But as to what might
+happen on arriving, they left in blank. Michel had a duel in mind, if honest
+seconds were to be had. The craftier <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_160'></a>160</span>Rodrigo hoped to find some of his own men lurking
+about the hacienda.</p>
+
+<p>A cessation of hostile moves was further stipulated, though treachery of
+course warranted the instant drawing of weapons. Should the prisoner try to
+betray the captor to guerrillas, this was to constitute treachery. Ney for his
+part insisted on his rights as captor. That is, he could call for help if he got
+the chance. Rodrigo assented willingly. He knew the neighborhood. He would avoid
+the Cossacks, and the Frenchman might shout to his heart&#8217;s ease. To do him
+justice, the outlaw had no desire to kill Ney, even if Ney gave him leave. A
+duke and prince in one was too valuable. A pretty ransom loomed brightly. Ney
+suspected as much, but not being ingenuous enough to obviate the risks, took a
+huge delight in them.</p>
+
+<p>Conforming to the terms of the truce, each man, simultaneously, put his gun
+in his holster. Then, good company enough one for the other, though with eyes
+ever on the watch, they proceeded along tortuous bridle paths until twilight,
+meeting no one. They camped in the same forest which that same moment held
+Murguía, Driscoll, and the two girls. They tethered their horses together and
+made a bed of leaves for themselves. Each laid his pistol a comfortable distance
+away, so that if either tried to arm himself while the other slept, there would
+be much snapping of twigs under his feet. Again simultaneously, they sat down
+and talked, and smoked cigarettes in lieu of supper. Ney progressed in his
+Spanish that evening. Fra Diavolo wished to impress on the companionable
+Frenchman that he, Rodrigo Galán, was a more terrible person than Colonel Dupin.
+He seemed envious, even of the compliment implied in the Tiger&#8217;s
+nickname.</p>
+
+<p>During a pause the brigand said, &#8220;Now don&#8217;t jump, caballero,
+because I&#8217;m only getting out my flask.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The beautiful idea!&#8221; returned Ney. &#8220;I&#8217;ll do the
+same.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_161'></a>161</span>But each stopped
+with the liquor at his mouth. It was consolation for lack of food, but if one
+refrained and the other partook&#8211;well, there would be a light sleeper and a
+heavy sleeper. With the tempting fumes in their nostrils, they waited, each for
+the other, to quaff first. And neither did. Finally Rodrigo proposed that they
+equalize the perils of indulgence. Accordingly each lowered the contents of his
+flask by three swallows, after which they compared the extent of the ebb tide in
+either bottle.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, voyons,&#8221; Ney objected, &#8220;you haven&#8217;t taken as
+much as I have!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rodrigo admitted the impeachment, and amiably took another draught. But the
+swallow proved too large, and Ney in his turn tried to balance that one, only to
+fail likewise. This entailed another effort from Rodrigo, which resulted in
+still another exaggeration.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now you&#8217;ve had <i>more</i> than I have,&#8221; Michel complained,
+growing vague on the real point at issue.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bien, señor, suppose you try a little of this. It&#8217;s catalan,
+genuine, too, smuggled at Tampico.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mine&#8217;s cognac,&#8221; said Ney. &#8220;Have some?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They exchanged flasks, and that night in the forest their snores were
+discordant and loud. Ney half awoke once, and remembered that he seemed to have
+heard the tramp of many horses. Toward morning, when it was not yet light, he
+was aroused for good by a savage tightening around his waist and a tremendous
+pull. He sat up, and heard his prisoner scuffling and swearing near him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve tied me, you sneaking animal without shame!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s you that&#8217;s tied me, tête de voleur!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But as Rodrigo wrested in the dark, Ney found that the brigand&#8217;s
+stumblings corresponded with the tightening about himself. He clutched at his
+waist, and discovered a rope.</p>
+
+<p>Both men groped vengefully forward with the line, and <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_162'></a>162</span>lurched into one another&#8217;s arms.
+Each had thought to come on a tree, only to discover himself tied to the other.
+In the first start of suspicion, and in no good humor from splitting headaches,
+one reached for his knife, the other for his sabre. But the knife was gone, the
+sabre was gone. Forthwith they grappled and strained and breathed by jerks and
+tumbled and rolled and wound themselves in the lariat, until at last they lay
+exhausted on their backs and blinked up at the beautiful innocent morn peeping
+through the trees.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now don&#8217;t you untie yourself till I get untied,&#8221; ordered
+Ney.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Or you yourself,&#8221; retorted the other.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let us both untie at the same time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But one might finish first,&#8221; objected Rodrigo. The brigand had
+grown amiable again. He saw advantages in the rope. It was well to have his
+prospective ransom never more than a few feet away.</p>
+
+<p>They discussed the problem at length, but were not equal to it. So the modus
+vivendi was stretched a rope&#8217;s length, and the treachery clause expanded
+to include any untying or attempted untying before their arrival at
+Murguía&#8217;s. Scrupulously simultaneous, they arose, found their pistols, and
+mounted their horses. To guard against any sudden varying in rapidity of travel
+and its consequences, each wrapped the lariat once about his saddle-horn. Where
+necessary, the brigand rode in front, since Ney insisted that the other way
+would reverse their rôles of prisoner and captor. Rodrigo got some tortillas
+from a charcoal burner, and they lunched and rested within the forest&#8217;s
+edge till dark. But they traveled all that night in the open country, and
+approached Murguía&#8217;s before noon of the next day. Hoping to find friends
+about the hacienda&#8217;s stables, Rodrigo suggested that they race up the
+highway into the pasture. He was thinking that then the Frenchmen might be
+overpowered the more easily. Ney fell into the trap. He <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_163'></a>163</span>accepted the challenge and was keen for
+the sport. Thus it happened that they all but ran down the Emperor of Mexico
+himself, and instead of guerrillas, Rodrigo saw Cossacks and Dragoons. But the
+mystery of the rope, added to that of the unloaded pistols, rested
+unexplained.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline was delighted. &#8220;If it were just conventional heroism,&#8221;
+she exclaimed, &#8220;one might talk of lieutenancies. But sire,
+this&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never fear,&#8221; replied Maximilian. &#8220;I cannot make him
+captain, but he shall have his reward.&#8211;Monsieur le Prince, I will leave
+you a half company of my Austrians, if, though a Chasseur, you will deign to
+command them. In a word, I desire you to have the honor of escorting
+mademoiselle to the City.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I thank you, sire. Parbleu, the sergeant is happier with such an
+order than&#8211;than the captain without it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Michel,&#8221; cried Jacqueline, &#8220;and where in the world now did
+you get that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why&#8211;out of my own head. Really, mademoiselle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_164'></a>164</span><a id='link_20'></a>CHAPTER XX<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>In the Wake of Princely Cavalcades</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;... Now swell out, and with stiff necks<br />
+Pass on, ye sons of Eve! vale not your looks,<br />
+Lest they descry the evil of your path.&#8221;</p>
+<p class= 'ar'>&#8211;<i>Dante</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Grand Equerry was again the Dignitary of the hour. He held the
+Emperor&#8217;s stirrup, while the Emperor, fittingly attired, swung gracefully
+astride a curvetting charger. Behind was his coach, ready for him when he should
+tire of the saddle. It was already late in the afternoon, and he meant to travel
+all night. Flatterers begged him to consider the importance of his health, which
+but made him unyielding. Some slight martyrdom for his country appealed to
+Maximilian. No, he said, grave affairs might be afoot since the
+Confederacy&#8217;s surrender. The capital needed his presence, and he reminded
+them that the State came first, as always.</p>
+
+<p>The retinue climbed into carriages. The escort, Dragoons, Austrians and
+Contra Guerrillas, formed in hollow square about their prince. Colonel Dupin
+scowled because he was going. Colonel Lopez, when unobserved, scowled because he
+was left behind. And Monsieur Éloin, at the Emperor&#8217;s side, thought well
+of himself in substituting for a rival favorite one so distant from favoritism
+as the Tiger. The Dragoons and Austrians who were to remain presented arms on
+the hacienda porch, and Lopez gave them the cue for a parting viva. The
+emancipated peons, still wet from spiritual grace, swelled the din gratefully
+and stridently, lured to it by their thoughtful pastor, the hacienda curate.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_165'></a>165</span>But Maximilian
+still lingered. He looked from window to window under the colonnade, and seemed
+expectant. But Lopez signaled to the buglers, and the trumpet call and the
+redoubled huzzas of a people thrilled him out of his melancholy. With a sigh he
+gave over his private loves and poesy. He breathed deep and his eyes flashed.
+And as the grand monarch and good, he departed with the acclaim of posterity in
+his ears, conscious that the superb figure he made was for History&#8217;s
+contemplation.</p>
+
+<p>At this time the Marquise d&#8217;Aumerle was half way up a ladder in the garden.
+She was picking the fragrant china blossoms, tossing them down to Berthe&#8217;s
+apron, and humming &#8220;Mironton, mironton, mirontaine&#8221; in blissful
+indifference to many things, to princes among them.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was the other girl behind the hacienda shutters. Yet she, at least, saw
+him ride away. High up in the chapel tower, between the bell and the masonry,
+crouched a sobbing little figure. She gazed and gazed, with straining eyes. Over
+there below, in front of her father&#8217;s house, were glittering swords and
+dazzling helmets, and the sheen of gilded escutcheons on coach doors. And as the
+beautiful pageant wound its way along the highroad, she watched in fawn-like
+curiosity. The sobs were only involuntary. She was not thinking, then, that this
+was matter for grief. Her dark eyes, that had been weeping, and were now so dry,
+held to a certain one among the cavaliers, to the very tall and splendid one
+with the slender waist, and they kept him jealously fixed among the others, and
+were ever more impatient of the blurring distance. But when finally he was lost
+for an instant in the general bright haze of the company, and she could not be
+quite sure after that which was he, then indeed the eyelids fluttered in a kind
+of despair. Yet only after the last carriage had vanished under the giant banana
+leaves of the hill beyond, did the tears come and tremble upon her lashes.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_166'></a>166</span>&#8220;He is
+married, the Emperor,&#8221; she told herself, as though the fact were that
+second written across the burning sky. At last, full, grim comprehension was
+hers.</p>
+
+<p>The stones of the tower glowed like a brazier in the sun, but the girl, with
+her head on her arm against the parapet, shivered as with cold; and a numbness
+at her heart grew heavier and heavier, like weighted ice.</p>
+
+<p>Below her the barren knoll, where an hour before swarthy stolid hundreds had
+crowded awaiting baptism, was lonely as the grave. The peons were dispersing to
+their village down by the river junction, or to their huts near the hacienda
+store, and on the air floated the falsetto nasal of their holiday songs,
+breaking ludicrously above the mumbling bass of loosely strung harps. Nearer by,
+the only life was an old man with a fife and a boy with a drum, who marched
+round and round the chapel, playing monotonously, while a second urchin every
+five minutes touched off a small cannon at the door. They did these things with
+solemn earnestness. It was to achieve an end, for San Felipe&#8217;s day would
+come soon, and meantime each and every lurking devil had to be driven off the
+sacred precincts. But there was one hideous fiend who grinned, and pinched, and
+shrieked. His abode was the girl&#8217;s heart, and he shrieked to her
+gleefully, that she could never, never in life, wed the man she loved. The fife
+and drum and the stupid little cannon simply made him the merrier.</p>
+
+<hr style='border:none; border-bottom:1px solid silver; height: 1px; width: 80%; text-align: center; margin: 10px auto;' />
+
+<p>The imps were left in peace for the night, and all about the chapel was dark
+and silent and desolate. But a man was working stealthily at one of the rear
+windows. It was a square, barred window, near the ground. The man chipped away
+at the granite sill with short, quick blows. The butt of his chisel was padded
+in flannel, so that even a chuckling that escaped him now and again made more
+sound than the steel. Soon he dropped his tools, and wrapping either hand around
+a <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_167'></a>167</span>window bar, he
+braced both feet together against the wall, and pulled. The two bars scraped
+slowly toward him across the stone. Then, with a sharp, downward jerk he tore
+them out. Quickly he climbed inside and cut the ropes of a man who lay bound on
+the floor. Both men emerged noiselessly through the window.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have a care how you step,&#8221; whispered the rescuer. &#8220;Your
+faithful guards are busy sleeping and don&#8217;t want any
+disturbance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That candle-stinking sacristy!&#8221; grumbled the rescued.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But it&#8217;s the only stone calaboose on the ranch. In fact,
+<i>I</i> suggested it, since Don Rodrigo should be kept tight and safe.
+That&#8217;s why Dupin left me behind.&#8221; The rescuer chuckled as before.
+&#8220;Careful, hombre, there&#8217;s a guard there, lying right in front of
+you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rodrigo made out the prostrate form, and lifted a boot heel over the upturned
+face. But his liberator jerked him aside.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fool, you&#8217;ll wake the fat padre, and he doesn&#8217;t like my
+jests, says they&#8217;re inspired of the Evil One.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thinking of the Bishop of Sonora&#8217;s waiting maid, was
+he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, what of it? Didn&#8217;t he elope here with her?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you, Don Tiburcio?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course; she naturally wanted to correct her first bad
+taste.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;By running away with you? If you call that good
+taste&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I call that a good joke on the padrecito.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Having by this time come safely to the front of the church, Rodrigo was for
+making certain his escape at once. But Tiburcio interposed. &#8220;There&#8217;s
+some talk still due between you and me,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Sit down, here in
+the doorway.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well?&#8221; said the brigand uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well?&#8221; repeated his jocular friend.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, there isn&#8217;t even a moon and we can&#8217;t deal monte,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_168'></a>168</span>as if that
+weren&#8217;t the same as giving you what you want, anyway.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I risk my hide saving you for money, then?&#8221; Don Tiburcio&#8217;s
+tone was aggrieved.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh no, for friendship,&#8221; the sardonic Rodrigo corrected himself,
+&#8220;and I think as much of you in my turn, amigo mio. Not half an hour ago I
+was wrapped in anxiety, imagining you trying to collect blackmail, and I not
+near to keep my patriots from your throat. Oh, the sorrow of it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;God be praised that a dear friend came and eased your worries! But you
+are not an ingrate. Since the Confederate Gringo took all my money the other
+morning&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tiburcio, on oath, I haven&#8217;t had money either, not since our
+last game at cards. There was Murguía, I know, but I let him off for bringing me
+that French girl. She was good for a big ransom, only your same
+Gringo&#8211;curse the intruder! If ever the Imperialists catch him, and Murguía
+is there to testify against him&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio moved nearer on the church step. &#8220;And then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s our secret, Murguía&#8217;s and mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But Rodrigo, he <i>is</i> caught. They are trying him and Murguía both
+this very minute. And do you know what for? For being your
+accomplices.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The outlaw started exultantly. &#8220;Then, if you want him
+shot&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well?&#8211;Oh don&#8217;t be afraid, maybe I can help.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Were you with Captain Maurel when we ambushed them near
+Tampico?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t remember,&#8221; said Tiburcio tentatively.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you will hurry down to this court martial, perhaps you will
+remember better. Go, and I&#8217;ll leave you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not quite so fast, Rodrigo. You forget that your devoted rescuer is
+penniless.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_169'></a>169</span>&#8220;So am I,
+I tell you. We&#8217;ll both have to go to work, Don Tiburcio.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the lay? Tell me.&#8221; The humorist&#8217;s tone was
+unmistakable.</p>
+
+<p>Rodrigo looked about him in the dark. &#8220;Listen,&#8221; he whispered,
+&#8220;there&#8217;s a bullion convoy out of San Luis before long, but&#8211;you
+shall hear no more unless it is agreed that I am to meet them first.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, hombre! How else could I threaten to expose them for
+contributing to the rebels?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bien, it&#8217;s next week. You will meet them this side of Valles,
+some time Thursday or Friday.&#8211;Now I&#8217;m off. Adios.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stay. You&#8217;ll find your horse down by the river. The
+administrator is waiting with it. And Rodrigo, don&#8217;t you want your pistol?
+Be more careful another time, and keep it loaded.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Something in his tone nettled the brigand. &#8220;What do you mean? Give me
+my pistol.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio pointed it at him instead. &#8220;When you cool a little, yes. But
+it takes a good marksman to hit a Frenchman with an empty
+pistol&#8211;especially when one wakes up and finds himself tied.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rodrigo stiffened. This was menacing to his dignity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Both lassoed,&#8221; Tiburcio went on, &#8220;and no telling which was
+heifer and which vaquero, stampeding down on poor Max.&#8211;Ai de mi, I never
+thought it could be so funny!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Give me my pistol!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Slumbering like two babes in the wood, and your sweet innocent breaths
+perfuming the woody forest. I&#8217;d have covered you with leaves, like the
+little robins, only&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Was it you tied us, you&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just like two babes, but,&#8221; and Tiburcio pointed his thumb to his
+mouth and shook his head sorrowfully, &#8220;that&#8217;s bad, very <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_170'></a>170</span>bad. Why didn&#8217;t you
+leave me some? Of the cognac, especially?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you don&#8217;t explain&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Softly there, amigo. Yes, I tied you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Another of your jokes&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Inspired of the Evil One? Oh no, it was&#8211;precaution. Yes, that
+was it, come to think; just precaution. You see, I and Dupin had scattered your
+guerrillas, and I was scouting ahead, to stir up any ambush waiting for
+us&#8211;which I did later, when we chased them, and burned Culebra. But going
+along, I heard snoring, and found you two, like two&#8211;&#8211;Now sit
+still!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why didn&#8217;t you wake me? Then we could have roped the
+Frenchman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And have him identify me after we&#8217;d gotten the ransom? Oh, no,
+I&#8217;m a loyal Imperialist. Now listen a minute, will you?&#8211;Our Contras
+were following me not a half mile behind. That meant I had to work quick. You
+see, I wanted to find you both there when I could come back alone. And meantime,
+I didn&#8217;t want you to hurt each other. If either got killed, there&#8217;d
+be no ransom. So I took your knife and his sabre. Then I tied you both with my
+lariat. I was going to get your lariat too, and tether the pair of you to a
+tree, hoping you&#8217;d hold each other there till I got back. <i>You</i> would
+do it, for I meant to pin a note on your sleeve, explaining. But just that
+minute the Frenchman stirred, for the Cossacks were getting into his ears, so I
+had to run back and turn them into another path.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So long as it wasn&#8217;t any of your infernal farces?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, it <i>was</i> worth a ransom, the way it turned out.&#8211;Sit
+still, will you? You <i>know</i> I take you too seriously ever to think of any
+joke with <i>you</i>! Here&#8217;s your artillery and cutlery. Quick now, clear
+out!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Both rose to go, each to his respective deviltry, but not six <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_171'></a>171</span>steps ahead in the black
+night Tiburcio stumbled over a soft, inert mass. He recovered himself, half
+cursing, half laughing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One of your guards, Rodrigo,&#8221; he muttered. &#8220;He must have
+got this far before the drug worked into his vitals.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your mescal probably killed him,&#8221; said Rodrigo indifferently.
+&#8220;But a little knife slit will look more plausible in the morning, for you
+it will.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Getting to his knees on the stone walk the outlaw groped over the body for a
+place to strike, holding his knife ready. But all at once he stopped and got up
+hastily, without a word. He only rubbed his left hand mechanically on his
+jacket.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, what ails you?&#8221; asked Tiburcio.</p>
+
+<p>Rodrigo gave a short, apologetic laugh. &#8220;It&#8211;it&#8217;s a
+woman!&#8221; He quit rubbing his hand, seeming to realize. &#8220;There&#8217;s
+blood,&#8221; he added.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here,&#8221; said Tiburcio, &#8220;you keep back, and run if anybody
+comes. I&#8217;m going to strike a match.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>By the flare they saw that it was a girl and that her head was crushed.
+Kneeling on either side, they peered questioningly, horrified, at each other.
+Their great sombreros almost touched. Their hard faces were yellow in the
+flickering light between, and the face looking up with its quiet eyes and dark
+purplish cleft in the brow was white, white like milk. With one accord the two
+men turned and gazed upward at the tower, whose black outline lost itself far
+above in the blacker shadows of the universe. They understood.</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio shrugged his shoulders, a silent comment on the tragedy from its
+beginning to this, its end. He threw the match away and arose, but Rodrigo still
+knelt, leaning over her, holding the poor battered head in his hands, half
+lifting it, and trying to look again into those eyes through the darkness. He
+would touch the matted hair, as if to caress, not knowing what he did, and each
+time he would jerk back his hand at the uncanny, sticky feeling. Roving thus,
+his fingers touched an <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_172'></a>172</span>ivory cross, and closed over it. With no present
+consciousness of his act, he placed the symbol in his jacket, over his
+breast.</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio touched him on the shoulder. &#8220;I&#8217;ll go now, and bring her
+father,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; returned the other vaguely, stumbling to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s going to kill the old man,&#8221; murmured Tiburcio,
+&#8220;or&#8211;God, if it should <i>not</i> kill him! He is a coward, but once
+he slapped you, Rodrigo, for so much as looking at her. And now, the Virgin
+help&#8211;may the Virgin help whoever&#8217;s concerned in this!&#8211;But
+here, you must go, do you hear?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then go, go!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; said Rodrigo again, moving slowly away.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;By the river, remember. You&#8217;ll find your horse there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Captain Maurel&#8217;s, the fine black one?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, I slipped it out of the stables for you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The fine black one?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes, hombre!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And&#8211;and she never&#8211;she never saw&#8211;how magnifico I look
+on&#8211;on that fine black horse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was still muttering as he reeled and staggered down the hill.</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone, and no alarm of sentinels rang out, Tiburcio took off his
+serape and laid it over the dark blot on the stones. Then he too stole away, to
+tell her father.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_173'></a>173</span><a id='link_21'></a>CHAPTER XXI<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Red Mongrel</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Be this the whetstone of your sword; let grief<br />
+Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Macbeth</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where,&#8221; inquired Din Driscoll, with a benevolent interest in
+their doing the thing right, &#8220;is the judge advocate?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Miguel Lopez resented what he took for a patronizing concern. It
+festered his complacency, for his was the code of the bowed neck to those above
+and the boot-tip for those below. Luckily for him, he did not strike the
+helpless prisoner. He turned to his judge&#8217;s bench instead, which was none
+other than the frayed and stately sofa of honor from the hacienda sala, deemed
+requisite to his dignity. The satin upholstery contrasted grotesquely with the
+adobe walls. Pungent tallow dips lighted the granary to a dull yellow, and mid
+the sluggish tobacco clouds were a shrinking prisoner in clerical black, and the
+mildly interested prisoner in gray, and red uniforms surrounding.</p>
+
+<p>Lopez flung his sword across the empty box that was to serve as desk, and
+filled the crimson seat with pompous menace. Lopez was a Mexican, but did not
+look it. He had red hair and a florid skin, and he was large, with great feet
+and coarse hands. Yet the high cheek bones of an Indian were his. The contrast
+of coloring and features unpleasantly suggested a mongrel breed. The eyes had
+red lids, out of which the lashes struck like rusted needles, and the eyes
+themselves, of a faded blue, seemed to fawn an excuse for Nature&#8217;s
+maladjusting. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_174'></a>174</span>But
+he had a goodly frame on which to hang the livery of a king&#8217;s guardsman.
+And as the cross of the Legion of Honor ticketed his breast, he must have been a
+goodly man too, and his Maker&#8217;s insignia only a libel. Once Maximilian had
+said, &#8220;What, Bebello, and art thou a better judge of men than I, thy
+master and the master of men?&#8221; For it seemed that Bebello, the simple
+hound, had read Nature&#8217;s voucher instead of Napoleon&#8217;s, and being
+thus deceived, would ever snarl at the Colonel of Dragoons. Maximilian of course
+knew better. What looked like toadying was only profound deference for himself.
+The royal favorite could discriminate. He could also be the thick-headed,
+intolerable martinet. The sandy lashes bristled as the American inquired a
+second time if he were to have counsel.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Being president of this court,&#8221; Lopez announced, &#8220;I am
+judge advocate.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the tone of congratulation Driscoll blandly said, &#8220;Well, then, I
+challenge the president.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Challenge?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Certainly, Your Honor. It&#8217;s my right, either on the ground of
+inexperience, malice, or&#8211;but I reckon the first two will do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is insolence!&#8221; cried the president, and glaring angrily, he
+maintained that it was a regular court martial for the field, and that as he was
+the ranking officer at hand, there could be no appeal beyond himself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A regular drum-head,&#8221; Driscoll observed. &#8220;Well, let it go
+at that. I&#8217;m in a hurry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez called a lieutenant of Austrian cavalry to his right upon the sofa, and
+the Dragoon color sergeant to his left, and the three of them sat thenceforth in
+judgment. The charges were read, and next a deposition, gathered that day from
+Michel Ney. Therein appeared the American, reinforcing Rodrigo Galán at Tampico,
+and in so far aiding the abduction of Mademoiselle d&#8217;Aumerle.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_175'></a>175</span>&#8220;The
+complicity is evident,&#8221; stated Lopez, and his colleagues, blinking at the
+candles on the box, nodded wisely.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s straight so far,&#8221; Driscoll agreed, &#8220;but the
+story goes a little further. Does the ma&#8217;am&#8217;selle herself happen to have
+left any deposition?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had, admitted the president, but it merely corroborated the foregoing.
+Driscoll, in sole charge of his own defence, insisted that her deposition be
+read, but Lopez would permit no such waste of time. He was brooding on Monsieur
+Éloin usurping his own place near the Emperor, and he wanted to finish the
+present business so as to overtake them both.</p>
+
+<p>Dupin&#8217;s written evidence provided the rest of the abduction story,
+seemingly, and there remained only the other charge, that of assisting at the
+ambush of the murdered Captain Maurel. For this there was no evidence, and the
+accused himself was examined.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your name?&#8221; asked the court.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Driscoll.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your full name, hombre?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;John Dinwiddie Driscoll, Your Honor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Din&#8211;whatever it is&#8211;that&#8217;s not a Christian
+name?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was, when I got it. Maybe I&#8217;ve paganized it since.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Devil take you, this is solemn!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, this is solemn.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez cracked his long nails irritably against each other.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You came here via Tampico,&#8221; he began anew. &#8220;What days were
+you in Tampico?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From about the twenty-third or twenty-fourth, till we left a few days
+ago.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>All three judges bent over a memorandum which the president pointed out among
+his notes. Captain Maurel was killed about April 26th.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How did you occupy yourself while in Tampico?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_176'></a>176</span>&#8220;Mostly
+trying to persuade Murgie here that it was his move.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But your horse needed exercise. Did you at any time ride across the
+river?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t notice. Have you anyone who saw me cross?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Goot!&#8221; blurted out the Austrian who was one of the judges, so
+suddenly that everybody half jumped. &#8220;Ya, das iss die cosa, sabe! Who has
+him seen cross?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The court floundered. The witness demanded by the accused was lacking.
+Murguía, a restless, huddled form on a straw-bottomed chair, was watching
+hungrily every step in the examination. Now he shifted excitedly, and his sharp
+jaws worked with a grinding motion. Then his voice came, a raucous outburst.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Search him, Your Mercy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez browbeat the meddler, and&#8211;took his advice. Driscoll submitted
+tolerantly to their fumbling over him, and all the while Murguía looked on as a
+famished dog, especially when they pulled out the whiskey flask. But when they
+tossed the thing aside, he sank deep into his black coat and gave vent to
+mumblings.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course we find nothing,&#8221; Lopez complained, &#8220;since his
+accomplice recommended the search.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It seemed, too, that the state&#8217;s case must fall.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Captain Maurel charge cannot hold,&#8221; announced the court.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ya, goot&#8211;mucha bueno!&#8221; exclaimed the Austrian with
+enthusiasm, while the color sergeant, who had a red nose, wet his lips
+hopefully. He believed that an acquitted outlaw, if a gentleman, would stand a
+bottle.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And as to the first charge,&#8221; continued the president,
+&#8220;here is the deposition of the Señorita d&#8217;Aumerle, which I have held till
+now for this purpose. Read it, and you will note that though the marquesa bears
+out the Señor Ney, she further <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_177'></a>177</span>testifies to the prisoner having later saved her
+from this very Rodrigo Galán at peril to himself. Bien, señores, have you any
+further questions?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian crinkled his brow, and after a momentous pause, shook his head
+till his cheeks rattled. The Dragoon promptly replied, &#8220;No, mi
+coronel.&#8221; Then the three withdrew, and when they came back, the Dragoon
+wiping his lips, they informed the accused that he was not guilty.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Which isn&#8217;t news,&#8221; said Driscoll as he thanked them.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía&#8217;s turn came next. The proof of the old man&#8217;s guilt
+blossomed almost of itself. Jacqueline, to clear her protector, had been forced
+to depose how Murguía had willingly betrayed her into Rodrigo&#8217;s hands. But
+she described the old man&#8217;s reluctance. He would have saved her, except
+for his terror of the outlaw. The sole case for the defence was Murguía&#8217;s
+character for stinginess; such a miser could not be accused of aiding the
+guerrillas. But this very point seemed to heighten Lopez&#8217;s prejudice
+against him. Driscoll, being held to testify, only talked sociably, and told
+nothing, and when under the quizzing he finally lost patience, he said,
+&#8220;Oh, let him go! What&#8217;s the use?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But they were so far from any such thing that they condemned him to be
+shot.</p>
+
+<p>Then a voice was heard at the door. The sentinel there stumbled back, and Don
+Tiburcio brushed by him into the room.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Old man,&#8221; he called, &#8220;come with me! Your
+daughter&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía started up, weakly swaying. The senile eyeballs, so lately parched by
+fear, swam in a moisture not of avarice. Someone was speaking to him of his
+daughter. He had not seen her yet. They would not let him. And now he must think
+of her in this new connection, which was his death. And her misery to learn it,
+and her misery, afterward! On the morrow they would be taking him to the
+capital, his <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_178'></a>178</span>sentence would be confirmed, he would be shot.
+Nothing of this he doubted. And he would never see her again.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía stretched out his arms toward the president of the court, &#8220;You
+will let me go to her, señor? Your Mercy will let me go to her?&#8221; He
+murmured her name over and over, &#8220;María de la Luz! María&#8211;Luzita
+mia!&#8221; until the words became a kind of crooning. Then he would break forth
+again, entreating, commanding, &#8220;Your Mercy will let me see her? Señor, you
+<i>will</i> let me see her!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At the first note of intrusion Lopez had brought the pommel of his sword down
+upon the box in front of him. But the syllables of the girl&#8217;s name seemed
+to get into his memory, and he began to stare with a puzzled frown at the
+half-crazed old man. Lifting his eyes, he met Tiburcio&#8217;s, and Tiburcio
+himself nodded in some deep hidden significance. Lopez straightened abruptly, as
+at an astounding revelation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tell me, Señor Murguía,&#8221; he said, &#8220;your
+daughter&#8211;Yes, yes, man, you shall see her!&#8211;But listen, what is she
+like? Has she large black eyes? Does she wear red sometimes? Come, señor,
+answer!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The father gazed, wonderingly, jealously. How should an elegant officer from
+the City and the Court know aught of María de la Luz?</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio crept behind the sofa, and bending to Lopez&#8217;s ear, he
+whispered, &#8220;Si, si, mi coronel, she is the one you have in mind, and she
+is his daughter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez swung round and searched the blackmailer&#8217;s face. &#8220;And
+now&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will let him come,&#8221; said Tiburcio. &#8220;But bring two
+guards. And have four others with&#8211;well, with a stretcher.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again Lopez searched the dark crescent that was Tiburcio&#8217;s eye, and
+again Tiburcio nodded with deep significance. &#8220;Bring him,&#8221; he
+repeated, &#8220;but tell him nothing. Seeing will be enough.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_179'></a>179</span>Murguía went,
+unknowing. He would see her, thanks to some freakish kindness in Don Tiburcio.
+He was torn between the joy of the meeting and the sharp grief of the parting
+that must follow. At the time he never noticed that they led him up the chapel
+walk instead of toward the hacienda house. Tiburcio was ahead with a lantern,
+but when near the top of the hill he turned back to them, yet not before the
+expectant Lopez had seen a black something on the pavement under the swinging
+light.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You first, mi coronel,&#8221; said Tiburcio.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I, you mean!&#8221; cried Murguía, &#8220;I, señor!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But we wish to see first if she is here,&#8221; said Lopez. &#8220;Don
+Tiburcio thought she might be at vespers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Vespers? There are no vespers to-night. Yet we come here! Why? Why do
+we come here?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio motioned to the guards. &#8220;Hold him until we return,&#8221; he
+ordered.</p>
+
+<p>A Dragoon reached out a hand indifferently to Murguía&#8217;s collar, and
+that second the old man&#8217;s ten fingers were at his throat. They overpowered
+him at last, but they would have fared better with a wildcat.</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio and Lopez went alone. They stopped before the covered thing near the
+church door.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So,&#8221; mused the colonel, &#8220;she ended it
+<i>this</i> way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From the tower,&#8221; Tiburcio grimly added.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, say it. You mean His Majesty?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His Majesty need know nothing of the&#8211;of the finale.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who is there to tell him, por Dios? I won&#8217;t. You
+won&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you forget a third, Don Tiburcio. I mean the man who was with you
+several evenings ago, when you&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When I was carrying off the padre&#8217;s sweetheart?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When somehow you two happened in this desolate neighborhood. Since you
+took his name out of my mouth just <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_180'></a>180</span>now, you must have recognized that it was His
+Majesty whom you saw talking to her almost where she now lies. I was near by,
+guarding his privacy, but you both escaped before I could stop you. Now then,
+who was that other intruder?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The other was Rodrigo Galán, but Tiburcio replied, &#8220;The other will not
+have much to say. Poor Captain Maurel!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bueno, bueno!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not yet, mi coronel. Only we two know of Maximilian&#8217;s part in
+this, but we must keep it from her father above all others. I am a loyal
+Imperialist, Don Miguel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What difference does that make?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Empire faces a crisis.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The royal favorite started guiltily. Since the news of the
+Confederacy&#8217;s surrender, Lopez&#8217;s ambitions were clouded by a growing
+fear of the fugitive Mexican republic. The Republic would have a good memory for
+royal favorites, and he had been thinking on it. &#8220;Will Lee&#8217;s
+surrender make such&#8211;such a difference?&#8221; he faltered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So much,&#8221; retorted Tiburcio, &#8220;that to-morrow we will have
+more rebels yet. So much, that what with freeing peons and confiscating
+nationalized church lands and giving them back to the church&#8211;well, a very
+little more might decide between Empire and Republic.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A little more? What do you mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I mean money for the rebels. Luz&#8217;s father is rich. If he knew
+that Maximilian&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hombre, hombre, he&#8217;s a miser!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just the same, I&#8217;m a loyal Imperialist, and if you are, too, you
+will take good care to tell nothing to Don Anastasio.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You forget, señor, that I am the one to say that to you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then don&#8217;t forget, Colonel Lopez. Do not forget that she fell,
+that it was a simple accident.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, a simple accident. Wait here, I am going to bring her
+father.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_181'></a>181</span>On returning
+Lopez sent the guards away, and he and Murguía were alone together. The old man
+stood dazed, unresisting.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One minute more,&#8221; said Lopez. &#8220;First, I must tell you
+something. And afterward, you will remember. Yes, you will
+remember&#8211;afterward. You know who I am, that I command the Dragoons of the
+Empress.&#8211;Are you listening? But do you know that, in a way, I am
+Maximilian&#8217;s confidant? Whenever he walks or rides, incognito, dressed as
+a ranchero, I alone go with him, as I did during the past ten days while we
+stopped at Las Palmas, three leagues from here. The very first evening there, we
+two rode out, with our cloaks about us. He likes to commune with nature, and
+gather curious flowers which he pastes in a book and labels with Latin names.
+But this time he was interested in peons, yet as he had a delicacy about prying
+into his host&#8217;s business, we rode until we left Las Palmas behind us. His
+Majesty would gaze on the hills and look at the sunset, and he talked to me of a
+poetic calm about them which made him long for he knew not what. And
+Murguía&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here the speaker paused abruptly, and his faded eyes shifted and
+hardened.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And Murguía, we came here, and&#8211;he met your child. He met her
+here, at this chapel, where she had been to pray for her aunt. Old man, do you
+hear me, the Emperor met your daughter! Then, next day, instead of going on with
+his journey, he complained of a cough, and stayed at Las Palmas. But every
+evening he rode here, he and I. Once I found a chance to ask her her name, but
+she would only tell her given name.&#8211;There, you will remember? Yes, you
+will&#8211;after you have seen her. Come, she is not far away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_182'></a>182</span><a id='link_22'></a>CHAPTER XXII<br /><span class='h2fs'>&#8220;<span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Equidad en la Justicia</span>&#8221;</span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;... and I think I shall begin to take pleasure in being at home
+and minding my business. I pray God I may, for I finde a great need thereof.&#8221; &#8211;</p>
+<p class='ar'><i>Pepys&#8217;s Diary</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>An hour later the candles were still guttering in the court room, and here
+Colonel Lopez assembled his minions of justice a second time. In his manner now
+there was nothing of the uncertainty, nor the feigning of penetration, which had
+before marked his handling of the trials. He pounded the box with his sword.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the light of new evidence,&#8221; he announced shortly, &#8220;the
+two cases of a while ago are reopened.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Din Driscoll strolled in. &#8220;I&#8217;ve come for my belt and pistols.
+Dupin took them,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>Lopez signed to the Dragoons to close round him. Then he gave vent. Did the
+Señor Gringo laugh so much at Mexican justice, since instead of escaping while
+he had the chance, he came back, coolly demanding his property? It was
+insolence!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Gra</i>-cious,&#8221; exclaimed Driscoll in his counterfeit of a
+startled old lady, &#8220;what&#8217;s the matter?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But Lopez put on a mien of dark cunning, and replied that he would find out
+later.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía&#8217;s case came first. The stricken father was there, dragged from
+his dead by the petty concerns of this world which cannot bide for grief. He was
+as a sleep-walker. He had come into another universe. The hacienda sala, where
+his child lay mid tapers, where mumbled prayers arose, or this <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_183'></a>183</span>adobe, where uniformed
+men fouled the air with cigarettes and looked after the Empire&#8217;s
+business&#8211;the one or the other, both places were of that other universe,
+dark and silent, in which his dazed being groped alone.</p>
+
+<p>The new element in the court martial was Tiburcio, and Tiburcio had in mind
+one golden goose to save and one meddling Gringo to lose. He riddled the
+foregoing evidence with refreshing originality. He testified to the brigand
+attack for possession of the marquise. Had he not found Don Anastasio stretched
+upon the ground? Had not the dauntless anciano, the self-same Don Anastasio,
+fallen in defence of the two French señoritas? And yet, did he not keep Rodrigo
+at bay? Si, señores, he had indeed, until Colonel Dupin and the Contras arrived.
+He, the witness, was with them. He had seen these things. Now, let anyone say
+that the loyal Señor Murguía was an accomplice of that cut-throat without shame,
+Rodrigo Galán; whom he, the witness, loathed from the innermost recesses of his
+being; whom he, the witness, should be greatly pleased to strike dead. But let
+anyone again besmirch the character of Don Anastasio!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no,&#8221; vociferously growled the Austrian.</p>
+
+<p>Lopez opposed nothing. He had a clear notion this time as to what he wanted.
+Driscoll marveled, and enjoyed it. Pigheadedness had made Don Anastasio guilty,
+why shouldn&#8217;t perjury make him innocent? And it did. The mountain of
+suspicion and some few pebbles of evidence melted away as lard in a skillet. The
+verdict was acquittal.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll knew well enough that the presence of the loyal Imperialist with the
+baleful eye meant a reversal in his own case too. But the recent and very
+definite animus of Lopez against him he could in no way fathom. The blackmailer
+testified again. The prisoner, this Americano, had waylaid him in the wood two
+days before, and had robbed him of his last cent.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_184'></a>184</span>&#8220;Which you
+stole from Murgie,&#8221; suggested the prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I? I steal from Murguía?&#8221; cried Tiburcio indignantly. &#8220;Ask
+him! Ask him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía was asked. Had the witness ever, on any occasion, robbed him? They
+repeated the question several times, and at last the rusty black wig, which was
+bowed over a chair, slowly shook in the negative. Perhaps he had settled a debt
+with the witness? The wig changed to an affirmative.</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio gleamed triumphantly. &#8220;An audacious defence!&#8221; he
+exclaimed. &#8220;But luckily for me, Don Anastasio is here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, hurry up!&#8221; protested Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>Asked if he knew anything more of the prisoner, witness could not swear for
+certain, except that he recognized in the American one of the guerrillas who had
+ambushed and slain Captain Maurel near Tampico. Yes, witness was scouting for
+the murdered captain at the time. Naturally, witness was present.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You wanted proof, Señor Americano, that you crossed the river?&#8221;
+said Lopez. &#8220;Well, are you content now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Go on,&#8221; Driscoll returned. He was bored. &#8220;Some people on
+earth are alive yet, but while Tibby is on the stand maybe I killed them too. I
+wouldn&#8217;t swear I didn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía was called next, but he did not seem to hear. His body was bent over
+his knees, silently trembling. A Dragoon pressed a hand on his shoulder, but a
+sobbing groan racked his frame, as of a very sick man who will not be awakened
+to his pain. The pause that followed was uncanny&#8211;a syncope in the affairs
+of men like a gaping grave under midnight clouds. Lopez spoke again. He
+regretted that they must intrude on a fresh and poignant sorrow, but the case in
+hand was a matter of state, before which the individual had to give way. It was
+very logical and convincing. But the feeble old shoulders made no sign.</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio leaned over and shook him gently, and whispered <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_185'></a>185</span>in his ear. Still Murguía did not move.
+Tiburcio gripped his arm. &#8220;You and Rodrigo,&#8221; he said, so low that
+none could hear, &#8220;there was something arranged between you. What was it?
+Tell me! Tell me, I say, if you want the Gringo shot!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He bent nearer, and against his ear came a muffled sound of lips. When he
+straightened, it was to address the court.</p>
+
+<p>If he might ask a question, had they searched the prisoner? They had. But
+thoroughly? Thoroughly. But not enough to find anything? No. Then he would
+suggest that they had not searched thoroughly. The court seemed impressed, and
+Driscoll was fumbled over again. Still they found nothing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whose flask is that?&#8221; Tiburcio demanded, pointing to where it
+had been tossed and forgotten. The prisoner&#8217;s. &#8220;Look that over
+again,&#8221; Tiburcio insisted. A guard handed it to Lopez, who squinted
+inside. &#8220;There is nothing,&#8221; he said. It was only an old canteen
+whose leather covering was dropping apart from rot.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía&#8217;s head raised, and his eyes fixed themselves on the judge, and
+in their intense fixity glittered a quick, keen lust. It was hideous, loathsome,
+fascinating. The eyes were swimming in tears, but their hungered, metal-like
+sheen made the sorrow monstrous, and was the more foul and ghastly because it
+distorted so pure a thing as sorrow. Driscoll felt queerly that he must, must
+remove from the world this decrepit old man who bemoaned a dead child. The itch
+for murder terrified him, and he turned away angrily from the horrid face that
+aroused it. But Murguía&#8217;s stare never relaxed while Lopez toyed with the
+canteen. And when Lopez, as though accidentally, thrust a finger under the torn
+leather and brought out a folded paper, the bright points of Murguía&#8217;s
+eyes leaped to flame. But the head went down again, as once more his grief swept
+over him, and another sob caught at the heartstrings of every man there.</p>
+
+<p>Lopez spread out the paper, and as he read, he started <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_186'></a>186</span>violently. He passed it on to the
+Austrian and the color sergeant, and they also started. But the most amazed was
+Driscoll, when he too had a chance to read.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ha, you recognize it?&#8221; exclaimed the president.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sure I do. It&#8217;s an order from Colonel Dupin to Captain Maurel.
+Rodrigo had it in Tampico, making people think that <i>he</i> was Captain
+Maurel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the court was not so simple. &#8220;How came you by it?&#8221; demanded
+Lopez. &#8220;Have occasion to be Maurel yourself sometime, eh?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With wrath, with admiration, Driscoll faced round on Don Anastasio. &#8220;Oh
+you pesky, shriveled-up gorilla!&#8221; he breathed. He was no longer amazed.
+This accounted for Murguía&#8217;s borrowing his flask the night they were in
+the forest. It accounted for Murguía and Rodrigo plotting together in Tampico.
+But why tell such things to the court? The Missourian was not a fool like King
+Canute, who ordered back the waves. &#8220;Hurry up,&#8221; he said wearily to
+the waves instead. Since he could not hold the tide, anticipation chilled more
+than the drowning bath itself.</p>
+
+<p>The tide assuredly did not wait. It rolled right on, nearer and nearer.
+Murguía was lifted to his feet. He was remembering already what Lopez had told
+him, about his daughter and Maximilian, as Lopez had said he would. The
+American&#8217;s easy, stalwart form in gray filled his blurred eyes. Here was a
+Confederate emissary come with an offer of aid for that same Maximilian. Such
+had been Murguía&#8217;s suspicion from the first, and now it moved him with
+venomous hate. Yes, he would testify. Yes, yes, the prisoner had ridden out
+alone at Tampico. Yes, yes, yes, the prisoner was with Rodrigo there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why, Don Anastasio,&#8221; asked Tiburcio purely in fantastic
+mischief, &#8220;did you bring such a disturbing man to our happy
+country?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_187'></a>187</span>&#8220;That will
+do,&#8221; Lopez interposed. &#8220;The Señor Murguía could not know at the time
+that this fellow was Rodrigo&#8217;s agent.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And,&#8221; Murguía added eagerly, &#8220;I was helpless, there at
+Mobile. The Confederates could have sunk my boat, and he held an order from
+Jefferson Davis.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s that?&#8221; cried Tiburcio, his humor suddenly vanished.
+&#8220;What&#8217;s that, an order from Jefferson Davis?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio&#8217;s was a new interest, now. He possessed a mind as crooked as
+his vision, and being crooked, it followed unerringly the devious paths of other
+minds. So, they had made a tool of him! Rodrigo and Murguía wanted the Gringo
+shot to help the rebel cause. And he, Tiburcio of the cunning wits, had just
+sworn away, not only the Gringo&#8217;s life, but the possible salvation of the
+Empire. Coming from Jefferson Davis, the Gringo with his mission could mean
+nothing else. Then there was Lopez. Tiburcio did not love this changeling
+Mexican who had red hair. But what could be the mongrel&#8217;s game? Why had he
+freed Murguía, if not to unleash a small terrier at Maximilian&#8217;s heel? Why
+was he trying the American over again, if not to poison a friendly mastiff? And
+why either, if Don Miguel Lopez were not seeking to make friends with the
+Republic? Or perhaps he was at heart a Republican. Thus Don Tiburcio, a loyal
+Imperialist, read the finger posts as he ambled down the crooked path.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, and here was Lopez putting on the final touch. Here he was, the traitor,
+pronouncing the death sentence, and poor impotent Don Tiburcio gnawing his
+baffled rage, as one would say of a villain. The execution was to take place the
+very next morning. His Majesty the Emperor would be asked to approve,
+afterward.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_188'></a>188</span><a id='link_23'></a>CHAPTER XXIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>A Curious Pagan Rite</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;È un peccato che se ne va con l&#8217;acqua benedetta.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Machiavelli</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Storm Centre looked round, about and above. He was as a fly in a bottle.
+A massive rough-hewn door, jammed tight, sealed him within adobe walls two feet
+thick. There was one window, cross-barred, as high as his chin, and only large
+enough to frame his head. They had brought him to the carcel, or dungeon, of the
+hacienda, where peons were constrained to docility. A wide masonry bench against
+the wall approximated a couch, but it was as blocked ice. By the flickering of a
+lone tallow dip, Din Driscoll noted these things with every sense delicately
+attuned to strategy. But his verdict was unpromising.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tough luck!&#8221; he observed.</p>
+
+<p>The adobe was built among the stables that bordered on the pasture, and when
+not needed as a calabozo, it served snugly for the administrador&#8217;s best
+horse. From the one stall came a tentative whinny. Driscoll jumped with delight.
+&#8220;Demijohn! W&#8217;y, you good old scoundrel, you!&#8221; The night
+before, he remembered, he had seen the horse bedded here. &#8220;Say howdy as
+loud as you want,&#8221; he cried, slapping him fondly on the flank,
+&#8220;you&#8217;ll not betray us. <i>That&#8217;s</i> been done
+already.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll was cavalryman to the bone, and it heartened him unaccountably to
+find his horse. If, only, he could have his pistols too! Ever since the Federals
+had cut him off from his furloughs home, those black ugly navies were next to
+the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_189'></a>189</span>nearest in his
+affections. The nearest was the buckskin charger. And now, only the buckskin was
+left, which simply made the dilemma more poignant. The condemned man gazed
+critically at the walls, the rafters, the ground, and shook his head. Supposing
+a chance for escape, could he bring himself to leave Demijohn behind? He got his
+pipe to going, sat down, and frowned ruefully at the candle.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t want to be shot!&#8221; he burst out suddenly, with a
+plaintive twang. Then he grinned. The boy still in him had prompted the
+absurdity. And the rough warrior had laughed at it. Boy and warrior faced each
+other, either surprised that the other existed. The boy flushed resentfully at
+the veteran&#8217;s contemptuous grunt. His eyes still had the boy&#8217;s
+naïvely inquisitive greeting to the world before him. Next, quite abruptly, the
+warrior knew a bitterness against himself. If he could, but once, whimper as the
+lad about to be soundly strapped! He took no pride in his irony, nor in his
+hardened indifference to the visage of death. How far, how very far, had the few
+past years of strife carried him from the youngster who used to gaze so eagerly,
+so expectantly, out on life!</p>
+
+<p>First, he was home from the University, from the pretty, shady little
+Missouri town of Columbia. But the vacation following he spent in bloodily
+helping to drive the Jayhawkers back across the Kansas line. And soon after,
+when the fighting opened up officially, and his State, at the start, had more of
+it than any other battle ground, how many hundreds of times did his life bide by
+the next throw of Fate? During one cruel winter month he had lain with other
+wounded in a hospital dug-out in the river&#8217;s cliff, and there, wanting
+both quinine and food, he would peep through the reeds, only to see the
+merciless Red Legs prying about in search of his hiding place.</p>
+
+<p>And then there was the wild, busily dangerous life with Old Joe&#8217;s
+Brigade, with that brigade of Missouri&#8217;s young firebrands. <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_190'></a>190</span>Once, stretched on the
+prairie, where he had dropped from exhaustion and hunger and loss of blood, the
+Storm Centre awoke to find a Pin Indian stooping over him for his scalp. On that
+occasion, the deft turning of the wrist from the waist outward, with the
+stripping of the pistol&#8217;s hammer simultaneously, had enabled him later to
+restore to relatives certain other scalps already dangling from the
+savage&#8217;s girdle.</p>
+
+<p>And now here he was in an adobe with walls two feet thick, and numerous
+saddle-colored Greasers proposing to shoot him first thing in the morning!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll be blessedly damned,&#8221; he drawled querulously,
+&#8220;I object!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was the warrior who spoke now, and with him the boy joined hands. They
+became as one and the same person. The common foe was without. They would see
+this through together, with grim stoicism, with young-blooded daredeviltry.</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and one of the common foe, bearing a tray, came within.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Don Erastus, how goes it?&#8221; With a pang of homesickness the
+Missourian thought of darkies who carried trays.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Juan Bautista, at Y&#8217;r Mercy&#8217;s orders,&#8221; the Dragoon
+corrected him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don John the Baptist then, como le whack?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bien, señor, bien.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Any theory as to what you&#8217;ve got there?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Y&#8217;r Mercy&#8217;s supper. The Señor Coronel Lopez does not desire that
+Y&#8217;r Mercy should have any complaint.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, none whatever, Johnny, except what I&#8217;m to die of. Set it
+down, here on the feather bed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There were a few native dishes, with a botellon of water and a jar of wine.
+Driscoll tipped the botellon to his lips. His whiskey flask had contained
+poison, though the poison of ink, and as he drank, he pondered on why water
+should not be an antidote for the poisons that lurk in whiskey flasks. <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_191'></a>191</span>Then he wondered why such
+foolish conceits at such times persist in shouldering death itself out of a
+man&#8217;s thoughts. And meanwhile, there stood the precursor of his end, in
+the emblematic person of a very brown John the Baptist. The fellow&#8217;s
+gorgeous red jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a sordid dirty shirt. He was
+officer of the guard, and had a curiosity as to how a Gringo about to be shot
+would act. He waited clumsily, lantern in hand. But he was disappointed. There
+seemed to be nothing out of the commonplace. Some condemned Mexican, though a
+monotonously familiar spectacle, would yet have been more entertaining.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll looked at him over the botellon. That earthen bottle had not left
+the prisoner&#8217;s lips. It had stopped there, poised aloft by an idea.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;See here,&#8221; Driscoll complained, &#8220;where&#8217;s the rest of
+the water I&#8217;m to have?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of what water, señor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;For my bath, of course. Don&#8217;t I die to-morrow?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, but&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here, this wine is too new for me. Drink it yourself, if you
+want.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Many thanks, señor, with pleasure. But a bath? I don&#8217;t
+understand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No? Don&#8217;t you Mexicans ever bathe before you die?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We send for the padre.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s it! And he spiritually washes your sins away? But
+suppose you couldn&#8217;t get your padre?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Indian shuddered. &#8220;Ai, María purísima, one&#8217;s soul would go to
+everlasting torment!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There! Now you can understand why I count so much on ablution.
+It&#8217;s absolution.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The native readily believed. Like others of his class, he thought all
+Protestants pagans, and none Catholic but a Mexican. &#8220;Must be something
+like John the Baptist&#8217;s day, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_192'></a>192</span>verdad, señor?&#8221; he said. &#8220;On that holy
+day, once a year, we must all take a bath.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quite right too,&#8221; Driscoll returned soberly. &#8220;A man should
+go through most anything for his religion.&#8211;Haven&#8217;t noticed my horse
+there, have you, Johnny?&#8221; The guard pricked up his ears. &#8220;Of course
+not,&#8221; Driscoll went on, &#8220;you&#8217;re worrying about my soul
+instead. Well, so am I. We Americans, you know, save our yearly baths for one
+big solemn final one, just before we die. And if I don&#8217;t get mine
+to-night, I&#8217;ll be associating with you unshrived Mexicans hereafter, and
+that would be pretty bad, wouldn&#8217;t it? It&#8217;s what made me think of my
+horse there. That horse, Johnny, is heavy on my soul. He&#8217;s most too heavy
+to wash away. Now, I&#8217;m not going to tell you that I actually stole him;
+but just the same, if a good man like you would take him, after I&#8217;m
+gone&#8211;why, I&#8217;d feel that he was washed off pretty well.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Mexican&#8217;s sympathy grew more keen.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the other sins,&#8221; Driscoll added, &#8220;they&#8217;ll need
+water, and a great plenty, too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Juan Bautista was feeling the buckskin&#8217;s knees. Driscoll longed to
+choke him, but instead, he drove again at the wedge. &#8220;Another thing,
+I&#8217;ll have to leave my money behind.&#8221; He mentioned it casually, but
+his breath stopped while he waited for the effect. The guard straightened.
+Demijohn&#8217;s knees seemed to be all right. He took up the tray, and opened
+the door, yet without a word. Driscoll&#8217;s fist doubled, to strike and run
+for it. Then the fellow spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Does Y&#8217;r Mercy want soap too?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The fist unclenched. &#8220;No,&#8221; came the reply, almost in a joyful
+gasp, &#8220;this is for, for godliness only.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One jar, señor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bless me, no! Two big ones, bigger&#8217;n a barrel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With a parting glance at Demijohn, the guard stole forth to gratify the
+heathen&#8217;s whim.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll give him enough to <i>buy</i> a horse,&#8221; Driscoll
+resolved.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_193'></a>193</span><a id='link_24'></a>CHAPTER XXIV<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Man Who Did Not Want to Be Shot</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='nbox'>
+<p>&#8220;A horse and a man<br />
+Is more than one,<br />
+And yet not many.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Taming of the Shrew</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now Berthe&#8211;why, what in the world&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Jacqueline
+began.</p>
+
+<p>It was her second morning to awake in the hacienda house, and the little
+Bretonne tripped into her room under a starchy mountain heaped high.
+&#8220;Clothes, madame,&#8221; she replied.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hé mais&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They were made yesterday by some of the ranchero women. Madame will
+look?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Calico! Grands dieux!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There were two dresses, one for each girl. The native seamstresses had slyly
+taken stock of mademoiselle the day before, only to discover that a
+&#8220;simple&#8221; frock from Paris was a formidable thing to duplicate. The
+marchioness smiled, and the maid also.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, for example, Berthe, who inspired this?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He did.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The American monsieur, of course.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, the American monsieur, of course! So, monsieur permits himself to
+observe that I need a wardrobe? But you, Berthe, you surely did
+not&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no, madame! I knew nothing, till just now, when the woman brought
+them. The monsieur ordered them yesterday, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_194'></a>194</span>she said. And naturally, madame, if he could have
+found better material, I do not doubt&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, child, I&#8217;ll not be reproached by your even thinking it
+necessary to defend&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And madame will see, too, that they will do nicely.&#8221; She spread
+the frocks on the bed, and began snipping here and there with the scissors and
+taking stitches everywhere. &#8220;By letting it out this way&#8211;voilà, if
+madame will kindly slip it on?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Berthe, you can&#8217;t mean&#8211;Oh nonsense!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>None the less the skirt passed over her head, and the maid&#8217;s deft
+fingers kept on busily. &#8220;And why not?&#8221; she talked as she worked,
+&#8220;unless one likes rags better. And who will see? Only men. Poof, those
+citizens do not know percale from a Parisian toilette.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline began to wax angry with the quiet tyranny of it. She looked at the
+horror and shuddered, then with both hands pushed the calico to the floor,
+gathering up her own lawn skirt instead. It was rather a woebegone lawn skirt.
+She gazed ruefully at the garment, then down at the blue flowering heaped about
+her ankles. Berthe, kneeling over the dress, raised her eyes. The puckered brow
+of her mistress spelled fury, and the maid tried not to laugh, at which
+Jacqueline stamped her foot. &#8220;Berthe,&#8221; she cried, &#8220;shall I
+slap you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mais oui, madame. And madame, I was thinking, what will he say if you
+do not wear it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline gave her a keen look. &#8220;Child, child,&#8221; she exclaimed,
+&#8220;you seem to imagine that whatever <i>he</i> wants&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oui, madame.&#8211;I think you can try it on again now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And madame submitted petulantly. But to herself she had to confess the magic
+in Berthe&#8217;s fingers. Though she pouted over the fresh, rustic effect, yet
+on her slender figure there was witchery in it.</p>
+
+<p>An orderly knocked. He was one of her Austrian escorts come to say that
+everything was ready for departure. She <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_195'></a>195</span>gladly hailed the chance to escape this house of
+mourning. All night long old women in the death chamber had mumbled
+incantations, and the droning was in her ears as she slept. It was not nice.
+Because she could not blot out the inartistic shock of ugly mortality, in very
+self-hate she yearned to get away. The evening before, even while she loaned
+common sense to the crazed household, even while she pressed down the icy
+eyelids, she wondered&#8211;obstinately wondered, despite herself, what the dead
+girl could have thought, what she could have felt, during that one horrid,
+thrilling second of flight downward, and what, in anticipation of the second
+after. It was gruesome, this being always and always the spectator. Yet
+Jacqueline knew that, had it been she herself plunging from the tower, she still
+would have been that spectator. Too well she knew that she would have analyzed
+what she thought and felt. She would have rated even the second before eternity
+in its degree as a frisson; and, no doubt, would have been aware of a voluptuous
+satiety, while anticipating the second after. She hated herself, and she hated
+too the smart, ultra-refined life that had brought her to it. How many of those
+past years, or of the years to come would she not give to shed a few tears
+without interrogating them!</p>
+
+<p>Ney met the two girls under the colonnade. At the steps was the coach and
+eight mules left by Maximilian for their use, and drawn up in stately line were
+Messieurs the Feathers and Furs, as Jacqueline called His Majesty&#8217;s
+Austrian Imperial Guards. When she appeared, out flashed their curved blades.
+The queenly little lady in blue-flowered calico and a rakish Leghorn hat
+returned the salute with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where are the Dragoons, Michel?&#8221; she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Ney did not know. But a Mexican with a crossed eye approached, doffing a
+silver-lettered sombrero. He had been waiting for her, he said. There was time.
+Otherwise he would have forced his way to wherever she was.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_196'></a>196</span>&#8220;Indeed,
+Seigneur Farceur?&#8221; said Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p>She recognized that most sinister of jokers, Don Tiburcio. He was eyeing her
+narrowly, and there was a vigilance in the baleful gleam, as though of late he
+might have been deceived by his fellowmen.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; he coolly proceeded, &#8220;only a few minutes are left
+now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My good man, whatever are you talking about?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And after the few minutes, we&#8217;ll have the shooting. I came to
+invite Your Mercy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shoot whom?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There is but one prisoner.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mean Señor Murguía? The American was acquitted, I
+believe.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the other way, señorita. They were both tried over again,
+and then, the American was condemned.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle,&#8221; ejaculated Ney, &#8220;you are
+deathly&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am not!&#8221; Jacqueline protested furiously. &#8220;It&#8217;s the
+powder.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But Berthe knew better. Her mistress used it not, for all the roguish freckle
+on her nose-tip. Tiburcio, too, was satisfied as to her sudden pallor. She would
+save him the American, he decided. &#8220;Your Mercy had best hasten,&#8221; he
+urged her frankly.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline ran to the end of the portico, from were she could see the
+pasture. Within, a platoon of red jackets were filing toward the carcel.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That scoundrel Lopez!&#8221; exclaimed Tiburcio, &#8220;he has
+advanced the time on us!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Only for an instant did Jacqueline wring her hands.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Michel, your horse!&#8221; she cried. &#8220;Quick, quick! Now hold
+the stirrup!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But Tiburcio was the quicker. He bent his knee, on it she stepped, and up she
+jumped, and kicked her heel as a <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_197'></a>197</span>spur. The charger leaped, and down the road
+clattered girl and horse, she swaying perilously.</p>
+
+<p>It was a hundred yards to the pasture gate, and as much again to the adobe
+inside. When her horse rose in his gallop, she caught glimpses over the wall.
+The Dragoons were drawing up before the carcel. Sentinels tugged at the huge
+wooden door, and Lopez goaded them on. He saw her coming, and would have it over
+with before she could interfere. He bellowed an order, and the shooting squad
+threw up their guns at aim. They would not wait. They would fire on their victim
+the second the door opened. The heavy oak began to give. But that moment
+swinging in through the gate, Jacqueline could see only the carcel&#8217;s blank
+adobe wall. Yet she pictured the man just behind. She pictured the door opening.
+And&#8211;too late! Dieu, the muskets had volleyed already!</p>
+
+<p>But&#8211;what made the shots scatter so? Scattered and flurried, they
+sounded. And no wonder! She saw a miracle in the doing. It was the most
+astounding sight of all her life long. Straight through the blank adobe wall,
+for all its two feet of thickness, she beheld a man on a great-boned yellow
+horse, both man and horse plunge mid a sudden cloud of dust, plunge squarely
+into the light of day.</p>
+
+<p>The dumfounded shooting squad had blazed crazily against the half-open door;
+and for the critical quarter minute following, their weapons were harmless.
+Other Dragoons ran wildly out into the pasture, and as wildly fired at the
+horseman. Only one of the sentinels had happened to be on the side of the magic
+exit, but as the solid wall dissolved into a powdered cloud and the apparition
+hurtled past him, down upon his head crashed a gigantic water jar filled with
+earth. He who had sympathized with pagan ablutions the night before stood now
+with mouth agape. Some heathen god was having a hand in this, he knew.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline wheeled to Driscoll&#8217;s side as he dashed toward <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_198'></a>198</span>her. He was coatless. His
+woolen shirt was open at the neck, the sleeves were rolled to the elbows. His
+slouch hat sat upon the back of his head. The short cropped curls, gray with
+dust, fluttered against the brim. She had never seen a face so buoyantly
+happy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Morning, Miss Jack-leen! Race you to the river?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They galloped through the gate together. He was for turning down the road,
+but she blocked his horse with her own. During a second the flight was
+stopped.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m in a hurry just now,&#8221; he panted, but made no effort to
+get by her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Up that way!&#8221; she cried. &#8220;Up that way, past the
+House!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But those pretty boys&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Austrians? They&#8217;ll not stop you, I promise.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then it&#8217;s our move. Careful, little girl, don&#8217;t
+fall!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline, waving her arm, signaled the Feathers and Furs to make room, and
+Tiburcio and Ney saw to it that they did. Man and girl raced through them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wait here, Michel!&#8221; called Jacqueline, leaving Ney still with
+thumb to cap at salute. Tiburcio gazed after them.</p>
+
+<p>Lopez ran across the pasture to the colonnade. His red face was redder than
+ever before. Tiburcio sardonically regarded him. Lopez glared at Ney.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why aren&#8217;t you in pursuit?&#8221; he demanded hotly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you, monsieur?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I, and I! Who are you to question me, señor? Every girth has been
+cut!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Caramba, mi coronel,&#8221; cried Tiburcio in dismay, &#8220;you
+don&#8217;t say so!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And it will take ten minutes to tie up the cords, while you, you,
+Señor Frenchman, you stand there, your men mounted and ready! Obey me, I tell
+you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Can&#8217;t,&#8221; said Ney doggedly. &#8220;Against
+orders.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Orders? Whose orders?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_199'></a>199</span>&#8220;Of
+Mademoiselle la Marquise, monsieur.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who runs away with a convict. A fit commander, por Dios!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Off came the Frenchman&#8217;s gauntlet, but he paused in the gesture of
+striking. Too quick at this, and not enough at wits, he might ruin her
+plans.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As fit,&#8221; he retorted instead, &#8220;as another who lets
+prisoners escape. I advise Monsieur the Colonel to look to his
+girths.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_200'></a>200</span><a id='link_25'></a>CHAPTER XXV<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Person on the Other Horse</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Yet am I sure of one pleasùre,<br />
+And shortly, it is this:<br />
+That, where ye be, me seemeth, pardè,<br />
+I could not fare amiss.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Ballad of the Nut Brown Maid.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Din Driscoll had never remotely imagined that there could be such
+intoxication in a horseback ride. The person on the other horse made for the
+difference. How the joy of her filled him that instant of his bursting through
+the black prison wall into the bright morning of the world! She, the splendid
+first thing to gladden his eyes! Could liberty be really so glorious? Ravishing
+horsewoman, she was coming to save him. He had supposed her on her way to
+Mexico, and &#8217;twas she whom he saw first of all.</p>
+
+<p>And now, she rode beside him. They two, they were riding together, alone. The
+smell of the wild free air of the universe thrilled them both with an exquisite
+recklessness. Vague, limitless, subtle in mystery, the seduction of it was
+ineffable. Out of the corner of his eye he peeped at her. But wasn&#8217;t she
+perched entrancingly on that dragoon saddle, wasn&#8217;t she, though? The
+richly heavy coils of burnished copper had loosened, and they were very
+disconcerting in their suggestion of flowing wealth. If they <i>would</i> but
+fall about her shoulders! And the lace from the slanting hat brim, and the
+velvet patch near the dimple&#8211;the velvet patch called an assassin.
+And&#8211;what dress was that? Flowered calico? Yes, and light blue. His cheeks
+burned as of one surprised in crime, but the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_201'></a>201</span> self-possessed young woman herself was oblivious.
+So was it this, a blue flowered gown, that made her so suddenly tangible, so
+tangible and maddening? The haughty Parisienne of imperial courts was gone. In
+fact, she had become so distractingly tangible that&#8211;well, he didn&#8217;t
+know. But a lump got into his throat. She might be a Missouri girl, this moment.
+And there came to him the vision of one, of a Missouri girl molding biscuits,
+patting them, and her arms were bared, in a simple piquancy just like
+Jacqueline&#8217;s now. He even saw the pickaninnies in the shade of the porch
+outside, worshiping the real Missouri girl from the very whites of their eyes.
+How he had loved to tease her! He could not help it; she was so daintily prim.
+That he should thus think of his sister, the while gazing on the one-time gilded
+butterfly&#8211;to say the least, it was a pertinent comment on the transmuting
+magic that lurks in blue flowered percale.</p>
+
+<p>They slowed to a trot.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur is my prisoner, yes,&#8221; said she in her wonderful
+English.</p>
+
+<p>He took the other meaning. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know&#8211;<i>yet</i>,&#8221;
+he returned soberly.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed, and he realized that he had spoken aloud.</p>
+
+<p>He turned on himself in dismay. &#8220;What&#8217;s the matter with
+me?&#8221; he muttered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I think, monsieur,&#8221; said Jacqueline demurely, &#8220;that I have
+the guess.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You haven&#8217;t&#8211;you can&#8217;t guess either! I don&#8217;t
+know myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just the same, I wish I knew so well my chances for heaven.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you&#8217;re mistaken, I tell you. I&#8217;m not!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not what, monsieur?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In, in&#8211;w&#8217;y, in love.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s laughter was the merriest peal. In the end <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_202'></a>202</span>he half grinned. Little
+use trying to convince the little witch! He had much to do convincing
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>On the farther slope of a hill where coffee grew and the giant sheltering
+banana hid the road, they paused at a trail that crossed the highway and wound
+on down toward the Pánuco river, where tropical stuff for Tampico was
+transferred from burros to dugout barges. Jacqueline listened. There were no
+sounds of pursuit as yet, nor was there any one in sight. Making up her mind,
+she changed to the path. Driscoll followed, with a delight in this new
+leadership over him.</p>
+
+<p>When they gained the river, she stopped again, and he did too.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you must go, on, on!&#8221; she protested. &#8220;They may not be
+deceived, no. They may have you to overtake here.&#8221; She held out her hand.
+&#8220;There, this path, you follow it to Tampico. Good bye. Yes, yes, you have
+not one minute!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll took the little gauntleted hand readily enough. He saw that the
+lines of her face were drawn, but her manner was inexorable.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How do you like your dress?&#8221; he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>Had she been on her feet, she would have stamped one of them.
+&#8220;Monsieur,&#8221; she cried, &#8220;here is no time to observe the
+replenishment of a lady&#8217;s wardrobe. Do you go? I insist. I wish you bon
+voyage to your own country, monsieur.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But it&#8217;s so far away. I reckon I&#8217;d better rest a spell
+first. A month or so, prob&#8217;bly.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She watched him clamber down and tie Demijohn to the low branch of a live oak
+on the river&#8217;s bank.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There you are, getting stubborn again,&#8221; she said. But the lines
+in her face had vanished.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course I mean to see you back to your friends,&#8221; he
+explained.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Merci bien. But you will not. You will have this river straight to
+Tampico. I say yes!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_203'></a>203</span>She turned her
+horse as she spoke, whereat he started to remount his own.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I think, sir&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; she began haughtily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The road is free.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, why have you to be so, so quarrelsome?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The temptation, I reckon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You really will go back with me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I might be going back along about the same time. It&#8217;s a public
+trail.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then <i>I</i> will stay, and you <i>must</i>! I will not permit you to
+go back there now. I will see that you do wait here so long until Lopez has the
+time to start to Mexico after you. Then you will be behind him. Have the
+goodness to hold my bridle. I think I shall take me a rest a little
+also.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Together they sat on a huge live-oak root and watched the sluggish Pánuco
+flow by.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No hurry now,&#8221; Driscoll observed comfortably. &#8220;Our scarlet
+upholstered colonel won&#8217;t get away for years yet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Years, at least, were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her quaintly
+inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned it in London
+long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her father played
+France&#8217;s diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers, then, was as broad
+as Mayfair, and to the Missourian doubly foreign, and doubly alluring.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I cannot understand,&#8221; she said, &#8220;why it is the Dragoons
+have not followed you immediately?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tibby&#8217;s the reason, I reckon. That Tibby is a deep
+one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She made him explain, and he told her. The blackmailing humorist, Tiburcio,
+had paid him a visit at his dungeon window during the night. Being chief witness
+for the prosecution, Tiburcio could pass the sentry unchallenged.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_204'></a>204</span>&#8220;Come for
+your money?&#8221; Driscoll had inquired, and Tiburcio seemed hurt.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is the matter,&#8221; Tiburcio demanded, &#8220;with pointing a
+revolver at the Señor Americano right now, and making him deliver?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll had not figured out what the objections might be, but he reckoned
+some would materialize.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; said Tiburcio, &#8220;I&#8217;m not doing it, and why?
+Simply because I want to know if you care to escape?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y,&#8221; returned Driscoll, &#8220;I&#8217;ll think it over,
+and let you know in the morning,&#8221; at which lack of confidence Tiburcio was
+more hurt than ever.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the use,&#8221; Driscoll objected, &#8220;they&#8217;d
+catch me again?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not if I fixed their horses, and if I do, will you promise to get
+out?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And thus the bargain had stood, and thus it was fulfilled, though at the last
+the anxious Tiburcio had called in Jacqueline to help.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now,&#8221; said the marchioness, settling herself for a treat,
+&#8220;I <i>must</i> know. Tame for me the miracle, explain it. I cannot longer
+hold my curiosity. But it was fine&#8211;exquis&#8211;however you have done
+it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Weren&#8217;t they a surprised lot, though?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the miracle, monsieur! The miracle!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, it was this way. Being on the yawning brink&#8211;as old Meagre
+Shanks, friend of mine, would say&#8211;I figured it out that lacking in
+godliness, I&#8217;d try to get the next best thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please, monsieur!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That I&#8217;d try to get a bath.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of dust and mud, for example?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At that Driscoll ceased all miracle taming and brushed himself off. But,
+putting him back into his dungeon, one will recall how he plotted to obtain two
+jars of water. This water <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_205'></a>205</span>he used simply to soften the hard, sun-baked adobes.
+First he hung his coat over the window. A suspicious guard naturally wanted to
+know why, and Driscoll appeared at the bars stripped to the waist. To keep out
+the cold air while he bathed, he said, and his teeth chattered. Then he went
+back to work. He handled his precious water with desperate economy. He began at
+the exposed end of one adobe brick, soaking it as needed and digging it out with
+a chip of earthenware knocked off one of the jars. The wall was two adobe
+lengths in thickness, but after he had gotten out his first brick, it was easy,
+by tugging and kicking, to tear out the others of the inside tier, since luckily
+they did not dovetail in with the outer ones. Soon he had an arch-shaped niche
+in the wall almost as high as his head when mounted on Demijohn. The really
+tedious part remained, and it was an all night job.</p>
+
+<p>To deepen the niche without breaking through, he had to scrape it out
+piecemeal, wetting the dried mud as he toiled. He measured carefully just how
+much of the thickness to leave, because the weed stalks in the adobe could not
+be trusted to hold too thin a crust, and also he had to take care that the water
+did not soak entirely through and make a tell-tale blot on the outside when
+daylight should come. It was an infinitely laborious task, and even with
+completion at last, there was yet the question&#8211;which would break first,
+bone or masonry?</p>
+
+<p>But he would learn when he should dash his horse&#8217;s skull and his own
+against the shell that remained. He saddled Demijohn, filled an empty jar with
+the soft earth of his excavations, and waited. His dramatic appearance at the
+instant of the door&#8217;s opening was not a coincidence. It was minute
+calculation. Already mounted, he faced the wall, with the heavy jar poised over
+his head in both hands, his spurs drawn back to strike. He waited until
+sentinels and shooting squad had gathered at the door. He waited to draw their
+fire, to <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_206'></a>206</span>empty
+their muskets. But he did not wait until the door should open enough to give
+them unimpeded aim. In the second of its opening he drove back the spurs, hurled
+the jar against the wall, and&#8211;crashed through his dungeon as easily as
+breaking a sucked egg.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; demanded Jacqueline eagerly, &#8220;how is it you did
+feel?&#8221; She was disappointed that the personal equation had had so little
+prominence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t recollect,&#8221; said Driscoll, puzzled, &#8220;there
+was nothing hurting especially.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no! Your sensations facing death, then escaping?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He brightened. &#8220;W&#8217;y yes,&#8221; he replied, happy to catch her
+meaning. &#8220;I felt toler&#8217;ble busy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She sighed despairingly. Yet there was plenty left her for wonderment, and in
+it she revelled.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ingenuity!&#8221; she mused. &#8220;I declare, I believe the first
+human being to stand up on his hind legs must have been an American. It simply
+occurred to him one day that he didn&#8217;t need all fours for walking, and
+that he might as well use his before-feet for something else.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And a Frenchman, Miss Jack-leen?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She flung up her hands.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>He!</i>&#8221; she exclaimed. &#8220;If ever a compatriot of mine
+had gotten that idea into his&#8211;how you say?&#8211;pate, would he not carry
+it out to the idiotic limit, yes? He? <i>He</i> would try to walk without any
+feet whatever, and use <i>all</i> of them for other things. Already you have
+seen him doing the, the pugilat&#8211;the box&#8211;with every one of his fours.
+Voilà!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But time was passing. Lopez had certainly repaired his girths by this time.
+Driscoll arose. &#8220;There&#8217;s a shorter way back,&#8221; he announced.
+&#8220;The river junction can&#8217;t be far down stream, and I&#8217;ll wait
+for you there, Miss Jack-leen, while you scout on ahead to the hacienda house.
+If all&#8217;s clear, you signal and I will advance with the heavy
+cavalry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_207'></a>207</span>&#8220;C&#8217;est
+bien, mon colonel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whatever that means, I hope it ain&#8217;t mutiny.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At best it was only mock compliance. Jacqueline also knew that time was
+passing, but she had not mentioned the fact. Now the reason transpired. She
+harked back on their separation, with a grave earnestness and a saddened air of
+finality. He was to leave her here, she said. He was to go back to his own
+country. How badly had his reception fared so far? Why not, then, leave Mexico
+to ingratitude, and have done? The romantic land of roses was notoriously a
+blight to hopes. Why should he seek to thrive despite the mysterious curse that
+seemed to hover over all things like a deadly miasma?</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll shook his head. &#8220;You know I have come to see
+Maximilian.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you are under sentence. You will lose your life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Miss Jack-leen, you said a while back that I was your prisoner. You
+have the Austrian escort. All right. You will deliver me to the Emperor,&#8221;
+and he waved his hand as though the matter was arranged.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But monsieur,&#8221; she cried, &#8220;may not others have plans as
+vital as yours? And, perhaps&#8211;yes, you interfere.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He did interfere, in grimmest truth. Leaving the Sphinx of the Tuileries, she
+had come with her mission, and with an idea, too, of the obstacles that must be
+vanquished. But here, almost at landing, she encountered a barrier left out of
+her calculations, and which alone, unaided, she had to surmount. It was the
+surrender of the Confederacy, and what this upsetting complication meant against
+her own errand was embodied in the man before her. For in him lay the results of
+the Surrender as affecting the Mexican empire. In a word, he brought aid for
+Maximilian at the moment when Maximilian might be discouraged enough to give way
+to France; when the forgetful prince might gladly leave all to the generous
+nation which had placed him on his throne and which by him <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_208'></a>208</span>was cheated of the reward of its costly
+empire building. Should the French threaten to withdraw, should they in reality
+withdraw, still he would not abdicate, not with Confederate veterans to replace
+the pantalons rouges. Like the dog of the fable, Maximilian would cling to the
+manger.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oui, oui, monsieur,&#8221; she repeated sharply, &#8220;you
+interfere!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In that case,&#8221; said Driscoll quietly, &#8220;I will leave you at
+the river junction. When I see that you are safely at the
+hacienda&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will go back to America?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That need not worry you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then you are <i>not</i> going back, back to your own country?&#8221; He
+would keep on to the City alone. She would have no chance to intercept him.
+After all Fate had been good to her&#8211;no, cruel!&#8211;to cast him in her
+path. &#8220;You might find the Austrian escort safer than going alone,&#8221;
+she said enticingly.</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated. What all this was about, he could not imagine. He knew nothing,
+naturally, of the dark intrigues of an enigmatical adventurer far away in the
+Tuileries, nor how they could affect him. And so he put away as absurd the fancy
+that she in her turn might interfere with him. Besides, he was tempted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a go!&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>She for her part was thinking, hoping, rather, that perhaps she was mistaken.
+Perhaps he only bore the offer of a paltry few hundred, a handful of homeseekers
+from his regiment. She hoped so. She would have prayed for it, had praying
+occurred to her.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_209'></a>209</span><a id='link_26'></a>CHAPTER XXVI<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Strangest Avowal of Love</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Nae living man I&#8217;ll love again,<br />
+Since that my lovely knight is slain.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Lament of the Border Widow.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Back once more at the hacienda, Driscoll recovered his coat still hanging
+over the dungeon window. Lopez would have called it insolence, had he been there
+instead of scouring the country toward Mexico. Jacqueline and Berthe settled
+themselves in the traveling coach left for their comfort by Maximilian.
+Driscoll&#8217;s effects, including his gray cape-coat and the bundle he had
+carried behind his saddle, were found in his room at the House. Jacqueline took
+them into the carriage with her, along with that absurd little valise that she
+had brought from the ship for an hour&#8217;s jaunt on shore. Driscoll rode with
+Ney and the Austrians, and was once again headed toward the capital, still sixty
+fair Mexican leagues southward.</p>
+
+<p>For six days it was an uneventful journey, seemingly. By day there were
+sierras, and valleys, and wayside crosses marking violent deaths. By night they
+accepted either ranchero hospitality or put up at some village mesón. But within
+himself, adventures were continuous and varying for the Storm Centre. He could
+not account for the strange, curious elation that possessed him, especially when
+Jacqueline would take Ney&#8217;s horse and ride at his side, perhaps for an
+hour, when the sun was not too hot. Driscoll never knew how long these occasions
+lasted. He did not know that they were long <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_210'></a>210</span>at all. As a matter of fact, he had ceased using
+ordinary standards of measurement. The universe, and sordid accessories such as
+time, radiated entirely about one little velvet patch near a dimple
+satellite.</p>
+
+<p>There came to be long silences between them as they rode, either boy or girl
+content to have it so, and neither the least bit lonesome. And they talked too,
+naturally, though this was not so significant. She would slyly provoke him. To
+her mind, there was never anyone quite so satisfying at a quarrel. She would
+pause in delighted expectancy to see his eyes grow big when she thrust, and then
+to see his mouth twitch at the corners as he caught her blade on his own keen
+wit. She had forgotten that he was rustic, except for the added zest it gave.
+Nor was there a false note in him, so happily and totally unconscious was he of
+self. And as for a certain gaucherie, that was the spice to his whole
+manner.</p>
+
+<p>They talked of many things; rather, she made him talk. She learned that his
+name was John, as hers was Jeanne, and she wanted to know why the horse was
+Demijohn.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because, Miss Jack-leen,&#8221; he answered, &#8220;he&#8217;s my
+other half, and sometimes the better one, too.&#8221; He remembered that once,
+when he had drooped limp over the saddle, the buckskin had carried him out of
+the fighting to the rear. &#8220;You see,&#8221; he added, &#8220;we were both
+colts when our little shindy up there broke loose.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you both went? Ah, Monsieur the Patriot, you did go, you did
+affront the tyrant? Yes!&#8221; She had the explorer&#8217;s eagerness. Perhaps
+she might discover in him her own especial demon of self-introspection.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;N-o,&#8221; he replied, &#8220;I reckon we went mostly for the fun of
+the thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fi donc!&#8221; she cried. &#8220;But wait till you are old. Oh yes,
+we have them too, those blessed, over-petted veterans of the Grande Armée. They
+are in the Hôtel des Invalides, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_211'></a>211</span>with medals to diagnose their glory. Oh, là, là, but
+there&#8217;s a pleasant fashion! The people, the politicians, they forget the
+hot blood that fought simply because there were pretty blows to strike. They see
+only the gray hairs. &#8216;Honneur aux patriotes!&#8217; You wait, monsieur. You,
+too, will be made into the hero, ex post facto, and you will believe it
+yourself. Yes, with the wolves, one learns to howl.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;N-o,&#8221; said the young Confederate, &#8220;we&#8211;we got
+licked.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They talked&#8211;he rather&#8211;of Missouri. He was not reluctant to have
+stirred the memories of his home, not with one who could listen as she did. In
+his heart settled a warmth that was good, and the glow of it shone on his face.
+He became aware that the gray eyes were upon him, taking conscious note of his
+hair, his mouth, his chin, as though she were really seeing him for the first
+time. What made a girl do that way? He felt queerly, it being thus brought to
+him that he had awakened interest in a woman, but the tribute she paid him was
+ennobling, and a deep thankfulness, though to whom or for what he had not the
+least idea, made more kindly and good the cheery warmth around his heart. The
+gray eyes had never sparkled on him in coquetry as they sometimes did on other
+men, and now they were grave and sweet. It was a phase of Jacqueline that only
+her maid had known.</p>
+
+<p>The marquise gathered that Missour-<i>i</i>, as she called it, was an
+exceedingly strange and fascinating region. She learned that it was a state,
+like a department in France, like her own Bourbonnais for instance. But there
+the comparison ended. The rest was all startling versatility. For the
+inhabitants had not only taken both sides during the Civil War, but through
+their governor had proclaimed themselves an independent republic into the
+bargain. They must be unusual citizens, those Missourians.</p>
+
+<p>But they were strangest because they did not seem to be actors. They did not
+refine living into a cult, with every <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_212'></a>212</span>pleasure and pain classified and weighed out and
+valued. No, they actually lived. It was hard to realize this, but in the end she
+did, and with ever increasing wonder, with also a beginning of envy and hunger.
+But there was still another thing even more indefinable. It centered in the word
+&#8220;home,&#8221; which she knew neither in French nor Spanish, but which she
+came to know now, as its meaning grew upon her. It was more than a
+&#8220;maison&#8221; or a &#8220;casa,&#8221; or a &#8220;chez nous.&#8221; It
+was a manner of temple. And the high priest there was a grim lord. How very
+grim, indeed! There was no compromise, no blinking, no midway gilded dais
+between the marriage altar and the basest filth. As grim, this was, as that
+original Puritanism which has become a synonym of American backbone. Grim, yes;
+but the woman there, where the high priest blinked not, was a divinity. She was
+a divinity in the tenderest and most devoted sense of the word. And the
+Puritanism was purity enshrined, as a simple matter of course. The longing, if
+only to know more of this odd country, rose in her mysteriously, and stronger
+and stronger.</p>
+
+<p>When on one occasion she went back to the coach, she found that Berthe also
+was enjoying the change to horseback. Jacqueline was glad of it. Now she could
+be alone, and she believed that she wanted to think. But she could not pin down
+what she wanted to think about; because, no doubt, there was so very much.
+Instead, she looked vacantly at the Storm Centre&#8217;s cartridge belt and
+pistols on the seat in front of her. They were grim, too, these playthings of a
+boy.</p>
+
+<p>Dupin had left the weapons with Ney, back at the hacienda, and Ney had turned
+them over to Jacqueline as to the real strategic chief of the expedition. And
+Jacqueline had kept them, perhaps to look at, perhaps because of a whim that a
+prisoner should not be armed. She liked to hear Driscoll mourn for them, not
+knowing where they were, and she held back the surprise as one lingers before an
+anticipated pleasure. She <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_213'></a>213</span>picked up the great, black revolvers with a
+woman&#8217;s fascinated respect for the harsh, eternal male of her species, who
+is primeval and barbaric yet, and ever will be, to hold his mate his very own.
+Her touch was gingerly, but there was a caress in her fingers on the ugly
+things.</p>
+
+<p>She lifted the belt. How heavy of metal it was! Idly, she thought she would
+count the leaden missiles. When finally she laid the belt aside, a bullet
+remained in her lap. It had fallen there out of its shell. Starting to fit the
+bullet in again, she suddenly dropped both bullet and cartridge. Her hands
+trembled. This particular shell contained no powder. But it contained a tightly
+rolled slip of oiled paper. The cartridge was a dummy, a wee strong box for some
+vital document.</p>
+
+<p>It was not for scruples against looking that she paused. On the contrary, it
+was that she must look, absolutely, in sacred, patriotic duty bound, that
+finally decided&#8211;nay, compelled her to look. Still she hesitated before
+drawing out the paper. She dreaded what it might tell her. Concealed thus, and
+revealed only by a hazard, the paper held, she felt certain, the secret and the
+significance of the American&#8217;s errand to Mexico. And she did not want to
+know. She reviled bitterly the cruel chance that had thrust it on her.</p>
+
+<p>She read. The paper was a communication addressed to the Emperor Maximilian
+by the Confederate generals of the Trans-Mississippi department. Foreseeing
+Lee&#8217;s surrender, they had gathered from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, at
+a place in the latter state named Marshall, and there they had decided that they
+would not surrender. They would seek homes and a country elsewhere, swords in
+hand. At this meeting, which had been inspired by Gen. Joe Shelby, they had
+deposed the cautious general commanding, Kirby Smith, and they had put in his
+stead Simon Bolivar Buckner. The Trans-Mississippi department numbered fifty
+thousand men. There would also be fugitives from Lee&#8217;s and Johnson&#8217;s
+corps, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_214'></a>214</span>besides
+Jefferson Davis in person, should he contrive to pass the Federal lines. Many
+thousands of veterans would shortly be marching across the Rio Grande. In Texas,
+at the Confederate arsenals and depositories, they would seize what they needed:
+guns, ammunition, horses, provisions, money. In Mexico they would become
+citizens, and they would defend their new homes against outlawry, rebellion, or
+invasion. The signatory generals prayed the Emperor Maximilian to consider this,
+and &#8220;to do it quick.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline put the letter back in the cartridge, and everything looked as
+before. But no genii, once out, can ever quite be bottled up again. That stray
+bullet had wounded her to the heart.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As bad as fifty thousand!&#8221; she cried half aloud. &#8220;And they
+will become citizens, too&#8211;Mon Dieu, <i>that</i> is a nation!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With them Maximilian would have a people behind him, and his throne would be
+as a rock. He could, and most certainly would, disdain the French army of
+occupation with its thirty thousand bayonets. The French might go back home. He
+would speed them cheerfully, and henceforth be Emperor in fact.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But our treasure and our dead,&#8221; sighed Jacqueline bitterly,
+&#8220;we cannot take <i>them</i> back. No, nor our hopes, though they weigh
+little enough now, for that matter. Oh dear, and <i>I</i> am one of those
+hopes!&#8211;Help me Heaven, else I shall hate my own country. Oh, I must be
+true!&#8211;Now, <i>why</i> couldn&#8217;t those Missourians have
+sent&#8211;someone else?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That evening she held a pen, but it would not move, not while her thoughts
+were upon it. So, by sheer will, she nerved herself not to think, and wrote
+mechanically. She wrote a message to Lopez, and another to Dupin, and yet a
+third. The third brought the tears long before it was finished. An Austrian took
+the first two, and rode all that night. She kept the other one herself.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_215'></a>215</span>This was the
+fifth day of their journey since leaving Murguía&#8217;s hacienda. They had
+taken pains to keep behind Lopez. Their pursuer, ahead of them, had not made
+twenty miles the first day, for he had delayed in order to search here and
+there. But the second day, he had evidently accepted failure, and hastened on to
+overtake the Emperor. The Emperor himself, after traveling constantly for a
+night and a day, had rested a night and half a day to reflect on his late
+energy, and thereafter he was proceeding as roadside ovations would permit.
+Accordingly on this, the fifth night, Lopez was close behind the Emperor, and
+both were within a day of the capital, and less than a day ahead of Driscoll,
+Jacqueline and Ney.</p>
+
+<p>All the next day Jacqueline kept to her coach. She was cross or nervously
+excited or melancholy, and by erratic turns in every mood that was hopelessly
+downcast, until her maid became well nigh frantic. At first Ney would hover near
+in helpless concern, but she ordered him away angrily. However, the storm broke
+at last when Driscoll reined in and waited at the roadside. She could see him
+through the little front pane of glass as the carriage drew nearer, and she
+watched with a fierce hunger in her eyes. All the time she stirred in greater
+agitation, and her breath came more and more quickly. At the very last moment,
+when a second later he might have seen her, she sprang to the window, looked
+once again, then in a fury snatched at the shade and jerked it down. Driscoll
+paused uncertain, but wheeled and galloped back to the head of the column.
+Berthe turned to her mistress. She was lying weakly against the cushions,
+staring at nothing and panting for air.</p>
+
+<p>Toward dusk they reached Tuxtla, a little pueblo on the highroad set mid
+maguey farms that made the rolling hill slopes of Anahuac look like a
+giant&#8217;s cabbage patch. In the distance, under two snow-capped peaks
+beyond, the mosaic domes and sandstone towers and painted walls of the capital
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_216'></a>216</span>glittered in the
+setting sun like some picture of an Arabian city vaguely known to memory. The
+travelers were not a dozen miles from their destination, but Berthe announced
+that madame her mistress would rest at Tuxtla for the night.</p>
+
+<p>The Austrians were quartered in the village, and Ney and Driscoll found
+accommodations for the two girls and themselves farther down the road, at the
+house of a maguey grower whom they persuaded to vacate. While it was still light
+Driscoll amused himself strolling alone between the rows of the great century
+plants. Under their leaves, curving high above his head, he watched peons with
+gourds suck out the honey water from the onion-like bulbs into goatskin bags.
+After a time he wandered through the hacendado&#8217;s primitive distillery and
+on back to the house, with a feeling for supper.</p>
+
+<p>As he entered, he heard the clanking of a sabre in the dark room. He thought
+nothing of it, but almost at once something cut through the air and a noose fell
+over him. He swung round, but the rope jerked tight about his knees, and he
+lurched and swayed as an oak before the axe. He struck with his fist and had a
+groan for reward, but a second lariat circled his shoulders and bound his arms
+to his body. As he went down under the weight of men, the shutters were thrown
+open, and he looked up into the red-lidded eyes of Colonel Lopez. A troop of
+cavalry was passing on the road outside, and he caught the sound of wheels
+departing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You hear?&#8221; said Lopez. &#8220;The marquesa is going to the City,
+having decided not to wait for you. But she leaves a note, pour prendre congé,
+eh? You will perhaps have time to read it before the shooting.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Once more Driscoll found himself in an adobe with a sputtering candle for
+company. But he also had her note. It was the third of the messages which she
+had written the night before.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_217'></a>217</span>&#8220;Monsieur,&#8221; it began, &#8220;I cannot
+let you die without telling you that it was I who betrayed&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He jumped to his feet. &#8220;Oh&#8211;the pythoness!&#8221; he breathed
+fervently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8211;&#8211;who betrayed you,&#8221; the letter read. &#8220;That you know
+this, monsieur, that your last thought shall be a curse at me, such will be my
+punishment. It is a self inflicted one, because you need not have known what I
+have done. The telling of this to you is my scourge, but it is not penitence.
+Worse and more unbearable is my sorrow that the penitence will never come, that
+I can feel no remorse, no more than if some inevitable thing, like the fever,
+had taken you. I would always do again what I have just done; as pitiless as I
+must be for you, Fate is for me. Your life, monsieur, is but added to the
+hundreds already snuffed out in this country for France&#8217;s sake. Those
+hundreds are my countrymen, and you, if you lived till to-morrow, would make
+<i>their</i> offering useless. I have tried to save you, monsieur, but you would
+not permit. You would not return to your own country, and&#8211;there was no
+other way. But do not think there will come emissaries in your place. Do not
+believe that I would so send you to death needlessly. There will be no
+emissaries after you. Your Confederates shall know that Maximilian&#8217;s court
+martial executed you, and is it that your compatriotes will then desire to help
+Maximilian? Believe&#8211;only believe, monsieur&#8211;that it is a cruel duty
+not permitting that I shall listen to my heart. If you but knew, if you but
+knew&#8211;and you shall know. Monsieur Driscoll&#8211;oh, mon chevalier, it is
+that I love you. There, know then, dear heart cheri, the enormity of my
+sacrifice. Know the necessity of it. Know that I envy you, for you are going,
+and I must stay, all alone, without you. Mon bien aimé, <i>without you</i>,
+through all my long life!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had signed it simply, &#8220;Jacqueline.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again Driscoll was on his feet. He paced up and down the <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_218'></a>218</span>room. &#8220;There&#8217;s one
+thing,&#8221; he muttered, &#8220;and that is, there&#8217;s nothing between her
+and Maximilian, not when she&#8217;s keeping help from him.&#8221; And on he
+paced, his fists opening and clenching. Suddenly he came to a dead halt.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;By God,&#8221; he cried, &#8220;I&#8217;m not going to be shot, no
+sir, not now, not after&#8211;not after this letter!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here was neither boy nor warrior. It was very much in the way of a lover.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_219'></a>219</span><a id='link_27'></a>CHAPTER XXVII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Berthe</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Il y a deux êtres en nous: l&#8217;acteur et le spectateur.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Sienkiewicz.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The same evening, though two hours later, a public hack entered an outlying
+quarter of the City of Mexico called San Cosme, and drew up before a white
+mansion with beautiful gardens. A young girl with soft brown hair and gentle
+eyes got out, ran to the door, and brought down the ponderous knocker so
+terrifically that it abashed her, for all her present agitation. To the flunkey,
+who noted the public hack and was reproachful, she said, &#8220;I must see His
+Excellency. Here, I have written my name on Mademoiselle d&#8217;Aumerle&#8217;s card.
+I am her maid. Say to Monsieur le Maréchal that he will regret it, if I do not
+see him at once. Quick now, you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If possessed of guile, Berthe could not have done better. With
+Jacqueline&#8217;s card, used only because it had a blank side, her admittance
+was certain and immediate.</p>
+
+<p>She passed the lackey into a luxurious apartment, Marshal Bazaine&#8217;s
+private cabinet. At one end there was a Japanese screen with a lamp behind, and
+at intervals came the sound of someone turning the leaves of a book. But Berthe
+thought solely of her errand. The marshal, thick necked, heavy cheeked and
+stocky, was standing, waiting for her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So,&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;milady is arrived, eh, and you bring
+me her commands?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, Your Excellency, my mistress does not know that I am here. When
+she learns, she will dismiss me. I&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_220'></a>220</span>The marshal of
+France grew cold. &#8220;It was a decoy then, the card you used?&#8221; he
+interrupted. &#8220;And was that one also, young woman, when you threatened that
+I should regret&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will indeed regret, monsieur, if you do not let me speak.
+There&#8217;s a mistake to correct if&#8211;if it&#8217;s not too
+late.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The chief of the Army of Occupation shrugged his shoulders until the back of
+his neck folded over itself. He had been correcting mistakes ever since
+Maximilian&#8217;s landing. But he was a child of the people himself, and the
+distress in her eyes made him patient. &#8220;Well, what is it?&#8221; he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is an American. They will shoot him, monsieur!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, one who interests the young person now before me, eh?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I want you to stop them, monsieur! I want&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Child, child, whom am I to stop?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Colonel Lopez, monsieur. The American escaped once, but mademoiselle
+gave him up again. He&#8217;d saved mademoiselle&#8217;s life, too. And
+mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The veteran soldier rubbed his finger tips on his bald, bullet-like head.
+&#8220;He saves her, and she gives him to Lopez. He must be an important species
+of American!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes, monsieur.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, don&#8217;t worry. His Majesty will pardon your friend
+to-morrow&#8211;if,&#8221; he added to himself, &#8220;only from
+habit.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But Lopez will shoot him before the Emperor knows.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The marshal had shrewd eyes, and now they opened wide. &#8220;Getting more
+important, our American!&#8221; he grumbled uneasily. &#8220;Berthe, did your
+mistress know that Lopez would shoot him before he could be pardoned?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh yes, monsieur.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class='figcenter'>
+    <a id='ill_220'></a>
+<img src='images/illus-220.jpg' id="img008" alt='' />
+<p class='center caption'>
+&#8220;BERTHE&#8221;<br />&#8220;... Brought down the ponderous knocker so terrifically that it<br />abashed her, for all her present agitation&#8221;
+</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_221'></a>221</span>&#8220;Name of a
+name, what does she want him killed for? Why is this drôle of a Lopez in such a
+hurry?&#8211;See here, child, you know something more. What did you mean by my
+regretting&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because, because everybody seemed to think that the poor brave
+American had come with an offer of aid for Maximilian, and as you need more
+troops, I thought&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who, in all mercy, is this American?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A Confederate officer, monsieur.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Not one man, but two, paced the floor because of Jacqueline that evening. The
+second was the marshal of France, and he went at it now, on hearing of the first
+man. &#8220;A Confederate officer?&#8221; There were twin creases over his
+straight nose, furrows of vexed and intense thinking. The lone Southerner was
+linked intimately in his reflections with the parliament of a great nation. The
+people of France had never warmed to the Mexican dream, and the Chambers already
+were clamoring for the return of the troops. And now, for every Confederate
+enlisted, a pantalon rouge could be sent back home. But why&#8211;name of a
+name&#8211;should Jacqueline try to prevent?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Did she,&#8221; he asked, but not very hopefully, &#8220;did she have
+any cause to dislike this American?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, monsieur!&#8221; The cry was pained surprise. That her mistress
+could or would pay a grudge! &#8220;On the contrary,&#8221; she protested
+vehemently, &#8220;I have never seen her so moved, never, and if <i>you</i> had
+seen her, monsieur, as we left Tuxtla! I thought she must surely lose her mind.
+One cannot imagine her terror. She cried to the driver, to the outriders, to
+lash the mules, harder, faster, till it&#8217;s a miracle we did not crash over
+a cliff. And all the time she would look back, and at every sound she would clap
+her hands over her ears and cry out to know if that was shooting. And then she
+would pound at the window to them to go faster. She wanted to get out of
+hearing, monsieur. It was only when we were really here in the City that she
+quieted, but that was worse. She lay and moaned. I cried, I could not help it,
+hearing her. She would <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_222'></a>222</span> mutter things, too. &#8216;France, France!&#8217; she
+said once, and it made me shudder. One almost thought she had a dagger in her
+hand&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never mind, what else did she say?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She said, &#8216;Oh, I hate thee, my country!&#8217; but she wasn&#8217;t in
+her mind, oh no, monsieur. Then she grew very still, and that frightened me more
+yet. Once I even thought she was dead, and I put my arm about her. But her heart
+was beating, and her eyes were open, wide open and dry. I could see, for we were
+passing between the Paseo lights. I laid her head on my breast, and after a
+while I heard her lips move. &#8216;God bless him! God&#8211;Oh, I hope there
+<i>is</i> a God, just for this, to bless him, and keep him!&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;H&#8217;m&#8217;m,&#8221; said the marshal, and went back and forth
+again, more perplexed than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Berthe watched him anxiously, jealous of each moment lost. Once she started
+to speak, but his gesture for silence was such that she did not dare a second
+time. There was no other sound in the room except the tramp, tramp on the soft
+carpet. Even the occasional turning of a leaf behind the screen had ceased.
+Bazaine was groping cautiously in the mystery. A state reason, and no personal
+one, had compelled Jacqueline; that much was certain. Direct from the Tuileries,
+she was weighted under some grievous responsibility, and this night, back there
+at Tuxtla, she had been true to it. And whatever it was, it exacted imperatively
+that no Confederate aid should reach Maximilian. Such was Napoleon&#8217;s wish,
+however contradictory to official instructions. But the marshal was sufficiently
+a disciple of the little Napoleonic statecraft to beware of meddling. He fretted
+under methods whereby the whisper of the Sphinx reached him through private and
+unofficial agents, but it was a great deal to catch the Sphinx&#8217;s whisper
+at all. Besides, he owed his elevation to this enigma of Europe, and he meant to
+be loyal.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_223'></a>223</span>&#8220;Berthe,&#8221; he said at last,
+&#8220;there&#8217;s just one man who can interfere where Mademoiselle d&#8217;Aumerle
+disposes, but he is rather far away. I mean the Emperor of France.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The little Bretonne looked, comprehended, and burst into tears. &#8220;My
+dear mistress!&#8221; she sobbed.</p>
+
+<p>There was the sound of a book dropped on a table, and the screen was brushed
+aside.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perhaps,&#8221; came a softly ironical voice, &#8220;a woman might so
+much as veto our mighty Jacqueline. At any rate, suppose we try it, Don
+Pancho.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Bazaine had forgotten his wife, his bride, who, to be near him, often retired
+behind the screen when he was busy with others. Hers was the loving ambition of
+a Lady Macbeth, in that a husband&#8217;s secret was never one for her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Step into this little room,&#8221; she said to Berthe, opening a door.
+&#8220;It will not take long,&#8221; she added, an assured light in her dark
+Spanish eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will save him, madame? You&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Against all the marshals of France, child. Go, wait in
+there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The marshal of France present smiled on his bride indulgently, admiringly, as
+she closed the door and faced him.</p>
+
+<p>She was less than half his age, the girl wife of a gray-haired veteran, and
+as his wife she was second lady of the land. A Mexican aristocrat, small and
+slender, of a subtle, winsome beauty, with the prettiest mouth and the most
+pyramidal of crinolines, she had reminded Bazaine of his first wife, and he had
+courted her. At the wedding Maximilian had stood padrino for the groom, and
+Charlotte madrina for the bride. The imperial gift to groom and bride was Buena
+Vista, as the white mansion and gardens in San Cosme were called. Naturally,
+then, Madame la Maréchale approved of Napoleon&#8217;s
+<i>official</i> instructions, which directed that Monsieur le Maréchal was to
+establish the Mexican empire solidly and for all time.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_224'></a>224</span>Now her manner
+of calling the marshal Pancho was considerable of an argument, especially when,
+archly formal, she made it Don Pancho. What if this Confederate aid were to go
+to the Mexican rebels, as it surely would if the emissary at Tuxtla were shot?
+And, without either French or Confederates, the Empire would fall, the rebels
+would win; and then, she wanted to know, what would become of their beautiful
+home, of their high position? Moreover, the United States was threatening to
+drive the French from Mexico, and Madame la Maréchale believed it a very good
+thing for the French to have at their side some of the very men who had held
+those Yankees back for four long years.</p>
+
+<p>Bazaine wavered. Then he smiled. This Mexican bride of his was Mexican all
+the time; and French, sometimes not at all. She had not the big trust in the
+pantalons rouges when it came to those Yankees.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, Pancho mio,&#8221; she went on softly, &#8220;now for the real
+reason, the one that holds you back. It is your Emperor Napoleon, verdad? You
+think that he does not want this offer to reach Maximilian. Bien, have you had
+any intimation of what he wants? Any orders? Of course you haven&#8217;t. Then
+save this American. Look at me&#8211;Don Pancho, I say-if&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sapristi, call the girl in! No, first I must have&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When madame could free herself from what he must have, she opened the door
+and triumphantly called to Jacqueline&#8217;s maid.</p>
+
+<p>A half-hour later, in one of the marshal&#8217;s own carriages, Berthe
+returned to the castle of Chapultepec. At once she hastened to her
+mistress&#8217;s apartments, and confessed what she had done. Still in the blue
+flowered calico, with the dust of their frantic ride still on her, Jacqueline
+was seated before a little desk. Her head was buried in her arms, and her
+loosened hair fell like a shower of copper over her shoulders. She did <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_225'></a>225</span>not move as Berthe
+entered, nor give any sign. But when in a word the story was told, she got to
+her feet and stared blankly at the girl. Berthe expected dismissal, but the next
+instant two arms were about her, and lips were pressed to hers, and hot tears,
+not her own, wetted her cheek.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Berthe, you little addle-pated goose! You&#8211;oh you little ninny,
+you, you&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Her phrases were broken by laughter, then by an
+uncontrollable peal that was near a shriek, &#8220;Little, little fool, dost
+thou know, thou hast this night lost to France fifteen thousand leagues of
+empire? Thou&#8211;thou&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Yet kisses were again the portion of the
+thief of fifteen thousand leagues.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But do you think they will be in time, Berthe? Yes, yes, you&#8217;ve
+answered that once. And Michel leads them, you say?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oui, madame, Monsieur Ney was most eager to go, above all when His
+Excellency gave him Frenchmen to command. They are the cuirassiers. They will
+surely save the American monsieur.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But will they be in time? Yes, yes, I think I&#8217;ve asked that
+already.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her hysteric glee, changing to anxiety, now changed as quickly to something
+else. Her face went deathly white, the pretty jaws set hard, and there was the
+glint of resolution in the gray eyes. She seized a cloak and threw it about
+her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come,&#8221; she said to the maid.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Madame is going&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, to <i>undo</i> your mischief. Bazaine must send to overtake Ney,
+must command him <i>not</i> to interfere with the execution. Bazaine will do
+this, when I see him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you will not find His Excellency to-night. Madame la Maréchale
+ordered the carriage for them both, as I was leaving there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_226'></a>226</span>&#8220;Indeed?
+Then she knew you were coming here to me? Then she did not mention where they
+were going?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, madame.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course not. Oh, she is cunning, your Madame la
+Maréchale!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Alas for Jacqueline! She might conquer herself, but add to herself a second
+woman against her, and she was beaten. She confessed defeat by throwing off the
+cloak.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tuxtla is far, you think they will&#8211;will&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh I think they will, madame!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Say you <i>know</i> they will! Say it, Berthe, say it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I hope so, madame. Monsieur the American is lucky.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The American? Somehow the blood swept hotly into Jacqueline&#8217;s cheeks.
+&#8220;Say they will <i>not</i> save him, Berthe. Say no, no, no!&#8221; she
+commanded, and imperiously stamped her foot, but stamp as she would, her furious
+shame was there still, flaunting its glorious color. She was thinking of her
+letter, of her avowal to a doomed man. After that, <i>any</i> man was under
+obligations to get himself shot. Only, this one was of a contrary fibre.</p>
+
+<p>In such an April mood, Jacqueline was capable of yet another caprice.
+&#8220;Berthe,&#8221; she cried, even as the whim came, &#8220;one is tired
+after playing the goose, n&#8217;est-ce pas? Do you, then, rest&#8211;yes, yes, while
+I comb your hair.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Madame!&#8221; Berthe protested with what breath astonishment left
+her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do ye call me chief?&#8221; demanded the mistress. &#8220;Then, de
+grace, sit still! And why shouldn&#8217;t I, parbleu? If it took our big French
+Revolution to throw me up an ancestor out of the common kettle, there has just
+now been another revolution here&#8221;&#8211;she pressed a hand against her
+breast&#8211;&#8220;to stir me back among the people again. Do you know, dear,
+that your hair is beautiful!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_227'></a>227</span>And so they were
+two girls, girl-like, passing the evening together.</p>
+
+<p>Of a sudden Jacqueline stopped, the braiding arrested by a most startling
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Grands dieux,&#8221; she told herself slowly, for it had to be
+believed, however improbable, &#8220;until this very moment I&#8217;ve never
+once stopped to think of all the emotions I have been having this day.
+I&#8217;ve never once examined them, and such emotions&#8211;Oh, là, là,
+they&#8217;re a collection, a veritable museum of creeps! And here I&#8217;ve
+hurried through that museum, till I&#8217;ve even forgotten my umbrella at the
+check stand!&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_228'></a>228</span><a id='link_28'></a>CHAPTER XXVIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Mike</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Quand on est aimé d&#8217;une belle femme, on se tire toujours d&#8217;affaire.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Zoroaster, vide Voltaire</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Storm Centre chafed under a mad desire to verify his name, which was not
+unusual. But it was the first time he had ever craved active danger as an
+antidote for his thoughts. The sound of bars lifting came as a relief, and he
+shook off the dark mood and was himself. Before the door opened, he thrust her
+letter into the candle flame. He had kept it till the last minute, but now he
+burned it, as she knew he would.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of executioners, he beheld a tray, gripped by chocolate hands.
+Involuntarily he looked up to the face above the tray.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Johnny the Baptist!&#8221; he exclaimed. &#8220;Well, well, how goes
+it itself to Your Mercy this evening?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pues bien, señor,&#8221; returned the Baptist, grinning sheepishly.
+&#8220;Would, would Y&#8217;r Mercy like another bath?&#8221;  The grimace was not
+unamiable. It betokened that this time he, and not the prisoner, might have a
+game to play.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A thousand thanks,&#8221; replied Driscoll, &#8220;but I&#8217;ll try
+to make that other bath answer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But señor, you wasted it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, perhaps so. You see, Johnny, it was this way. I had only one
+bath coming, and on the other hand there were two things to save. Do you know,
+Johnny, I&#8217;ve been mortified ever since, to think how I squandered my one
+bath in <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_229'></a>229</span>saving just
+my life, and how I left my soul to bustle along for itself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Baptist drew nearer. &#8220;But suppose, señor,&#8221; he whispered,
+&#8220;suppose the need of absolution was again postponed, even now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll&#8217;s fork stopped half way to his mouth. There was no
+superstition in the affair this time. The once gullible Dragoon, moreover, was
+playing all the leads. &#8220;Of course,&#8221; Driscoll agreed heartily,
+&#8220;I&#8217;d certainly like it right well,&#8221; and he went on eating. But
+his wits were in a receptive state, alert for the meaning when it should come.
+The opening innuendoes exasperated him, for the guard was a clumsy agent. The
+man must needs feign a great dread of discovery, and tremble lest his colonel,
+Don Miguel Lopez, should find him out. As though supper, instead of a shooting
+squad, did not belie it all?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Still your move, Johnny,&#8221; Driscoll had to remind him.</p>
+
+<p>In the end it was to be gathered that Don Benito Juarez, the fugitive Señor
+Presidente of the fugitive Republic, might welcome an offer of Confederate aid,
+and &#8217;twas a pity that the condemned señor should have no chance to escape.
+But if he did escape, he might find his way to the Señor Presidente far off in
+the state of Chihuahua.</p>
+
+<p>So, the cards were dealt at last. Driscoll looked over his hand. He
+recognized a crooked game, a game of treachery and dark dealing; but even so he
+perceived that a trump or two had fallen to him, perhaps unwittingly, and he
+decided to &#8220;sit in for a spell.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He began, with coy hesitancy, to beat his scruples around the bush, which was
+not a bad lead. Supposing he turned his offer from Maximilian to President
+Juarez, wouldn&#8217;t it, well, look as though he did so to save his hide?
+Brown Johnny opened his eyes as at something unfamiliar. Driscoll went on. If he
+were shot, how was he to go to Juarez? But if he, uh, happened to get loose, he
+might just possibly be influenced <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_230'></a>230</span>to think of the Juarez proposal. But actually buying
+his way out would look dishonorable. &#8220;Now,&#8221; he concluded abruptly,
+&#8220;run along, and put it that way to whoever sent you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The man protested, and in some genuine alarm, that he had no employers.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh all right,&#8221; said Driscoll easily, &#8220;then you&#8217;re
+bound to help me. Because if you don&#8217;t, I&#8217;ll sure tell Lopez what
+you&#8217;ve just been trying to hatch up here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The trap worked beautifully, for the guard tried hard to quake. But his
+fright was not spontaneous enough. Driscoll smiled. Now he knew the real player
+in the game.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Cheer up, Johnny,&#8221; he spoke soothingly, &#8220;I&#8217;d not
+tell on you. But hadn&#8217;t you better go and think it over by yourself a
+little?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Baptist would hasten straight to Lopez, and Lopez, Driscoll foresaw,
+would interpret his scruples into a disguised acceptance. The crookedness of the
+game left the American no other trump, and he played it&#8211;against immediate
+death. Lopez, of course, would send him under guard to Juarez, but Driscoll
+thought he could trust that staunch old Roman, when once informed, to call for a
+new deck and an honest deal.</p>
+
+<p>Juan Bautista &#8220;thought it over&#8221; outside, and directly returned
+with an answer. But when he again left Driscoll, he did not bar the door behind
+him. Within ten minutes thereafter Driscoll was creeping past a sleeping
+sentinel, on between rows of maguey, toward the road. Around him hovered five or
+six shadows. They were to be his escort and take him to Juarez. They would join
+him openly a safe distance away, at a place where their horses waited. But as he
+emerged upon the road, for the moment alone, a voice in French challenged
+sharply. &#8220;Halte-là!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The shadows hesitated an instant, then showed themselves with energy. They
+sprang out and closed on their &#8220;escaped&#8221; prisoner. They handled him
+more roughly than did the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_231'></a>231</span>Contra Guerrillas, who had first cried
+&#8220;Halt,&#8221; and who were now appearing as by magic. The blended anger
+and gratification of the shadows over the escape and recapture was vociferously
+sincere.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Take them all, mes enfants,&#8221; a huge tone of command filled the
+darkness. It was Colonel Dupin. He had that moment arrived. Jacqueline&#8217;s
+message had reached him in the City not an hour before. The American had
+escaped, it said; he was at Tuxtla. The Tiger, knowing nothing of Lopez lying in
+wait for the same American at the same place, had dismounted his men, surrounded
+town and farms, and was closing in, when Driscoll himself fell among them.</p>
+
+<p>The interview between Dupin and Lopez brewed stormy at first. The latter
+turned gray under his ruddy skin when Dupin walked in upon him in the front room
+of the farmhouse. But seeing that his own men were holding Driscoll, he
+nervously congratulated them upon the capture.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How did he escape this second time?&#8221; demanded the Frenchman.
+&#8220;It seems to me, mon colonel, that the question would occur to you
+too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez was sufficiently alive to his peril. He quickly sent two Dragoons to
+the temporary guard house to investigate. Dupin curtly ordered two Cossacks to
+accompany them. Soon they brought back the sentinel who had been conveniently
+asleep when Driscoll slipped past. The sentinel rubbed his eyes as he faced
+Lopez. So far everything had passed according to arrangement, and he looked for
+a severe mock examination. But the Tiger had been left out of the calculations,
+and the Tiger forthwith shouldered himself into the inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you understand, Colonel Lopez, that your guard here was asleep? Si,
+señor, asleep! What now, mon colonel, is the little custom as to guards who
+sleep?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez glared at the sentinel. It was a fine simulation of outraged
+discipline, and so life-like that when he spoke of a <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_232'></a>232</span>court martial, the culprit weakened. He
+opened his mouth. At that Lopez&#8217;s stern anger became real. He feared the
+sentinel would tell all he knew.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si señor,&#8221; cried Lopez, &#8220;we don&#8217;t have to be taught,
+we Mexicans. We shoot them. Here, six of you, out with him! Quick, before he can
+whine!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Go with them,&#8221; added Dupin quietly to six of his Cossacks.</p>
+
+<p>The sentinel was dragged out. His cries, whether for mercy or not, were
+smothered first by a sabre belt, and then for all time by musketry. The Cossacks
+returned and assured their chief that the execution was bona fide. This allayed
+Dupin&#8217;s suspicions.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Permit me to suggest, Colonel Lopez,&#8221; he said courteously,
+&#8220;that you likewise honor our friend the American. I came from the City to
+do it myself, but it is a pleasure to give way before your superior
+vigilance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It had already occurred to Lopez that Driscoll also might talk. &#8220;You
+are very amiable, Señor Dupin,&#8221; he replied. &#8220;My court martial found
+him guilty, and as a matter of fact, he would have paid the penalty by now had
+Your Mercy not arrived. Between us, Colonel Dupin, he will hardly escape a third
+time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At his command six of the crack Dragoons stood forth. They were brown, and
+Mexicans. Lopez bowed to Dupin, who called forth as many Contras. The Contras
+were of variously hued races, but they were all the Tiger&#8217;s whelps. The
+file of Dragoons was jaunty crimson, the other corroded red. Driscoll fell in
+meekly between them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sacred name of a dog, you are honored, señor!&#8221; Dupin exclaimed
+reprovingly. It angered him when a victim quailed. The present one ought to
+appreciate, too, that he was answering for two besides himself, for Murguía and
+Rodrigo, whose escape had wrenched the old warrior&#8217;s bowels.</p>
+
+<p>The Storm Centre glanced at the picked hussars, at the <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_233'></a>233</span>famously infamous Cossacks, and assented
+modestly. So plain in gray, he did indeed look colorless among them. The Contra
+at his elbow was an American, whose brutish, swaggering scowl meant the world to
+know what a bad man he was. The type gives the decent citizen a mad desire to be
+bad himself just once, only long enough to prove the tough a contemptible sham.
+Driscoll&#8217;s neighbor leered ferociously, that the prisoner flanked by
+sabres and muskets might respect him and be cowed. Driscoll kept him in mind,
+and in the tail of his eye.</p>
+
+<p>There was one anxiety for the Storm Centre. If they should bind him! But they
+had not, he was so docile. And as they marched out the door, he exulted, and
+could hardly wait. Wouldn&#8217;t it be a lovely row, though! Just one good,
+last good time! He did not feel hard toward them, not when they had left off the
+ropes. He felt that he was to have value received, and all the while he figured
+out his desperate campaign.</p>
+
+<p>As they passed outside beyond the window&#8217;s sphere of light, docility
+changed to whirlwind. A blow with his left, a jerk with his right, and he had
+the tough&#8217;s carbine. He swung it between the two files, a grazing circle.
+He got blows in return, but not a man fired. That was because of the darkness,
+and a first shot would inspire a wild, general fusillade, endangering them all.
+As it was, the blows were impartial, except one, which came down with pointed
+favoritism on the tough&#8217;s cranium. After that Driscoll helped one side or
+another, and when they were nicely mixed, he ran. He got as far as the road, but
+to find a troop of cavalry charging down upon him. Changing ends with the
+carbine, he fired from the waist at the leader of the new arrivals. This leader
+dropped his sabre, plunged heavily, and was dragged by the stirrup. Driscoll had
+not the time to change back to club musket, he used the barrel as such. But
+being for the instant alone, he was marked <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_234'></a>234</span>out, and Cossacks and Dragoons threw themselves upon
+him and brought him down.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It <i>was</i> lovely,&#8221; he muttered under the heap.</p>
+
+<p>They brought him back to the house, swathed in a mesh of lariats. Lopez
+awaited them, frothing oaths. Dupin was there too, and he looked an
+epicure&#8217;s satisfaction as they stood his victim against the wall. He did
+not regret the incident, since it had turned porridge into so choice a
+morsel.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;Tis you, monsieur,&#8221; he confessed with rugged grace, &#8220;who
+have honored us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, your grandmother!&#8221; said Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, be patient. It will be all over in a minute more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Tiger was, in fact, ordering the shooting squad, when through the open
+door glittering helmets and excited French and clanking sabres flooded the room.
+It was still another wondrous uniform for Driscoll, this of the cuirassiers,
+with so much of brass, and a queue of horse&#8217;s hair, and loose pantaloons
+that merged into gigantic black boots. In they strode, an agitated host of
+bristling moustaches, while outside was the restless sound of many hard breathed
+horses. The cuirassiers bore their wounded leader, and laid him on the iron bed
+in the room. But the man struggled to his feet. He called loudly for
+&#8220;Monsieur le Colonel,&#8221; and only by force, though gentle, could they
+hold him quiet.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is it?&#8221; responded both Dupin and Lopez.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I, I mean the American Colonel. He&#8211;he&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hello, Mike!&#8221; cried Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>He could not see for the others, nor move, but he recognized the voice of
+Michel Ney. He knew, too, that Michel must be the cavalry leader he had just
+shot. &#8220;Darn it, Mike!&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry! But
+weren&#8217;t there enough of &#8217;em without you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur Ney,&#8221; the Tiger interrupted, &#8220;let your men tend
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_235'></a>235</span>you here, and we
+will be back at once to see what can be done for your hurt. But just
+now&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He signed to Lopez, and Cossacks and Dragoons caught up the prisoner and
+started for the door.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wait!&#8221; Ney moaned feebly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tonnerre, mon prince, your wound must be paid for, first. Hurry there,
+Messieurs les Imbeciles!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wait!&#8221; Ney gasped. He half raised himself, but sank back with
+closing eyes. He made a gesture to his breast. All halted as in the presence of
+death.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Help him, you there!&#8221; cried Driscoll. &#8220;Open his
+coat!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The cuirassiers, eager, awkward nurses, fluttered round the bed, and tore
+away the sky-blue jacket, thinking to find the wound beneath. Instead, they drew
+out a paper. One of them read the address on it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Al Señor Coronel Don Miguel Lopez.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez broke the seal, frowned, and put the message in his pocket.
+&#8220;Nothing&#8211;oh, nothing important,&#8221; he volunteered. &#8220;Now,
+once for all, let us finish our work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wait!&#8221; a faint whisper came from the bed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He says to wait,&#8221; doggedly repeated a cuirassier.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, wait,&#8221; Driscoll pleaded suddenly. &#8220;Just a minute,
+before I go, before we both go, perhaps,&#8221;&#8211;he thought in a flash that
+it might be a last word from Jacqueline&#8211;&#8220;perhaps, gentlemen, he, he
+has something to tell me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But Ney&#8217;s head, moving weakly on the pillow, was a negative.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner&#8217;s voice grew firm again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then hurry up!&#8221; he ordered in the old querulous drawl.
+&#8220;Don&#8217;t you know I&#8217;m in a hurry?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ney opened his eyes as he heard the shuffling of feet. Men were carrying out
+the prisoner. With feeble anger he brushed aside the hand of a cuirassier who
+was trying to staunch the blood at his groin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8211;I&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; His lips barely moved.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_236'></a>236</span>The cuirassier
+sprang to his feet. He looked to his fellows, spoke to them. Puzzled, mystified,
+they rushed to the door and barred the way.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We don&#8217;t know why we came,&#8221; stammered one, &#8220;and he
+can&#8217;t speak. But his signs are enough for us. It&#8217;s,
+it&#8217;s&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s something to do with the American,&#8221; declared a second
+cuirassier.</p>
+
+<p>Dupin pounded back his half unsheathed blade. Brusquely he wheeled and faced
+the colonel of Dragoons. &#8220;Lopez,&#8221; he roared, &#8220;what was that
+message?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;N-nothing, mi coronel, absolutely.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If it was from Maximilian, I&#8217;d know it to be a pardon, and not
+blame you. But I recognized the marshal&#8217;s seal, and that&#8217;s
+different.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez blanched, yet insisted again that the message was nothing.
+&#8220;Besides, señor,&#8221; he added, &#8220;I do not take orders from His
+Excellency, the marshal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But <i>I</i> do,&#8221; thundered Dupin. &#8220;And I see them obeyed
+too. Oh, you can protest to your Emperor afterwards, my royal guardsman, if you
+want to, but a marshal of France is the law when I am near.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Grunting contemptuously, Dupin turned to the bedside. The cuirassiers had
+gathered cobwebs from the rafters, and were dressing the wound. Michel tossed
+and groaned in the beginning of delirium. Dupin muttered with vexation, but he
+took hold of the lad&#8217;s wrist, and firmly closed his hand over it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Listen,&#8221; he said, very distinctly, putting into his tones every
+timbre of quiet, compelling will. &#8220;Listen, hear me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Slowly the feverish man grew still.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hear me,&#8221; said Dupin. &#8220;There are two questions&#8211;two,
+only two. You are to answer them.&#8211;You will shake your head, &#8216;Yes,&#8217;
+or &#8216;No&#8217;&#8211;do you hear me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Chasseur&#8217;s eyes opened wide, and they were calm.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_237'></a>237</span>&#8220;Good,
+that&#8217;s the brave gentleman! Now then, steady. The first question: Shall we
+shoot this American?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Slowly, painfully, the head rocked on the pillow, from one side to the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s &#8216;No&#8217;!&#8221; cried a score of men.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Silence!&#8221; roared the Tiger. &#8220;Now, the second question:
+Does this order come from Marshal Bazaine?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Michel&#8217;s chin sank to his breast. He groaned, he could not lift it
+again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, thank&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Ney himself, his voice!</p>
+
+<p>Dupin swung round. &#8220;Colonel Lopez,&#8221; he ordered savagely,
+&#8220;you will turn your prisoner over to Sergeant Ney, at once, sir! Open your
+mouth, you dog, and every Dragooning dandy of a Mexican among
+you&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Tiger&#8217;s pistols were drawn. His whelps looked hopeful. The
+cuirassiers bristled in sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>Cracking his finger nails, fawning to the marrow, Lopez agreed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Unbind the prisoner,&#8221; ordered Dupin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank God!&#8221; came faintly from the bed.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_238'></a>238</span><a id='link_29'></a>CHAPTER XXIX<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Whisper of the Sphinx</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;La politique, première des sciences inexactes.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Emile Augier.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Jacqueline had divined in Bazaine another obstacle to her mission. And yet it
+seemed preposterous that he should not be her staunchest ally, since Napoleon
+had found a marshal&#8217;s baton for him in his knapsack, just as he had
+transformed his own policeman&#8217;s club into a sceptre. Nevertheless
+Jacqueline had her doubts, and they were homage to her sex. In other words, she
+returned to Mexico to find that His Excellency had married again.</p>
+
+<p>The very day after her arrival she called to see her dear friend, now Madame
+la Maréchale. The two women were hardly more than girls, but who shall fathom
+the depth of their guile? They kissed each other affectionately on the cheek,
+and while the marshal was in the other room, reading the packet Jacqueline had
+brought him from Napoleon, they expressed earnestly their joy at meeting
+again.</p>
+
+<p>When Bazaine returned, madame rose to leave them to their &#8220;stupid state
+affairs.&#8221; The marshal smiled, knowing how ravenous was his bride for the
+same stupid affairs of state, but Jacqueline agreed that indeed they were
+wearisome. Of course she might tell His Excellency much about Paris, but as to
+politics&#8211;and her little shrug bespoke a Sahara of ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>In the packet delivered by Jacqueline, the Sphinx had by no means turned
+oracle, and Bazaine wished to know what <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_239'></a>239</span>his crafty master would have said between the lines.
+But the first topic of their conference was Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your prisoner is incommunicado then?&#8221; said she.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have no fears, he is comfortable, here in this very house?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He has sent no word to Maximilian of his arrival?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not as yet, mademoiselle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And why not, pray?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because I anticipated the honor of seeing you before permitting him so
+much. I must know the campaign better. A plain soldier is dense at guessing,
+mademoiselle, while you&#8211;you have talked with Napoleon.
+If&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, don&#8217;t be tedious. You alone hold the knight that means
+royalty triumphant or checkmated, and you know that you do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you who are inspired, tell me how I shall play.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You forget that I left this man to be shot?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then I am to destroy him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline shuddered. &#8220;That was my only way, but you, monsieur, you can
+lift him off the board entirely.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Bazaine rose from his chair and stood before her. &#8220;I am no poet,&#8221;
+he said, &#8220;and these flowers of speech hide the trenches. My American means
+that I may have thousands more like him, and he is a good one to be multiplied
+even tenfold. Mademoiselle, <i>what</i> am I to understand?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Does Napoleon&#8217;s letter satisfy none of your doubts?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Without a word he handed her the packet. It was from Napoleon&#8217;s
+minister of finance, and it exuded woe. The French loans were exhausted by
+Maximilian&#8217;s luxury and mismanagement, and therefore Bazaine was
+instructed not to advance a cent further. He was, moreover, to take charge of
+the Mexican ports, and administer the customs. Here, then, was the annihilation
+of Maximilian&#8217;s sway. Here was the whispering of the Sphinx. France
+herself would take over the Empire.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_240'></a>240</span>&#8220;Hardly,&#8221; returned the marshal,
+&#8220;but we will frighten His Majesty into bettering his finances,&#8221; and
+he handed her a confidential missive that had accompanied the other. Bazaine was
+therein authorized, when the security of the Mexican Empire absolutely demanded
+it, to advance ten millions of francs.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline sank back disheartened. Not even Napoleon would help her. The
+Sphinx had not the courage of his own designs, and she contemptuously flung him
+out of her way. She would strive alone, and against him, Napoleon, among the
+rest. First of all, there was his captain general, the man before her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur le Maréchal,&#8221; she began, as impersonally as though
+quoting a dry paragraph of history, &#8220;there is a party among the Mexicans
+who fear the republicans and what the Republic would do. Yet their hope for the
+Empire is gone, and they want no more of it. These, monsieur, are the moderate
+liberals, and strange to say, they are the clericals too; in a word, the great
+landowners. They are for what is good in Mexico. They demand order. But they
+would not take it from the United States. They look to France&#8211;to France,
+which is Catholic, and liberal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I know,&#8221; said the marshal. &#8220;They have already hinted at
+annexation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Annexation to France, of course. Now then, monsieur, if we stay at
+all, we shall have to fight the United States. But do you imagine that we would
+undertake such a fight for Maximilian? Parbleu, the French people would mob
+Napoleon over night. But, supposing we were to do it for ourselves, and not for
+an impecunious archduke&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His Excellency&#8217;s eyes blazed. &#8220;Ah, it would be a fight
+superb!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you commanding, Monsieur le Maréchal. And behind you, with our own
+pantalons rouges, those Confederates against <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_241'></a>241</span>their old enemies. <i>Then</i> would be the moment
+to set your knight on the chess board. And,&#8221; she added insidiously,
+&#8220;France would need a viceroy over here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The plain soldier started as though shot.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle,&#8221; he gasped, &#8220;you&#8211;<i>you</i> are
+Napoleon! The <i>great</i> Napoleon, I salute you, mademoiselle!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hélas, monsieur, that I am not in a position to credit Napoleon III.
+with what I have said!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet you wish me to believe that you are only inspired by him? Pardon
+me, mademoiselle, but <i>he</i> is the inspired one, and&#8211;mon Dieu, I do not
+blame him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But it&#8217;s very simple,&#8221; said Jacqueline, &#8220;and
+honorable too. Maximilian&#8217;s bad faith nullifies our treaty with him. Très
+bien, we are free, free to withdraw our troops. At least we may threaten as
+much. Then he will, he must abdicate, unless&#8211;well, unless he first sees
+Your Excellency&#8217;s prisoner.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She arose, feeling that she was leaving a good Frenchman behind her. But
+Madame la Maréchale appeared to bid her adieu, and Madame la Maréchale looked
+sharply from one to another, noting especially Bazaine&#8217;s flush of
+enthusiasm. The good Frenchman straightway became uneasy. And Jacqueline, riding
+back to Chapultepec in her carriage with its coronet and arms and footmen, did
+not know that Driscoll had not been incommunicado against Madame la Maréchale.
+Who could be? And Madame la Maréchale betimes had paid her respects to a third
+woman, who also was but little more than a girl. She and the Empress Charlotte
+had discussed both the prisoner and Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_242'></a>242</span><a id='link_30'></a>CHAPTER XXX<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Ambassador</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='wbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Receive then this young hero with all becoming state;<br />
+&#8217;Twere ill advis&#8217;d to merit so fierce a champion&#8217;s hate.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Nibelungenlied.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In his bedroom at Buena Vista, the marshal&#8217;s residence, Driscoll the
+next day received a personage, and offered him a cigar. Declined, with bow from
+shoulder. Hoped he would have a nip of peach brandy? Declined, with sweep from
+hips. He <i>was</i> a personage. Driscoll noted regalia, medals, cordon; and
+apologized for the temerity of Missouri hospitality.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Especially,&#8221; he said, &#8220;as you&#8217;re a Grand
+Divinity.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dignity, señor,&#8221; the hidalgo corrected him, &#8220;Grand
+Dignity.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll have to pardon me again,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;but
+I really didn&#8217;t intend any short measure at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was the Imperial Grand Chamberlain himself. There were no incomunicado
+doors before <i>him</i>; he came from the Emperor. The Empress had spoken to His
+Majesty, having just had her discussion aforementioned with Madame la Maréchale,
+so that Monsieur le Maréchal had had to lift from his prisoner the ban of the
+incomunicado. But monsieur had been extremely reluctant about it.</p>
+
+<p>The Chamberlain&#8217;s name went well with his exalted fourth degree of
+proximity to the throne. It was Velasquez de Leon, a very bristling of Castilian
+pride. He looked over the battered American in homespun gray, and wondered where
+the mistake <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_243'></a>243</span>was.
+For, as arbiter of precedence, appraiser of inequality between men, and
+supervisor over court functions generally, he had been sent in the way of
+business. Driscoll felt sorry for him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just tell them to let me out of here,&#8221; said the prisoner,
+&#8220;then I&#8217;ll call in on the Emperor whenever it&#8217;s convenient for
+him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, señor,&#8221; the don objected testily, &#8220;with what status,
+pray? Has your country a representative here? You must obtain a letter from your
+ambassador, or have him present you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll shook his head. &#8220;Can&#8217;t,&#8221; he said,
+&#8220;haven&#8217;t any country.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The minion of etiquette despaired.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; Driscoll added, &#8220;I&#8217;ve got as good as
+credentials from what used to be my country.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Velasquez de Leon grasped at the straw. &#8220;Then,&#8221; he cried,
+&#8220;we can register you as an ambassador.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bringing my country with me,&#8221; Driscoll suggested.</p>
+
+<p>So it was all straightened out pleasantly, and quite in the orthodox manner,
+too. The American&#8217;s status was defined. His reception would fall under the
+rubric: &#8220;Private Audience.&#8221; There remained only one grave drawback.
+The protocol allowed no hints as to the un-protocol aspect of an
+ambassador&#8217;s wardrobe. The hidalgo could only finger nervously the
+Imperial Crown in his Grand Uniform, and with stiff dignity take his leave.</p>
+
+<p>The ambassador who was his own country rode in the marshal&#8217;s landau to
+court, with a retinue of Lancers that was also his guard. Soon they entered the
+Paseo, which Maximilian was making beautiful at inordinate cost as a link
+between the City and his summer palace, the alcázar of Chapultepec. Turning into
+the wide, stately boulevard, Driscoll was that moment plunged into an eddying
+splendor of Europe transplanted, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_244'></a>244</span>and he blinked his eyes, half humorously. There were
+mettlesome steeds, and coaches with a high polish, and silver weighted harness,
+and the insolence of livery, and armorial bearings, and the gilt of coronets on
+carriage panels. There were silk hats and peaked sombreros, lace mantillas and
+Parisian bonnets. A lavish use of French money was doing these things, and the
+Mexicans, believing in their aristocracy since the revival of titles never heard
+of in Gotha, believed also that such brilliancy of display made their capital
+the peer of Vienna, or of the Quartier St. Germain. The Mexicans were very happy
+and arrogant over it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wonder how they can fight and yet keep their clothes so
+pretty,&#8221; thought the Missourian.</p>
+
+<p>The gallant carpet-knighthood of uniforms was bothering him again. They were
+dashing, militant, these paladins, a bal masqué of luxurious oddity and color.
+They twisted waxed moustaches, and their coursers cantered to and fro in the gay
+parade, and among them only the charro cavaliers with a glitter of spangle let
+one guess that this could be Mexico. There was the Austrian dragoon with his
+Tyrolean feather, and the Polish uhlan, fur fringed, and the Hungarian hussar,
+whose pelisse dangled romantically, and there were some fellows in low boots and
+tights and high busbies, who were cross-braided on the chest and
+scroll-embroidered on the front of the leg, and looked exactly like Tzigane
+bandmasters or lion tamers. The Slav, the Magyar, the Czech, and yet others of
+the Emperor&#8217;s score of native races, all were here out of the nearer
+Orient, with curved swords and ferocious bearing. There were the countrymen of
+the Empress, too; the Belgians, who were as bedecked of sleeve as a drum corps.
+And as to the French, there they were in green and silver, in sky blue, in
+cuirassier helmets, in the zouave fez, or in any of the other ways in which they
+bore <i>their</i> chips on the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Shelby&#8217;s ragged Missourians had tossed on straw for the <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_245'></a>245</span>lack of quinine, and yet
+were presuming to save this gorgeous empire of golden spurred gentlemen. The
+thought of his mission gave Driscoll an ironic twinge.</p>
+
+<p>But there was the pantalon rouge, the little soldier boy of France who did
+the work, and the sight of him put the American into a friendly humor. He was
+everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the walks, dotting the cafés
+with red, and every wee piou-piou under the great big epaulettes of a great big
+comic opera generalissimo. His huge military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the
+crimson pompon cocked on his little fighting képi was more often awry, and he
+could not by any effort achieve a strut. He was only bon enfant, this
+unconquered soldier lad; so he gave over trying to be martial, and left to his
+officers the rôle of the Gallic rooster, taking it all as a droll joke on
+himself, while his vivacious eyes danced with fun.</p>
+
+<p>The ambassador&#8217;s coach passed under the cypresses and wound round the
+Aztec hill of the Grasshopper, and came at last to the castle on the summit. And
+as Guatemotzin had once ventured to this place to plead with Moctezuma to save
+his empire, and to show him how to do it, so Driscoll now entered the portals of
+Chapultepec on a very similar errand.</p>
+
+<p>The superb Indian lord was never so hedged in with barbaric ceremony as was
+his Teuton successor of three centuries later. But Driscoll was patient. He
+advanced as the red tape gave way, humming under his breath &#8220;Green Grows
+the Grass,&#8221; a schottische which the American invaders of &#8217;48 had sung in
+taking this same fortress, which also had given all Americans the name of
+&#8220;Gringo.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Guardias Palatinas saluted the Missourian at the entrance. Two Secretaries of
+Ceremony, Grand Uniform, with cordon and the Imperial eagle, bowed before him in
+the Gran Patio. One stepped to his right, the other to his left, with all the
+ceremony of which they were secretaries, and the three walked abreast the length
+of the Galería de Iturbide, where they were <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_246'></a>246</span>joined by the Lesser Service of Honor. Thus,
+swelling by cumulative degrees of impressiveness, Trooper Driscoll came at last
+into the Sala de Audiencias, and gazed with admiration at its beautiful Gobelin
+suite.</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor was there, tall, white browed, refined. He bowed. Driscoll bowed,
+and started toward him, for they were scarcely in speaking distance. But His
+Imperial Highness bowed again. He was absent-minded, evidently, but Driscoll
+bowed also, and pretended not to notice. Then yet a third time the monarch
+bowed. And with true courtesy the American overlooked what was growing
+ridiculous, and did likewise. Thus the ritualistic three obeisances were
+accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian dismissed the Lesser Service, and he and his guest were alone. Now
+Driscoll supposed, considering the discommoding interest his mission had
+awakened in everybody except in the Emperor, that the Emperor himself would this
+time be concerned enough to &#8220;get down to business.&#8221; But not so.
+There were yet the formalities.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I understand, Señor Embajador,&#8221; Maximilian began in the language
+of his court, &#8220;that Your Excellency&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank you, sir, but my name is Driscoll.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That Your Excellency comes accredited from a government that no longer
+exists. But We will waive that, since the said power existed at the moment of
+Your Excellency&#8217;s departure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This was to harmonize the absurdity with the Ritual. Maximilian liked to play
+at receiving an American representative. It grieved him sorely that the United
+States had never recognized his dignity, but that it had consistently rated him
+as merely &#8220;the Prince Maximilian.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll&#8217;s first words cut short the make-believe.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;d hardly call them credentials,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Our
+president, it is true, helped me on my way, but I have nothing from <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_247'></a>247</span>him to you. And yet I
+bring more than Mr. Jefferson Davis could send. Here,&#8221; and he produced the
+memorandum from the Confederate generals of the Trans-Mississippi department,
+which in his belt Jacqueline had had restored to him with his other effects.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian took the note handed him, but stared at the emissary. Charlotte
+had induced the monarch to grant the audience. She had hinted at its importance,
+but not until now did Maximilian recognize his guest. Driscoll was attired in
+the full uniform of a lieutenant colonel of cavalry, which, by the way, was what
+he had carried so jealously in the bundle behind his saddle. From the dignified
+young officer in gray back to the desperado young giant in homespun proved
+considerable of a reach for the Hapsburg; but at last, by virtue of much
+caressing of his silky beard with delicate finger tips, he arrived.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So, it was you the marshal saved!&#8221; he exclaimed. &#8220;Yes,
+yes, I should have remembered sooner. Colonel Lopez told me. A capable, faithful
+officer, is Lopez! I could not but approve the finding of his court martial. And
+yet, against his urgent advice, I have decided to pardon you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To apologize, you mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor looked hurt. As a foil for his royal clemency, there should be
+humble gratitude. Maximilian often mistook fawning for such.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Isn&#8217;t it a bit odd,&#8221; Driscoll queried whimsically,
+&#8220;that an ambassador should be arrested?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jove, that&#8217;s a fact! I hadn&#8217;t thought.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Certainly. But if it don&#8217;t occur again, we&#8217;ll just let the
+apology go.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no,&#8221; protested the monarch. &#8220;You must have your
+apology. You will receive it from the Grand Chamberlain to-morrow, and it will
+appear in the Journal Officiel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, all right,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;anything to clear the
+way.&#8221; Whereupon he plunged and stated his business.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_248'></a>248</span>With debonair
+Prince Max it was not a question of even who talked best. It was who talked
+last. And Driscoll, being for the moment an exhorter of both descriptions, drove
+home conviction as a sabre point. He spoke bluntly, earnestly; and, at the scent
+of opposition, he spoke fiercely. The South was defeated, he said, and the North
+would now make good its threat to drive out the French. And the French would go,
+too. Suppose they were even willing to undertake a great war for Maximilian, yet
+they would go just the same. And why? Because they had fought the Russians. They
+had fought the Austrians. And they were keeping the Italians out of Rome to help
+the Pope. So they had not a friend left, not one, to help them against the enemy
+they must soon fight, which was Prussia. Consequently they would draw every
+bayonet out of Mexico, and Maximilian would be left alone to face his rebels.
+But Maximilian could not face the rebels alone. They had been dominant before
+the French came. To replace thirty thousand French, Driscoll offered fifty
+thousand Southerners, fifty thousand well-equipped, splendid veterans.
+Twenty-five thousand were already on the frontier, he meaning those under
+General Slaughter at Brownsville, and Shelby and the others were not far
+behind.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; said Maximilian, smiling bitterly, &#8220;you forget that
+the United States would still object to my poor Empire.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not when the French leave, they wouldn&#8217;t. We would become
+citizens. We would not be a foreign intervention. You would be backed up by
+Mexicans against Mexicans, and the North could not interfere. But, suppose that
+the French remain, wouldn&#8217;t they have to fight? And they would need our
+aid to do it, too. Don&#8217;t you see, sir, that in any case you should make us
+very welcome?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There is assuredly no other way to look at it!&#8221; admitted the
+prince uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>Dreaming himself a monarch of chivalry days, Maximilian <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_249'></a>249</span>was subtly enthralled by the idea of a
+band of heroes flocking to his standard, their swords on high. Stouter than
+those warriors who had helped Siegfried to his bride, they would hold for him a
+treasure greater than that under the Rhine. Themselves and their children
+forever, they would be the real mainstay of the dynasty founded by Maximilian
+the Great. They were Anglo-Saxons, Germanic, his own kindred, and to him they
+came for new homes and a new country. They would be his landed gentry, his
+barons, his hidalgos. It was a prospect for an emperor; above all, for a poet
+emperor. As he looked now on the young Confederate officer, on him who had
+seemed a desperado, Maximilian thought that here stood one who was the
+instrument of Destiny.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Can&#8211;can they really come?&#8221; he demanded breathlessly.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll smiled. &#8220;Of course, there&#8217;s no time to lose,&#8221; he
+replied. &#8220;For instance, if I&#8217;d had your answer there at
+Murguía&#8217;s ranch, I&#8217;d have gotten back in time to head off whole
+regiments who&#8217;ve probably given up their arms since then. But you can
+still count on an army west of the Mississippi that hasn&#8217;t surrendered
+yet. At least <i>my</i> general hasn&#8217;t, not Old Joe, and he won&#8217;t
+either. But you must say &#8216;yes&#8217; pretty quick. We&#8217;re restless, and
+might conclude to run the French out of here. We haven&#8217;t forgotten how
+Napoleon forgot to help us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a cunning stroke. Maximilian would have asked nothing better than
+independence from his &#8220;dear imperial brother,&#8221; and just this was the
+bribe so temptingly held out by the instrument of Destiny. But the Hapsburg of
+the heavy, trembling underlip credited wavering as statesmanlike prudence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To-morrow,&#8221; he said, &#8220;no, the day after, you shall have my
+decision.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline witnessed the ambassador&#8217;s departure. Hidden among the roses
+of the fortress rock, where she sat with a book, she peeped out as he came down
+the steps to the marshal&#8217;s <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_250'></a>250</span>landau. The glacial Secretaries of Ceremony flanked
+him on either side, and the statuesque Palatine Guards saluted. She could not be
+mistaken, the corners of his mouth were twitching. It was such an inimitable
+commentary on the Ritual that she had much to do not to dart out and laugh with
+him in gleeful mischief.</p>
+
+<p>Then, she noted his uniform. After the ornate regimentals of all Europe, what
+a relief was the simple gray! There was the long coat, the belt, the dragoon
+sabre, the unobtrusive insignia on the collar, and she murmured her verdict
+advisedly. It was beautiful! Next she noted the man&#8211;as though she had not
+in the first place. His easy frame still had that charm of gaucherie, and the
+rollicking daredeviltry lurked quiescent in the brown eyes, but enough to recall
+the rider of fury, her chevalier de Missour-<i>i</i>, plunging through a wall
+and cloud of dust on a big-boned yellow charger. And though now he was in this
+beautiful simplicity of gray, she looked in vain for some hint of martial stride
+or pompous chest.</p>
+
+<p>She wondered for a moment why he had worn the uniform. It signified nothing,
+since the Confederacy had fallen. Then she understood. <i>He</i> had not
+surrendered. Nor had those he represented. The gray, for him, still had its
+reason, and was a power yet; the power to decide an empire&#8217;s fate. It was
+the grave dignity of a lost cause; striving, before being doffed forever, to
+leave behind a new cause. Or, if failing, to accept the lot of surrender. In
+either case, her chevalier de Missour-<i>i</i> was wearing the dear uniform for
+the last time. With her keenness for intuition and sympathy, Jacqueline
+<i>knew</i>. She knew what it must mean. And he looked so strong, so splendid!
+Her eyes unexpectedly dimmed in tenderness for him.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll, being now a free man, established himself at a hotel near the
+diligencia office in the busy Plateros street. He drilled through the following
+day with tedious waiting for the day after, when he was to have the promised
+reply. Used to <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_251'></a>251</span>men
+who knew their own minds, he hoped for strength in this emperor fellow. Then,
+his mission successful, he would be in the saddle by the next night, perhaps by
+noon, and hastening toward the border with tidings of homes and more fighting
+for his comrades of the Old Brigade. But the next morning, even as he was
+mounting Demijohn to go to Chapultepec, a thin man in riding breeches entered
+the hotel patio and accosted him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am Monsieur Éloin,&#8221; the stranger announced in English that
+could be understood, &#8220;of Her Majesty&#8217;s household. Also aide and
+secretary in private to the Emperor. I see, you go to horse. It is well, sir.
+Mine is outside.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the answer?&#8221; asked Driscoll. &#8220;I&#8217;m not
+up on conundrums.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is that we go to Cuernavaca.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t say! Now where&#8217;s that, and what for?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Cuernavaca is His Majesty&#8217;s country sit-down, about a douzaine
+of leagues from here. You have not read of this morning the Journal Officiel?
+Here it is. The court went there yesterday. His Majesty has to need
+rest.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he was to see me to-day! What&#8217;s the matter with
+him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>M. Éloin&#8217;s brow contracted narrowly, and he shrugged his shoulders.
+&#8220;His Imperial Highness is much worked. He is worse of good health. Her
+Majesty sought at having him stay, to give you that same-self answer he had
+promised already. And the Marshal Bazaine, sensible this once, did talk
+yesterday night before last, after you were there, and beseeched him to accept
+your offer. And they all beseeched, Her Majesty and Madame la Maréchale, and
+I.&#8211;But, what would you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m sure I don&#8217;t know. What the devil&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, not him! But her, sir, her!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Her, who?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, her. We all talk, argue, beseech; and she, in one <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_252'></a>252</span>little whisper, she only
+tell His Majesty he has to need that rest&#8211;and, poof! off they all go to
+Cuernavaca, and I know nothing. Her Majesty leave me a note. I bring you it
+here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But who is the &#8216;she?&#8217; You don&#8217;t mean&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, we others call her Jacqueline. She did it, against everybody who
+beseech. But we&#8211;how you say?&#8211;we fool her, you and me. Come, we are
+there to-night, at Cuernavaca.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just that little girl&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Driscoll murmured
+wonderingly.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_253'></a>253</span><a id='link_31'></a>CHAPTER XXXI<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Carlota</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Der sicherste Weg nicht sehr unglücklich zu sein ist das Glück nicht erwarten.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Schopenhauer.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Everybody he met seemed to twist Driscoll&#8217;s business into a vital
+personal issue, and it did not take him long to place M. Éloin. The supercilious
+Belgian of the rancid brow, as Driscoll mentally described him, wanted the
+perpetuation of the empire, and he wanted it for the very simple reason that the
+favorite of a realmless prince does not amount to much. Hence he intrigued for
+the acceptance of Driscoll&#8217;s offer and for the confusion of
+Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p>A small escort of Belgians joined him and Driscoll at the garita, or little
+customs house, on the edge of the City. Accompanying them was a burly priest
+with a head shaped like a pear. The padre had very small eyes for so large a
+man, but they were exceedingly bright and roved adventurously. They would settle
+with crafty calculation on Éloin time and again, though his manner toward the
+favorite was always a thing of humble deference.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His Dutch Holiness from Murgie&#8217;s!&#8221; Driscoll observed to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>But there might be an ecclesiastical college along, for all the Missourian
+cared. His own thoughts were battalions. &#8220;When it&#8217;s over, one way or
+another,&#8221; he kept deciding, &#8220;I&#8217;ll speak to her, yes I will!
+What&#8217;s there to be afraid of? W&#8217;y, she&#8217;s&#8211;only a
+girl.&#8221; It might be an unfair advantage, his not dying after the confession
+in her farewell letter to him, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_254'></a>254</span>but he would have her, he would have her! The Lord
+be good to him, he <i>had</i> to have her!</p>
+
+<p>Late in the afternoon they arrived at the quaint old Aztec village of
+Cuernavaca, which had been the country seat of Cortez, and was now that of a
+second fair god and a second Hernando. After dismounting at the hotel near the
+conquistador&#8217;s palace, Éloin hurried Driscoll across the plaza into the
+beautiful Italian gardens where Maximilian made his home. At the villa,
+Charlotte&#8217;s own residence in the gardens, Éloin had himself announced to
+Her Majesty. The American reflected that women seemed to have a great deal to do
+with the reigning business. In the drawing room, the Empress received them.</p>
+
+<p>She was a slender young woman whose lips were thin and proud, whose eyes were
+dark and lustrous. Her hair was black and very heavy, coiled in the old
+fashioned style away from a high forehead that was beautifully white. She could
+not be older than twenty-five, and there was even a girlishness in her bearing.
+But she had a steadiness of gaze&#8211;one eye seemed the least heavy
+lidded&#8211;and there was a firmness to the slightly large mouth, which gave an
+impression of strong lines to what was really a soft, oval face. Yet the
+temperament could not be mistaken. She was a woman of acute nerves. She was
+tensely strung, inordinately sensitive.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll believed now what he had heard, that the Empire fared better when
+Charlotte was regent and her lord on a journey. Maximilian dreamed, while she
+realized. The Hapsburg cadet, gazing over the Adriatic from the marble steps of
+Miramar, had brooded fondly on what Destiny must hold for him. He would be king
+of a Poland born again among the nations. Then Louis Napoleon whispered of
+another throne in the building. Whereupon <i>she</i> began the study of Spanish;
+<i>she</i> decided her half hesitating spouse to accept, <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_255'></a>255</span> however loftily they both scorned the
+adventurer who helped them to it.</p>
+
+<p>Carlota, for so the natives called her, amiably greeted the Missourian. She
+was a woman of tact, and though one Din Driscoll was for her as impersonal a
+thing as some opportune event, yet events must be neatly turned to account.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His Majesty and I have discussed your presence in our country,
+sir,&#8221; she began in English, &#8220;and feeling that he desires to see you
+again, I requested M. Éloin to bring you to Cuernavaca.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, thank you, ma&#8217;am,&#8221; said Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>She all but reproved the form of address. But, for her at least, common sense
+was beginning to prevail. The rigid court punctilio, largely of her own
+enthusiastic designing, had gone hard with her. Her husband had proved no more
+than consistent to the medieval revival. He was but true to that old chivalry
+which distinguished between the divinely fair damsel to be won and the mere
+woman won already. He was the monarch, she his consort. Classifying others, the
+Empress found herself classified. He was her liege, and she might not even enter
+his presence unannounced. But how much happier was she in the blithe sailor
+prince who came a-wooing, who wooed for love, in accordance with that same
+ancient chivalry!</p>
+
+<p>A princess of the Blood, of the House of Orleans, Charlotte had had that
+nicest poise of good breeding, the kind that is unconscious. But here among the
+Mexicans, she had to proclaim a superiority not taken for granted, and the nice
+poise was gone. In her the generations&#8211;Henry IV., the Grand Monarch, and
+all of that stately line&#8211;in her they stooped. And an element of sheerest
+vulgarity, as plebeian as a Jew&#8217;s diamond, crept in perforce. Poor
+tarnished escutcheon of Orleans! Poor princess of the Blood, become menial with
+scouring it! She was weary. Over this New World there floated too much of
+obscuring democratic dust. So she <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_256'></a>256</span>allowed &#8220;ma&#8217;am,&#8221; like a homely
+fleck, to settle unreproved on the ancestral doorplate.</p>
+
+<p>Driven to expediency for her very Empire&#8217;s sake, she herself trampled
+on the Ritual. Waiving all formalities, they would go and seek out His Majesty.
+He must be somewhere in the gardens, perhaps beside the pond with its fringe of
+deep shadows from the trees. There they expected to find him, breathing the air
+of orange blossoms, gazing enraptured into the water, and on the gold fish and
+the swans and the fountains. He would be teasing Nature for a sonnet&#8217;s
+inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll went ahead, since Carlota and Éloin talked earnestly in French,
+intent on their plot for the persuasion of the Emperor. But as the American
+parted a clump of oleanders and laden rosebushes that hid the little lake, he
+stopped, his eyes wide on something just beyond. In the instant he fell back,
+and confronted the other two with such a look on his face that both started in
+vague alarm. They saw the sickened look of one who turns from a revolting sight.
+A wretch stricken suddenly blind may know at once the fact of a terrible grief,
+yet he cannot quite at first gather to himself the fullness of the horror. He is
+only aware that, afterward, the meaning will slowly take shape, like a gradually
+darkening despair.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll gazed uncertainly at the Empress, as though she had somehow arrested
+his thoughts. Then, as a strong man rushing from danger, he comprehended that
+here was a frail woman near the same peril.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will not go, ma&#8217;am,&#8221; he ordered in a kind of terror
+for her.</p>
+
+<p>Éloin had already hastened on to the screen of roses. Being a fellow of the
+arras and closets, he scented a royal secret. The Empress lifted her shoulders
+and would have followed, but Driscoll did not hesitate. He took her by the elbow
+and gently turned her the other way.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_257'></a>257</span>&#8220;You must
+not!&#8221; he said again, with that same scared manner on him.</p>
+
+<p>She bridled indignantly, but when she saw how white he was, and how earnest,
+something there awed her. In a flash she understood. Her lip curled, baring
+teeth of the purest pearl, and a sneer quivered on the highbred nostrils. But
+suddenly, in piteous tumult, her breast heaved once, and betrayed the wound. It
+gave him to know the knighthood which covets blows in a woman&#8217;s behalf.
+But she, with a will that held him in admiration and reverence for her, spoke to
+him, and her tone was even, was unbroken.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I dare say you are right,&#8221; she said, and turned to retrace her
+steps. But, as if to drink deeper of the bitter cup, she paused, and forced
+herself to a last word.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I suppose I should thank you,&#8221; she went on, and her eyes, still
+dry of tears, were lustrous as they lifted to his, &#8220;but a
+gentleman&#8211;and I have never known one more than you, sir, this minute
+past&#8211;will understand that I cannot&#8211;There, I am going now. And
+after&#8211;after this that you have just beheld, I shall never see you again,
+sir. Alas, it&#8217;s the more pity. Such as you are rare, even in&#8211;in my
+world.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll watched her blankly as she left him, her head poised high, her step
+as slow as dignity itself. His own face was cruelly drawn, with the first
+sickened ghastliness still on him. He stumbled to a bench, and sat down. But
+there was nothing to think about, nothing he could think about, just then. Yet
+his brain was full to throbbing, and he had no consciousness of where he was,
+nor of the passage of time.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_258'></a>258</span><a id='link_32'></a>CHAPTER XXXII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Woman Who Did Not Hesitate</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;The soul of man is infinite in what it covets.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Ben Jonson.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Stealthily Éloin drew aside the bushes, and peered through. The tiny pond
+with its crystal surface sunk deep in foliage, its flowering island in the
+centre, looked not unlike a mirror on a dining table luxuriantly wreathed by
+garlands. The Belgian stared greedily. He did not see quite what Driscoll had
+seen, yet he saw enough to draw his brow to a narrowing fold of keenest
+interest. Jacqueline was seated on the raised edge of the basin, pensively
+dipping a hand into the water. Her plump wrist showed rosy, like coral, and
+glancing sideways now and again at a poor agitated prince striding up and down,
+she looked as she did that day in the small boat, while tempting a shark. As she
+leaned over, the line of her waist and neck was stately and beautiful; and there
+were the maddening baby tendrils of soft, glowing copper. Maximilian had
+evidently found her there, in a reverie perhaps, and was at sight of her lured
+to some act bold and desirous; for just as evidently, if his flushed face and
+the way he bit his lip were tokens, he had that moment been repelled. Éloin
+watched them avidly, the tall archduke pacing up and down, the demure lady
+seated on the basin&#8217;s edge.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was but the lowly homage of a prince,&#8221; Maximilian cried out
+peevishly. Such was his apology.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Homage of a play-king,&#8221; she corrected him with exasperating
+sweetness.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_259'></a>259</span>He turned on her
+angrily. &#8220;Why do you say that&#8211;a play-king?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whose embassies,&#8221; she proceeded calmly, &#8220;cringe for
+recognition. Like beggars they prowl about that White House at Washington, yet
+never cross the threshold.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian was too amazed for denial. &#8220;How do you know?&#8221; he
+exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;While at the same time,&#8221; she went on, &#8220;the same neighbor
+receives the minister of the Mexican republic, and sends one in turn. But no
+matter. The marionettes of empire can dance, so long as Napoleon holds the
+strings. Was the princely homage a make-believe, too?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But&#8211;but, if I should convince you, mademoiselle, that the
+majesty which only asks to kneel is genuine?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her eyelids narrowed, and she looked at him with the oddest smile.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know&#8211;sire&#8211;that I only ask to be convinced. Where will
+Your Imperial Highness begin?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Know then that the American peasant named Lincoln, who would not
+recognize a Hapsburg, is dead. He has been assassinated. He will no longer
+encourage our rebels in Mexico.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That poor gentleman whom you call a peasant,&#8221; she returned with
+galling frankness, &#8220;was greater than any Hapsburg. He was fifty million
+people, and one million are still under arms. Your rebels know it. They still
+cry, &#8216;Viva la Intervención del Norte!&#8217; But go on, <i>sire</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He chafed under her mockery in the title. But sitting there, goading an
+imaginary shark, she was no less inciting than when he had ventured his
+caress.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They are of no consequence,&#8221; he burst forth, &#8220;neither the
+Americans, nor the dissidents. Your own countrymen, mademoiselle, will, and
+must, assure my empire.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;H&#8217;m&#8217;n,&#8221; she ejaculated, with a quick shrug. &#8220;Even
+the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_260'></a>260</span>marshal,
+greatly against his will, has had to inform Your Majesty that we will shortly
+withdraw.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then I shall depend on my subjects alone!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She contented herself with repeating, &#8220;Viva la Intervención del
+Norte!&#8221; That too, was ample comment as to the loyalty of his subjects. The
+Emperor paused in his walk. &#8220;Alas,&#8221; he sighed wearily, &#8220;a
+Hapsburg sacrifices himself to regenerate a people, and&#8211;they do not
+appreciate it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline bent her head to hide a smile. She dreamily made rings in the
+water, and seemed to fall into his mood of poetic melancholy. &#8220;A
+comedietta of an empire,&#8221; she mused sympathetically, &#8220;a
+harlequinade, nothing more. Grands dieux, I do not wonder that Your Highness
+finds it unworthy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There is no such incense to a man as when he imagines himself understood by a
+pretty woman.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the temptress now found herself the harder to master. It was the thought
+of what she must yet do. But she gave her head an impatient toss, and the tears
+that had come were gone. The lines of her mouth tightened, and the dangerous
+glint shone in her eyes. &#8220;So,&#8221; she added, almost in a whisper,
+&#8220;you did not mean it, sire, when you offered only a play-empire&#8211;to
+me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She knew that he started violently, and was looking down at her. But she kept
+her gaze averted, that he might not see the hard expression there that was
+merciless for them both. He did see, though, the long lashes, and the warm pink
+of her forearm, so tantalizing for shark or man.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;These imperial gardens, they are beautiful,&#8221; she went on softly,
+&#8220;but, hélas, they are not the Schönbrunn. Nor is Chapultepec more than a
+feeble miniature of the Hofburg. Oh, the wretched farce! The wretched farce,
+sire, in your pretension to&#8211;to honor me! A wooer from the throne, indeed?
+A straw throne&#8211;no, no, I do not like it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_261'></a>261</span>Then she let him
+see her eyes. Half raised, half veiled; they held the daring suggestion hidden
+in her words.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And if,&#8221; he cried, &#8220;and if we <i>were</i> in the
+Schönbrunn&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes,&#8221; and she clapped her hands with delight, &#8220;yes,
+where the heroic figures on the crest of the hill are silhouetted against the
+sky, where&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never mind the heroic figures! But where I shall be really an emperor,
+<i>the</i> Emperor over Austria, over Hungary. Then, what then?
+Jeanne&#8211;Jacqueline, tell me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had brought him to it. Yet her face clouded pitifully, as that day in the
+small boat, when she told Ney that a woman might only give. Such a woman too,
+would be lost for the reason that she would <i>not</i> hesitate. Here was the
+errand of the Sphinx, and achievement at her hand. Dainty flower of France, yes!
+But in truth, what was she?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And then?&#8221; she repeated, and the maddening promise in her voice
+thrilled him. &#8220;Why, sire, I suppose that I could not help but listen to
+you. Yet first,&#8221; she hastened to add with subtle emphasis, &#8220;first,
+you would have to give up your play kingdom here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His blue eyes flashed. &#8220;I will!&#8221; he cried. &#8220;It shall be
+mine, the Roman empire of Charles V. They are tired of my brother Franz. Already
+they cry out for me. Our mother made an uncle abdicate for him, I will do as
+much for myself. I will, Jeanne, I will!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Éloin behind his screen moved uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The devil go with her!&#8221; the eavesdropper muttered.
+&#8220;She&#8217;ll have him abdicating himself in another minute. She must be
+stopped, she must!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He tiptoed back, and once out of hearing, he ran. He found Driscoll on a
+bench, slowly passing his fingers through his hair, and staring fixedly at the
+ground.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Coom,&#8221; said Éloin, &#8220;coom quick! He is alone. You find your
+chance. He is that happy, he say yes to anything.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_262'></a>262</span>Driscoll got
+heavily to his feet. There was his mission. For the sake of that, for the sake
+of comrades depending on him, he would go and once more offer succor to this
+libertine princelet.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, not that way,&#8221; the Belgian directed. &#8220;The path here,
+it leads the more direct at the pond, so. Quick!&#8221; He knew that foliage
+would hide the couple until Driscoll should turn the corner of the hedge and
+burst on them squarely. The American hastened down the walk. &#8220;A nice
+surprise, mutual.&#8221; Éloin chuckled to himself.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline did not falter before her victory. She knew that Maximilian rated
+the Mexican throne as a stepping-stone to another in Europe. She knew of a
+certain family pact among the Hapsburgs and how it rankled in Maximilian&#8217;s
+breast. Therein he had, on accepting the Mexican throne, solemnly renounced all
+right of inheritance to that of Austro-Hungary. But she knew also that he
+considered his oath as void, since Franz Josef had forced it on him. Craftily
+she pictured the Mexican enterprise, how instead of enhancing his prestige at
+home, it but turned him into a sorry and ridiculous figure. And so she won the
+child of Destiny. Yet, when in a sudden fervent outburst he came and sat beside
+her, and would have taken her hand, she still did not falter. Napoleon would
+have the glory, and she a shame unexplained, but for all that her country would
+have Mexico. Her country would have Mexico! Would have a vast expanse of empire,
+greater and more enduring than any won for her by Bonaparte himself.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, she brushed away the gallant&#8217;s arm with more vigor than
+her coy rôle demanded. &#8220;No, no,&#8221; she moaned faintly, &#8220;not
+yet!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, <i>cruelle</i>&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not yet, not until I know that you will try to win in Austria, not
+until&#8211;you abdicate here!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, I shall sail this very month, I&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_263'></a>263</span>&#8220;And never
+return, never to Mexico?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Frankly, then, she placed her hands in his.</p>
+
+<p>That moment Driscoll turned the corner of the hedge, and was before them. He
+fell back, and reddened as though himself caught in wrongdoing. It was strange
+how he noted, at such a time, that she was clothed in light blue, in the very
+dress he had given her. But no, he perceived at once that it was of some
+delicate silk from Japan. Yet the pattern was so nearly the same. She must have
+selected it&#8211;she had selected it!&#8211;with him in mind. And now, against
+a girl&#8217;s love so quaintly, shyly revealed, to behold this contrast, her
+hands there, wantonly surrendered!</p>
+
+<p>Instantly she tore herself free and confronted him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, why, <i>why</i>,&#8221; she cried fiercely, &#8220;did you not let
+them kill you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly her hands flew up to her hot face. &#8220;Then,&#8221; she moaned,
+&#8220;then you would not have lived to see!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor stepped between them. Tall, severe, he was cold in anger.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the intrusion of a rowdy, mademoiselle.&#8221; To Driscoll
+he said, &#8220;Now, go!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Utterly confused, the trooper turned to obey. But at the first step he swung
+round, looking as he had never looked in the bloodiest of cavalry charges.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am here for your answer, sir,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Answer? What answer, fellow?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll breathed once, he breathed twice, and yet again. It may be he
+counted them. Then he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You understand, of course, that I might call you a puppy? Or break you
+over my knee? But I&#8217;ve got something harder on hand. It&#8217;s to make
+you honor your promise. I&#8217;ve ridden forty miles for what you were to give
+me six hours ago at Chapultepec. Now then, shall I bring the men to save your
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_264'></a>264</span>empire? Think well.
+You need not take the question from me. Take it from them, from an army of fifty
+thousand men. Now, answer! And remember, you can save your empire.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Save my empire?&#8221; Maximilian repeated the words.</p>
+
+<p>There was a reluctant note in the query. Jacqueline heard. And the bravest
+act of her life was when she raised her head and faced her shame, with
+<i>him</i> to see. She must begin her fight all over again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, your play empire, sire,&#8221; she said, wielding two weapons,
+the mockery in her voice, the seduction of her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll saw his cause forlorn against eyes like those.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s unfair!&#8221; he protested involuntarily.</p>
+
+<p>She turned on him in defiance. &#8220;It is <i>not</i> unfair! And you,
+monsieur, of all men, know that it is not. You, and you alone, know what I, what
+I would give&#8211;what I tried to give&#8211;that I might win in
+this!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He could not help a thrill of admiration. She was battling against all men
+and women to change the destinies of two continents.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, I take it back then,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>She stared at him in wonder, and drew farther away. It was his tone, altered
+as she could never have thought possible, nor had she known that aught on earth
+might hurt her so. She heard a decent man addressing some unavoidable word to a
+strumpet. All vestige of respect was gone, gone unconsciously, except that
+respect for himself which would not allow that the word be coarse or an insult.
+She looked in vain, too, for a trace of anger. Once she had sought to kill him,
+but that had not changed his big heart. While now! How much&#8211;oh, how much
+easier&#8211;was that other sacrifice of hers than this!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perhaps, sir,&#8221; she found the strength to say, &#8220;perhaps I
+have even, in my humble opinion, favored the acceptance <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_265'></a>265</span>of your offer. But His Majesty knows far
+better than I under what conditions he might accept.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll turned to Maximilian direct. &#8220;Name them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There is but one. We cannot give refuge to the enemies of the United
+States&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The conditions?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Therefore, to avoid complications, your men must lay down their arms
+on entering Mexico. Then we would deliver the arms to the United States on their
+recognizing Our Empire&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Trade us off, you mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Or, in case the United States still held aloof, then, as citizens of
+Mexico, you could take up your arms again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll looked at Jacqueline. She, the inspiration of such a condition, knew
+quite well beforehand that he would not submit.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is final, is it?&#8221; he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is, because We cannot provoke war with the United States,
+but,&#8221; Maximilian urged querulously, &#8220;you have only to surrender your
+swords.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;After refusing them to the Federals, to the men who <i>fought</i> for
+them? And now we are to give them up to a pack of&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Driscoll
+stopped short and took another breath. &#8220;By God, sir, no sir!&#8221; he
+cried.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_266'></a>266</span><a id='link_33'></a>CHAPTER XXXIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>A Sponsor for the Fat Padre</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Every man is as heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Cervantes.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When Driscoll had gone, Jacqueline would not linger. Maximilian sought to
+detain her, but something had happened that he could not fathom. She was no more
+the same person.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not even a token to bid me be brave so far away in Austria?&#8221; he
+pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There have been tokens enough,&#8221; she returned shortly. &#8220;I
+ask Your Majesty&#8217;s leave. Good-night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She gained her room, and worked till late on a cipher dispatch to Napoleon.
+Its purport was, that now, if ever, Maximilian must be discouraged absolutely.
+Following on what she herself had done, such would bring his abdication. She
+implored, above all things, that Bazaine be kept from meddling, from extending
+false hopes. Poor girl, after what it had cost, she was passionately bent on
+success. A courier took her packet to the City the next day, whence the message
+was to be sped to Paris.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That foolish Prince Max,&#8221; she thought, &#8220;if he does give it
+up and go, I am really saving him from terrible sorrow. But, who will save me
+from mine, I wonder? Mine, that is come already! God in Heaven
+cannot.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian had watched her as she left him, till her stately girlish figure
+was lost in the dusk under the trees. Then with a sigh he turned away. At the
+villa he found his wife. She was seated apart from her maids, and Éloin was
+talking to her, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_267'></a>267</span>in
+tones low and swift. Charlotte only half listened. Her agitation was nearly
+hysterical. Her eyes gleamed wildly, and sometimes they would close, as though
+they ached for the soothing that tears might bring.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who,&#8221; demanded Maximilian, &#8220;has had the presumption to
+introduce a spy on these grounds?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Éloin glanced quickly at the Empress. &#8220;A spy, sire?&#8221; he said
+uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I mean that American, sir. But shall I ask the sentinels at the
+gate?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That, Ferdinand,&#8221; Charlotte interposed icily, &#8220;is not
+necessary. Monsieur Éloin, at my command, brought the American here. You should
+know why.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To save my play-empire, I suppose?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;An empire,&#8221; she cried, catching up the word the more hotly
+because she knew it to be Jacqueline&#8217;s own gage of battle, &#8220;an
+empire, August Sire, to be gained by fighting, as your forefathers, as mine, won
+theirs. And that is nobler, <i>I</i> suppose, than puny inheritance. I do not
+know what the Hapsburg may be fallen to, but a daughter of Orleans still has the
+right to expect a crown from her husband. If not, she is unworthily
+mated.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian thought of that other empire, which that other temptress exacted
+of him. It seemed that he had many realms to conquer. But the grimmest humor of
+all was that he blithely imagined himself capable of satisfying the whims, not
+of one woman, but of two. Deluded Prince Max!</p>
+
+<p>But the Emperor was not there to discuss empire building, much less to face
+the tigerish light in his lady&#8217;s eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur Éloin,&#8221; he said, &#8220;this is my first personal
+complaint against you, but there have been others, long, insistent ones, from
+French and Mexicans alike. You lose me my friends, sir, however I assure them
+that you have not the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_268'></a>268</span>slightest influence over my policy. So, after the
+awkward intrusion of to-day, I am resolved that you had best leave
+us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Majesty desires&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That you leave the country at once, Monsieur Éloin.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; protested Charlotte, &#8220;that is open disgrace. At
+least cover it with the pretext of some mission.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The downcast courtier took heart. Watching his master with narrowed sycophant
+eyes, he said, &#8220;But it need not be a pretext, sire. Since I must leave
+Your Highness, permit me, then, to find my mission, and one in which I can still
+serve my sovereign, though in spite of himself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Imperceptibly Maximilian fell under the spell of the old fawning.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what mission could that be, my good friend?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To feel the Austrian pulse, sire. To know when the time is ripe, to
+hasten the time&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The time for what?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;For Your Majesty&#8217;s return. Even now the unpopularity of His
+Imperial Highness, Franz&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Éloin!&#8221; Maximilian stopped him sharply. But he could not hide
+the flash of his own blue eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What would Your Majesty? In Vienna, in Budapest, in your own Venetia,
+sire, they long for you; at least as regent till the crown prince shall come of
+age. Would you rebuke them also, as you do me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte stared at the Belgian in amazement and distrust. He had only just
+warned her how Jacqueline had kindled Maximilian&#8217;s Austrian hopes in order
+to get him out of Mexico, and here he was borrowing that woman&#8217;s guile.
+And here was Maximilian, too, softening under the enervating blandishment,
+softening behind his frowns for the officious meddler.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, there, Éloin,&#8221; he said, &#8220;you know that I must be
+inexorable. But in the Journal Officiel it will appear that you <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_269'></a>269</span>are gone on a secret
+mission, though you have no mission at all. None at all, do you understand,
+sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Éloin protested that he understood.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;None,&#8221; repeated the Emperor, &#8220;except to win back my
+confidence. When you have taken leave of Her Majesty, you may come to my cabinet
+to bid me farewell.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As Maximilian left them, Charlotte turned on the favorite. &#8220;Indeed,
+Monsieur Éloin?&#8221; she said in utter scorn.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, Your Majesty&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is Napoleon, then, so liberal a paymaster?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Majesty!&#8221; and in genuine distress the courtier hurried on.
+&#8220;If you would listen, Madame! &#8217;Tis true that Jeanne d&#8217;Aumerle has found
+the surest lever to pry His Highness out of Mexico&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So good a lever, that you would use it too, to topple over my
+throne.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not so, Madame. It&#8217;s a cunning lever, yes; but <i>I</i> shall use
+another fulcrum.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Really, monsieur, if I were in the mood for riddles and such pretty
+trifles, I&#8217;d ask you to favor Us with a chansonnette.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But this is as plain as day. First, our little intrigante knows that
+if His Majesty tries for the Austrian throne, he must leave Mexico.
+<i>That</i> is her lever to move him. But suppose we shift it to my fulcrum.
+Then, whatever encourages his hopes for Austria, will make him but the more
+determined to cling to Mexico. For to succeed in Austria, he must triumph first
+in Mexico. He must prove to Europe that he can reign brilliantly. But if he
+abandons Mexico, as Jacqueline would persuade him, what of his prestige then?
+What of his glory to dazzle the Austrians? If Your Majesty would suggest to him
+this phase&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you, meanwhile in Europe?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I shall find his chances good over there, but conditional on his
+success here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_270'></a>270</span>&#8220;Monsieur
+Éloin, I find that I must congratulate you. More, I even regret that you are
+going, for I dread that some other will replace you in favor with the Emperor
+who&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who may not be in accord with our views, Your Majesty would say? But
+if you will permit, Madame, I believe I know quite a different man. Moreover, he
+has already made an impression on His Highness, during our brief stay at an
+hacienda in the Huasteca. Now he is here. I brought him to commend as a future
+loyal follower.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pray, who is the paragon?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A priest, Madame, a German priest, who perhaps would not refuse the
+Bishopric of Durango. The hope of that rich see would insure his devotion. His
+name is Fischer. He is a clerical, he is an imperialist, he is resourceful. Our
+Jacqueline will have much to do to outwit him. This corpulent padre, Madame,
+would wheedle the sulky pope himself into a good humor with us. If I might
+venture so far as to present him before&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I suppose so,&#8221; said Charlotte wearily.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+
+<h1>PART SECOND<br /><span style='font-size:smaller;'>THE ROSE THAT WAS A THORN<br />IN THE LAND OF ROSES</span></h1>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;The rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;Emerson.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_273'></a>273</span><a id='link_34'></a>CHAPTER I<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Meagre Shanks</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;... and should a man full of talk be justified?&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Book of Job</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>At the hotel in the City of Mexico where Driscoll stopped, the entrance was
+big enough for a stage coach to drive through. But as to height, it did not seem
+any too great for the attenuation of Mr. Daniel Boone, who therein had propped
+himself at his ease, delightfully suggesting a tropical gentleman lounging on a
+veranda under the live oaks. One shoulder was impinged on the casing of the
+archway, from which contact his spare frame drifted out and downward, to the
+supporting base of one boot sole. The other boot crossed it over, and the edge
+of the toe rested on the pavement of the Calle de los Plateros, familiarly
+so-called.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone hailed from Boonville, but in Missouri, with Kentucky for ancestral
+State, such was not a strained coincidence by any means. An individual there of
+the name of Boone, and a bit of geography likewise distinguished, are bound to
+fall together occasionally. For instance, a flea&#8217;s hop over the map, and
+Mr. Boone and Boonville both might have claimed the county of Boone. Under the
+circumstances, Daniel&#8217;s Christian name was the most obviously Christian
+thing his parents could do, and followed (to precede thereafter) as a matter of
+course.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Missouri, in the beginning of the Civil War, was a very Flanders for
+battles, and this sort of thing had ended by disturbing Mr. Boone considerably
+in the manipulation of an <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_274'></a>274</span>old hand-press, dubbed his Gutenberg, which worked
+with a lever and required some dozen processes for each impression of the
+<i>Boonville Semi-Weekly Javelin</i>. Finally, when Joe Shelby and his pack of
+fire-eaters were raiding Missouri for the second time, Daniel plaintively laid
+down his stick in the middle of an editorial on Black Republicans, and what
+should be done to them. The shooting outside had gotten on his nerves at last.
+That blazing away of Missourians back home made him homesick. He was like the
+repressed boy called out by the gang to go coasting. And he went. An editorial
+by example, he went to do unto the Black Republicans somewhat personally. The
+Javelinier was a young man yet.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s been rumors hitherto about the pen and the sword,&#8221;
+he mused, &#8220;but type, now&#8211;that&#8217;s <i>hot</i>!&#8221; Wherewith
+he emptied his cases into a sack, took down a squirrel rifle, chased off his
+devil, locked in the Gutenberg, and joined the raiders. Flinging his burden of
+metal at General Shelby&#8217;s feet, he said, &#8220;There sir, is <i>The
+Javelin</i> in embryo for months to come. Now it&#8217;s pi, which we&#8217;ll
+sho&#8217;ly feed out by the bullet weight, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>From then on the newspaper man followed his proclivities and turned scout,
+and it was a vigilant foe that could scoop him on the least of their movements,
+whether in the field or in their very stronghold, St. Louis itself.</p>
+
+<p>At the present moment Mr. Boone was retrieving a lost familiarity with good
+cigars. There was a black one of the Valle Nacional in his mouth, and also in
+his mouth there was a wisp of straw. The steel-blue smoke floated out lazily,
+which his steel-blue eyes regarded with appreciation. It was an Elysium of
+indolence. The cigar, the not having to kill anybody for a few minutes, and a
+place to lean against, these were content. Troubadour phrases droned soothingly
+in his brain. Of course he had to apostrophize the snow-clads:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_275'></a>275</span>&#8220;Popo, out
+there, grand, towering, whose frosty nose sniffs the vault of heaven, whose
+mantle of fleecy cloud wraps him as the hoary locks of a giant,
+whose&#8211;Sho&#8217;, if I had some copy paper now, I&#8217;d get you fixed
+<i>right</i>, you slippery old codger!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The wisp of straw hardly tallied with poesy of soul, nor did the lank figure
+and lean face, nor the cavalry uniform, badly worn, though lately new, nor yet
+the sagging belt with dragoon pistols. But the eyes did. Those eyes held the
+eloquence of the youth of a race. They were gentle, or they flashed, according
+to what passed within. It did not matter necessarily what might be going on
+without. They would as likely dart sparks during prayer meeting, or soften as a
+lover&#8217;s mid the charge on a battery. Shaggy moustached Daniel, not yet
+thirty, was a scholar too, of the true old school, where dead languages lived to
+consort familiarly with men, and neither had to be buried out of the world
+because of the comradeship. Once, in Pompeii, Daniel blundered suddenly on that
+mosaic doormat which bears the warning, &#8220;Cave canem&#8221;; and before he
+thought, he glanced anxiously around, half expecting a dog that could have
+barked at Saint Peter himself. From which it appears that the editor had
+traveled, and it would not be long in also appearing that he had gathered enough
+of polite and variegated learning to fill a warehouse, in which junk-shop he was
+constantly rummaging, and bringing forth queer specimens of speech wherewith to
+flower his inspirations.</p>
+
+<p>Streaming back and forth before the shops in lively Plateros street were
+elegance and fashion and display, the languishing beauty of Spain, the
+brilliancy of the Second Empire, the Teuton&#8217;s martial strutting, the
+Mexican&#8217;s elation that Europe had come to him and with the money to pay
+for it. The toughened Boone gazed on the bright morning parade of ravishing
+shoppers and ogling cavaliers with the unterrified innocence of a child, or of
+an American. He had the air of <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_276'></a>276</span>doing nothing, such as only a newspaper man can have
+when really at work. He did not look as though he were waiting for some one. But
+only a half-hour before he had gotten from the saddle. He had just ridden four
+hundred and fifty miles for the express purpose of waiting for someone now.</p>
+
+<p>Finally the keen, lazy eyes singled out an immense yellow horse and rider
+from among the luxurious turnouts. &#8220;Jack!&#8221; he exclaimed gladly.
+&#8220;The Storm Centre,&#8221; he improvised, as the new comer approached,
+&#8220;straight as Tecumseh, a great bronzed Ajax, mighty thewed, as strong of
+hand as of digestion&#8211;w&#8217;y, bless my soul, the boy looks pow&#8217;ful
+dejected, knocked plum&#8217; galley-west! I never saw him look like that
+before.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Man and horse had come all night from Cuernavaca. But Din Driscoll never
+tired, wherefore Boone knew that <i>something</i> was the matter. At the doorway
+Driscoll flung himself from the saddle, gave the bridle to a porter of the
+hotel, and was following, his face the picture of gloom, when he heard the
+words, &#8220;How&#8217; yuh, Jack?&#8221; His brow cleared in the instant.
+&#8220;Shanks!&#8221; he cried, gripping the other&#8217;s hand.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone untwined his boots and for the first time during a half-hour stood
+in them. As he shook Driscoll&#8217;s hand, he shook his own head, and at last
+observed, in the way of continuing a conversation, &#8220;It was the almightiest
+soaking rain, Din, for the land&#8217;s sake!&#8221; And he shook his head
+again, quite mournfully.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll had not seen Mr. Boone since leaving Shelby&#8217;s camp back in
+Arkansas. He naturally wished to know what was being talked about. But his
+woeful friend only kept on, &#8220;It wet all Texas, heavier&#8217;n a sponge,
+and,&#8221; he added, &#8220;they ain&#8217;t coming.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shanks! You don&#8217;t mean&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t I? But I do. They&#8217;re a surrendered army. The <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_277'></a>277</span>whole Trans-Mississippi
+Department of &#8217;em, pretty near. But not quite, bear that
+in&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the rain? What in&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What did you come down here for, I&#8217;d like to know? To say how
+the Trans-Mississippi wouldn&#8217;t surrender, didn&#8217;t you?
+Well?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, go on!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, it rained, I tell you. Didn&#8217;t it rain before Waterloo?
+Didn&#8217;t it now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone believed in trouble as an antidote for trouble. When he had stirred
+Driscoll out of his dejection enough to make him want to fight, he deigned to
+clear the atmosphere of that befogging downpour in Texas.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You rec&#8217;lect, Din, that there war god we put up in Kirby Smith&#8217;s
+place, who so dashingly would lead us on to Mexico?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Buckner, yes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Him, Simon Bolivar B., whose gold lace glittered as though washed by
+the dew and wiped with the sunshine&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, Shanks, drop it!&#8221; Driscoll was referring to the editorial
+pen which Mr. Boone would clutch and get firmly in hand with the least rise of
+emotion. Against his other conversation, the clutching always became at once
+apparent.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Anyhow,&#8221; said Daniel meekly, &#8220;he wilted, did our Simon of
+B. B. calibre, and he gave back the command to Smith. And Smith&#8217;s first
+order, his very first order, sir, was that the Department, the whole fifty
+thousand, should march into Shrevepoht and&#8211;and <i>surrender</i>, by
+thunder!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dan, you&#8217;re not going to tell me&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That <i>we</i> surrendered, we, the Missourians, the flower of
+&#8217;em all? Now s&#8217;pose you just wait till Joe Shelby gets back to us in
+Arkansas, after that conference with the other generals? Then you&#8217;ll see
+what <i>he</i> does. He proclaims things, on wall paper. The Missouri Cavalry
+Division will march to Shrevepoht, will depose Smith for good, will head off the
+surrender, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_278'></a>278</span> will
+lead the other divisions on to Mexico. And we started to do it too. And then,
+and then&#8211;it rained. Rained, sir, till our trains and guns were mired, and
+we couldn&#8217;t budge! And all the time we knew that regiment after regiment
+was stacking arms off there at Shrevepoht. Did Little Joe rave? Opened Job his
+mouth? He did. His fluency gave the rain pointers. I sho&#8217;ly absorbed some
+myself, me, that have language tanks of my own. Well, I reckon all our hearts
+pretty near broke. But we had our Missouri general and our Missouri governor,
+and the Old Brigade just decided to come along anyhow. And we&#8217;re a coming,
+Din, we&#8217;re a coming!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll&#8217;s face went blank. He thought of the scant welcome his
+homeless comrades would get. But Mr. Boone did not notice. He had only stretched
+his canvas, a big one, and there was a picture to paint. His long body began to
+straighten out, and his eyes glowed. From Xenophon to Irving&#8217;s Astoria,
+from Hannibal crossing the Alps to Marching Through Georgia, he ransacked both
+romance and the classics for adequate tints, but in vain. The colors would have
+to be of his own mixing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Din Driscoll,&#8221; he began solemnly, &#8220;<i>you</i> know that
+devil breed? Of coh&#8217;se, you&#8217;re one of &#8217;em. You&#8217;re a chunk of
+brimstone, yourself. And you&#8217;ll maybe rec&#8217;lect they did some fighting off
+and on. There was that raw company, f&#8217;r instance&#8211;boys, hardly a one broke
+in his yoke of oxen yet&#8211;and they hadn&#8217;t even gotten their firearms,
+but they took a battery with their naked hands, and got themselves all tangled
+up in the fiery woof of death. But you&#8217;ll not be rec&#8217;lecting that that
+there Brigade ever <i>lost</i> a gun. And those raids, Din, back into Missouri,
+a handful back into the Federal country, when men dozed and dropped from their
+saddles and still did not wake up, and some went clean daft for want of sleep,
+and fighting steady all around the clock too, fair and <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_279'></a>279</span> square over into Kansas! And there was
+the night they buried eight hundred!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In all this Daniel might have said &#8220;We,&#8221; but reportorial modesty
+forbade.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And,&#8221; he went on, gaining momentum, &#8220;I don&#8217;t reckon
+you&#8217;ll be forgetting Arkansas, and the ague and rattlesnakes? And how the
+small-pox swooped down on that camp of cane shacks? And how the quinine gave
+out, and&#8211;and the <i>tobacco</i>? Lawd!&#8211;And how those boys forgot how
+to sew patches, their rags being so far gone! And how they made bridles out of
+bark, and coffee out of corn! And how they kneaded dough in old rubber blankets
+and cooked it on rocks! Well, Jack, there they were, in Arkansas like that, and
+the War was over at last, and Missouri was just a waiting for &#8217;em. And
+then, to think that they had to face square around another way entirely! Din,
+you&#8217;ll just try to imagine that there devil breed facing any other way
+except to&#8217;ds home!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t, Shanks, you&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Devils? They were the wildest things that are. It&#8217;s a mighty
+good thing they didn&#8217;t go back. Think of their neighbors across the Kansas
+line, getting ready for &#8217;em with every sort of legal persecution under the
+sun, and carpet-bag judges to help! Outlaw decrees? Well, I reckon those decrees
+will make a few outlaws, all right, and there&#8217;ll be unsurrendered Johnny
+Rebs ten years from now. Shelby&#8217;s boys had the look of it. Your own
+Jackson county regiment would have flared into desperadoes at sight of a United
+States marshal. They were all in just that sort o&#8217; mood, as they turned
+their backs on Missouri. And after four years, too! But there, it&#8217;s a
+stiff wind that has no turning, so cheer up! <i>They</i> did, as soon as that
+deluge got done with and they were headed for Mexico, one thousand of &#8217;em.
+Soldiers mus&#8217;n&#8217;t repine, you know. For them, Fate arrays herself in
+April&#8217;s capricious sunshine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_280'></a>280</span>Driscoll had to
+smile. &#8220;Careful, there, Dan, don&#8217;t stampede.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I ain&#8217;t, but if now &#8216;I hold my tongue I shall give up the
+ghost,&#8217; and I want to tell you first that Texas is a handsome state.
+We&#8211;they&#8211;were considerable interested all the way through
+it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, Meagre Shanks, where&#8217;d you leave &#8217;em?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Back in Monterey, drinking champagne with Fat Jenny. Alas, &#8216;who can
+stay the bottles of heaven?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fat&#8211;who&#8217;s she?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now you wait. They&#8217;ve got heaps to do in Texas yet, before they
+get to Fat Jenny. First, they helped themselves out of their own commissary
+departments, horses, provisions trains, cannon, everything. Decently uniformed
+for the first time, and the War over! You should of seen &#8217;em, a forest of
+Sharpe&#8217;s carbines, a regular circulating library of Beecher Bibles. There
+were four Colts and a dragoon sabre and thousands of rounds of ammunition to
+each man. They had fighting tools to spare, and they cached a lot of the stuff
+up in the state of Coahuila. And they fed, and got sleek. This ain&#8217;t
+editorial, my boy. It&#8217;s God&#8217;s own truth. Adventures every step of
+the way only did &#8217;em good. They saved whole towns from renegade looters by
+just mentioning Shelby&#8217;s name. They fought all day and danced all night.
+San Antone was the best. There they gathered in generals, governors, senators,
+and even Kirby Smith, all yearning to join Old Joe&#8211;our Old Joe, who
+ain&#8217;t thirty-four yet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The speaker paused, and when he began again, there was a light ominous of
+inspiration in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At the Rio Grande,&#8221; he said, solemnly, &#8220;they crossed out
+of the Confederacy forever, so it was meet and right that there, in midstream,
+they should consign their old battle-flag to the past. They had not surrendered
+it, but as a standard it existed for those gallant hearts no more. Woman&#8217;s
+loyal <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_281'></a>281</span>hand had
+bestowed it. Coy victory had caressed its folds mid the powder pall and horror
+of ten score desperate fields. And now it floated over the last of its
+followers, ere the waves should close over it forevermore. With bowed heads,
+they gathered sadly about&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lay it down, Shanks, lay it down,&#8221; Driscoll pleaded. He was
+referring again to the pen in hand.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All right, Din,&#8221; Boone answered hastily. &#8220;Yes, I know, we
+all got kind of weepy too. No wonder Colonel Slayback wrote some verses. Reckon
+you can stand just one? This one?</p>
+
+<div class='poetry'>
+<p>&#8216;And that group of Missouri&#8217;s valiant
+throng,<br />Who had fought for the weak against the
+strong&#8211;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Who had charged and
+bled<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;Where
+Shelby led,<br /> Were the last who held above the
+wave<br /> The glorious flag of the vanquished
+brave,<br /> No more to rise from its watery
+grave!&#8217;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;And,&#8221; he added savagely, &#8220;just let any parlor critic smile
+at the sacred feet of those same lines!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let him once!&#8221; said Driscoll. His eyes were moist.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone faithfully traversed the rest of the way with the &#8220;Iron
+Brigade,&#8221; and no company of errant knights, perhaps, ever had such a
+junketing as those same lusty troopers. No sooner did they set foot in the
+enchanted land of roses than a damsel in distress, the República Mexicana
+herself, came to them for succor. Or more literally, a dissident governor,
+backed by the authority of President Juarez, offered Shelby military control of
+the three northern states and grants in the fabulously rich Sonora mines, if he
+would hang high his shield and recruit his countrymen in the republican cause.
+There is little doubt that General Shelby could have raised an army and become
+henceforth a power in Mexico, for Washington would have smiled on the
+undertaking and all Texas would have afforded a base of supplies. But the
+Missourian&#8217;s Round Table voted it down. They awaited Maximilian&#8217;s
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_282'></a>282</span>reply which
+Driscoll was to bring. Perhaps, too, they would have a chance to wage war
+against the United States again, and that was better than being smiled on.</p>
+
+<p>Henceforth they fought the forlorn damsel herself, fought every foot of the
+way through desert mesquite thick enough to daunt a tarantula. There were
+guerrillas, robbers, spies, deserters, and Indian tribes. It was one eternal
+ambush, incessantly a skirmish, often a pitched battle. They saved a French
+garrison. They rescued a real maiden by a night attack on an hacienda
+stronghold, and did it with strictly de rigueur dash and chivalry. Once or twice
+they were even stung, by some &#8220;langourous dusky-eyed scorpion of a
+saynorita&#8221; to fight among themselves, cavalryman&#8217;s code. Daniel was
+never one to spoil a romance by mentioning that a tropical maid was faced like a
+waffle-iron, though more than likely she was. Finally, as a last stroke, Fat
+Jenny promised to shoot Shelby and hang the rest.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve been derogatory about this lady before,&#8221; Driscoll
+interposed, &#8220;and I want to know who she is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She is the English for Jeanningros, the French general at Monterey,
+who&#8217;d heard about those negotiations with the República. But Shelby formed
+in battle line, to storm his old city, and at the same time sent word explaining
+that he hadn&#8217;t accepted any offer from the República. So, instead of
+shooting and hanging, Jenny asked us around for supper. That&#8217;s where I
+left &#8217;em.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What for?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y,&#8221; said Boone in surprise, &#8220;to see if you&#8217;d
+gotten here, and to take back Maximilian&#8217;s answer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But what&#8217;s the use? The Trans-Mississippi went and
+surrendered.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Gra-cious, but you&#8217;re in a vicious humor! Now, here&#8217;s the
+use. Instead of fifty thousand, we&#8217;re only one thousand, I know. But there
+are hundreds and hundreds of Americans <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_283'></a>283</span>down here like us, and all of &#8217;em wanting
+service. There&#8217;s that colony just starting at Córdova near Vera Cruz. But
+they&#8217;d fight, if there was an American to lead them, and more yet &#8217;ud come
+from the States. Quicker&#8217;n that, Old Joe will have a division.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll ruefully shook his head. &#8220;Maximilian wants us,&#8221; he said,
+&#8220;if we&#8217;ll give up our arms first.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If we&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If we will surrender, Dan.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone&#8217;s jaw fell. The phrase that would measure the depth of the
+proposed ignominy would not come. Finally, he dug from his pocket a bright new
+gold coin, twenty pesos, and contemplated reflectively the side that bore
+Maximilian&#8217;s effigy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve got the cub repohter&#8217;s superstition,&#8221; he said
+at last. &#8220;You get your cards printed,&#8221; here he tapped the coin
+significantly, &#8220;and you&#8217;re sure to lose your job&#8211;still we
+might of helped him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing, though, for Daniel but to turn back and meet the Brigade.
+Learning Maximilian&#8217;s decision, the Missourians would probably join the
+Córdova colony. Boone reckoned that <i>he</i> would. He discovered that he was
+tired of fighting. Perhaps the new citizens at Córdova would want an organ, a
+weekly at least; and already his nostrils were sniffing the pungent, fascinating
+aroma of printer&#8217;s ink. Then he asked Driscoll what he thought of doing,
+now that he was free.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t know,&#8221; came the reply lonesomely. &#8220;Stir
+around, I guess. There&#8217;s a flying column leaving this week to capture
+Juarez. Maybe that&#8217;ll do me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_284'></a>284</span><a id='link_35'></a>CHAPTER II<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Black Decree</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;So may heaven&#8217;s grace clear whatso&#8217;er of foam<br />
+Floats turbid on the conscience.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Dante.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>That unleashed hawk which was the flying column failed to clutch its prey.
+From the City of Mexico across the far northwestern desert the Chasseurs and
+cuirassiers rode their swift Arabian steeds, and into the town of Chihuahua at
+last. But the old Indian for whom they came was not there. Benito Juarez had
+fled. He must have known. Yet how, no one might conjecture. It was as though
+some watchful Republican fairy had marked the sturdy, squat patriot as the one
+hope of the Empire&#8217;s overthrow, and did not propose to have him taken.
+Scouts, spies, the entire French secret service, delved, gestured, and sweated.
+But they laid bare next to nothing. At the Palacio Munícipal a number of
+functionaries told of a peon in breech clout, a wretch coated with alkali dust
+till the muscles of his legs looked like grayish ropes, who had emerged from the
+cacti plain ten days before and come running into Chihuahua. The peon had made
+direct for the Palacio, where, in some way, he had contrived a secret word with
+Don Benito; and that very day Don Benito with his one minister, Lerdo, had set
+out toward the north.</p>
+
+<p>Afterward the functionaries had questioned the messenger, but he knew next to
+nothing. A señor chaparro had sent him, was all he said. It was a ridiculous
+anti-climax. A señor chaparro, &#8220;El Chaparrito,&#8221;
+&#8220;Shorty,&#8221; such a one to be the omniscient guardian of the Republic!
+But for all that <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_285'></a>285</span>&#8220;El Chaparrito&#8221; was to be heard of again
+and many times, and always as an enigma to both sides alike, until the absurd
+word became freighted on the lips of men with superstitious awe. There was an
+inscrutable, long-fingered providence at work in the blood-strife of the nation.
+The warning to Juarez at Chihuahua was its first manifestation.</p>
+
+<p>Their quarry had escaped, but Driscoll was not sorry. More than once he had
+felt a vague shame for the unsportsmanlike chase after one lone, indomitable old
+man. Driscoll held a commission, which Michel Ney, happily recovering, had
+procured for him from the marshal. But as the American&#8217;s healthy spirits,
+like cleansing by vigorous blood, swept the gloom from his mind, he began to
+wonder at the craving for bustle and forgetfulness which had made him snatch at
+such an offer. The corners of his mouth twisted in whimsical self-scorn. He, one
+of your drooping, unrequited lovers! &#8220;Shucks!&#8221; that is what he
+thought. And he persuaded himself that it was all over. Quite, quite persuaded
+himself. But as a matter of fact, he hoped that he might never have to see her
+again.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until October of the same year that Driscoll saw actual battle in
+his new service. With the Fifth Lancers under Colonel Mendez, the best of the
+few native regiments in the field, he had been assisting at a manner of
+pacification. That is, they marched from town to town, and received allegiance.
+Guerrillas of course punished the towns later, but Maximilian would not be
+induced to organize a native army, and thirty thousand French could not garrison
+fifteen thousand leagues. They could only promenade, through sand storms,
+through cacti. Then the battle took place. It was the last vestige of Liberal
+resistance to the Empire. A few hundred men near Uruapan in Michoacan flaunted
+their defiance. Driscoll noticed an expectant and wolfish look in his
+colonel&#8217;s eyes. Mendez was a strikingly handsome and gallant Indian, but
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_286'></a>286</span>his expectancy now
+was not for battle. It was for the battle&#8217;s sequel. Michel Ney and a squad
+of Chasseurs had just brought him an Imperial packet from the City, and the
+packet contained general orders very much to his Indian taste.</p>
+
+<p>The fight was a rousing one, and Driscoll enjoyed himself for the first time
+in many days. His Mexicans behaved as he could have wished, better than he had
+hoped. At the start in the familiar uproarious hell, he missed the hard set,
+exultant faces of his old Jackson county troop, and seeing only tawny visages
+through the smoke and hearing only foreign yells, he felt a queer twinge of
+homesickness. But he was at once ashamed, for the humble little chocolate
+centaurs whom he had been set to train were dying about him with lethargic
+cynicism, just as they were bidden. Wearing a charm, either the Virgin&#8217;s
+picture in a tin frame, or the cross, they might have worn the crescent. They
+were as effective as Moslems. They were ruthless fatalists.</p>
+
+<p>Michel Ney also spent a diverting half-hour. He had lingered for the fray.
+Waving a broken sabre snapped off at the hilt, he charged with Gallic verve and
+got himself knocked under his kicking and wounded horse, and pummeled by Liberal
+muskets on every side. Driscoll saw, and straightened out matters. Handing the
+Frenchman a whole sabre, he reproved him soberly, as a carpenter might an
+apprentice caught using a plane for a ripsaw.</p>
+
+<p>After it was over, the living of the enemy were prisoners. The victors
+marched them to Uruapan near by, because it was charged that at this place two
+of the captured Liberals, Generals Arteaga and Salazar, had lately shot two
+Imperialists. Here, in their turn, they were promptly executed.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll heard the volleys, ran to the spot, and saw the last horrid
+spasms.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8211;what&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ney turned on him a sickened look.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_287'></a>287</span>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you know, it&#8217;s the new
+decree.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What new decree? These dead men were prisoners of war. If murderers,
+they weren&#8217;t tried.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the decree I brought from Maximilian, the decree of general
+amnesty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll glared fiercely at such a jest, but to his utter amazement Ney was
+quite in earnest.</p>
+
+<p>He who had commanded the shooting squad stooped over the corpses, a smoking
+pistol in his hand. Now he glanced up at Driscoll. &#8220;Pues, si
+señores,&#8221; he said, &#8220;of amnesty, yes,&#8221; and chuckling, he
+indicated the bodies with his pistol. &#8220;But wait&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; He thought
+he saw a form quiver, one he had overlooked. Remedying this with a belated coup
+de grace through the brain, he shoved back his white gold-bordered sombrero and
+mopped his forehead as a laborer whose labor is done.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Under which general amnesty, caballeros,&#8221; he went on merrily,
+&#8220;you have just witnessed the first act. My loyalty to the Emperor grows.
+His Majesty has a sense of humor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was Don Tiburcio. He had deserted the Contras to waylay the rich bullion
+convoy of which Rodrigo Galán had told him. But the convoy never came. Rodrigo,
+the &#8220;sin vergüenza,&#8221; had not levied toll at all. He had swallowed it
+whole, a luscious morsel of several millions in silver and gold. The coup was of
+a humor the less appreciated by Don Tiburcio because he had figured on doing the
+very same thing himself. At present he was chief of scouts under Mendez, and
+commanded the Exploradores, audacious barbarians who were invaluable for their
+knowledge of the country.</p>
+
+<p>From Tiburcio and Ney Driscoll finally gathered the meaning of the decree. It
+was the keynote to the Imperialist hopes. Its cause was the flight of Juarez
+across the border. Maximilian was surcharged anew with enthusiasm. Even the
+United States must now recognize his empire, he believed. <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_288'></a>288</span>And confounding flurry with activity, as
+usual, he fervently proclaimed the courage and constancy of Don Benito Juarez,
+but added that the Republican hegira finally and definitely stamped all further
+resistance to the Empire as useless. Then, august and Cæsar-like, he allowed
+amnesty for those who submitted immediately; he prescribed death for all others.
+Rebels taken in battle were not even to have trial. Maximilian believed that
+ink, thus sagaciously besmeared by a statesman&#8217;s fingers, would blot out
+further revolution. But it was so fatuous, so stupidly unnecessary! The court
+martials, or French gardens of acclimatization, as the dissidents called them,
+were already doing the work of the decree. The poet prince merely lifted the
+odium of it to his own shoulders. His amnesty became infamy, and was called the
+Bando Negro, a nefast Decree to blacken his gentleness and well-meaning for all
+time.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll left his informants, and walked up and down, up and down, alone. It
+did not occur to him to fill the cob pipe between his teeth. A scowl settled
+between his eyes, and it deepened and grew ugly. The desperado was forming in
+the man&#8211;desperado, as contrast to polite conventions. Desperado, as
+primitive man, who hews straight, cutting whom or what he might, cutting first
+of all through the veneered bark of civilization. For this reason, in this
+sense, he might be termed outlaw. And walking up and down, up and down, he hewed
+till he had laid bare the core of the matter. And he saw it naked, without the
+polish. Thereupon he knew what he was going to do.</p>
+
+<p>He saddled Demijohn, and Demijohn followed at his shoulder to the jefetura.
+Here, at the entrance, under the brick-red portales, Driscoll left the horse,
+untied, and opened the door and passed within.</p>
+
+<p>The jefetura, or prefecture, was at present the headquarters of the command,
+and in the long front room were assembled a <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_289'></a>289</span>number of officers, including Ney and Tiburcio,
+besides the jefe of the place and several town magistrates, all chatting with
+Colonel Mendez about the recent victory. They greeted the American cordially,
+and poured out tequila for him. He had done as much as any to win the fight.
+Michel laid a hand on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur,&#8221; he said with mock formality, &#8220;to-day, when you
+permitted yourself to save my skin, you called me a fool. But I would have you
+observe, monsieur, that only my patron divinity, the god of fools, is permitted
+to know so much.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll loosed himself from the affectionate grip, and turned to Mendez.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Colonel,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to get out of
+this.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>What?</i> Oh come, mi capitan, find a better one!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not a joke, sir. Profiting by a commission that does not
+bind me, I am here to tell you good-bye.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jean, mon ami!&#8221; Ney cried in protest.</p>
+
+<p>Don Tiburcio waited with keen appreciation, as he always did when the
+unexpectedness of this Gringo was unfolding. The others stared agape at the man
+between them and the door. Mendez saw too that he was in earnest, and he began
+to argue, almost to entreat. The Mexican leader had lost the quality of mercy in
+civil wars that had touched him cruelly, that had exacted many near to him, but
+there was sincerity in the man, and men were won by the stirring sound of his
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You would retire now,&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;now, when every soul
+here may look for promotion, and none of them more than you, Señor
+Dreescol?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But he did not stop there. He conjured up a tempting vista of long and
+honored life under an empire that was now supreme. Even the scum of rebellion
+yet left on the calm surface was that day swept away, and naught remained but to
+enjoy the favors of his grateful Majesty.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Which only makes it,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;a good time to quit.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_290'></a>290</span>I should mention,
+too, that I intend to join the Republic, that is,&#8221; he added, &#8220;if
+there&#8217;s any of the Republic left.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Tiburcio was not disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>Mendez sprang to his feet and his voice was stentorian, as when he rallied
+his men by the magnet of fury and hatred.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s desertion!&#8221; he roared.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Or simple honesty,&#8221; Driscoll corrected him. &#8220;But it
+doesn&#8217;t matter. The penalty is no worse for a deserter, if you catch
+him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mendez curbed his rage. He did not wish to lose this man. That is, he would
+regret deeply having to kill him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Why</i> do you mean to change?&#8221; he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because I can&#8217;t feel <i>right</i>! It&#8217;s like&#8211;somehow
+it&#8217;s like being an accomplice of murderers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dios mio, I suppose Your Mercy and his tender heart refers to the
+Decree?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Partly. That thing is a blanket warrant of death. Just because your
+enemy can&#8217;t fight any longer&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you forget, señor, the mines that exploded in the highways. You
+forget the poisoned springs, the ambuscades, the massacres. Would they not shoot
+prisoners too, your new friends?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si señor, as you and others may some day experience
+personally.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then, mighty judge, condemn them also.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t I? But I can&#8217;t blame them. They are punishing
+crime.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But not of murder, as we did to-day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That too, for that was murder to-day. But I was thinking of a worse
+crime. I was thinking of theft, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Theft? How can that be worse?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Theft of their country, I mean, and as your accomplice I owe
+restitution. Leaving after a victory ain&#8217;t so bad, but if I&#8217;d known
+that I was fighting for that Black Decree, I&#8217;d of <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_291'></a>291</span>dropped out before the fight. But look
+at it anyway you please. <i>How</i> it looks be damned!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Señor, lay down your pistols and sabre, there, on that table, because,
+by Heaven, I shall stop you! But if you are armed, I&#8211;I shall have to shoot
+you, too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hang it, Mendez, you&#8217;re a good fellow! But&#8211;I can&#8217;t
+help it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lay them down, you renegade!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll removed his sabre and gravely placed it on the table.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The guns are my own,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Dupin had them returned to
+me. <i>He</i> took them. Suppose <i>you</i> take them, Colonel Mendez!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was in the doorway, and from there he faced them. The day was hot, and
+Mendez had taken off his belt with his weapons. But the others were armed. Yet
+they hesitated. They were brave enough for death, but before the certainty of
+death for at least one among them and the uncertainty of which one, they paused.
+Driscoll had not touched the black six-shooters under his ribs. That would have
+snapped the psychological fetter. As he expected, Mendez sprang first. This put
+an unarmed man between himself and the others. In the instant he wheeled, was in
+the saddle, and clattering down the street.</p>
+
+<p>Back in the room Mendez saw his blunder and made way. Ney passed him first,
+reached the door, aimed and fired. But someone behind him touched his arm, and
+the ball sped high. Ney turned, and saw Tiburcio filling the door against the
+others, and regarding him with evil challenge in his eye.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, don&#8217;t think that I hold it against you,&#8221; Ney cried
+gratefully.</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio half laughed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A man who don&#8217;t want prisoners shot is better with the enemy
+than dead,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio&#8217;s chuckle was prophetic. The enemy invariably <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_292'></a>292</span>executed Exploradores,
+and would certainly do as much for Don Tiburcio if they caught him.</p>
+
+<p>Ney heard the hoof beats, already far away.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;May the god of fools look after him too,&#8221; he murmured
+heavily.</p>
+
+<p>The fugitive swept round the first corner of the street and on through the
+town. None thought to stop him. Soldiers and townsmen supposed him on the
+Empire&#8217;s urgent business, and when they knew better, there was no longer
+hope for their ponies against the great Missouri buckskin, now a diminishing
+dusty speck mid cacti and maguey.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The devil of it is,&#8221; Driscoll muttered ruefully, &#8220;I
+don&#8217;t know where there&#8217;s anybody to desert <i>to</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>However, he was feeling much better.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_293'></a>293</span><a id='link_36'></a>CHAPTER III<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>As Between Women</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Lamb.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Jacqueline had wrought close to success during that May twilight on the edge
+of the Cuernavaca pond. She had won a promise of abdication. Yet in the end it
+was not the Emperor that left Mexico, but the Empress. And Jacqueline was to
+accompany her, to leave despite herself the scene of her labors. Such was the
+case precisely, and it all came to pass in this wise.</p>
+
+<p>Maddened by the distance which his temptress kept, also goaded to it by the
+sorry state of his empire, Maximilian thought only of abdication. Napoleon
+responded to Jacqueline&#8217;s cipher dispatch with orders to Bazaine. But
+Bazaine, urged thereto by Empress and maréchale, ignored the orders, and
+advanced Maximilian more money. And Maximilian, having no longer his excuse to
+quit, stayed on to spend the money. Jacqueline sighed, and&#8211;began all over
+again. Consequently Bazaine, hearing once more from Napoleon, found himself a
+defaulter, and virtually recalled. Consequently, Napoleon set dates for
+evacuation. Consequently the rebellion sprang into new life, and the Empire lost
+armies and cities, and thousands of men by desertion. But the darkest cloud was
+formed by one hundred thousand Yankees massed along the Rio Grande. Napoleon
+took heed. He ordered that the French troops should leave at once, unless half
+the Mexican customs were turned over to the French administrator. This <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_294'></a>294</span>was during the summer of
+1866, only six months after the bright hopes embodied in the Black Decree of
+general amnesty. Utterly appalled, Maximilian took up his pen again to sign his
+abdication.</p>
+
+<p>But there was Charlotte. Even yet she pettishly clung to her crown. The
+Mexican agents in Paris had availed nothing with Napoleon. Bien, she would
+herself go to Paris. She would get the ultimatum recalled, and Bazaine as well,
+because Bazaine no longer advanced money. The imperial favorites, among them the
+sleek-jowled padre recommended by Éloin, seconded her intention. And as they all
+talked so well, Maximilian quaffed of hope. With a spite hardly noble though
+entirely royal, he predicted that soon the marshal would find himself in a
+sadder fix than himself, the Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, secretly, a little after midnight, Charlotte left the capital.
+Maximilian bade her good-bye with a solemn promise to rejoin her in Europe if
+she failed. Three days later Dupin and his Contra Guerrillas met her in the
+Tierra Caliente, and offered to join her French cavalry escort. The Empress took
+his presence as an affront. Of late small things excited her to a feverish
+agitation which she was unable to control. The Tiger bowed over his saddle, and
+kept his gray hair bared to a torrential downpour while her carriage passed on.
+It was the tropical rainy season. The clouds hung low around the mountain base
+and truncated the more distant peaks, while the valley below was a bright
+contrast in wet, tender green. The wheels sank deep, and mired in the black,
+soggy earth. Men tugged constantly at the spokes, and the steaming mules reared
+and plunged under the angry crack of whips.</p>
+
+<p>The Tiger of the Tropics waited as carriage after carriage toiled past him
+and creaked and was forced on its way. Behind the dripping windowpane of the
+very last he saw a face he knew, a beautiful, saddened face, puckered just now
+by some <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_295'></a>295</span>immediate
+ill-humor. She frowned on recognizing the French barbarian, but unlike
+Charlotte, she did not jerk down the shutter. Instead, she lowered the glass by
+the length of her pretty nose.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is it dotage already, monsieur? Then put on your hat!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Name of a name, yet another petulant grande dame!&#8221; But the
+Frenchman turned his horse and rode beside her coach.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Did Her Majesty pout, then?&#8221; inquired the lady within.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Almost as superbly as Mademoiselle la Marquise.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank you well, but I have a superb reason for it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because you return to Paris, surely not? Yet, if that is the reason,
+you need not quite despair.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, what&#8211;what do you mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Only brigands, mademoiselle. When everyone is looking for abdication,
+a cortège mysteriously leaving the City must be the Emperor who goes back to
+Austria. The news travels like wildfire. The Indito runners go as fast as when
+they brought Moctezuma fresh fish from the Gulf. I rather think they have
+carried the news to an old friend of ours. It&#8217;s my chance to catch
+him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not my Fra Diavolo&#8211;Rodrigo Galán?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;None other. But Rodrigo is stirred by more than patriotism these days.
+Upon it he has grafted a deep wrong, and he swears lofty vengeance by a little
+ivory cross such as these Mexican girls wear. The conceited cut-throat imagines
+there is a blood feud between himself and His Majesty. So if he hears that
+Prince Max comes this way&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He will find Charlotte instead? But he must not detain her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tonnerre!&#8221; exclaimed the Cossack chief. &#8220;Why not? She goes
+to Europe to sustain the Empire, while we French&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All the same, let her go. She will gain nothing there. Listen to me,
+monsieur. She leaves that he may <i>not</i> abdicate, while if I stay, she fears
+that&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_296'></a>296</span>&#8220;He
+<i>will</i> abdicate?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your wits, mon colonel, are entirely satisfactory. And so she invited
+me to go with her, and as first lady of her household, I could not refuse. I
+wonder, now, if Fra Diavolo would deign to capture just me, alone!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The sharp look which Dupin gave her from behind the streams tumbling off his
+sombrero was the sixth of a half-dozen. But it was this last one that seemed to
+satisfy him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Put up the window, mademoiselle,&#8221; he said, &#8220;you&#8217;re
+getting wet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ten minutes later Jacqueline felt the coach lurch heavily and sink to the hub
+on one side.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Go on with your nap, Berthe,&#8221; she said to her one companion.
+&#8220;They&#8217;ll pull us out, as usual.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The customary yelling and straining began, and men grunted as they heaved
+against an axle. After a long séance of such effort there came a sharp
+exclamation, like an oath, and the confusion fell to a murmur of dismay. Someone
+jerked open the door, and Dupin&#8217;s grizzled head appeared.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle, I regret to have to announce that a wheel is dished
+in.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s gray eyes regarded him quizzically. The sardonic old face
+spread to a grin, but deftly readjusted itself to the requisite despair.</p>
+
+<p>Not a carriage except the wrecked one was in sight. Only the Tiger&#8217;s
+whelps, by the hundred, surrounded her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And the others? Her Majesty?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The others did the sensible thing. They know that you will catch up
+with them when they themselves are mired. Her Majesty, being ahead, is probably
+still in ignorance of your accident.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the wheel?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If mademoiselle wishes it mended?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is it so bad?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_297'></a>297</span>Dupin caught her
+expression. &#8220;It will take six hours,&#8221; he said mercilessly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh dear!&#8221; said Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s a settler&#8217;s cabin a mile from here. If you will
+accept my horse, and Mademoiselle Berthe can mount behind&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Poor Berthe,&#8221; sighed Jacqueline. But she nodded eagerly.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_298'></a>298</span><a id='link_37'></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Lacking Coincidence</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Achilles absent was Achilles still.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>The Iliad.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Colonel Dupin helped first one and then the other of his charges upon the
+same horse and wrapped them about in the same gaudy serape till only two pair of
+pretty eyes peeped forth at the rain. The Vera Cruz highway clung to the
+mountain side, but the Contra Guerrillas took a venturesome little bridle path
+which dropped abruptly down into the rich valley of a thousand or more feet
+below. Emerging from the dense tropical growth of the highland, they beheld a
+vast emerald checkerboard of cultivation, field after field of sugar cane, and
+set in each bright square a little house of bamboo with a roof of red piping.
+After the dreary black gorges behind them, the light of the sun seemed boxed in
+here under a leaden cover of cloud. Coming suddenly out of the chill and mist,
+the two girls felt the very rain gratefully warm and the fragrant smells of the
+wet earth a thing of comfort. As the beauty and the cheer of it subtly gladdened
+her mood, Jacqueline thought that here at any rate was an adequate mise-en-scène
+for whatever tremors might befall.</p>
+
+<p>There was one circumstance that already seemed a portent, and got on a
+person&#8217;s nerves like the stillness of nature just before a Kansas cyclone.
+This was the curious absence of all human life. Except for the grimly expectant
+troop around her, and the clanking of metal as the Contras rode, she had no
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_299'></a>299</span>token of a fellow
+creature. The first of the plantations was deserted, and likewise the next. But
+the house doors were open. Nothing showed preparation for departure. The riddle
+was uncanny. At the third Jacqueline stated that she would go no farther. She
+hated to tramp down a man&#8217;s field when the man himself was not about to
+express an opinion, and the ruthless swath made by her escort through the cane
+gave her shame. Besides, it was too much like wading, the way her skirts brushed
+the long leaves and knocked off glistening drops by myriads.</p>
+
+<p>The third cabin was abandoned too, but there were inducements within for any
+houseless creature. A hammock was hanging from corner to corner in the front
+room, probably to thwart the fauna of tropical stingers, and there was that
+comfort unfamiliar to French women, a rocking chair, before a most inviting
+fireplace, itself a luxury rare in Mexico. The two girls removed their cloaks,
+and settled themselves to dry their shoes before a roaring fire which the men
+lighted for them. Then the Cossacks, including their colonel, left on some
+stealthy business without, and Jacqueline and Berthe were alone.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline tried the rocker, found it good, and smoothed her skirts over her
+knees to the warmth of the blaze. &#8220;We&#8217;ve only to yawn at the flies,
+eh, ma chérie?&#8221; said she.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not a thing else, madame,&#8221; came a cheery voice from the
+hammock.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline was at once suspicious. &#8220;You absurd little mouse,&#8221; she
+cried, &#8220;don&#8217;t I understand that gaiety of yours! And all the while
+you are really trembling in fear of terrible bandits. For months now you grieve
+because you imagine that I&#8211;well, that I am sad. But you&#8217;ll not make
+me hilarious, you won&#8217;t, Berthe, as long as it&#8217;s &#8216;madame.&#8217;
+Child, child, will you not let me have my friend in you, I who have none, nor a
+mother or sister! There now, if I&#8217;m not to
+be&#8211;ah&#8211;pensive&#8211;remember <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_300'></a>300</span>there&#8217;s no &#8216;madame&#8217; between thee and me,
+dear!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Bretonne&#8217;s gentle eyes filled suddenly. Jacqueline had before
+sought to change their relations, ever since Berthe&#8217;s part in
+Driscoll&#8217;s rescue from execution, but she had always tried to bring it
+about by playful bantering. Now, however, Berthe was given to see the utter
+loneliness of an orphaned girl in one who for all the rest of the world was the
+disdainfully independent little aristocrat, who had met the proffered intimacy
+of the French empress with a sneer, who was the cold princess when among
+princesses of the Blood. The loyal child of simple Breton folk sprang
+impulsively to the arm of the rocker, and was herself clasped no less
+impulsively.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But there,&#8221; said Jacqueline, laughing rather brokenly,
+&#8220;we&#8217;re forgetting the flies.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A belt over the fireplace caught her eye, and she unexpectedly discovered
+that her breath had quickened. She stared fascinated at the letters on the
+buckle. &#8220;C. S. A.,&#8221; she murmured. Then her startled gaze roved
+hurriedly over the walls. It became even frightened before a faded gray
+cape-coat of the Confederate cavalry and a battered white gauntlet sticking from
+the pocket. Involuntarily, trembling foolishly, she looked to see if there might
+not be an old cob pipe also. There was not, but the other familiar objects made
+her imagination leap fearfully to what might be. Both hope and dread will always
+override common sense, and convoy imagination perforce. If <i>he</i> did live
+here&#8211;if they should meet! Could such a coincidence happen, could it,
+outside the neat ordering of a book or play?</p>
+
+<p>She sprang to her feet and began investigating. She went awesomely as one
+would tiptoe over a haunted house. In the next room she came upon what was an
+odd treasure trove for an isolated bamboo cabin tucked far away under the Tropic
+of Cancer. It was a printer&#8217;s shop, after a fashion. The <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_301'></a>301</span>case was a block of
+stone, in whose surface the little compartments had been chiseled. They were
+sparsely accoutred with type and plentifully with cigar ashes. As for a press,
+there was none. But a form had been made up on a slab of marble, and near by
+were a tiny hillock of ink, a roller and a mallet. The mysterious printer could
+at least take proofs. There was one now on a file. Jacqueline pulled it off, and
+contemplated a miniature American newspaper, of one sheet, printed on one side
+only, and no larger than a magazine cover. At the top she read the legend, in
+German caps: &#8220;<i>The Córdova Colonist</i>&#8211;<i>Weekly
+Independent</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is that a pun?&#8221; she wondered.</p>
+
+<p>But now at least she could identify the ghostly company of the valley, though
+not its scribe. That word &#8220;Córdova&#8221; gave the clue. A year ago one
+thousand hardy men had ridden into the capital from the north. Their leader was
+a fiery, black-whiskered little man with a plume in his hat and the buff sash of
+a brigadier general around his waist. They were the Missourians, defamed as
+&#8220;Shelby&#8217;s horse thieves and judges of whiskey,&#8221; honored as
+&#8220;The Old Brigade,&#8221; and so feared and respected under any name that
+the City fairly buzzed and stared goggle-eyed. But Maximilian again refused
+their offers to enlist under his standard, and they could only disband. Some
+took ship to hunt for Kidd&#8217;s treasure in the Pacific, others went to Japan
+and the Sandwich Islands, and a number joined a congenial regiment of veterans,
+the Zouaves. But the majority, she remembered now, had been settlers, persuaded
+thereto by their countryman, Commodore Maury, who was Imperial Commissioner of
+Immigration. Maury had secured a grant of land near the town of Córdova, within
+a hundred miles of Vera Cruz. There were one-half million acres of rich land,
+suitable for the three Big C&#8217;s of southern countries, cotton, cane and
+coffee. But until now the strip had not been cultivated. The Church had held it
+fallow. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_302'></a>302</span>Then the
+Republic had nationalized it; and the Empire was selling it to the Americans at
+$1.25 an acre. The hopeful settlement bore the name of Carlota.</p>
+
+<p>So the cape-coat and those other things were explained. She was denied her
+coincidence. But as there was so much of a plot forward anyway, she ought to
+have been satisfied&#8211;as an artist, she ought. She craved an ecstasy of
+peril or of terror, not as the former dilettante of emotions, but as the lotus
+eater who exacts forgetfulness.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime she read editorials, and got interested. The <i>Colonist</i> never
+advanced beyond the proof-sheet stage, but as such it circulated with avidity
+over the valley. Eloquence flowed serene under mashed type and variegated fonts.
+The editor persisted in viewing the Empire and Republic as political parties,
+and the horrors of civil warfare as incidents of an electoral campaign. He had
+congenial scope for his unpartisan and independent pen, advising with owl-like
+sagacity or abusing with peppery virulence, and either, for either side, with
+blithe impartiality. At times, though, the strained analogy between ballots and
+bullets evidently cracked, and rather floored the editor. For instance, in a
+pot-pourri of long primer and pica with a dash of Old English lower-case was the
+following:</p>
+
+<div class='bquote'>
+<p>As we wen<b>t</b> to press last week we paused to entertain a torchlight
+procession of the Young Imperialists&#8217; Flambeau <b>C</b>lub, which was
+collecting a campaign contribution in the semblance of our alfalfa stack. The
+spectacle of citizens taking an active <b>p</b>art in the issues before their
+country ne&#8217;er fails to rouse in us a spirit of collaboration, so <b>w</b>hat
+could we do but join heartily in the celebration, so that a most excellent time
+was had. Later our editorial staff, a score who in our canefields teach the
+tender sprouts <b>h</b>ow to shoot, knowing t<b>h</b>e same so well themselves,
+gently laid to rest a score and one Cossacks, past members of the
+<b>F</b>lambeau Club, wh<b>o</b> had lingered behind for the reason that they
+<i>were</i> past. But, we ask, <i>ad quod damnum</i>?&#8211;i.e., isn&#8217;t it
+as futile as cauterizing a wooden leg? How much longer, O Jove, must we let our
+public-opinion moulds cool off while we chase enthusiastic young patriots away
+from our alfal<b>f</b>a!!!... In conclusion, with a cool brow, we are
+constrained to say that if the party in power cannot discourage the depredations
+above ci<b>t</b>ed, we shall have to fortify ourselves to the contemplation of a
+c<b>h</b>ange of administration.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_303'></a>303</span>&#8220;Why,&#8221; cried Jacqueline, &#8220;what an
+<i>animal disputans</i> it is!&#8221; She perceived an ink bottle, and exclaimed,
+&#8220;Ah, more milk from the black cow!&#8221; Taking up a wad of copy paper,
+on which a future editorial was already begun, she read, and quickly her
+amusement changed to a livelier interest.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Rumor goes,&#8221; she read under the caption, <i>Ardentia Verba</i>,
+&#8220;that Father Augustine, political manager for the administration, vice
+Éloin, is soon to leave for Europe. He goes to have a pourparler with the Pope.
+He will concede everything, since the Empire no longer hopes to win over the
+moderate Mexicans. But the obstinate though Holy Father will negotiate a
+concordat on one basis only, and that is the return to the Mexican church of all
+nationalized church lands.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Men of the colony, attention now! We each own something like three
+hundred acres apiece of these lands. And we are paying for them, we are
+cultivating them, and we have to defend them against both guerrillas and
+contra-guerrillas. And now they are to be confiscated! Our new homes are to be
+taken from us!! Alas, we who are peaceful settlers, to think that we were
+Trojans on a time!!! Fellow citizens, with us it&#8217;s a severe case of <i>e
+pluribus unum</i>. Oh, for a leader! But our incomparable chief of yore will not
+stir. Yet there <i>was</i> one, gallant cavalier of the South, peerless captain,
+just the dauntless heart for any forlorn hope under the starry vault of heaven,
+if he were only here! If he, John D. Driscoll, were only&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The matter stopped abruptly. More than that, by force of habit the scribe had
+ringed the figures &#8220;30&#8221; underneath. They meant &#8220;finis.&#8221;
+The editor had known, then, that he would not return to end his harangue.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A flea bite,&#8221; mused Jacqueline, &#8220;would interrupt the
+penning of an Alexandrian line. Now, I wonder who or what the flea could have
+been, and what&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_304'></a>304</span>But there, she
+would ask herself no question concerning the editorially mentioned &#8220;John
+D. Driscoll.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was mid afternoon when Colonel Dupin, like a shaggy, dripping bear,
+returned to the house and begged leave to dry himself. Standing before the fire,
+he reloaded his holster pistols. They were tremendous, elegant utensils of
+French make, with a nine-chambered cylinder, and a second barrel underneath that
+carried a rifle ball. Where no prisoners were taken on either side, the owner of
+such a weapon usually reserved the murderous slug for himself, and the loading
+of that lower barrel became a sort of ghastly rite. Jacqueline shuddered as she
+watched him fix on the cap.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How do you explain your desertion of Her Majesty?&#8221; she asked.
+&#8220;Our Fra Diavolo should thank me for drawing you off.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Tiger adjusted the double hammer so that it would play on the cylinder
+first. A rumbling chuckle came from the depths of his throat.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I should be honored with mademoiselle&#8217;s approval,&#8221; he
+said, &#8220;for at court mademoiselle is a guileful warrior. The casualties
+there may not be so sanguinary, but the strategic principle is the same. Know,
+then, that Rodrigo Galán employs a spy whom I own, body and soul. By now Rodrigo
+has learned from this spy that the Imperial coach broke down, and that to-night
+Her Majesty rests&#8211;here. So you see that she is not likely to be
+attacked&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I see that <i>we</i> are, parbleu!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course,&#8221; and the Tiger unctuously rubbed his hands in the
+blaze. &#8220;It&#8217;s my chance to trap him. He has only three hundred
+men.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you, monsieur?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Our mutual spy has told him that I have less than two hundred men. The
+brigand knows that I was forced to leave a garrison at Tampico.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_305'></a>305</span>&#8220;But how
+many have you, really?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dupin motioned her to the window. But she saw not a man, not a musket. She
+saw only the wet fields of cane, and the black mist-shrouded mountains
+beyond.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just the same,&#8221; the Frenchman assured her pleasantly,
+&#8220;they are there, full five hundred of my little tribe. Does mademoiselle
+approve?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It looks like the curtain on &#8216;Fra Diavolo,&#8217;&#8221; she replied,
+shuddering.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_306'></a>306</span><a id='link_38'></a>CHAPTER V<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Missourians</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Men sententious of speech and quick of pistol practice.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Major John N. Edwards.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>An hour before nightfall the guerrillas attacked. Jacqueline was standing at
+the window, when she heard a jubilant din and saw a tawny troop charging through
+the fields toward the house. They yelled as they came, waving machetes and
+carbines. It was the usual theatrical dash of Mexicans. Like savages, they
+thought first to frighten their adversaries.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Won&#8217;t you come and see, Berthe? It&#8217;s like a
+hippodrome.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She felt sorry for them. The dulcet cane grew thorns. Under the leaves the
+black soil was become clay red with leather jackets. The Cossacks had fixed
+sword-bayonets to their muskets, and were waiting on their knees.</p>
+
+<p>Stung by the hidden barbs, the first horses reared in air, pawing and
+screeching frantically. Many sank down again, and they were limp as the life
+ebbed. Others crashed backward, their riders underneath, and those behind
+plunged over them, unable to stop. Soon it was a fearful jumble; men and beasts,
+hoofs and steel, curses and shrill neighing. Then the firing began, a woof of
+fine red threads through the warp of pale-green reeds. The guerrillas yet
+fought. The myth of their own heavier numbers kept them from panic. Ragged
+fellows with feet bare in the stirrups leaned over to slash at heads between the
+tasselled stalks. They squirmed like snakes from under kicking horses, and
+fainting, got a carbine to the shoulder at aim, and someway, pulled the trigger.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_307'></a>307</span>Then they were
+taken in the rear. One-half of the Contra forces, mounted, had waited under the
+sapling growth of the nearest foothill. Now they sprang from cover, bloodthirsty
+whelps trailing the Tiger. The guerrillas could not turn back. To retreat they
+must cleave the way in front, and they did, by sheer desperation. Falling in the
+mesh at every step, they at last gained the large open space around the
+cabin.</p>
+
+<p>Then it was that Jacqueline got a near view of Don Rodrigo. He was superbly
+mounted, and his long body made a heroic figure on the curveting charger. He
+frowned, and his mustachios bristled fiercely, and his shouts of command were
+heavily ominous. The wind turned the folds of his black cloak. It was faced with
+scarlet silk; and the charro elegance beneath was black and resplendent. All
+told, he was a very outburst of glitter; breeches, jacket, sombrero, saddle,
+stirrups, and bridle; not of silver, but of gold. Good carbines for his vagabond
+Inditos, magnificence for himself, these had come from that fabulous theft of
+the bullion convoy. And he had arrayed himself this rainy day to dazzle a
+princess of the Blood. So now he wielded his sword with a conscious flourish,
+glancing toward the window to see if he were seen.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The poseur, never out of his rôle,&#8221; murmured his audience there.
+&#8220;How will he enjoy running, I wonder?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But to her astonishment he did not run, though Dupin was cutting closer and
+closer through tangled bodies, eager to grapple with his old-time slippery foe.
+Don Rodrigo raised in his saddle, and looked anxiously in all directions.
+Suddenly his dark face lighted, and wheeling round, he called to his men, and in
+his turn strove as furiously to reach the Tiger as the Tiger had striven to
+reach him. Jacqueline could not now tell which side to feel sorry for. But she
+exulted in the thrill of it, even as she wrung her hands at sight of the red
+agony.</p>
+
+<p>Then something happened, which even the Tiger, who knew his warfare so well,
+had never known; which got into even his <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_308'></a>308</span>dried and toughened marrow. It was the Rebel yell.
+It rose over a sudden thunderous rush of hoof beats. And next, as a puff of air,
+a herd of horsemen, a wild mud-spattering streak, surged past the house. On
+across the open, and straight upon the fray, they merged everywhere, and made
+bigger and livelier the blotch of mad swarming. Some wore slouch hats, others
+straw sombreros, and all were ruddily burned. They fought with revolvers, and
+often one would pause between shots to spit tobacco. They brought to the battle
+one thing above all else, and that was vim, vim unbounded, vim that simply had
+to have vent.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline caught her breath. What race of men were these? Exalted,
+quivering, she watched them doing as workmen what fell to their hands, yet ever
+with that whirlwind of vim.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Missourians&#8211;of course!&#8221; she cried.</p>
+
+<p>Through powder smoke and misty rain the figure of one horseman slowly grew
+familiar. She caught fleeting glimpses of him, as he darted into a mêlée, as he
+spurred round to find a hotter field. Suddenly her eyes widened, and she pressed
+a hand hard against her breast.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The coincidence!&#8221; she gasped, trembling from head to foot.
+&#8220;It is the coincidence!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her nose flattened against the wet pane. She remembered how that general of
+the Missourians had told Charlotte about this man, for the Empress had asked.
+And the general had related how the troop had dubbed him the Storm Centre.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And no wonder!&#8221; she breathed. &#8220;Mon Dieu, how he
+<i>enjoys</i> it!&#8211;But, oh&#8211;he will be killed&#8211;oh!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Yet nothing of the kind happened. When she uncovered her eyes, his assailants
+were in flight. Every Cossack survivor was in flight. The Storm Centre wheeled
+and confronted Don Rodrigo, who raised his sombrero effusively.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_309'></a>309</span>&#8220;Rebellion
+makes strange comrades,&#8221; thought Jacqueline. &#8220;But no,
+my&#8211;the&#8211;chevalier&#8211;does not take his hand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Indeed Driscoll was looking the guerrilla over with little favor.
+&#8220;So,&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;it was you I was to help here!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what better patriot, señor&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never mind that. Why didn&#8217;t you wait till dark to attack?
+Weren&#8217;t those the orders, or&#8211;that is, the suggestion?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But whose suggestion? Perhaps, señor, <i>you</i> know who El Chaparrito
+is?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Haven&#8217;t the least idea, nor anyone else. But it&#8217;s certain,
+Rod, that this is your first experience of Shorty. Another time, and
+you&#8217;ll have sense enough to take his hints. Now then, where&#8217;s the
+emperor we were to catch?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Fra Diavolo&#8217;s smile was Satanic. &#8220;Your Chaparrito was either
+mistaken about the Emperor, or,&#8221; and he glanced toward the window,
+&#8220;or he deceived you into helping me capture a beautiful young
+woman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How? What&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I mean that His Cautious Majesty did not come, however much El
+Chaparrito seems to want him. But&#8211;&#8221; and Rodrigo&#8217;s tone lowered
+heavily, &#8220;but his August Spouse came instead. She is in that cabin now. It
+is well, señor, for vengeance in kind is just. It is righteous, it is biblical.
+Since fate has thrown&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;E-a-s-y! Eas-y, boy. Of course, if we&#8217;ve gone and netted an
+empress, we&#8217;ll ask &#8217;em to please take her back. This ain&#8217;t a
+woman&#8217;s game.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Give up a queen&#8217;s ransom?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll nodded cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I believe, caballero,&#8221; said the brigand with awful dignity,
+&#8220;that I command here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll looked at his Missourians returning from the chase.
+&#8220;Well,&#8221; he laughed, &#8220;you might try it on, and see how they
+take it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_310'></a>310</span>Behind
+Jacqueline the door opened. She almost jumped. Of the hundreds likely to enter
+there, her startled fancy pictured only one. But the new comer was a
+stranger.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh-ho, come a-visiting, eh?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The voice was cordial, robust, Western.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Missour-<i>i</i>!&#8221; she exclaimed involuntarily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes&#8217;m, Cooper county.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She turned, won to friendliness, and beheld a man who, to use her mental
+ejaculation, was &#8220;of a leanness!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; and she paused.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Boone, ma&#8217;am. Daniel, your most obedient servant. If I&#8217;d
+known&#8211;Sho&#8217;, we might of had things spruced up a bit. Are you the
+queen, maybe?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The lady&#8217;s laugh rang as clear as a bell. Taken aback, Boone sought to
+correct his mistake. He saw that Berthe was seated in the hammock. She, then,
+must be the Empress.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m downright sorry we went and captured Your Majesty,&#8221; he
+began.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Her Imperial Highness does not understand English,&#8221; Jacqueline
+explained.</p>
+
+<p>Then to her surprise the man proceeded in French. He was evidently greatly
+disturbed because Missouri hospitality did not harmonize with war. &#8220;It was
+a blunder,&#8221; he apologized earnestly, &#8220;come of our deciding just this
+morning to make you Europeans vacate our continent. But don&#8217;t let that
+worry Your Majesty. Here, under my roof, the decision doesn&#8217;t hold,
+<i>at</i> all!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Berthe lifted her head quickly. It was her second promotion in the social
+scale that day. She had trembled when the door opened, for she knew that
+Rodrigo&#8217;s side had triumphed. But this tall stranger brought relief to
+one&#8217;s nerves, and somehow she had watched him trustingly. He was of the
+same race as Monsieur Driscoll, to whom also she had once turned instinctively
+for help. But when the tremendous young fellow <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_311'></a>311</span>addressed her with reverence due a queen, she felt
+only the respectful admiration due a pretty young woman. It unexpectedly
+awakened in her the knowledge that she was a pretty young woman; and with a
+winsomeness that amazed and delighted Jacqueline, to say nothing of its effect
+on Daniel, she gently put him right as to her identity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It doesn&#8217;t matter,&#8221; Boone protested stoutly, &#8220;you
+ought to be one!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The door opened again. It struck the wall with an insolent bang, and in
+strode Don Rodrigo. Jacqueline noted who it was and indifferently seated herself
+in the rocking chair, with her back toward him. The Mexican advanced to the
+centre of the room. The brief twilight had fallen, and the place was in half
+light except for the blazing logs. He stopped rigid and flung his scarlet-lined
+cloak back over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where,&#8221; he demanded in the huge tones of a victorious general,
+&#8220;is the tyrant&#8217;s empress?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>No one volunteered as to where the tyrant&#8217;s empress might be. The toe
+of Jacqueline&#8217;s boot was indolently busy with the embers on the hearth.
+The heads of both girls were in shadow.</p>
+
+<p>Rodrigo&#8217;s furrowed brow creased more deeply. &#8220;Which of you is
+she?&#8221; The heavy syllables dropped one by one. He stepped tentatively
+toward Berthe. So did Boone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stand aside, señor!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Can&#8217;t, dear brigand,&#8221; said Daniel.</p>
+
+<p>Then Berthe spoke. &#8220;Please, messieurs,&#8221; she began, &#8220;Her
+Majesty is not&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s only a maidservant,&#8221; Rodrigo exclaimed in
+chagrin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t make any difference,&#8221; said Boone, &#8220;she&#8217;s
+come a-visiting.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If, Seigneur Brigand,&#8221; spoke a clear voice, &#8220;you had not
+interrupted Mademoiselle Berthe, you would stand informed by now that Her
+Majesty is not here. Will you deign to close the door?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_312'></a>312</span>Rodrigo knew
+well those bell-like tones. Forgetting the question of an empress, he drew
+nearer to the lady of the rocker. She gave him no heed, but her profile against
+the red glow was very soft and beautiful. His chagrin vanished. Here was a more
+ravishing triumph.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A vengeance in kind,&#8221; he muttered, wetting his lips. &#8220;Ha,
+he took nobody&#8217;s wife, as to that; and his wife may go. But in the matter
+of sweethearts&#8211;ah!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Bending, he laid a hand caressingly on her neck, against the tendrils.</p>
+
+<p>At the touch she sprang to her feet, and Boone leaped forward with fist drawn
+back. But both stopped. Her face changed from fury to pallor. Boone&#8217;s
+expressed approval.</p>
+
+<p>The room had filled through the open door with men and torches, but the first
+man among them had come as far as Rodrigo&#8217;s shoulder even as the insult
+occurred. From behind, the man&#8217;s arm had straightened under
+Rodrigo&#8217;s chin, and twisting to a lever, was gradually forcing back his
+head. Rodrigo groped for a knife, but half way to his waist the fingers clutched
+vainly in a sharp spasm, and all involuntarily flew up and gripped at the vise
+under his chin. Yet another ounce of pressure, and it seemed his neck must snap
+like a dry twig. Suddenly his spine bent limp. Muscles relaxed. The whole body
+capitulated. Then the man behind stooped a little, and Rodrigo began to rise.
+Slowly at first, and next, as from a catapult, the brigand shot backward over
+the man&#8217;s shoulder and struck his length on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, not that, boys,&#8221; said the man. &#8220;Don&#8217;t kick him.
+Laugh at him, it hurts more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He spoke more particularly to one &#8220;Tall Mose&#8221; Bledsoe of Pike
+county who was purple with indignation that a &#8220;saddle-colored Greaser
+should dare lay hands on a white woman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But there were also &#8220;Rube&#8221; Marmaduke of Platte, &#8220;Mac&#8221;
+Crittenden of Nodaway, the &#8220;Doc&#8221; of Benton, &#8220;Cal&#8221;
+Grinders <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_313'></a>313</span>from the
+Ozarks, Clay of Carroll, and Carroll of Clay, besides a ruddy sprinkling from
+the county of Jackson. Among the latter was &#8220;Old Brothers and
+Sisters,&#8221; a plump little young man with cherubic eyes behind round brass
+spectacles. Clem Douglas had been ordained in the M. E. Church (South), and
+became thereupon the Rev. Mr. Douglas. &#8220;Old Brothers and Sisters&#8221;
+was a theological degree of later acquirement, lovingly bestowed by the Iron
+Brigade. But in his more recent gospel of pistol practice, Clem Douglas was not
+a backslider. He was simply all things Southern to all men. Like the others in
+the cabin, his hat was off, his muddy boots scraped; and like the others, he was
+not unaware of the two girls.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Rather showery out,&#8221; he observed genially, wiping the mist off
+his glasses, and imagining weather a livelier topic than battle.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline did not hear. Her eyes were still on the man who had disdained to
+strike Rodrigo from behind, who had flung him away instead, as one would a dog.
+She stood motionless, and her face was very white. She saw that he wore loose
+leather &#8220;chaps,&#8221; a woolen shirt, and an old coat, with only stained
+shoulder straps, green braid on dark blue, to indicate a uniform. His wet black
+hair was curly. His brown eyes flashed whimsical contempt on the resplendent
+guerrilla at his feet. He was the Coincidence; he was the Storm Centre. He
+turned, expecting to see the Empress, and he met her eyes. His own darkened with
+a new anger, and involuntarily, he swung round, himself to kick the Mexican who
+had insulted her. But a flood of memory swept over him, the memory of what he
+had seen at Cuernavaca. Not for her could he touch a fallen man.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Take him into the back room, two of you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Red, red to the neck, he was turning to follow, when he saw Berthe.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Miss Burt!&#8221; he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_314'></a>314</span>Heartily he
+shook hands with her. &#8220;It&#8217;s my first chance, you know, to mention
+what you did for me over a year ago. But I sure appreciate having my life saved,
+you know that. There now, you&#8217;re not to worry over this present mess.
+We&#8217;ll have it straightened out, just in no time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stammered as he spoke, and when he turned and left the room, his bearing
+was constrained. Jacqueline&#8217;s eyes followed him until the inner door
+closed behind him. Then, with a half shrug, she sat down and pensively resumed
+the building of fiery mounds on the hearth.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_315'></a>315</span><a id='link_39'></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>If a Kiss Were All</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;A man, a woman, a passion&#8211;what else matters?&#8221;</p><p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Sardou.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tall Mose&#8221; Bledsoe and the Rev. Mr. Douglas conveyed Don Rodrigo
+to the back room, and here Driscoll and Boone joined them. They did not disarm
+the Mexican. It did not occur to them that any man would risk drawing a weapon
+in such company. And as to Fra Diavolo they surmised correctly. He sulked a
+little at first, for there were sore tendons that ached. But in the end he grew
+reasonable, and his white teeth gleamed acquiescence to all that the señores
+were pleased to say. He agreed to bivouac his men apart from the Missourians and
+go his own way at daybreak. The Contras were routed. The Tiger had barely
+escaped. There was no further need of combined forces. Indeed, Don Rodrigo
+feared a night attack so little that he meant to reward his men with many
+copitas of aguardiente. Might he send a barrel over to his esteemed allies?</p>
+
+<p>Mose Bledsoe turned a pleading look on the parson, and to his surprise the
+Rev. Mr. Douglas beamed tolerant benevolence. &#8220;Why yes, my friend,&#8221;
+he himself said to Don Rodrigo, &#8220;good liquor is always acceptable,
+especially when soldiers must sleep on the wet ground.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The brigand was then allowed to depart, and Old Brothers and Sisters
+explained. It was best to let Rodrigo send the brandy, for then one knew what to
+expect. Otherwise the Christian brother and rascal would hatch up some other
+plot, and any other plot might take them off their guard.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_316'></a>316</span>When an hour
+later, Rodrigo did in fact attack the presumably somnolent Americans, more
+happened than either he or they expected. A third was also waiting to strike for
+the sake of a woman. He was Dupin, who wanted nothing better than the allies at
+each other&#8217;s throat. Crouching warily near, the Tiger sprang at both of
+them. In the rain and the black night, the three-cornered fight raged like
+firecrackers under a tin bucket. The guerrillas, repulsed by the Americans, fled
+upon the Contras, whereat the Americans swept them both back indiscriminately.
+Instead of a lady, the Tiger carried off Don Rodrigo, and was quite glad to
+carry himself off. But Boone, scouting near, reported that Rodrigo was held a
+prisoner instead of being executed at once. This meant something. It meant
+beyond any doubt that the Mexican and the Frenchman would combine, Rodrigo for
+his life, Dupin to rescue Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p>The Missourians held council in Daniel&#8217;s sanctum. To restore the
+captives to Dupin had been Driscoll&#8217;s intention from the first. But now it
+was a question of trading them against Rodrigo. Dupin must know the American
+offer before he and Rodrigo should attack. Driscoll proposed for himself alone
+the errand to the Tiger&#8217;s camp. Rising to his feet, he left his protesting
+friends without a word further. But he had to pass through the front room first,
+to get the cape coat hanging there. It was, in fact, his own. The two girls were
+seated before the fire, Jacqueline still in revery, Berthe nervously agitated
+from the late racket of battle. Daniel Boone had laid before them a
+ranchman&#8217;s supper with tropical garnishing, but it was untouched. Driscoll
+nodded, crossed the room, took the coat from its nail, and started for the outer
+door as he drew it on.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Snubbing&#8211;an acquaintance,&#8221; spoke an impersonal little
+voice, &#8220;is cheap.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, waited.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_317'></a>317</span>&#8220;Of a
+gentleman, I reckon you&#8217;d say,&#8221; he interrupted uneasily.
+&#8220;Maybe not, but a ruffian&#8217;s got his instincts too. When he&#8217;s
+afraid of hurting someone, he hides himself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was mistaken,&#8221; she said gravely, with that quaintest
+inflection of the English he had ever heard, &#8220;yes, mistaken. Hé
+mais&#8211;but it is just that the complaint. You hurt more by
+<i>not</i> speaking.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But there&#8217;s nothing to say,&#8221; he faltered. &#8220;I&#8217;m
+just going to Old Tige&#8217;s&#8211;to Dupin&#8217;s camp, and get him to come
+here for you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur, monsieur, you fight for your captives only&#8211;only to
+give them up?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s not the question. You can overtake the Empress yet. Dupin
+will&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But it is not that I want to overtake empresses at all.
+I&#8211;Berthe, would you mind carrying back these supper
+things?&#8211;I,&#8221; she continued, when they were alone, &#8220;have no wish
+to go back to Paris. I shall return to the City.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again the liaison with Maximilian, he thought bitterly. And Charlotte away!
+It was infamous. However, he had no right to be concerned.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very well,&#8221; he said, &#8220;then Dupin can take you to the City,
+or wherever you wish.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ma foi, what trouble to be rid of your prisoners, monsieur, and after
+two battles too!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s got nothing to do with it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She meant, though, to have him confess that she had had a great deal to do
+with it. She was taken with the self-cruel fancy to lay bare and contemplate his
+love for her, that she might feel more poignantly the happiness she had lost.
+But he abruptly turned again to leave, and all else was forgotten in terror.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You go to that Tiger!&#8221; she cried. &#8220;Do you not know <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_318'></a>318</span>that&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; She
+darted between him and the door&#8211;&#8220;that he recognizes no rules of war?
+He will shoot you, he will, he will!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll laughed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ll be safe enough all right, thank you. Dupin holds
+Rodrigo, we hold you. So it&#8217;s simply an exchange of prisoners. And
+he&#8217;ll not do anything to me, for fear of what might happen to you here.
+You&#8217;re not a hostage, sure not, but as long as he thinks so, I&#8217;ll
+profit by it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are right,&#8221; she admitted, yet not heeding his anxiety to
+pass. &#8220;Dupin will not even detain you. He will judge you Missou-riens by
+himself. So, voilá, he frees Diavolo. He comes for me. And&#8211;and you,
+monsieur?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Me? W&#8217;y, I&#8217;ll wait for the boys at Dupin&#8217;s camp,
+after he takes charge here. Then we&#8217;ll march.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And&#8211;you do not come back?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No need to. Now will you please get away from that door?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not coming back!&#8221; she repeated. Could the Coincidence be for
+naught after all? Could not real life be for once as complacent as art? He was
+going, and when, where, in the wide world, in all time, might they ever meet
+again? And he was going, like that! Except for her, he would not even have
+spoken.</p>
+
+<p>But&#8211;if he were the man to hold her, despite herself? If he were primal
+man of primal nature, the demigod raptor who seizes his mate? Yes, she would
+forgive him&#8211;if only he were that man. If, as such, he would but hold her
+from her duty, from her sacrifice, despite herself,
+if&#8211;if&#8211;if&#8211;&#8211;And so her daring fancy raced, raced as desire and
+hope to outrun sorrow. And why not? She could look him in the eye with that
+honesty which pertains to woman, for she knew that the shame he thought of her
+was only in the evidence of what he had seen, of what he had heard the world
+say, and not&#8211;no, not in fact. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_319'></a>319</span>And for the kindness of that fact she thanked
+Providence. Then, daring to the end, her insane hope for happiness gave her to
+remember that there was a clergyman among these Americans, and to see in that
+the ordering of fate.</p>
+
+<p>But Reality was still there, grim and greater than either Providence or Art.
+The man was waiting for her to step aside, and when she did, he would pass
+through the door and out of her life. She gazed, as for the last time, on his
+stalwart shoulders, on his splendid head, the head of a young Greek, on his
+flushed face, his mouth, and those obstinate little waves of his hair. How good
+he was to look upon&#8211;for her, that is! No, no, she could not let him
+go.</p>
+
+<p>And she tempted him. With all her woman&#8217;s beauty she tempted him. If
+beauty were aught, it must win her now what she held dear. Afterward, when she
+should tell him why, he would forgive her the unmaidenly strategy. She had noted
+with a passionate joy that the lines of his face were tightly drawn, were even
+haggard, that his breath came short; in a word, that he suffered. It told her
+that his gruff manner was not indifference, but the rugged front of
+self-control. What a will the man had! Knowing that strength, she must have been
+an odd young woman indeed not to try to break it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I suppose,&#8221; she said, lowering her head and shaking it in demure
+resignation, &#8220;no, I suppose a captive has not the littlest thing to say of
+her disposal? But if the poor child has curiosity, monsieur? If, for the
+instant, she wonders why a monsieur fights for her, and then why he hazards his
+life to be rid of her?&#8221; With which she raised her eyes inquiringly. It was
+disconcerting.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll not talk of that any more,&#8221; he grumbled. &#8220;Are
+you going to let me pass?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Frail creature between him and the door, how easy to remove her! But he
+feared the warmth of her hand, should he but <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_320'></a>320</span>touch it, or the faint odor from her hair, should a
+stray lock no more than brush his cheek.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Even a captive will wonder why she is so little prized,&#8221;
+observed the perverse maid.</p>
+
+<p>She considered with glee that the window was too small, and with yet keener
+delight that his wits for strategy had left him. He did not once think of exit
+by the inner door.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why do you keep me?&#8221; he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>His tone was harsh command, and for the moment it frightened her. She all but
+gave way, when she perceived that the menacing growl was really a plea. The poor
+fellow was at bay. She very nearly laughed. Then, too, he would not meet her eye
+again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, am <i>I</i> keeping you?&#8221; she exclaimed in innocent
+dismay.</p>
+
+<p>It provoked him to what she wanted. He came toward her angrily, while she
+stepped back against the door and spread her arms across it. Her pose was a
+dare; and the trouble was, he had to look. He had to see the girlish, the
+wonderful line of head and shoulder, the color flooding cheek and neck, and most
+dangerous of all, the challenging gray eyes. His teeth snapped to, and his hand
+closed over her wrist. He pulled, she yielded. He felt her other hand laid on
+his. The touch seemed to sear his flesh.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You must not go,&#8221; she whispered, &#8220;must not!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He drew her farther from the door, toward himself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Must not!&#8221; she repeated. He could feel the breath of her
+whisper.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t&#8211;Jack-leen!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She barely heard the words, but she knew the agony there. And he, as he
+gripped her wrist, sensed the throbbing that passed through her whole body. For
+pity, he was powerless to thrust aside a lass who pitied him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is that common, yes. It is not the instinct of&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_321'></a>321</span>Yet, all the
+while, like another Brunhilde, she was praying in her heart that she had not
+taunted him in vain. A very eerie Valkyrie, she had taunted him to be the
+stronger, stronger than his will, stronger than herself, to strive with her, to
+master her. And now she saw a fury of love and hate aroused in him, a fury
+against herself for making him love her more than his great will could bear. In
+her lust for seeing this anger of his, she forgot her mission absolutely, forgot
+why she had come to Mexico, forgot all but the prayer in her heart.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing was left her but to learn the answer, and this she did, by tugging
+firmly, coyly, to free her wrist. The answer was rapture; his grip had
+tightened. She pulled harder, and felt herself being drawn toward him. Yes, yes,
+her triumph was a fact. Slowly an arm of iron, a tremulous, masterful vandal,
+circled her waist.</p>
+
+<p>She pushed at him with her fists, and panting, tried to fight him off,
+however the blood stung in her veins and coursed hot as in his. The matter had
+gone far enough. It was time for explanations, for an adjustment. But he did not
+seem to think so. He was relentless. Barbarian Siegfried with the warrior virgin
+was not more so. The tendons in that arm of his suddenly went rigid, and crushed
+her body against him. It was then that a sudden horror took her, and she
+struggled like a tigress. She gasped out a cry for help, but the scream had no
+volume. Before she could try again, his hand covered her mouth.</p>
+
+<p>And then, and then&#8211;oh, the words he was whispering! Even as he
+smothered her shriek, she heard them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well&#8211;we&#8217;ll just have in Clem Douglas. You&#8217;ve seen
+Clem, little girl? He&#8217;s our parson.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His life long, Driscoll had never dreamed of heaven as he saw it then in her
+eyes. Never, his whole life long, as she raised those eyes to his. And the sweet
+relaxing of herself, the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_322'></a>322</span>trustful pillowing of her head on his breast, the
+soulful content as she softly breathed there, instead of that wild panting of a
+moment before! Blinded to the world, he fervently thanked God that he had been
+made.</p>
+
+<p>He touched her white brow lovingly, and gently tilted back her chin. Again
+her eyes lifted, confidingly. His head bent. She waited. His lips drew nearer to
+hers, very slowly. He was held in a deep reverence, in an awe of something
+sacred. It was a rite of adoration before a shrine. And she, seeing that look in
+his eyes, wanted him to know that the shrine was truly as pure as in his
+oblivion to the world he for the moment believed. For later memory would come to
+him, and that she could not bear. He must know now, before their lips met. Yet a
+good woman may not brazenly avow that rumor and evidence speak what is false.
+But for all that he still must know, in some way. With a playful gesture she
+intercepted his lips against the soft palm of her hand, her eyes the while
+holding his in their communion of soul. And thus she spoke, prettily, saucily,
+and blushing the while,</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And are you so sure, sir, that you are the first?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had looked for protestation, and she would have answered. And he would
+have believed. He must have believed. But instead the spell of faith broke
+sharply. Poisoned memory rushed in before it could be belied. She could see the
+tragedy of it in his changed look, in his ashen face, cold and gray. He thought
+her question a gloating over his weakness, and it revolted him. He was, then,
+but a caprice for her. He remembered that after all he had only happened by, and
+that she was returning to Maximilian. But still she was hardly less tempting. He
+had a moment of cruel conflict with himself, which left him with a sullen rage
+against the princelet in Mexico, against the order of princelets, that thus fell
+a deathly pall between an honest man and a true love kiss. Yet, she was there in
+his arms, dear and fearfully clinging and&#8211;no less tempting.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_323'></a>323</span>&#8220;Take this
+woman to my mother?&#8221; the question rose.</p>
+
+<p>As one might close the eyes of his dead wife, he loosed the arms about his
+neck, and let them fall at her side. Once free, he leaped to the door, flung it
+open, and was gone.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_324'></a>324</span><a id='link_40'></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>A Crop of Colonels</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;And thus they led a quiet life<br />
+During their princely raine.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Ballad of King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid.</i></p> </div>
+
+<p>Some years after the events recorded here, there appeared in the Boonville
+Javelin (post-bellum and revived) a serial of reminiscences, which, behind an
+opalescent gossamer of romance, pictured the Missourians and the chivalrous rôle
+they played around that forlornly chastened and be-chased damsel, la República
+Mexicana.</p>
+
+<p>Quite aside from the prodigious deeds set forth therein, the journalistic
+epic is of itself naïvely prodigious, as anyone knowing Mr. Boone with pen in
+hand will at once suspect. All the little Trojan band&#8211;call them Gascons if
+you will, but own that if they boasted they were ever keen to substantiate the
+bluff&#8211;all of them, then, strove and blazed away invariably as heroes and
+were just as peerless as could be. You wouldn&#8217;t look for anything else
+from Mr. Boone. He must, however, be credited with one peculiarity, that he
+never hinted at himself as one of the glorious company. Daniel knew his
+newspaper ethics. He knew that the newspaper man is <i>not</i> the story, however
+they may regard it in France, for instance, where the reporter is ever the
+bright particular cynosure of any interview that bears his signature.</p>
+
+<p>A few strokes of the Meagre Shanks brush in the way of excerpts from his
+narrative, with plenty of extenuating dots in between, should make an
+impression, even though impressionistic, and serve perhaps as a sketch of what
+befell after Din <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_325'></a>325</span>Driscoll had bearded the Tiger, freed Don Rodrigo,
+and surrendered his own two captives. To begin:</p>
+
+<p>A retreat was had [Daniel always got under way slowly, as though
+fore-resolved not to stampede.] Echo demands, &#8220;Retreat?&#8211;The Iron
+Brigade in retreat?&#8221; &#8217;Twas true. Rallied once again, but under another
+flag than the Bars, the Missourians rode all that dank, wet night lest they meet
+and have to fight their new friends, the guerrillas under Rodrigo Galán. It was
+a weird predicament. Two days before, they were peaceful settlers in the
+land&#8211;<i>omne solum forti patria</i>&#8211;their blood-flecked swords as
+ploughshares fleshed in earth&#8217;s warm bosom.... But tyrannical confiscation
+of the soil they tilled loomed foreboding.... Pestered nigh unto forceful
+phrases with shooing robbers of both sides out of their melon patches, and fired
+at last by the sentiment that it behooved them to sally forth and regulate
+things themselves.... They only lacked a Cincinnatus. Their old general would
+not lead them. Wearing his bright chaplet of renown, Joe Shelby now drove mules,
+a captain over long wagon trains....</p>
+
+<p>Then gallant Din Driscoll appeared among them, the dry-humored, reckless Jack
+Driscoll of other days, attired now in the brave, dashing regimentals of the
+Republic[!] From out the wilds of distant Michoacan he came with the long gallop
+that never would tire, and pausing at cabin after cabin in the Colony&#8217;s
+broad acres, summoned his old comrades to arms ... to arms against the
+invader.... Who, now, will argue bucolic content? Those lusty young planters
+smelled the battle from afar. What now were waving tassels to the glory of
+deeds?&#8211;<i>a cuspide corona</i>&#8211;to a wreath of powder-burned laurel?
+That very day the Iron Brigade rallied again, gathered once again at the oft
+remembered bugle&#8217;s full, resonant blare.</p>
+
+<p>Fighting came sooner than the Missourians hoped. Even as they started for
+Michoacan, a ragged Indito, whose village <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_326'></a>326</span>had been razed by the Cossacks, met the command and
+asked for the Señor Coronel Gringo. Driscoll heard what he had to tell, and was
+greatly concerned, though the others laughed at first and scoffed. For it seemed
+that the Indito did not know who sent him, except that it was a señor
+chaparrito, a short little señor. &#8220;Then you must be a Shorter Yet?&#8221;
+said Driscoll. &#8220;Well, what do you bring?&#8221; The Indito produced from
+his ragged shirt a bit of parchment, whereon Colonel Driscoll was urged to join
+with his new recruits in an attack on Maximilian&#8217;s escort, for Maximilian
+was on his way to Vera Cruz. The parchment was signed, &#8220;El
+Chaparrito.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shorty! That word means &#8216;Shorty&#8217;,&#8221; the troopers guffawed.
+But Driscoll showed them another handwriting at the bottom. The parchment had
+been countersigned in blank, thus: &#8220;Benito Juarez, Libertad y
+Reforma.&#8221; The Missourians were respectful after that. Many thought that
+the mysterious guardian angel of the Republic&#8217;s battles must be the
+Presidente himself, though the Presidente was thousands of miles away.</p>
+
+<hr style='border:none; border-bottom:1px solid silver; height: 1px; width: 80%; text-align: center; margin: 10px auto;' />
+
+<p>After the victory won against Dupin&#8217;s Contra Guerrillas [so the
+chronicle goes on], the Missourians found their ally to be none other than that
+picturesque buccaneer of the Sierras, Don Rodrigo, wild as a prairie wolf,
+handsome as Lucifer; and their captives to be not the Emperor and suite but two
+beautiful women....</p>
+
+<p>When the prisoners had been exchanged&#8211;i. e., the two fair girls
+restored to Dupin, and Rodrigo freed&#8211;and Rodrigo had hurried away to
+gather his scattered vagabonds from among the foothills, the Missourians
+realized their predicament. That day they had fought the Empire. Then they had
+turned and fought the Republic in the person of the guerrilla chief, Rodrigo
+Galán. They had rebelled against the rebels, so were doubly rebel, doubly
+outlawed. Ye gods, it <i>was</i> bizarre! And as morning dawned on them trailing
+along a <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_327'></a>327</span> dreary
+inferno gorge of the Sierra Gorda, they blinked at each other ruefully. Poor
+waifs, they had lost their native country. And now, one rainy morning, they
+found they had lost an adopted one. But each man looked into a face likewise so
+rueful that his own broke into a grin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll just start a <i>new</i> country,&#8221; cried Driscoll
+abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>His voice sounded strange and very unlike him, but the inspiration was
+characteristic of the man, and true to the old irrepressible Storm Centre they
+had known. Hunted outlaws, they too were in the mood for any desperate venture.
+Spontaneous as wildfire, they seconded this one ere they had asked a question.
+They never did ask &#8220;How?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A new country,&#8221; roared Tall Mose, &#8220;but where?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And when?&#8221; Old Brothers and Sisters inquired gently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll start right after breakfast,&#8221; their intrepid leader
+replied. &#8220;And right here in Mexico. It&#8217;s anybody&#8217;s country
+yet, and we might as well slice off a little private republic for
+ourselves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And won&#8217;t we fight, by Jiminy!&#8221; drawled Cal Grinders, with
+Ozarkian deliberation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And it don&#8217;t matter whom we fight,&#8221; Marmaduke added.
+&#8220;Let &#8217;em show themselves, Slim Max or Don Benito. We&#8217;ll meet
+all comers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That was the mood they were in, and they were in it to the chin. Submit a
+wholesale fighting order, and they bid for it like neither bulls nor bears, but
+like wolves.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;About taxation?&#8221; asked Clay of Carroll dubiously.</p>
+
+<p>But as a good general, or as another Romulus, Driscoll had figured it all
+out. His answer brought comfort.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll not have any. We will levy on commerce, as republics have
+the right to do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then,&#8221; said Carroll of Clay, &#8220;we&#8217;ll need a
+seaport?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course. Ain&#8217;t Tampico simply waiting for us? The French
+aren&#8217;t there now. They are concentrating in Mexico <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_328'></a>328</span>City for evacuation. There&#8217;s no
+more of a garrison than what Old Tige left, a few hundred Cossacks. If we get
+there before the Liberals&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; ...</p>
+
+<p>... And why not? They were nearly five hundred and greater than Romulus. They
+were Missourians, sir. They were from that State which gave the best fighters to
+both sides; which, population considered, gave more to the North than any other
+Northern state, more to the South than any other Southern state, and yet as a
+state would be a Republic unto herself. What, then, might not be possible to
+these her sons on a foreign shore? Intrepid youngsters, they were of royal State
+lineage, Missourians from Kentucky, Kentuckians from Virginia, which was in the
+beginning. Dauntless cavaliers of the Blood, if they chose to carve themselves a
+kingdom, why not?</p>
+
+<p>But they themselves answered the questions, questions that had men&#8217;s
+lives in them thicker than hard words in the Blue-back speller. The business was
+as already done, and Mose Bledsoe could go back to his chant with an easy mind.
+And once more Missouri&#8217;s revered saga echoed among the crags:</p>
+
+<div class='poetry'> <p>&#8220;I come from old Missouri,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Yes, all the way from Pike.<br /> I&#8217;ll tell you why
+I left there,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;And why I came to roam<br /> And leave
+my poor old mammy,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;So far away from home.&#8221;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Then, the bard leading in a fashion vociferous, the whole command helped
+out:</p>
+
+<div class='poetry'>
+<p>&#8220;Says she to me, &#8216;Joe
+Bowers,<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;You are the man to win;<br /> Here&#8217;s a
+kiss to bind the bargain,&#8217;<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;And she hove a
+dozen in....&#8221;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>... Bivouacked under the black-lipped howitzers of Tampico&#8217;s sullen
+heights.... Dismal fens ... where fever exhaled its dread gray breath thick over
+swamp and lagoon ... above, the vast ægis of the firmament, <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_329'></a>329</span>wrought in a diamond dust of stars ... a
+sickly, jaundiced, moon tilted drunkenly.... Through ooze and fetid slime the
+Americans crept stealthily out of the reeds; and on, over cypress roots,
+silently in the silent night; on, up the hill under the low walls of Fort
+Iturbide. Gently and fleeting as a dark beauty&#8217;s sigh in old Castile, they
+were come in canister range.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Steady, men,&#8221; their leader whispered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Unto death,&#8221; came the low-breathed response.</p>
+
+<p>[No such words were uttered, as Daniel knew perfectly well, but he knew that
+they should be&#8211;in the telling.].... A sharp cry ... fearful alarums from
+the crest of the hill ... next a belching fury of grape.... But Tall Mose was
+happier for it. The seal was off his lips at last, and out thundered his
+stentorian war-song:</p>
+
+<div class='poetry'>
+<p>&#8220;O Sally! dearest Sally!<br />O Sally! for your sake....&#8221;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>... still upward, until the cannon fumes broke as a dun-colored wave over
+pennant and plume ... and grimy troops fell as spring blossoms in a balmy south
+breeze.... Dying as they loved to die, game to the last ... they stumbled back
+to the river, which swept over the gallant stranger slain....</p>
+
+<div class='poetry'>
+<p>&#8220;... It&#8217;s enough to make me swear!&#8211;<br />That Sally had a baby,<br /> And the baby had red hair....&#8221;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>... Then piercing and wildly plaintive, the clarions rang out, clamoring for
+victory and <i>væ victis</i>... and Din Driscoll&#8217;s hoarse voice....
+&#8220;We are the last of the race, let us be the best as well.&#8221;...
+&#8220;Back at &#8217;em, fellows!&#8221; Bledsoe bellows.... And the parson
+murmurs, &#8220;He prays best who fights best, both great and small&#8221; ...
+his soft voice tremulous enough for Glory, his superb <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_330'></a>330</span> trigger finger disturbing enough for
+Chaos.... At last, the supreme command &#8220;like volley&#8217;d
+lightning&#8221;&#8211;&#8220;Give &#8217;em the revolver.
+<i>Charge!</i>&#8221;...</p>
+
+<p>Not until the story is told shall ... for over the battered masonry, in
+through the splintered doors, felling shadowy foes on every hand.... When well
+within-side ... the prowess of each unto himself ... tempest of pistol cracking
+... bleeding deathfully ... ah, the killing is fast and desperate ... and not a
+candle over the pitiless fray.... Huddled together for a brief last stand, the
+Cossacks ... panic, flight.... <i>The fort is taken!</i></p>
+
+<p>When the incarnadine embers of sunrise glowed in the east, the Missourians
+stood on the battlements and surveyed their domain. &#8220;You are the man to
+win, Joe Bowers,&#8221; Mose hummed with an I-told-you-so air, but softly, for
+many of his comrades were wounded, though he was not, as usual, for all his
+seven feet of perpendicular target. But &#8220;the Doc,&#8221; of Benton, was,
+of course. Getting wounded was the greatest trouble with Doc. If he attacked a
+hornet&#8217;s nest, he would contrive some way to get a leg shot off. But with
+him such things had become to be a matter of course, so now he crated himself
+together enough to move around and attend to the others. Driscoll was most
+innumerably barked, with a perforated humerus as climax. [The modest Boone might
+have catalogued similarly his own casualties.] Old Brothers and Sisters, that
+cool Christian, had lost a lens out of his spectacles, and was now replacing it
+from a supply he always carried. What, though, were fractured arms and busted
+specs to becoming a republic over night?</p>
+
+<p>But eternal vigilance is ever ... and menace was not long in coming. Three
+French gunboats, like sluggish water beetles, crossed the bar and steamed up the
+river.... Promptly the howitzers on the ramparts were trained.... <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_331'></a>331</span>But there was no need ...
+a white flag ... a naval lieutenant at the fortress gate.... The gunboats had
+not come to fight. Bazaine had sent them to carry off the endangered garrison,
+it being expected that a Liberal army under a General Pavon would shortly
+besiege the place. The Frenchman was astounded to find that the Liberals, as he
+imagined the Missourians, had already arrived. Driscoll allowed him to embark
+the dislodged garrison, as well as the defenders of the other fort, Casa Mata;
+that is, all except those who might want to change sides. And nearly every
+Mexican among the Cossacks did change. It was a sign of the panic that had
+spread throughout the Empire. Driscoll also insisted on the burial of certain
+guerrilla corpses which Dupin had left hanging to the town&#8217;s lamp posts.
+After which the gunboats took themselves out of republican waters.</p>
+
+<p>Yet they left behind expectancy. So, a Liberal army two thousand strong was
+approaching? The Missourians provisioned themselves from the town and rested on
+their arms. The Liberal host appeared, variegated of costume, piratical of
+aspect.... Again a flag of truce.... &#8220;If the señores Imperialistas desired
+to surrender?&#8221;... &#8220;We are not Imperialists,&#8221; came the reply
+from the fort, &#8220;and we&#8217;re blessedly d-n-d if we desire to
+surrender.&#8221;... &#8220;Then, the saints bless us, <i>who</i> are
+you?&#8221;... &#8220;The Republic of Tampico, de facto and
+determined.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The dumfounded Liberals scratched their heads. They were Republicans, and
+here was a republic, and naturally it bothered them. But when they had gotten it
+tangled unmistakably enough, they decided that they wanted surrender anyhow, if
+the señores Tampicoistas would have the kindness ... and on refusal from the
+fort, they withdrew to load their siege guns.</p>
+
+<p>They had sent a shot or two and received a dozen, when an Indito, emaciated
+and loathsome from scales of dirt, dashed <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_332'></a>332</span>from nowhere through the cross-fire and pounded at
+the fortress door. Driscoll ordered him admitted. The first President of the
+Tampico Republic seemed extraordinarily anxious about this ragged vagabond,
+especially as he had perceived a second one, likewise from nowhere, dash into
+the Liberal camp. Ten minutes later the enemy ceased firing. &#8220;Now come,
+all of you,&#8221; Driscoll then said to his little army, &#8220;and hear what
+he&#8217;s got to tell. I reckon he&#8217;s a Shorter Yet.&#8221;... &#8220;From
+Shorty, then!&#8221; exclaimed his men. And so it proved, for the Indito
+produced the usual bit of parchment, signed El Chaparrito and countersigned
+Benito Juarez, Libertad y Reforma. The message thereon demanded why the Coronel
+Driscoll and his new recruits for the cause had turned against it....
+&#8220;&#8217;Cause we don&#8217;t hanker after hanging,&#8221; Cal Grinders
+interposed.... Was it, Driscoll continued to read, because they thought they had
+lost favor by fighting Rodrigo Galán? If so, there was naught against them,
+nothing, because President Juarez had outlawed Galán for robbing a bullion
+convoy. It was true that the writer of the parchment had used the said Rodrigo,
+in the hope of capturing Maximilian, but the bandit was not for that reason a
+Republican officer.... &#8220;In other words,&#8221; lisped Crittenden of
+Nodaway, &#8220;we&#8217;re in-lawed because the good patriot Don Rodrigo is
+away outlawed.&#8221;... &#8220;Therefore,&#8221; the parchment went on,
+&#8220;His Excellency the Presidente through the writer has herewith sent a
+message to General Pavon of the besieging camp to comply with whatever Their
+Mercies the Americans may deem fit to require. Further, knowing the temper of
+Their Mercies, General Pavon is ordered to at once cease operations and leave
+Their Mercies in possession.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Missourians looked at one another and were reluctant. They hated to
+forego a battle. But it takes two sides to make one. Not outlawed, not even
+threatened, they had no excuse to hold against the Liberals.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_333'></a>333</span>&#8220;But,&#8221; said Crittenden, &#8220;as an
+ally of this sister Republic, we&#8217;ll still have our fighting.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; demanded Driscoll, &#8220;what will you ask
+for?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Our Córdova lands back, after we&#8217;ve won them from the
+Empire.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And,&#8221; put in Grinders, &#8220;equality. We want republican
+equality.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then we&#8217;ll all be privates?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No sir-ee, by cracken! Equality high up, that&#8217;s what!
+We&#8217;ll be colonels, breveted colonels, every last one of us&#8211;Colonel
+Driscoll, Colonel Grinders, Colonel Brothers and Sisters,
+Colonel&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s easy,&#8221; said Driscoll smiling. &#8220;Now I&#8217;ll
+go and fix it up with General Pavon, before he gets away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>... To conclude this chapter on the Missourians&#8217; Republic, there is yet
+a word, which perhaps is also explanation of the saddened change that had come
+over Din Driscoll since that night after the battle with Don Rodrigo. It must be
+remembered that the peerless lad had just won his old comrades to the Mexican
+Republican cause. While yet rejoicing that here he more than made good the three
+hundred Liberals he had helped to capture when a captain under the Empire, he
+found that he had only cast his recruits out of the pale of law, first against
+the Empire, and then against the Republic.... Then he proposed their own
+republic, and for themselves they took Tampico from the French. But why? What
+was the real object in Driscoll&#8217;s innermost thought? The suspicion arises:
+Was it to win a peace-offering wherewith to make friends again with the
+Liberals? Such an explanation of his otherwise wild scheme is but a theory, but
+the theory fits, for John D. Driscoll, though as reckless as any and quick for
+any forlorn hope, was, when a leader, scrupulously practical.</p>
+
+<p>The above suggestion, moreover, is apropos in these later <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_334'></a>334</span>days, when the Tampico
+Republic has become to be folklore throughout Missouri, and when our cousins,
+the Kentuckians, even those proud colonels by acclamation, cannot rank beside
+these five hundred colonels scattered over the sister state; so that, when a
+stranger questions, a Missourian answers: &#8220;He a colonel? W&#8217;y yes, of
+course, sir. And, by God sir, a Tampico colonel, too! Yes, one of the five
+hundred!&#8221; and the stranger&#8217;s eyes bulge as he takes off his hat.</p>
+
+<p>[The deposition of Meagre Shanks ends here.]</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_335'></a>335</span><a id='link_41'></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Royal Resolution</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;... O restless fate of pride,<br />
+That strives to learn what Heaven resolves to hide.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>The Iliad.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>On returning to the capital, Jacqueline did not once set foot in any Imperial
+palace, but she established her own salon of a grande dame, and there installed
+herself mid a simple elegance. What was left of the mortgaged château in the
+Bourbonnais went to pay for it. Jacqueline would accept not a louis out of
+Napoleon&#8217;s Black Chest. A French gentlewoman, she impoverished herself to
+work for France. And when, a little later, Napoleon dishonored his own name and
+that of France in his dealings with Maximilian, she thanked the instinct that
+had kept her free. Puddles muddied one&#8217;s skirt so! The valiant maid broke
+her sword. She would serve no longer. At least, she was quite certain that she
+would not.</p>
+
+<p>Napoleon&#8217;s shame lay in this. Maximilian had accepted his harsh
+ultimatum regarding the Mexican customs, and in return for such humiliation he
+depended on the presence of the French troops for yet another year. But the
+United States threatened war, and Napoleon cringed. He would withdraw the troops
+immediately. He would abandon Maximilian, treaty or no treaty. Thus the quiet
+forces in the American Legation at Paris battled against the proud House of
+Orleans. The princess of that House failed. She could not save her
+husband&#8217;s throne, and her own. Her mind gave way. She became a raving
+maniac. So much for Charlotte&#8217;s mission.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_336'></a>336</span>With the news
+Maximilian was a broken man. He seemed to remember his promise to rejoin her in
+Europe, for he set out coastward and left the marshal a letter that was
+virtually his abdication. Yet in the Hot Country he stopped for his health. An
+Austrian frigate waited for him. But behind him was his capital. Would he
+return? History will never know, perhaps, the soul-despairing network of
+intrigue and counter-intrigue that wound and tightened about the young sapling
+roots that would strike deep in an unnourishing soil and become a dynastic oak.
+The rabid clericals, who were Maximilian&#8217;s ministers at the time, thought
+their puppet gone, and in terror of an avenging Republic they resigned. But
+Bazaine, urged to it by Padre Fischer, prevailed upon them to remain, and
+Fischer gave his word that the puppet would not escape. So France lost another
+chance to take back the Mexican Empire, and thereby pave a way out of her shame.
+For while Maximilian recuperated, he reconsidered. Clerical generals assured him
+of armies, the ministers talked eloquently of treasure from the Church coffers.
+The fat padre manipulated generals and ministers and Emperor, He was supreme.
+None might come near the royal ear except at his pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>It was at this time, about the first of the year, some six months after
+Charlotte had sailed to Europe, and only a few weeks before the French would do
+the same, that one evening Jacqueline&#8217;s footman brought her a plainly
+sealed envelope, without crest, without writing. She tore it open, and started
+as she looked at a simple autograph on the card inside.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His&#8211;this gentleman, Tobie, you admitted him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The well-trained servant stood impassive. &#8220;What would madame
+have?&#8221; he replied. &#8220;The man walked in like a lord, keeping his face
+hid in a cloak. But if madame&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Was there a carriage?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, madame, but I noticed a saddle horse at a little distance, held by
+a mounted soldier with a carbine. But if madame&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_337'></a>337</span>&#8220;He is in
+the drawing-room, then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oui, madame, and without removing his Mexican sombrero. But if madame
+desires that this citizen find himself&#8211;h&#8217;m&#8211;pressed to
+go&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tobie! No, on the contrary, you will permit him to wait undisturbed,
+until I come.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A few minutes later Jacqueline beheld a tall figure in elegant charro garb
+striding the length of her salon. As she entered, her guest threw off sombrero
+and Spanish cloak, and revealed the drawn and troubled features of the Emperor
+of Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Majesty has returned to His capital!&#8221; she exclaimed.
+&#8220;Then it is true&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That I shall cling to my play-empire? But I do not know yet,
+mademoiselle, I do not know yet. If I did, I should not be here, here in your
+house for the first time, and against your wishes&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Will Your Highness be seated?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian flung himself wearily into an armchair. The fire of the enthusiast
+had died out of his eyes, and the fire of fever had left them faded. They
+reminded one of the blue of old-fashioned china.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; she began.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why come to you, you mean? I don&#8217;t know; instinct, I
+suppose.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Isn&#8217;t that rather vague? Your Imperial Highness returns to the
+City, to his palace&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not to his palace, mademoiselle, not while it would seem a mockery of
+my poor imperial state, but to an hacienda in the suburbs. If I enter my Mexican
+palace again, it will be because I have decided to remain an emperor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And for the reason that you have <i>not</i> so decided, you do me the
+honor&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I do myself the service, mademoiselle. I can bear this torment of
+indecision no longer, and you can help me, for you, <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_338'></a>338</span>dear lady, see clearly where the vision
+of others is distorted. The enthusiasm of the others is unsafe. Yes,&#8221; he
+sighed, with a little superior air of resignation to all human foibles,
+&#8220;those on whose loyalty I can depend are indeed few, but I am thankful
+that among them are my ministers, and my faithful secretary, Father Augustin
+Fischer&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then why, in heaven&#8217;s name, does Your Highness come to
+me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Instinct, or&#8211;perhaps it&#8217;s mania. Something has forced me
+to learn what <i>you</i> would say.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s foot&#8211;a small digression, at most&#8211;was slippered
+in blue, and this she pillowed on a cushion of red. And on another cushion she
+settled her elbow; and the sleeve of the chemisette, or blouse, or whatever the
+high-necked filmy white garment was, fell away, revealing a rounded forearm
+clasped in a band of gold. And resting her chin on her thumb, she regarded the
+young prince thoughtfully. In her look there may have been a sedate twinkle of
+amusement, but all was gently, pityingly sympathetic.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let me know,&#8221; she said, &#8220;more of the doubts that trouble
+Your Highness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Unerringly she touched the right chord. Doubts, yes, doubts of a broken
+dreamer. Illusions shattered as bubbles. A dweller in an ideal shadow, believing
+that subjects needed only lofty phrases, Maximilian was finding himself
+tragically maladjusted to the modern day in which he lived. But as the words
+tumbled from his lips in the passionate relief of unburdening, it quickly
+appeared that his misgivings arose only because he had fallen short of Dark Age
+standards. He recalled bitterly how, unlike the illustrious among his ancestors,
+he had not stirred until others had won his crown for him. But destiny was kind.
+He had the chance for redemption. To hold his empire now depended on him alone.
+He would mount his horse, give to the light a true Hapsburg blade, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_339'></a>339</span>and valiantly ride forth
+to conquer or perish, and in any hazard be worthy of his House.</p>
+
+<p>Then, without abrupt change, he talked of Austria&#8217;s late woes. Had he
+but commanded his country&#8217;s ships at Lissa! Could he but have risked his
+life at Sadowa! And moreover, he was still needed over there. But in some quick
+recollection a moisture dimmed the blue eyes. He drew from his vaquero jacket a
+dispatch. It was from Franz Josef. If Maximilian returned to Austria, the
+message ran, then he must leave behind the title of Emperor&#8211;leave behind
+even the title!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And will that hurt so much?&#8221; asked Jacqueline.</p>
+
+<p>The Ritual again! For it a man withheld asylum from his brother.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is there no mother,&#8221; cried the exasperated girl, &#8220;to spank
+both your Majesties?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;Tis of Her Serene Highness&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Maximilian began with
+dignity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Highness? Yes, I forgot, but not high enough to chide majesty, though
+she be a mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet she has only just warned me of her deep displeasure if&#8211;No,
+her message shall wait. I wish to hear first what you think. Tell me, shall I
+go, or shall I stay? Tell me, tell me, and why!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Feverishly the man craved one frank word. There was in his look the prayer of
+a desperate gambler who watches a card poised between the dealer&#8217;s
+fingers. Jacqueline had one answer only. But exactly how to express it, lest she
+be wrongly taken, made her pause.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the first place,&#8221; she began slowly, &#8220;there is only a
+single consideration involved, and in that lies the solution of Your
+Majesty&#8217;s doubts. I mean the consideration of honor. Now if Your Highness
+is&#8211;<i>whipped</i> off his throne&#8211;<i>that</i> is ignominy&#8211;But
+wait, wait, I am not through. I&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Almost my mother&#8217;s words!&#8221; he cried triumphantly. And
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_340'></a>340</span>with a hand that
+trembled, he got out the letter from that Archduchess Sophia who had given one
+son a crown and loved this other as her darling.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Rather than suffer humiliation by a French policy&#8217;&#8221; he
+read from her letter, &#8220;&#8216;stay, stay, though you be buried under the walls
+of Mexico!&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Jacqueline interposed. She had been taken amiss
+after all.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You too bid me stay,&#8221; he insisted. &#8220;But I might have
+known. I might have known. One who never errs said that this would be your
+counsel. The Padre is wonderful&#8211;wonderful!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Father Fischer, of course! What else? How consummate was the snake in his
+cunning! He counted on honesty and nobility in another, though having none
+himself. He knew Jacqueline. He thought that, both good and frank, she must
+advise the Emperor as his mother had done. Accordingly, when Maximilian became
+afflicted with doubts, the priest allowed him to go to Jacqueline. She would be
+an accomplice despite herself. Only his judgment did not go quite far enough.
+Jacqueline had not spoken <i>all</i> her mind.</p>
+
+<p>Imperiously she compelled Maximilian&#8217;s attention. &#8220;I said
+ignominy, yes,&#8221; she persisted, &#8220;but I would have added that
+honor&#8211;the modern and the decent&#8211;and the only courage, lies in facing
+this same ignominy. Listen. If the least of impure ambition enters in your
+decision to remain, then for each death in the civil war that must result, Your
+Highness may hold himself to account, and so be held by history. Now,&#8221; she
+went on, unmoved by the fact that he had winced, &#8220;the question remains
+with Your Highness&#8211;does aught besides honor hold you to stay?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To himself he answered as she spoke, and guilt confessed mounted his
+brow.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But there,&#8221; she said, &#8220;Father Fischer will interpret the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_341'></a>341</span>will of the
+Almighty. Before Your Imperial Highness retires to-night, my words will be
+forgotten.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The lash fell on flesh already raw and smarting. To predict that he would
+change yet again, when to change he branded himself a wilful murderer&#8211;no!
+That was more than he could endure. She must not think that of him. He held out
+his hand. &#8220;Jeanne!&#8221; he murmured imploringly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t!&#8221; she cried, &#8220;Don&#8217;t call me
+that!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then she bit her lip, and her fury turned against herself.
+&#8220;Jeanne&#8221; was feminine and French for &#8220;John,&#8221; which was
+masculine and&#8211;American. This important discovery she had made months ago
+when riding beside a man whose horse was &#8220;Demijohn.&#8221; As a girl in
+love, she had found a cozy joy in their names being the same. But for that very
+reason any recollection of it, since then, was the less to be borne.</p>
+
+<p>Blushing indignantly, she saw that Maximilian was regarding her with a
+puzzled expression. Manlike, he referred it to himself, and suddenly, he too
+started. Only once before had he addressed her thus familiarly, which was during
+that memorable afternoon beside the artificial lake at Cuernavaca. Here,
+therefore, must lie the association that caused her agitation. Yet, since that
+afternoon, she had permitted no reference to their interview, unless to raise
+her brows quizzically at his continued presence in Mexico. But now, what of the
+self-betrayal into which he had just surprised her? It could not but be
+connected with that other time when he had murmured her name. There was,
+however, no conscious vanity in the remarkable explanation. It was remorse. He
+thought of Charlotte, his wife. And this other woman, had he wronged her also?
+For during the past weeks of trouble he had forgotten that he had loved her, and
+she had not forgotten. In two such facts, falling together, was the wrong, and
+one that a woman scarcely ever forgives, as he had had reason to know.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I could not help supposing, mademoiselle,&#8221; he ventured <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_342'></a>342</span>diffidently, &#8220;that
+what you said at Cuernavaca was inspired by&#8211;by no feeling toward myself. I
+could suppose nothing else in the light of your utter indifference since then,
+and&#8211;and your aversion for my very presence.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline laughed pleasantly. &#8220;In that Your Highness deceives himself.
+I did then, as I do now, feel for Your Highness enough to wish him safely out of
+Mexico.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Charity, then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She did not protest.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As I thought,&#8221; he said. &#8220;There was no feeling
+in&#8211;in&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline raised her eyes and met his frankly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When a woman feels in the sense you mean, sire,&#8221; she said,
+&#8220;then she does not make an empire, even the Austrian Empire, a condition.
+If the man in question has no more than his horse, his pistols, even his pipe,
+then the woman&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; But she stopped abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With you,&#8221; he granted honestly, &#8220;it was not a matter of
+personal ambition either. But if neither of these, then what&#8211;<i>Now</i> I
+see!&#8221; he cried. &#8220;A state reason! A decoy, to tempt me out of Mexico!
+Yes, yes, now I see!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is good to know,&#8221; said Jacqueline, not ungratefully,
+&#8220;that Your Majesty at least, if no other, can see a high motive in my self
+abasement.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now what can she mean by that?&#8221; he demanded of himself.
+&#8220;What other, in particular, thinks hard of her that she should
+care?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Éloin was the only other man who could have seen them, there at Cuernavaca.
+No, little it mattered to her what Éloin thought. But&#8211;yes, there was
+another. There was the American who had intruded and wanted to save his empire.
+Maximilian recalled now her change to bitterness after the American had left
+them, and a moment ago he had seen the identical pain of self-contempt tug at
+her lips. And yet, once <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_343'></a>343</span>she had left the American to die. But Maximilian
+answered even that objection. Leaving him to die was a necessity for her
+country. And the sacrifice had gone farther. It had not faltered before the
+self-degradation of which she had just spoken.</p>
+
+<p>The admiration in his eyes grew. The chivalry in his race awoke within him,
+and exalted him. He felt himself become the true knight, in the purity of
+devotion to a woman&#8211;a gentleman, as real chivalry would have the term.
+Poor man and poet, he felt even the impulse to bend the knee and crave as a boon
+some risk of life in her service, without thought of boon thereafter&#8211;a
+knightly impulse nearly obsolete in chivalry, if ever customary. But he knew now
+that the impulse was really possible, and the proof was this: that the
+constraint between them had vanished, that soon he was talking with her easily
+and naturally.</p>
+
+<p>For Jacqueline also the air had become blessedly pure, and deeply,
+gratefully, she breathed of it. Because now she talked with one whose respect
+was a fact, who <i>knew</i> her for what she was, and during a moment&#8217;s
+space she was happy, with the happiness of delusion. It seemed that other men,
+that one other man, might one day know her too, and give her his esteem. But the
+phantasy passed. The knowledge must forever be restricted to the man before her,
+and for him she did not care.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian, very strangely, was thinking of the very self-same thing. Here
+was a service in her behalf already offering. If he could cause that other man
+to know? But it was out of the question. Men may convince one another of a
+woman&#8217;s guilt, and only too easily. But of her innocence? No, it was
+absurdly out of the question. Besides, next day the true knight would be
+starting back for Europe. Had he not just decided?</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_344'></a>344</span><a id='link_42'></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Interpreter to the Almighty</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;... and could make the worse appear<br />
+The better reason.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Paradise Lost.</i></p> </div>
+
+<p>After half an hour&#8217;s sharp canter, Maximilian dismounted at La Teja,
+his suburban hacienda. He had come quickly from Jacqueline&#8217;s, for his
+heart was light. The stress and storm of wavering were ended at last. Soon now
+he would be at Miramar, at beautiful Miramar, overlooking the sea, where
+Charlotte awaited him, but knew it not. And by love and tender care he would
+coax her back to sanity. Ah, no, the pure joy of living was not done for them
+yet!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Desire Father Augustin to attend me in my private cabinet,&#8221; he
+said to the first lackey.</p>
+
+<p>The huge priest came on the instant. He bore a candle in one fat, freckled
+hand, and above its light the dull flesh of his face shone yellow. His head was
+as ever pear-shaped with its heavy, flabby jowls, and in the apex the two little
+beads of eyes leaped adventurously at sight of the prince.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am here, sire,&#8221; he said purringly. &#8220;Your Majesty, then,
+wishes me to prepare for his return to the imperial palace to-morrow?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, father,&#8221; His Majesty answered stoutly, though not without an
+uneasy glance. &#8220;To-morrow I set out for the coast. The <i>Dandolo</i> is
+still there at anchor. You will give the necessary orders to my Hungarians, who
+will be my escort.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Fischer opened his lips, to close them. The involuntary creasing of his brow
+smoothed at once. Maximilian, who had <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_345'></a>345</span>dreaded argument from this man, breathed easier. But
+of course any man would give way when a Hapsburg had irrevocably made up his
+mind. The padre laid down the candle, and interlaced his bloated fingers over
+his paunch in an attitude of sleek calmness. He was smiling and fawned meek
+anxiety to second his patron&#8217;s least wish.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Imperial Majesty&#8217;s wisdom, I see, is not a thing to be
+turned by the fräulein?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;On the contrary, Mademoiselle la Marquise d&#8217;Aumerle counseled my
+departure, not my remaining.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The fingers tightened slightly over the bulge of the sutane. &#8220;She then
+presumed to differ from Her Serene Highness, Your Majesty&#8217;s
+mother?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My mother would counsel the same, were she in Mexico. I thank you,
+padre, that I went to see the only one who could so take my mother&#8217;s
+place, because now, at last, I know what I must do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The priest took a long breath, and drew back, mentally, to some vantage point
+whence he could survey the field and plan his campaign anew. He nodded humble
+acquiescence, but the small bright eyes seemed to gorge themselves on the
+prince. Maximilian stirred restively. One has seen a lion watch the
+trainer&#8217;s whip, as though he wondered that a creature with only a whip
+should yet, in some way, compel him to do this or that. Before an obscure
+adventurer the monarch hastened to justify his abdication. But it did not make
+him easier because the padre listened so obsequiously, with never a quiver
+before the horror and misery pictured. He only listened, this man of God, noting
+it all deferentially, item by item, with a smiling gesture that he heard and
+understood, and was quite ready for the next. Maximilian became aware at last of
+his own low stooping. And that moment he stopped abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Lord reward Your Majesty&#8217;s tender heart,&#8221; now <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_346'></a>346</span>spoke the priest,
+&#8220;and may the reward be such as a ruler should expect from his
+God!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you mean?&#8221; demanded Maximilian in impatient anger.
+&#8220;Have all the barbarities of civil war no power to move you? Do I not know
+that the savagery has already begun?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The curate crossed himself. In humility he would bear the charge of hardness
+of heart. &#8220;Power to stir me?&#8221; he repeated. &#8220;If Your Majesty
+would think on his power to bring this same savagery to an end! That is his
+reward offered by Heaven, the reward of bringing holy peace to a stricken
+land.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Did I not come for that? You only remind me how I have
+failed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And why, sire? Because your instruments were not blessed. The French
+oppressed the Church as well as the people. But now the French are leaving. It
+is the hand of Providence.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She <i>said</i> he would interpret the will of Heaven!&#8221;
+Maximilian exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>The priest heard, stammered, and went to wreck miserably, as a hypocrite
+unmasked knows that his next word must sound like hypocrisy. How slyly she had
+checkmated him! Forseeing his thrust, she had countered his every shift of
+cunning through this feeble fencer before him. And the mistake he had made, in
+sending Maximilian to her! For a moment the expression of the apostate Lutheran
+was very ugly in its baffled rage. But he was too wise a trainer to lose
+patience utterly. He realized instead that the struggle was harder than any he
+had yet had with his royal dupe, since now his real antagonist was the young
+Frenchwoman.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I? I interpret the word of God?&#8221; He said it very humbly, with
+bowed head. &#8220;Alas, Your Majesty knows I am the last to presume to that.
+But there are those who can. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_347'></a>347</span>There is the Holy Father in Rome, who is infallible.
+I only know that <i>he</i> told Your Majesty&#8217;s servant, myself, that a
+ruler blessed by the Church is an instrument of God. But if the ruler turns his
+back ere his work is done&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian&#8217;s nostrils were dilating strangely, and the consummate
+tempter hurried on. He exalted the grandeur of the Emperor&#8217;s task, yet
+craftily made success appear simple and easy. The forces of &#8220;the
+arch-rebel Benito Juarez&#8221; were concentrated in &#8220;a horde of impious
+thieves calling themselves the Army of the North.&#8221; But Miramon, His
+Majesty&#8217;s own general, was hastening to meet them. One decisive battle,
+and there would be no more rebels. The nation must then recognize that the
+Empire had sustained itself without French aid.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course a few lives will be lost,&#8221; he quietly sneered,
+&#8220;and we who do not understand may grieve for them, but the ways of Heaven,
+for its own ends, are inscrutable. Your Majesty knows that others before him,
+his ancestors, have had to wade through the blood of God&#8217;s enemies. But
+Your Majesty&#8217;s glorious ancestors were fulfilling their destiny. And why
+should not you, also, sire, you who are the child of destiny?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a magic word. Fischer knew his man devilishly well.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But how can I tell,&#8221; Maximilian demanded petulantly, &#8220;that
+my destiny really lies in Mexico?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then your destiny, sire, must lie in Europe, in Austria,&#8221; was
+the priest&#8217;s astounding concession. &#8220;After all, a prince&#8217;s
+intuitions, being given him by divine revelation, can alone be his
+guide.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian&#8217;s eyes flashed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then I abdicate&#8211;herewith!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Fischer meekly assented.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There are rumors, nay, more than rumors,&#8221; he mused <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_348'></a>348</span>aloud, &#8220;that a
+strong hand is needed in Austria. I repeat only what all Europe says boldly,
+that Franz Josef cannot long hold his throne. Yes, yes, sire, but do not stare
+so!&#8211;Yet the crown prince is a child. Who then shall be regent? Who
+but&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Enough, enough, I say! Now look to my orders. We start
+to-morrow.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The secretary beamed unctious joy that his master had so decided, and was
+bowing himself out, when abruptly he paused, &#8220;Oh, I forgot, a packet for
+Your Majesty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian took the missive. It was not heavy. It did not seem as heavy as
+Fate, not as heavy as a coffin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is an old date,&#8221; he said in a puzzled way. &#8220;See, the
+postmark, &#8216;Brussels, Sept. 17.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It just came by courier from Vera Cruz, being sent via New York no
+doubt accounts for the delay.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian sighed. Even the post no longer considered royalty. Packets had
+taken on leisurely habits since the Empire&#8217;s crumbling&#8211;or since the
+secretary&#8217;s ascendancy. He broke the seal with tremulous fingers. The
+thing must tell him of Charlotte.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From Monsieur Éloin,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he&#8211;he does not send bad news, nothing, sire, of Her Imperial
+Highness?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Well enough did that soul of mud know the letter&#8217;s contents. Well
+enough he knew that Éloin and himself could waste no time on an insane woman.
+Their chances of future position were in too critical a state. And the packet
+was designed for just such a crisis as the present.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian frowned, read excitedly. He was swept along as by a torrent. Fixed
+on him were the small bead eyes of the priest, darting a light, like a flame on
+oil. And when the Emperor gasped quickly and sprang to his feet with hands
+clenched in the manner of a strong man, the priest was ready.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_349'></a>349</span>&#8220;Good
+news, then?&#8221; he cried. &#8220;What fortune! Now Your Majesty will hurry
+the faster to Vienna?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian gave him a glance, as though he were dense to think so.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here, read, read it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>M. Éloin, sycophant, courtier, had never sung for his royal patron a
+roundelay more pleasing than his prose of the moment. It caused to vibrate the
+very heart chords of the susceptible prince. There were subtle appeals to spite
+ungratified, to wounded pride, to ambition, to honor. The letter ran:</p>
+
+<div class='bquote'>
+<p>... Nevertheless, I am convinced that to abandon the throne now, before the
+return of the French army, would be interpreted as an act of weakness....</p>
+
+<p>If this appeal (to the Mexican people) is not heard, then Your Majesty,
+having accomplished his noble mission to the end, will return to Europe with all
+the prestige that accompanied his departure; and mid important events that are
+certain to happen, he will be able to play the rôle that belongs to him in every
+way....</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And then the supreme refrain:</p>
+
+<div class='bquote'>
+<p>In passing through Austria, I was able to bear witness to the general
+discontent that reigns there. Yet nothing is done yet. The Emperor is
+discouraged; the people fret and publicly demand his abdication; the sympathies
+for Your Majesty are spreading visibly throughout the entire Empire; in Venetia
+a whole population wishes to acclaim its former governor....</p></div>
+
+<p>Thus it was that Éloin pilfered Jacqueline&#8217;s lever, and thus he used
+another fulcrum, as he had promised Charlotte he would. By pandering to
+Maximilian&#8217;s Austrian ambitions, he showed the weak prince how they could
+yet never be realized if prestige were lost in Mexico. To keep this prestige, to
+increase it, Maximilian must prove to Austria that he could hold the empire he
+already had, and that without foreign bayonets. He had only to stay a short time
+after the French should evacuate. And then, within a few months, a few weeks, he
+might lay down the sceptre voluntarily, to take up the one awaiting him across
+the ocean.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We will leave here in the morning,&#8221; cried
+Maximilian&#8211;&#8220;no, to-night, at once!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_350'></a>350</span>&#8220;For Vera
+Cruz, sire?&#8221; queried the padre.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, for my capital, for my palace! And father, allow no one to mention
+abdication to me again. My decision to stay is irrevocable.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The padre promised faithfully that he should not be disturbed, and this was
+one promise that the good padre kept.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_351'></a>351</span><a id='link_43'></a>CHAPTER X<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Alone Among His Loving Subjects</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;And Jove himself shall guard a monarch&#8217;s right.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>The Iliad</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Early one morning a month later, a solemn little group of uniformed men
+climbed to the roof of Buena Vista, the imperial wedding gift to Marshal
+Bazaine, and nerving themselves, pulled down the Tricolor. France, a Napoleon,
+were again leaving the New World. It was Evacuation.</p>
+
+<p>The Army of the Expedition came tramping down the Paseo. There were heavy
+Dragoons and Cuirassiers, on majestic chargers. There were light Chasseurs and
+Lancers, on fleet Arabians that had often proved themselves against the Mexican
+pony. There was the clanking of steel, and the flash of helmets through the
+dust. The imperial eagles, gilded anew, were poised for flight back to their
+native aeries. Lower in the earthly cloud bobbed the tasseled fez of the bronzed
+Zouave, and the perky red pompon on the fighting cap of the little piou-piou.
+With the steady beat of the march, the pantalons rouges crossed, spread,
+crossed, spread, like regiments of bright, bloody shears. The bands played. And
+yet it was not a martial scene. Feet, not hearts, lifted to the fife&#8217;s
+thrilling note. Nor was the multitude that thronged the wide avenue a fiesta
+populace. It looked on stolidly, without a huzza, yet without a hiss. Enthusiasm
+in either sense would have been relief, but the Mexicans assisting at the bag
+and baggage of an invader were as unmoved as those other spectators, the
+colossal figures in the glorietas; as the two Aztec giants, leaning on <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_352'></a>352</span>their war clubs; as
+Guatemotzin, with high feathered crest and spear aloft, foreboding as in life to
+the European conqueror; as Columbus, who, having himself suffered, gave now no
+sign of remorse for the blows which this new hemisphere gave the old; as Charles
+IV. on his iron horse, who had bargained with a former Napoleon to be called
+Emperor of America, and who, unlike Maximilian, had wisely surrendered such a
+crown.</p>
+
+<p>Cavalry, infantry, cannon, wagons, on they came through the city and past the
+Zócalo, under the Cathedral towers, under the lifeless, shuttered windows of the
+Palacio. Here in the Zócalo, in the central plaza, the sometime first lady of
+Her Imperial Majesty&#8217;s household sat in her barouche, and opposite her a
+pretty girl, and she was talking with an officer of Chasseurs d&#8217;Afrique whose
+horse was restive, and all the while there was the rumbling of wheels, the tread
+of feet, and the ring of hoofs.</p>
+
+<p>The sometime first lady was saying good-bye to the officer, as she had
+already to many another gallant chevalier pausing beside her carriage. But for
+her it was farewell to all her countrymen there, to the little piou-pious most
+of all, and her gray eyes were frankly moist.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And now they are going,&#8221; she mused aloud, &#8220;really going,
+because, parbleau, a monsieur in Washington says they must.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wish to heaven,&#8221; swore the young officer gloomily, &#8220;some
+monsieur would say as much to you! See here, we&#8217;d give you and
+Mademoiselle Berthe enough room on the ship for a barracks, if you&#8217;d only
+come. There&#8217;s a many less welcome,&#8221; and he jerked his head toward a
+stream of vehicles straggling among the troops. They were filled with Mexican
+aristocrats whose doubtful titles had been revived by the Empire, all eagerly
+accepting French transport out of their native land.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline laughed. &#8220;They&#8217;re so afraid of the Liberals, they will
+forget their escutcheons. So of course they&#8217;ve forgotten the bouquets. You
+should have seen the garlands, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_353'></a>353</span>Michel, that heralded our grand entry here. Oh,
+lá-lá! We paid for them ourselves. Thus arrived the Drapeau Civilizateur de la
+France. And now behold the departure. Not the cost of a violet to spare from
+Napoleon&#8217;s strong chest! Hé mais, hear that tune! It&#8217;s &#8216;Leaving for
+Syria,&#8217; the thing decreed into our national hymn. For once I&#8217;m glad,
+glad it&#8217;s not the &#8216;Marseillaise.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle&#8211;dear friend,&#8221; spoke the slow-thinking Michel,
+&#8220;you do not wish to answer my question. Why do you stay behind, alone?
+Why? Nothing good ever happens to anyone in this country, and who can tell what
+might happen to you when the army is gone? Come now,&#8221; he went on, forcing
+some bluff cheer into his words, &#8220;Jeanne d&#8217;Aumerle, your friends want you
+out of it. Fall in with us, here, now. Let me give the order, &#8217;Cocher, à
+Paris!&#8211;Voilà, what more&#8217;s to be done?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, what more simple? Or more to be desired? Yet there was nothing she
+desired less. She thought of what she had found in Mexico, and must leave
+behind. It was a dead thing, true, and already buried. But&#8211;the grave was
+too fresh as yet. However, the real reason for her staying involved something
+else.</p>
+
+<p>She made no reply, for at the moment a strange voice, with a jagged Mexican
+accent and a thin insidious inflection, broke in upon them, and startled them
+all three.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nay, Monsieur le Duc,&#8221; it began, rolling the title as a morsel
+on the tongue. &#8220;Your Grace would deprive us of too much honor. Why,
+indeed, should mademoiselle not remain among us?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Turning quickly, Jacqueline beheld the stranger&#8217;s black eyes upon
+herself. He, too, wished to know why she stayed in Mexico, but in his sharp,
+shifting look there was a penetration quite different from that of the guileless
+Michel. He bestrode a magnificent horse that seemed made for armor, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_354'></a>354</span>whereas he himself would
+surely have been crushed under so much as a Crusader&#8217;s buckler. Being so
+very small, and perched so very high, he cut a ludicrously martial figure with
+his plumed hat and epaulettes and gold buttons and braid and medals and
+exquisitely mounted sabre. It was not a French uniform that he wore, but Mexican
+Imperial, and stupendously ornate. And within the brave array, he was such a
+little, little man!&#8211;insignificance glorified into caricature.</p>
+
+<p>But the pigmy was not altogether on parade. He had that morning been
+receiving arsenals and fortresses from the French; in short, the keys of the
+Empire. For he was Commander in Chief of the Imperial armies, was this species
+of manikin. And ugly? He was a man of lifted upper lip under a bristling
+moustache, a man of fangs, a wee, snarling, strutting, odious creature of a man.
+A deep livid scar split his cheek and would not heal. Instead of arousing
+sympathy, it proclaimed him rather for the scratches he gave to others. For he
+was that Mexican of infamous name, the Leopard. Once he had looted the British
+Legation. Another time he massacred young medical students attending the wounded
+of both sides. There were stories of children speared and tossed in ditches. Yet
+certain priests blessed his ardor as defender of the Church. Maximilian had sent
+him on a mission to Palestine, since he was abhorrent to the moderates. But now
+he was back again, to lead the clerical armies. The valley of Mexico shrank from
+his brutal proclamation demanding submission. &#8220;Mexicans, you know
+me!&#8221; so ended the snarl. He gathered forced loans. He drafted peons,
+though they were exempt. He emptied the prisons, and convicts he sent in chains
+as recruits for the Imperial garrisons. In such a fashion Leonardo Marquez began
+his duties as generalísimo of the Empire.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Excellency is most kind,&#8221; said Jacqueline, for no other
+reason than to annoy him by changing from French into his own language.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_355'></a>355</span>&#8220;On the
+contrary,&#8221; returned Marquez, &#8220;I am flattered that you will be here
+to observe how we, alone, shall crush the rebels. Your countrymen, señorita,
+happily leave plenty of them. But I cannot believe that this is why you
+remain.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Make her tell you, then,&#8221; interposed the helpless Ney. He was
+utterly at sea. There was a trial of strength on between these two, but how or
+for what was quite beyond him.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline pushed back the Persian shawl she wore&#8211;this fifth day of
+February was the Mexican springtime&#8211;and settled herself to the contest in
+earnest. &#8220;I fear,&#8221; she began slowly, &#8220;that my motive in
+staying can hardly be intelligible, unless, perhaps, Your Excellency knows why I
+came to Mexico in the first place. No señor, that blank smile of yours will not
+serve. Your Excellency cannot feign ignorance of public gossip.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, I have heard that&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To be sure you have,&#8221; she returned dryly, &#8220;and you might
+add that I failed, since Maximilian has not yet abdicated. But Your Excellency
+is not one to imagine that the end can be long delayed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She, too, was searching for a motive, his motive in the interview.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Mexicans alone will sustain our patriotic ruler,&#8221; stoutly
+declared the generalísimo. &#8220;But let us suppose, merely for pastime, that
+His Majesty does abdicate. What then? What profit to France, since at this
+moment, before our eyes, her army is leaving?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline smoothed the ruffled pleats on her full gray skirt. They looked
+like an exaggerated railroad on a map, and doubtless needed smoothing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And remotely supposing,&#8221; she said, &#8220;that our army
+<i>might</i> come back again?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then, in a flash, she raised her eyes, and surprised the start he gave. But
+she laughed at once, and at him, for taking her nonsense as serious.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_356'></a>356</span>&#8220;No,&#8221; she exclaimed, &#8220;Your
+Excellency can more easily recall Santa Anna from his island exile.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This, too, was nonsense, or so he was forced to consider it. But knowing that
+the Empire could not endure, he was believed even then to be negotiating with
+the rich former dictator. In his scowl Jacqueline discovered what she sought. He
+wanted, in brief, to negotiate with Napoleon also, and he wanted to negotiate
+through her. Napoleon could bid higher than Santa Anna. She saw, moreover, what
+was worrying the traitor. If Napoleon did not mean to bid, why then was she
+staying in Mexico?</p>
+
+<p>Marquez glanced fretfully at Ney and Berthe. If he might be honored in the
+privilege of calling to pay his respects?&#8211;&#8211;</p>
+
+<p>But Jacqueline regretted that she was to be too much occupied in preparations
+for her own early departure. And that very evening she sent a note to
+Maximilian, frankly warning him against the Leopard. But she warned His Majesty
+farther, that if he did not heed, that when it should be too late to save him in
+any case, and Marquez still had something to sell, that then she would advise
+her own emperor, should her own emperor wish to buy. Hoping, though, for the
+best, she sent by Ney a message to Bazaine at the head of the column, suggesting
+that he delay embarkation as long as possible. She had in mind Maximilian
+awakened to the faithlessness of his chief support and wishing to overtake the
+French troops.</p>
+
+<p>For which it appears that Jacqueline still wielded a free lance, belonging to
+her own country alone and owning no master other than her own conscience.</p>
+
+<p>As Bazaine at the army&#8217;s head rode through the Zócalo, he looked up to
+find the palatial shutters closed. The Mexican Empire was sulking like a
+spiteful child. The marshal wearily shrugged his shoulders, and thought on the
+ingratitude of princes. But the silence of the Palace was only a pose, mean and
+despicable. Maximilian himself was peeping through the <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_357'></a>357</span>shutters down upon the gallant, moving
+sea of color. It was a stream of gleaming bayonets, of champing horses, of
+lumbering artillery. His eyes would single out and cling to this or that figure
+till it was lost in the street beyond, and then he would try to realize that it
+was lost to him forever. For the street beyond lay toward the coast, where many
+ships awaited. The archducal petulance gave way to vague melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>Finally he looked upon the last swinging foot, then at the dust settling.
+Below, in the Zócalo, what had been a fringe of mourning around the troops,
+became a scurrying of human creatures. They were his subjects. Not a French
+uniform remained, but the prince sighed heavily as he turned from his ignoble
+peep-hole. Courtiers and counselors glanced at each other significantly. By
+tacit consent one among them spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Free at last, sire, free at last! Ah, see them, there below. They know
+their shackles are broken, they know that the foreign invader who chilled their
+allegiance is gone. Nay more, their loyalty has already borne fruit. In the
+north, sire&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How, father? You do not mean&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sire, yes, the mother of God be praised! I mean victory, and
+death to many traitors. The news has just come. Miramon has won a decisive
+battle and taken Zacatecas.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Zacatecas! But Juarez was there?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sire, and Miramon entered so suddenly the arch rebel surely could
+not have escaped.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Juarez taken, that man taken!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Even so, sire, And&#8221;&#8211;Fischer&#8217;s interlaced fingers
+tightened until the veins grew large&#8211;&#8220;and, it only remains for Your
+Majesty to dispose of him, according to the law.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian trembled with joy. He was master of the situation. His people had
+made him master. Here was divine right vindicated. It was&#8211;Destiny! He had
+but to follow whither the heavenly finger pointed. And in rapture, he seized his
+pen.</p>
+
+<div class='bquote'>
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_358'></a>358</span><span
+style='font-variant:small-caps'>Palace of Mexico</span>, Feb. 5th, 1867.</p>
+
+<p><i>My dear General Miramon</i>:</p>
+
+<p>I charge you particularly, in case you do capture Don Benito Juarez, Don
+Sebastian Lerdo de Tejado, and others of his suite, to have them tried and
+condemned by a council of war ... but the sentence is not to be executed before
+receiving Our approbation....</p>
+
+<p>Your affectionate  <span
+style='font-variant:small-caps'>Maximiliano</span>.</p></div>
+
+<p>Bazaine and the French camped the first night, the next day, and yet another
+night outside the City, waiting. They did not reach Puebla until the tenth. The
+rear guard fell farther and farther behind, keeping the road open. At last there
+was news. Juarez had escaped Miramon at Zacatecas, warned in time through some
+mysterious agency. And farther, Miramon had encountered another Republican army,
+by whom he was not only defeated, but routed completely. In panic he was fleeing
+to Querétero.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Maximilian must surely abdicate now,&#8221; thought Bazaine, and he
+sent back a message. &#8220;I can,&#8221; he wrote, &#8220;yet extend a hand to
+His Majesty to help him retire.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Vera Cruz the marshal waited for an answer. Day after day passed, and then
+the answer came. Too late, was its refrain. Maximilian had left his capital with
+what troops he could spare. He had left for Querétero, to join Miramon
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Bazaine, the last to quit the shore, climbed aboard his ship, and taking one
+final look for a chance horseman with word to wait yet longer, and seeing none,
+gave the order to weigh anchor.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_359'></a>359</span><a id='link_44'></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Fatality and the Missourian</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Si debbe ai colpi della sua fortuna<br />
+Voltar il viso di lagrime asciutto.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Machiavelli.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The mountain villages were arming. Bronzed men, savagely joyful, poured from
+under roofs of thatch, strapping on great black lead-weighted belts. In the
+corrals others lassoed horses. It looked like a sudden changing from peaceful
+highland domesticity, as the clans of Scotland or the cantons of Helvetia might
+gather. But these men were not rising to defend their homes. The hamlets
+clustered among the crags were their barracks, nothing more. The wildest cañons
+of the Sierra Madre del Sur, far away in the rocky southwestern corner of the
+continent, were only their camping grounds, their refuge. To be armed was their
+natural state. They were fighters by occupation. They were an army. Unceasing
+hardship and constant peril had seasoned them, and their discipline was perfect,
+unconscious, because it came from the herding instinct of wolves. During years
+they had waged war against a ruthless foe, and they, too, were relentless. The
+penalty of defeat was massacre.</p>
+
+<p>The foe of this army was a greater army, and between the two it was a duel of
+chieftains, of General Régules in the Sierra, of General Mendez on the plain.
+Deadlier antagonists might not be imagined. Mendez, he who had shot two
+Republican generals under the Black Decree, was above all men the likeliest to
+hold stubborn Michoacan for the Empire. But even he failed, because the man
+against him was not less a man than <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_360'></a>360</span>he, because also the spark of resistance to sceptre
+and crosier never dies out in Michoacan.</p>
+
+<p>The man as good as he was Régules. A Spaniard, Régules had fought with the
+Catholic Don Carlos. And now, he was suffering for Mexican Liberals the most
+that any general can suffer, defeat after defeat, and sometimes annihilation.
+But he was a Marion, a Fabius. He knew the mountain recesses as no one else,
+even better than Mendez, who was born among them, and here he would gather
+fugitives, draft every straggler, until in time he sallied forth again to badger
+his arch enemy. He hoped only to exist till that day when the French should
+leave Empire and Republic face to face, on equal terms. It had taken tenacious
+faith and gloomy years, but the day came at last. The news sifted through defile
+and gorge. The invader had embarked for Toulon. Nearer at hand Mendez had
+evacuated Morelia, and was marching to Querétero. And at Querétero was Miramon,
+driven there from the north by Escobedo. At Querétero was the Emperor&#8211;was
+the Empire, desperate, ferocious, an animal at bay. Out boldly upon the plain,
+then! But no longer as a slinking guerrilla horde! As an army rather, with
+thrilling bugles and the Mexican eagle aloft, and regiment numbers in gold on
+pennons of brightest red! For the Empire was the hunted mad-dog now, and the
+dignified host was the Republic. The barracks of the Sierra were arming.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the corrals an officer of cavalry was quelling insubordination with
+soft words. But the mutineers, not knowing their man, did not fathom the
+dangerous sweetness of his tone. They were deserters from Mendez, come that
+morning, and as they had horses, were foisted on the officer&#8217;s splendid
+troop. But like the native infantry, they insisted that their women, the
+soldaderas, should go with them on what was to be a swift march to Querétero.
+Having brought useful information concerning Mendez, they were insolent in their
+demands.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_361'></a>361</span>&#8220;Now,
+muchachos,&#8221; said the officer of cavalry, &#8220;you see how absurd it is,
+so quiet down. The women can follow later.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A Gringo to dictate to us, bless me the saints! Us, free Mexicans, and
+Republicans!&#8221; And the ringleader drew his machete and rushed on the
+officer.</p>
+
+<p>The Gringo smiled, in a way that a man rarely smiles. His eyes opened in mild
+surprise, and as the mutineers looked to see his head roll from his shoulders,
+he was still smiling in that poisonously sweet way. Perhaps there passed across
+his face just the shadow of pity or of revulsion, but none might say for
+certain, because of a pistol&#8217;s flash that came so quickly after. With the
+report the assailant plunged headlong, and on the ground seemed to shrivel in
+his rags. Behind the smoke the officer was carelessly holding a large black
+revolver, no higher than his hip.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because,&#8221; he added, &#8220;it&#8217;s not a woman&#8217;s
+game.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then he thrust the weapon back under his ribs and sauntered away. The
+mutineers gaped in trembling at his back. When they picked up the ringleader,
+they saw that his fingers had been neatly clipped at the hilt of the
+machete.</p>
+
+<p>The cavalry officer was Driscoll&#8211;but changed! He was changed as bland
+Mephisto would change a man, if the material were adaptable and Mephisto an
+artist. Such exquisite gentleness in peril and in slaying could be no other than
+the devil&#8217;s own, and in the most devilishly artistic mood of that suave
+dilettante.</p>
+
+<p>It was natural that any man should color somewhat into a desperado,
+considering such an existence among those Sierras, but Driscoll was a desperado
+refined by cynicism. And yet there was still naught of self-consciousness in it
+all. The change had not been abrupt, but gradual, as a growing into maturity.
+The roughened native instincts of a gentleman had sobered from Quixotic impulses
+into a diabolic calm. His bravery was turned to cool and almost supernatural
+self <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_362'></a>362</span>possession,
+mocked withal by gentleness. And yet he was not a villain. To the mutineers, to
+those who beheld his smile, he seemed a fiend. But his horse knew no change in
+him, which was significant. Something had gone wrong, that was all. The young
+man who had looked out on the world, half challenging, half expectant, must have
+seen too suddenly that part of life which is unlovely. However, the thing may
+not be thus easily explained. The soul of a man, when bent or distorted under
+stress, is a weird and fearful growth. One may contemplate it in awe; but
+understand it, never.</p>
+
+<p>More than a year before, when Driscoll changed sides, he was embarrassed to
+find a side to change to, so thoroughly had the Empire swept away all vestiges
+of the Liberal strength. But on achieving that farewell of his to Mendez, he
+rode happily southward, with some vague notion of tracking the Republic into
+Michoacan. The first night he slept under the stars mid tunas and Spanish
+daggers, and when he awoke it was to find a strange Indito squatting patiently
+at his feet. He sat up and rubbed his eyes at what might have been a Hindoo
+image, except that it doffed a straw sombrero.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Y&#8217;r Mercy is awake?&#8221; queried the idol.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;N-o, but it will probably not be long now. Who in thunder are
+you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Indito explained, and Driscoll covered his knees with his hands, and
+stared and grew more astounded. The ragged fellow said that he had escaped from
+Mendez&#8217;s camp by squirming on his belly through the cacti, and he had
+followed the American señor, on foot. He was, he added, a Republican spy.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll mechanically drew his pistol, but recalled that now he also was
+Republican.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why follow me?&#8221; he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was sent to watch only Y&#8217;r Mercy, Y&#8217;r Mercy&#8217;s thousand
+pardons.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_363'></a>363</span>&#8220;The
+devil!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And with Y&#8217;r Mercy&#8217;s permission, I was to kill Y&#8217;r Mercy at the
+first chance. But since Y&#8217;r Mercy has changed sides&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now look here, who&#8211;who put you up to this business, I want to
+know?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The man shrugged his shoulders. He only knew that a señor chaparro had sent
+him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A short señor?&#8221; Driscoll repeated. &#8220;Then we might call you
+a Shorter Yet, and maybe you know where this República is hiding out?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Indito brightened. &#8220;That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m here, señor.
+I&#8217;ll take Y&#8217;r Mercy to the Citizen General Régules.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At the name Driscoll frowned involuntarily, but laughed as he again
+remembered that he no longer shared the Imperialist hates.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Régules?&#8221; he repeated. &#8220;But we all thought he was dead,
+since the last time we scoured his mountains.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That the Virgin would have let me kill Y&#8217;r Mercy before then!&#8221;
+said the Indito regretfully. &#8220;But no matter, Y&#8217;r Mercy will discover that
+the citizen general is still alive.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And so he was. They found him in the wildest of the wild region of the Sierra
+Madre del Sur, far away beyond the Rio de las Balsas, beyond Michoacan, in the
+impassable tierra caliente of the Pacific slope. The Indians here were the
+Pintos, who knew naught of the world outside, and owned allegiance to none but a
+grizzly old dictator, royally described as the Panther of the South. One thing
+was certain, the Empire could never follow Régules to the fever and ambush of
+the Panther&#8217;s marshy realm, and Régules was hard pressed indeed when he
+sought such protection. But he was there now, in that last refuge of Liberalism,
+alone, wounded, fever stricken, emaciated, but undaunted. Driscoll found him so,
+and became his first recruit.</p>
+
+<p>For the moment Régules had no army, but armies were only <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_364'></a>364</span>weapons brandished by the real
+principals in the duel. Over battle and rout and slaughter the two chiefs would
+glare each at the other, blade in hand and panting, but either ever ready for
+the stroke that should thrust through the army to the heart of its general. Such
+a struggle needed only antiquity and a bard to be Homeric. No Greek could equal
+either champion in cunning, nor Trojan in prowess, nor both in grim persistence
+and rugged hate. It was truly a fight to have a hand in, and with big, lusty
+zest, the Storm Centre bounded into the lists. He leaped backward into the age
+of colossal, naked emotions, which strove as great veined giants with a rude
+splendor that was barbaric. It was the grandeur of primeval man, of majesty
+resting on him who fought best. After a thousand years of roof and tableware a
+man may be no longer primeval, but he is no longer quite a man either if his
+primeval state does not sometimes appeal to him. As for the young Missourian, he
+was enthralled.</p>
+
+<p>During that winter, the Spaniard and the American were a recruiting squad of
+two, picking up the seeds of rebellion among the fertile rocks. The vago, or
+poor Indito, was drafted wherever caught. Guerrilla fugitives rejoined their
+leader. The little band grew slowly, but in appearance merited Mendez&#8217;s
+contemptuous epithet of brigand thieves. Fluttering yellow rags revealed only
+leathery-hided bones. Sandals sloughed away. There were a few machetes, and one
+or two venerable musketoons. But the commoner weapon was a heavy wooden staff,
+used for trudging up the steep paths. Imagine a Mexican abandoning his horse!
+But pursuers often tracked &#8220;the brigand thieves&#8221; by their mounts
+dying here and there&#8211;a pitiful blazed trail. And their exhausted riders
+often lay down as well, and would not rise, though Régules lashed them, though
+the terrible Mendez followed close behind. If at this time the Republic compared
+its conditions with the tapestried court in Mexico, then hope of success must
+have <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_365'></a>365</span>seemed
+lugubrious irony. Yet there was the watchword still, &#8220;Viva la Intervención
+del Norte!&#8221; Régules looked to the United States to drive away the French.
+Driscoll&#8217;s face would twist to a grimace. It was a peculiar position for
+an ex-Confederate.</p>
+
+<p>The Republicans in Michoacan were cut off from all outside help, while those
+along the Rio Grande drew from the friendly Americans in Texas much aid and
+comfort. Driscoll pondered on this, until in June he got leave to go to the
+Córdova colony and there enlist, if possible, his old comrades of Shelby&#8217;s
+brigade. The result is known. After the affair at Tampico, he came back with a
+troop of colonels. They were the nucleus of a cavalry which he loved more than
+Demijohn, more than his ugly pistols, more than his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>It was a grim affection that Driscoll bore his regiment of horse. He was no
+longer the same man as when he left. He returned from Córdova with a mood on
+him, which settled more and more heavily as he nursed his troops into a splendid
+fighting machine. There was a dangerously quiet exultation in the patience with
+which he built the regiment up to full strength and trained it into the power of
+a brigade. He did wonders through the idea, pleasantly instilled, that much of
+the fun of fighting lies in the winning, and he demolished, as an absurd fetich,
+the idea that the hunted men of Régules were doomed never to win.</p>
+
+<p>Thus he labored with the Inditos, his terrible little fatalists in combat.
+There were enough to choose from, since by now the tide of desertion was
+changing toward the Republic. The problem of mounts in time solved itself. The
+French began selling their horses rather than transport them back to Europe, and
+these being declared contraband of war by the Liberal government, were
+complacently taken away from their owners without even Juarez script in payment.
+The question of arms proved more troublesome, but the answer at last was even
+more <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_366'></a>366</span>satisfactory.
+For the besieged at Quéretero, Driscoll&#8217;s troop later became some
+unfamiliar dragon hissing an incessant flame of poisonous breath. This was due
+to a strange and mystical weapon which not only carried a ball farther than any
+rifle known before, but sixteen of them, one after the other. The strange and
+mystical weapon multiplied a lone man into a very genii of death, until the
+Missourian&#8217;s twelve hundred were more to be dreaded than many
+battalions.</p>
+
+<p>The repeating rifles, it may be explained, formed a part of the cache which
+General Shelby had made on crossing into Mexico. He had taken them, among other
+things, from the Confederate depositories in Texas. Driscoll knew of the cache
+through Boone, and by infinite patience had it brought into Michoacan. A
+solitary Indito journeyed eight hundred miles unnoticed with some seeming
+fragments of scrap iron. Other vagos were in front of him. Others followed. And
+these passed yet others, empty handed, trudging in the opposite direction. So an
+arsenal came to the Sierra Madre del Sur all the way from the Rio Grande, and
+each and every cavalier, whether miserable ranchero or veteran Missourian,
+became an engine of destruction, good for a fusillade of forty shots without the
+biting of a cartridge, for sixteen from his rifle, for six from each of his
+revolvers, and after these, good for terrific in-fighting with his dragoon
+sabre. It was no marvel that Driscoll loved such a troop, but the wonder lay in
+his smile, soft and purring and far-away, as he stroked his murderous
+darling.</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Daniel Boone, chief of scouts, was harassed nearly to insomnia over
+the change in his friend. At the bottom of the mystery there must be inspiration
+for a glowing line, and with pen ready poised over the violet fluid of romance,
+it was disheartening to have the solution elude him. He proposed clues as a poet
+tests rhymes. There was vendetta. There was blighted passion. But he ruefully
+discarded both. Either <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_367'></a>367</span>would be marked by violent growth, while this thing
+that touched the Storm Centre formed as slowly as the gravity of wisdom. But
+what baffled most was that Driscoll himself was completely oblivious. If
+<i>he</i> knew nothing of the effect, how then could one ask him about the
+cause?</p>
+
+<p>Daniel, however, overlooked the fact that a malady may break out variously,
+according to temperament. As an instance Daniel&#8217;s patient would lose
+himself in reverie, long and deep and mellowing. Now he was riding with a girl
+whose gray eyes were upon him in that pensive way she had; or rather, in the
+pensive way of a girl who finds herself in love, and wondering at it, seeks to
+learn the reason through a grave scrutiny of the object. It seemed very good to
+be riding with her again like that, for there was a soothing sense of
+companionship, of dear camaraderie that needed no words, but only that
+expression of her mouth and a pair of gray eyes. The day dream, while it lasted,
+had nothing of bitterness, but lulled his soul instead, and when it passed, he
+would be left with thankfulness for his moment of fleeting bliss and ineffable
+comfort. Or again, he awoke to reality with a longing that fiercely would not be
+denied. &#8220;Oh, I want&#8211;Jack&#8217;leen!&#8221; Often and often the imperious
+smothered cry all but passed his lips. And then he would shake himself, as out
+of physical slumber, and he would take up his life again. But he would be a
+shade deeper in the devil&#8217;s own mood, of gentleness and a smile.</p>
+
+<p>After Cuernavaca Driscoll had brooded somewhat, yet rather as a boy whose
+melancholy is callow and easily fades. But during that evening in Boone&#8217;s
+cabin, he had changed to a man, for it was then he came to know the meaning of
+possession, and in the same moment he learned the meaning of loss. A dull and
+indefinable resentment thereafter grew on him. But against whom? Against no one,
+perhaps. Yet he had had a vision of his life&#8217;s dearest happiness, and it
+was gone, that vision, beyond recall.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_368'></a>368</span>Ignorant as he
+was of Jacqueline&#8217;s mission, Driscoll had but one explanation. A man had
+been born a prince, and a prince dazzles a woman. Yet the rankling in him was
+neither because of the prince, nor because of the woman. It was much more
+hopeless than that. It was because a man could be born a prince at all.
+Something was out of harmony in the world. The irony of it made him grim, and to
+his sense of humor that such things could be came the smile. A prince in the New
+World and in the Nineteenth Century!&#8211;Now here was as incongruous a
+juxtaposition as a bull in a crockery shop. And the result?&#8211;A people
+robbed of their dignity as men; a spike among the cogs, and the machinery
+everywhere grinding discordantly. For the pilfered people, however, the matter
+could be righted, and Driscoll felt his vague wrath as one with theirs. Together
+they would drive the bull from the shop. The Mexicans could later repair
+<i>their</i> crockery. But as to his own precious little bit of bric-à-brac, that
+was shattered beyond hope. His only balm was to help the other sufferers. His
+only resentment was against fatality. But to pout at fatality is such a foolish
+business that he smiled, in a gentlemanly, sardonic way. Lucifer himself would
+be obsequious before fatality. And as for presuming to chastise it, that does
+indeed require the devil&#8217;s own mood.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_369'></a>369</span><a id='link_45'></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Rendezvous of the Republic</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;It may be short, it may be long,<br />
+&#8217;Tis reckoning-day!&#8217; sneers unpaid Wrong.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Lowell.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was a long column that undulated over the cacti plain with the turnings of
+the national highway. Men and horses bent like whitened spectres under a cloud
+of saltpetre dust. They burned with thirst, and had burned during fifteen days
+of forced marching over bad roads. They kept their ranks after the manner of
+soldiers, else they would have seemed a hurrying mob, for there was scant boast
+of uniforms. The officers wore shoulder straps of green or yellow, and some of
+the men had old military caps, high and black, with manta flaps protecting the
+neck.</p>
+
+<p>Except for an occasional pair of guaraches, or sandals, the infantry trudged
+barefoot, little leather-heeled Mercuries who cared nothing for thorns. Their
+olive faces, running with sweat, were for the most part typically humble,
+patient under fatigue, lethargic before peril. Here and there one held the hand
+of his soldadera, like him a stoic brown creature, who shared his hardships that
+she might be near to grind his ration of corn into tortillas. Veterans were
+there who had fought the French at Puebla, and on coarse frayed shirts displayed
+their heroes&#8217; medals. Some among them had meantime served the Empire, and
+had lately deserted back again&#8211;but no matter. In the cavalry there were
+those who on a time had ridden against the Americans in Santa Anna&#8217;s
+famous guard. Now <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_370'></a>370</span>they rode with Driscoll, among the Missourians. And
+the Missourians sang:</p>
+
+<div class='poetry'>
+<p>&#8220;My name it is Joe Bowers,<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;And I&#8217;ve got a brother Ike;<br /> I come from old Missouri,<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;Yes, all the way from Pike.&#8221;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Their mouths opened wide to the salty dust, and they roared with great-lunged
+humor, the stentor note of Tall Mose Bledsoe&#8211;Colonel Bledsoe of the State
+of Pike&#8211;far and away in the van of the chorus. Even the Mexicans, who
+comprised over half the regiment, chanted forth the tune. They had heard it
+often enough, and thought it a species of appropriate national hymn. Only the
+colonel of the troop rode in silence, but not gloomily. This playfulness of his
+pet before a snarl was music that he liked. The other Missouri colonels (brevet)
+were as boys ever, were still only Joe Shelby&#8217;s &#8220;young men for
+war.&#8221; There was Colonel Marmaduke of Platte. There was Colonel Crittenden
+of Nodaway. There was Colonel Grinders from the Ozarks. There was Colonel Clay
+of Carroll, and Colonel Carroll of Clay. These were captains. Colonel Bledsoe
+was a major, and so was Colonel Boone, also chief of scouts. Colonel Clayburn,
+otherwise the &#8220;Doc&#8221; of Benton, was ranking surgeon; while the
+chaplain, lovingly known as &#8220;Old Brothers and Sisters,&#8221; and the
+choicest fighter among them, was lieutenant-colonel.</p>
+
+<p>Of course some of the four or five hundred colonels had to be privates. But
+they did not mind, they were colonels just the same. Which provoked
+complications, especially with a Kansan who had wandered among them some time
+since. The Kansan, whose name was Collins, was an ex-Federal, even one of their
+ancient and warmest enemies, of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry. And being a mettlesome
+young man into the bargain, he rose by unanimous consent to command a native
+company of the troop. But Captain Collins found it hard to address a <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_371'></a>371</span>Missouri private as
+colonel, and to be addressed by the Missouri private as an inferior in rank. A
+sporadic outburst of jayhawker warfare generally ensued. But according to the
+merger treaty between the Republic of Colonels and the República Mexicana, the
+Missourian was strictly in his rights. Besides, both needed the exercise, and
+after the business of fists, formality dropped of itself. Captain Collins
+thereupon became &#8220;Harry;&#8221; and the private &#8220;Ben&#8221; or
+&#8220;Jim,&#8221; or whatever else.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll&#8217;s troop wanted for nothing. Regimentals, luckily, were not
+considered a want. But in replacing worn-out slouch hats and cape-coats, the
+Americans set an approximate standard, which was observed also by their fellow
+troopers among the Mexicans. They were able to procure sombreros, wide-brimmed
+and high-peaked, of mouse-colored beaver with a rope of silver. The officers and
+many of the men had long Spanish capas, or cloaks, which were black and faced in
+gray velvet. Their coats were short charro jackets. As armor against cacti, they
+either had &#8220;chaps&#8221; or trousers &#8220;foxed&#8221; over in leather,
+with sometimes a Wild Western fringe. They came to be known as the Gray Troop,
+or the Gringo Grays. The natives themselves were proudest of the latter
+title.</p>
+
+<p>The brigade marched as victors, but they remembered how they had formerly
+skulked as hunted guerrillas, and also, how Mendez had scourged the dissident
+villages. They found bodies hanging to trees. At Morelia a citizen who cried
+&#8220;Viva la Libertad!&#8221; had been brained with a sabre. It was the hour
+for reprisals. And Régules exacted suffering of the <i>mocho</i>, or clerical,
+towns that had sheltered the &#8220;traitors.&#8221; Requisitions for arms,
+horses, and provisions marked his path. Deserters swelled his ranks. He had
+enough left-overs from the evacuation to organize what in irony he called his
+Foreign Legion. At Acámbaro a second Republican army, under General
+Corona&#8211;&#8220;welcomer than a stack of blues,&#8221; as Boone
+said&#8211;more <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_372'></a>372</span>than doubled their force, and together they hastened
+on to Querétero.</p>
+
+<p>But at Celaya, when men were thinking of rest in the cool monasteries there,
+they learned that they must not pause. The word came from El Chaparrito, who
+ever watched the Empire as a hawk poised in mid-air. General Escobedo of the
+Army of the North had pursued Miramon south into Querétero, but only to find him
+reinforced there by Mendez and the troops from the capital. This superior array
+meant to attack Escobedo, then turn and destroy Corona and Régules. The
+Republicans, therefore, must be united at once.</p>
+
+<p>The message was no sooner heard than the two weary brigades of Corona and
+Régules set forth again. They covered the remaining thirty miles that night,
+expecting a victorious Imperialist army at each bend in the road. But they met
+instead, toward morning, a lone Imperialist horseman galloping toward them.
+Régules&#8217;s sharp eyes caught the glint of the stranger&#8217;s white
+gold-bordered sombrero, and with a large Castilian oath he plucked out his
+revolver. Driscoll touched his arm soothingly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, María purísima,&#8221; cried Régules, &#8220;he&#8217;s an
+Explorador!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Exploradores were Mendez&#8217;s scouts, his bloodhounds for a Republican
+trail, and the most hated of all that breed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Aye, Señor General,&#8221; the stranger now spoke, &#8220;I was even
+the capitan of Exploradores, who kisses Your Mercy&#8217;s hand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a familiar quality in the man&#8217;s half chuckle, and Driscoll
+hastily struck a match. In its light a face grew before him, and a pair of
+malevolent eyes, one of them crossed and beaming recognition, met his.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Tibby?&#8221; said Driscoll quietly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;First your pistols, then what you know,&#8221; commanded Régules.
+&#8220;Here, in between us. Talk as we ride, or&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Tiburcio complied. Such had been his intention.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_373'></a>373</span>&#8220;I am no
+more a loyal Imperialist,&#8221; he announced, with a gruesome contortion of the
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nor a live deserter for long,&#8221; said Régules. &#8220;Quick,
+what&#8217;s the news at Querétero?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Carrai, my news and more will jolt out if I open my mouth. Eh, mi
+coronel,&#8221; he added to Driscoll, &#8220;you&#8217;ve taught this barbarous
+gait to the Republic too, I see?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Better obey orders,&#8221; Driscoll warned him gently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But there&#8217;s no need of hurry, señores. Not now, there
+isn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mean the Imperialists have whipped Escobedo,
+that&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not so fast, mi general. If they had, wouldn&#8217;t I want you to
+hurry, for then there&#8217;d be a conquering Empire waiting for you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Colonel Driscoll,&#8221; said Régules, &#8220;fall back a step.
+I&#8217;m going to kill this fellow now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As you wish, general. But he&#8217;s got something to tell.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then por Dios, why doesn&#8217;t he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, Tibby, why don&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Tiburcio cocked a puzzled head toward the American. He had not known such
+softness of voice in Mendez&#8217;s former captain of Lancers. But he saw that
+Driscoll had drawn his pistol, which accorded so grimly with the mildness of his
+tone that the scout chuckled in delight and admiration.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know that I&#8217;ll tell&#8211;now,&#8221; he said reproachfully.
+&#8220;In a word, there&#8217;s been no battle at all, curse him, curse
+both&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No battle! Escobedo kept away then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, not even that. The Imperialists would not fight, and the Empire
+has lost its last chance. Curse them both, curse&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, curse away, but who, what?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I curse, señores mios,&#8221; and the scout&#8217;s words grated in
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_374'></a>374</span>rage and chagrin,
+&#8220;I curse His Excellency the general-of-division-in-chief of the army of
+operations, Don Leonardo Marquez. I curse, señores, the Reverend Señor Abbot,
+Padre Augustin Fischer&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good, that&#8217;s finished. Now tell us why there was no
+battle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I curse His Ex&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You have already, but now&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio flung up his hand in a gesture of assent, and his ugly features
+relaxed. Though going at a brisk trot, he rolled a cigarette and lighted it.
+Then he told his story. Querétero? Ha, Querétero was now the Court, the Army,
+the Empire! Pious townsmen shouted &#8220;Viva el Señor Emperador!&#8221; all
+day long. The cafés were alive with uniforms and oaths and high play. Padres and
+friars shrived with ardor. There was the theatre. Fashion promenaded under the
+beautiful Alameda trees, and whispered the latest rumors of the Empress Carlota.
+Maximilian decorated the brave, and bestowed gold fringed standards. Then came
+Escobedo and his Legion del Norte, but they kept behind the hills. Bueno, the
+Empire would go forth and smite them, and the pious townspeople climbed to the
+housetops to see it done. And yesterday morning the Empire, with banners flying
+and clarion blasts, did march out and form in glittering battle array.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And then, hombre?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And then the Empire marched back again, señores.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Régules and Driscoll were stupefied. What gross idiocy&#8211;or
+treachery&#8211;had thrown away the Empire&#8217;s one magnificent chance?</p>
+
+<p>Tiburcio sucked in his breath. &#8220;I curse&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Marquez?&#8221; cried Régules.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si señor, Marquez! Marquez cried out against the attack, and His
+Majesty ordered the troops back into town again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_375'></a>375</span>&#8220;But
+Miramon, hombre? Miramon, the best among you, where was he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;General Miramon fairly begged to fight, but he has been defeated once,
+and now Marquez warns the Emperor against Miramon&#8217;s &#8216;imprudence.&#8217;
+Marquez is chief of staff, and crows over Miramon, who was once his president.
+He personally ordered Miramon off the field, yet it was Miramon who first made
+the insolent little whelp into a general.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;does not explain why you desert to
+us?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For an instant the old malignant humor gleamed in the baleful crescent.
+&#8220;It&#8217;s the fault of the fat padrecito,&#8221; he replied. &#8220;Your
+Mercy perhaps does not know about the pretty servant he eloped with from the
+Bishop of Durango&#8217;s to Murguía&#8217;s hacienda? Well, but trouble started
+when I saw her, or rather, when she saw me, even me, señor, for then she
+perceived that the padrecito was not a handsome man. Presto, there was another
+eloping, and the holy Father Fischer felt bad, so very bad that when he got into
+favor with Maximilian, he had me condemned for certain toll-taking matters he
+knew of. But I vanished in time, and I&#8217;ve been serving under Mendez as a
+loyal and undiscouraged Imperialist until yesterday. But yesterday the padre
+recognized me at a review of the troops. Your Mercy figures to himself how long
+I waited after that? Your Mercy observed how fast I was riding?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The fellow&#8217;s audacity saved him. The news he brought proved correct.
+Escobedo had not been attacked. Besides, Régules perhaps hoped to trap Mendez
+through the former Imperialist scout, though Driscoll derided the idea and even
+counseled the worthy deserter&#8217;s execution.</p>
+
+<p>Don Tiburcio&#8217;s lank jaw dropped. Driscoll&#8217;s advice was too heavy
+a recoil on his own wits, for had he not once saved the Gringo&#8217;s life,
+feeling that one day he might be a beneficiary <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_376'></a>376</span>of the Gringo&#8217;s singular aversion to shooting
+people? And now here was the Gringo in quite another of his unexpected humors.
+But what bothered Don Tiburcio most was the acumen that tempered the
+American&#8217;s mercy. The facts indeed stood as Driscoll casually laid them
+before General Régules. Tibby, for instance, had neglected to call himself a
+&#8220;loyal&#8221; Republican. Asked for a description of the new earthworks on
+the Cerro de las Campanas, he only told how peons and criminals were forced to
+carry adobes there though exposed to Escobedo&#8217;s sharpshooters, which had
+in it for Tibby the subtle element of a jest. Or asked about the new powder
+mills, he described how Maximilian slept patriotically wrapped in a native
+serape, woven with the eagle and colors, or related how the Emperor won the
+hearts of soldiers and citizens by his princely and ever amiable bearing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now sing us the national hymn,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;and the
+betrayal of your former friends will be complete.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But though Don Tiburcio had deserted for convenience and perhaps meant to be
+a spy in the dissident camp, yet Régules saved him, while Driscoll lifted his
+shoulders indifferently and at heart was not sorry.</p>
+
+<p>The Celaya road, crossing a flat country, first touches Querétero on its
+southwestern corner, and from here the two Republican brigades beheld the
+ancient romantic town in the dawn as they approached. Many beautiful Castilian
+towers, stately and tapering to needles of stone, rose from among flat roofs and
+verdure tufts, and pointed upward to a sky as soft and warm as over the Tuscan
+hills. Other spires were Gothic, and others truncated, but the temples that gave
+character to the whole were those of Byzantine domes. Lighted by the sun&#8217;s
+level rays of early morning, their mosaic colors glittered as in some bright
+glare of Algeria, but were relieved by the town&#8217;s cooling fringe of green
+and the palms of many plazas within. It might have been a Moorish city, in Happy
+Arabia <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_377'></a>377</span>called
+paradise, a city of fountains, and wooded glens, like haunts of mythical fauns.
+Querétero once boasted a coat of arms, granted by a condescending Spanish
+monarch, and for loyalty to the hoary order of king and church she in those old
+days described herself as Very Noble and Royal. Stern cuirassed conquistadores
+held her as a key to the nation&#8217;s heart, as a buckler for the capital, and
+lately the French did also. And now the Hapsburg had come to a welcome of
+garlands, and called her his &#8220;querida.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But however excellently Querétero served as a base of military operations, as
+a besieged place pocketed among hills her aspect altered woefully. She was like
+an egg clutched in the talons of an eagle. On north and east and south the hills
+swept perilously near, a low, convenient range, with only a grass plain a few
+miles wide separating them from the town below. On north and east the heights
+were already sprinkled with Escobedo&#8217;s tents and cannon. They commanded
+the only two strongholds of the besieged, as well as the town itself, which lay
+between. One stronghold was the Cerro de las Campanas, a wedge-shaped hill on
+the northwestern edge of the town, which held nothing but trenches. On the
+northwestern edge was the other stronghold, the mound of Sangremal, which fell
+away as a steep bluff to the grassy plain below. From the bluff, across the
+plain, to the hills opposite, stretched a magnificent aqueduct. On the
+mound&#8217;s commodious summit of tableland there was the Plaza de la Cruz,
+also the Church de la Cruz, and an old Franciscan hive, called the monastery de
+la Cruz. Here Maximilian established himself in a friar&#8217;s lonely cell. On
+the north a small river skirted the town, on the south, where nothing intervened
+between the grassy plain and the wooded Alameda, the besiegers found the most
+vulnerable flank.</p>
+
+<p>On this side investment began with the arrival of Corona and Régules, and
+soon after, of General Riva Palacio. The <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_378'></a>378</span>Republicans numbered fifteen thousand already, and
+more were coming daily, but as yet there were ragged strands in the noose being
+woven around the beleaguered place. Curiously enough, the most feverish to see
+the cordon perfected was none other than Don Tiburcio.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Marquez will escape! Marquez will fly the net!&#8221; he kept
+bewailing. &#8220;Si señor, and the padrecito with him, curse them
+both!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Two weeks passed, filled with skirmishes and ominous tests of strength. At
+night fiery parabolas blazed their course against the sky, up from the outer
+hills, sweeping down on Las Campanas or La Cruz. Imperialist chiefs urged a
+general attack, but again Marquez foiled their hopes. Then, at two o&#8217;clock
+one morning, there came to pass what Tiburcio had feared. A body of horse stole
+out upon the plain, and gained the unguarded Sierra road to Mexico. Four
+thousand cavalry pursued over the hills, but in vain. The fugitives were Marquez
+and the Fifth Lancers, his escort. He was gone to the capital to raise funds,
+and to bring back with him, at once, the Imperialist garrison there of five
+thousand men. Doting Maximilian had even named him lieutenant of the Empire, and
+Mexico City would shortly have the Leopard for regent. Querétero, moreover, was
+seriously weakened by the loss of the Fifth Lancers, and there were those who
+remembered how, when Guadalajara was besieged by Liberals seven years before,
+Marquez had likewise set out for aid, and had returned&#8211;too late.</p>
+
+<p>To his wrathful disgust, Don Tiburcio learned that Father Fischer was also
+gone with Marquez. The priest had disguised himself in an officer&#8217;s cloak,
+and for the moment none in the town knew of his flight. The fat padre, it
+appeared, no longer hoped for the luscious bishopric of Durango. His was the
+rat&#8217;s instinct, as regards a sinking ship.</p>
+
+<p>The Leopard and the Rat got away only in time. The <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_379'></a>379</span>very next day ten thousand ragged
+Inditos, largely conscripts, arrived from the Valley of Mexico and filled the
+gap in the besiegers&#8217; line. Investment was now complete, against a paltry
+nine thousand within the town.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_380'></a>380</span><a id='link_46'></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>A Buccaneer and a Battle</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Bacon.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the paltry nine thousand were the best army of Mexicans ever yet gathered
+together. For weeks they kept more than thirty thousand Republicans out of an
+unwalled, almost an unfortified town. But while the Republicans were largely
+<i>chinacos</i>, or raw soldiery, they inside were trained men. There were the
+Cazadores, a Mexican edition of the Chasseurs, organized by Bazaine under French
+drill masters. There was Mendez&#8217;s seasoned brigade. There was
+Arellano&#8217;s artillery, though numbering only fifty pieces. There were the
+crack Dragoons of the Empress, the Austro-Mexican Hussars, and a squadron of the
+Municipal Guards. There were veterans who had fought at Cerro Gordo, and
+steadily ever since in the civil wars. There was the ancient Battalion de
+Celaya, mainstay of the Spanish viceroys, and later of the Emperor Iturbide, its
+colonel. There were the Battalion del Emperador, the Tiradores de la Frontera, a
+company of engineers, and several well-disciplined regiments of the line.</p>
+
+<p>But the day came when they began to starve, and being hungry took the heart
+out of many things. It took the heart out of bombarding Escobedo in his hillside
+adobe; out of taunting &#8220;uncouth rebels.&#8221; The rebels were in trenches
+often not a street&#8217;s width distant, and for reply they pointed to certain
+dangling acorns who had been &#8220;traitors&#8221; caught slipping through the
+lines. Being hungry took the heart out <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_381'></a>381</span>of the quick-time diana, played after a brilliant
+sortie. Out of the embrace Maximilian gave Miramon. Out of Miramon&#8217;s call
+for vivas for His Majesty the Emperor. Out of standard decorating and promotions
+and thrilling words of praise. Out of the anniversary of Maximilian&#8217;s
+acceptance of the throne. Out of a medal presentation for military merit, which
+the generals bestowed on their Emperor in the name of the army. Out of being
+made a caballero of the Order of Guadalupe, especially as the monarch could give
+only a ribbon, since the cross must wait until his return to the capital. And
+being hungry certainly made pathetic his prediction that some among those
+present would one day wear the medal for twenty-five years of faithful service
+to the Empire. Being hungry took the poet-hero&#8217;s glow out of his wan cheek
+as he declared again that he, a Hapsburg, would never desert, for even then he
+heard Imperialist platoons shooting recaptured deserters. Or he thought of the
+wounded left to die on the grassy plain and lying there unburied. No, all the
+heart was being taken out of these things, for Marquez still did not come with
+the help he had gone to bring, and the noose was tightening day by day. Attempts
+were made to send some one through to depose Marquez, but each one failed.
+Splendid sallies resulted in prisoners taken, which were only so many more
+mouths to feed. The Roman aqueduct had long since been cut off, and now the
+wells were giving out. Mules and horses drank at the river, while sharpshooters
+picked them off. The feebler animals were butchered and distributed as rations.
+And still the sorry Marquez gave no sign. Even hope failed the empty
+stomachs.</p>
+
+<p>But for those who waited outside as Vengeance enthroned, expectation began to
+take on a creepy quality. The besiegers were preparing against themselves a
+host, not of men, but of frightful spectres, of famished maniacs, of unearthly
+ghouls, who would clutch and tear with claws any man that stood between <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_382'></a>382</span>them and a morsel of
+food. And the fury of desperation sharpened with each succeeding irony of a
+dinner hour.</p>
+
+<p>The siege had endured six weeks. Marquez had been gone a month. But the
+Republicans held ready for whatever force he might bring. Their key to the
+situation was the Cimatario, the highest hill on the south. Between it and the
+wooded Alameda stretched the grassy plain. Republican trenches from base to
+shoulder of the peak opposed Imperialist trenches under the Alameda trees.
+Republican troops flanked the Cimatario on either side, lying in wait for
+Marquez. On one side Driscoll&#8217;s Grays guarded the Celaya road.</p>
+
+<p>So here they were sleeping encamped on the morning of April 27, when the
+bugle of a patrol cracked their slumbers. They lay booted and spurred. A moment
+later they were horsed as well, blinking across the plain in the pearly mist of
+dawn. They had heard hoofbeats, sharp and dry on the high tableland. Now they
+saw a wild, shadowy troop, which was hotly pursuing a spectral coach of gossamer
+wheels, with six plunging mules frantically lashed by outriders. At once,
+almost, the coach was lost among the dim strangers, who snatched at flying ends
+of harness, and with their prize raced on again.</p>
+
+<p>The Grays stared. It was like some pictured hold-up, not real. But they knew
+better when from among themselves a colossal yellow horse and rider dashed
+toward the road. Then they awoke for certain, and tore after their colonel to
+solve this ashen mystery so early in the morning. Was it Marquez, perhaps? But
+the coach white with dust, and white curtains flapping, what was that?</p>
+
+<p>Striking their flank at an angle, Driscoll drove hard into the fleeing horde.
+The Grays saw his hand raise as a signal, whereat they did not close in, but
+swerved and galloped parallel, some fifty paces distant. Driscoll struggled
+alone against the heaving sea about him. But no cut-throat of that pirate mass
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_383'></a>383</span>so much as drew a
+knife. By force of brawn, he wedged his way toward the coach, reached it, leaned
+forward, and caught up the curtain. And what he saw was a poke bonnet. The
+bonnet was a bower of lace and roses, held by a filmy saucy knot under a
+lady&#8217;s chin. He saw a face framed within, of a skin creamy white, of lips
+blood-red, of hair like copper, and he saw a pair of eyes. They were gray eyes,
+and as they opened suddenly and wider upon him whom she thought must be her
+captor, the lady started violently, her cheeks aflame. But at once the eyes
+snapped as in mockery, and her lips moved.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur permits himself&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; she began, but no one heard
+except her terrified companion within the coach. Driscoll had already dropped
+the curtain as a thing that burned, and was raging on again with the turbulent
+stream. He got to the leader of the band, and jerked the fellow&#8217;s bridle.
+He raised his voice, and louder than the pounding of hoofs he cursed in wrathful
+disgust.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dam&#8217; you Rod, this here&#8217;s getting monotonous!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The man swung in his saddle. His eyes were black-browed and savage. He was
+Rodrigo Galán, the terrible Don Rodrigo. But shabby, how very shabby he looked
+for the thief of million dollar convoys! Yet that bonanza coup of the bullion
+train had happened two years ago. Since then the outlaw had visited the capital.
+Boldly, audaciously, he had gone as a rich hacendado, and after the manner of
+rich hacendados he had &#8220;seen the City.&#8221; Mozos with gorged canvas
+bags on their shoulders had followed his stately stride into the gambling
+casinos. He had played with regal nerve, and on the last occasion, had flung the
+emptied sacks away as nonchalantly as on the first. Only, the last time, he had
+felt remorse that the &#8220;bank&#8221; had profited instead of Tiburcio. In
+that matter of the bullion convoy he had not treated Don Tiburcio as one
+caballero should another.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_384'></a>384</span>Their
+horses&#8211;Rodrigo&#8217;s and Driscoll&#8217;s&#8211;were racing by bounds
+shoulder to shoulder. This endured for possibly the space of a second. Then
+Demijohn felt his rein tighten, and he took more time. Next his bit suddenly
+pinched, and down the old fellow came upon his front feet together, firmly
+planted, and sank to his haunches. Driscoll still held Rodrigo&#8217;s bridle,
+and Rodrigo and horse, being in air, lunged backward.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We stop here,&#8221; Driscoll announced.</p>
+
+<p>Don Rodrigo plumped down heavily in his saddle. His bristling moustache
+lifted over his cruel white teeth. Two hundred swarthy little demons reining in
+around them looked expectantly for a signal. But their chief frowned at the
+twelve hundred Gringo Grays hovering on his flank. They too wanted only a sign,
+and they outnumbered the Brigand&#8217;s six to one. But Rodrigo believed he
+held the advantage. First he obediently halted himself and his minions.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now then señor,&#8221; said he in pompous and heavy syllables,
+&#8220;I am at your disposition. Will your people commence the battle, or shall
+we?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll appreciated the dilemma. The carriage would be in the line of fire.
+He had had an intuition of its occupants, and for that reason had kept back his
+men.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where was she going?&#8221; he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Rodrigo feigned surprise. &#8220;And where,&#8221; he asked, &#8220;or
+rather, to whom, should Your Mercy imagine?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To Querétero! To Maximilian, of course! This, too, Driscoll had divined
+already.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No matter,&#8221; he retorted shortly, &#8220;but how did you run
+across her this time?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The outlaw filled his chest, &#8220;You Americans, señor, do not understand
+the feelings of a man bowed under a heavy wrong. You&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_385'></a>385</span>&#8220;We&#8217;ll let it go at that,&#8221; said
+Driscoll, with a little wave of the hand, &#8220;but&#8211;how
+in&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You scoff already, señor? But will you, at these stains of blood? Then
+let me say to you, señor mio, they make me remember one shameless deed for which
+the tyrant Maximilian must pay.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The stains Rodrigo meant were on a little ivory cross which he had taken from
+his jacket. The emblem served him to lash his emotions, to goad his precious
+sense of wrong. He studied the cross intently; then, by a vast and excruciating
+effort, thrust it into Driscoll&#8217;s hand.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes,&#8221; he cried, &#8220;you must take it! He said
+so.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si, señor, he who shares my wrong, Don Anastasio Murguía.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Murgie!&#8221; exclaimed the bewildered American.
+&#8220;But&#8211;why, hombre, I haven&#8217;t seen the old skinflint
+since&#8211;since he and I both were court-martialled by Lopez!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Still I promised him to send the cross to you, because you will have a
+chance to give it to him. He said so.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, he did?&#8221; But Driscoll put the trinket in his pocket, not
+unwilling to see more of this foolish drama in Latin-American sentiment.
+&#8220;Now then, Rod,&#8221; he went on impatiently, &#8220;you haven&#8217;t
+explained yet how you happen to find her again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That,&#8221; replied the outlaw, &#8220;was <i>his</i> part of the
+bargain.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whose?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Anastasio Murguía&#8217;s.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Rod, you talk like a&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But no, señor, it&#8217;s because you Americans cannot understand.
+Murguía also believes in vengeance. I haven&#8217;t seen him either, not since
+he sold his hacienda over a year ago. But I do know that he or some spy of his
+is in the capital, for a messenger from him came to me in the mountains. The
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_386'></a>386</span>messenger said that
+the Marquesa d&#8217;Aumerle was leaving for Querétero. If I captured her, it would
+be vengeance in kind. But Murguía wanted pay for his information. He wanted that
+cross&#8211;it was his daughter&#8217;s&#8211;and I was to send it to him
+through you. Dios mio, but I had to hurry! A little more, and the Marquesa would
+have been inside your lines.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She is already,&#8221; Driscoll corrected him, &#8220;and so are you.
+Will you fight it out, or surrender?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to the Grays as he spoke. They had dismounted, and each man had a
+rifle at aim across his saddle. It was a reminiscence out of Driscoll&#8217;s
+boyhood of Indians and the Santa Fé trail. But Don Rodrigo only smiled.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You want the coach first?&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No!&#8221; Driscoll retorted. &#8220;You&#8217;re the one that&#8217;s
+wanted, and you can either wait for your trial, or be shot now, fighting. The
+coach will have to take its chances. But see here, if the firing once starts,
+not a thief among you will be left standing&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a perilous &#8220;bluff,&#8221; and none might say if it would have
+broken the deadlock. But the outlaw interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Listen! What&#8217;s that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, nothing. We&#8217;re only throwing a few bombs into
+Querétero.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Only!&#8221; The brigand&#8217;s eyes flashed, and his voice was
+filled with envy. Throwing bombs among the traitors?&#8211;and magnificence like
+that had grown common! Yet he, whose patriotism was a passion that fed and
+thrived upon itself, must be barred from such exquisite satiety.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll understood, and thought it droll. First there was that loyal
+Imperialist, Don Tiburcio, frothing chagrin because he had had to desert. And
+now here was this rabid Republican, heart broken over being outlawed from the
+ranks of his country&#8217;s avengers.</p>
+
+<p>Again Rodrigo interrupted, more excitedly yet. &#8220;Señor, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_387'></a>387</span>señor, you don&#8217;t
+shoot them that way every day? What does it mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Both gazed across the plain to the city of domes under the green hills.
+Driscoll&#8217;s chin raised, and he listened intently. What had commenced like
+indolent target practice against a beleaguered town had suddenly burst into a
+terrific cannonading chorus. More, there was musketry, vicious and sustained.
+There were troops deploying over the plain. Something critical was happening. If
+it were the supreme rally of the famishing Empire!</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll stirred uneasily. He glanced at his outlaw. He thought of the coach.
+To leave her with these ruffians? To miss a fight? Here was a quandary!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are not going?&#8221; Rodrigo cried at him furiously. &#8220;Now,
+now,&#8221; he raged, &#8220;is the hour of triumph for the incarnation of
+popular sovereignty. Go, I say, go, the Republic needs you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Until those words Rodrigo had held the situation. With them he lost it, and
+Driscoll was master. And Driscoll grew serene, and very sweet of manner. He
+began filling a cob pipe. A nod of his head indicated the coach as a condition
+of his going.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Look, look!&#8221; Rodrigo shouted. &#8220;Oh, que
+viva&#8211;they&#8217;re running! We&#8217;ve smoked them out! We&#8217;ve
+smoked them out!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll swept the country with his glasses. Thousands of men were running
+like frightened rabbits down the Cimatario slope, and spreading as a fan over
+the grassy plain. Mountain pieces boomed farewell behind them, until in abject
+panic they cast away carbines and scrambled the faster. But other troops were
+pushing up the slope opposite the town, and these were ordered ranks of
+infantry. Up and up they climbed, to trench after trench, and the howitzers one
+by one stopped short their roar. When <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_388'></a>388</span>Driscoll laid down the glasses, his face was white.
+Rodrigo&#8217;s glee turned to uncertainty.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8211;what&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Smoked out, you fool? We&#8217;re the ones smoked out!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But those runaways?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Are our own men, ten thousand of &#8217;em, raw conscripts to support
+our batteries on the Cimatario.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the Cimitario?&#8221; Rodrigo knew by instinct the crucial
+importance of the black cone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Cimitario is taken by the Imperialists!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll did not forget, however, the nearer contest, and as the Mexican grew
+frantic, he was the more coolly indifferent.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Max has everything his own way now,&#8221; he added soothingly.
+&#8220;He can either evacuate, or go around on the north side and thrash
+Escobedo.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the Grays were clamoring for action. &#8220;By cracken, Din, hurry up
+there!&#8221; yelled Cal Grinders.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll raised his palm, waving the fingers for patience. He scanned the
+plain again. The Imperialist ranks were breaking. Hungry men rushed on the
+besiegers&#8217; camps, snatching untouched breakfasts. The townsmen poured out
+among the uniforms, and darted greedily in every direction. The llano was alive
+with scurrying human beings. Driscoll could well wait for the psychology of
+Republican defeat on Don Rodrigo, since at the same time he awaited the effects
+of victory on a starving army. The Grays fretted, but they knew their colonel
+was never more to be depended upon than when his blood grew cold like this.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If,&#8221; Driscoll observed pleasantly to the Mexican,
+&#8220;Escobedo isn&#8217;t already making tracks for San
+Luis&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was the last straw. The patriot brigand jerked off his sombrero and flung
+it to the ground. He gestured wildly over the plain, and he gestured in the
+American&#8217;s face. He choked on words that boiled up too fast.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_389'></a>389</span>&#8220;You&#8211;you&#8211;traitor!&#8221; he
+spluttered. There was actually froth on his lips.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We haven&#8217;t,&#8221; Driscoll reminded him with exceeding
+gentleness, &#8220;settled this other yet,&#8221; and again he nodded to the
+coach.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8211;that is why you wait?&#8221; Rodrigo had forgotten his
+prize entirely. &#8220;Take her, then, take her! Only go, go, kill all the
+traitors!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;After you, caballero,&#8221; Driscoll returned with Mexican
+politeness. He wanted to be sure of the outlaw&#8217;s departure, since holding
+him prisoner was now out of the question. But Rodrigo chafed only to be gone.
+With a reed whistle he signaled his little demon centaurs, then at a touch of
+the spurs his horse leaped forward and all the band clattered close on his
+heels.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sure anxious to escape,&#8221; thought Driscoll. But he stared after
+them in wonder. Instead of turning to the safety of the mountains, they charged
+straight ahead on the town, straight against the Empire, and in any case,
+straight into the maw of justice. Behind, the coach and mules stood high and dry
+in the road. Driscoll was at once all action.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shanks,&#8221; he called.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone hurried to him from the Grays.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shanks, will you stay here with six men&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jack Driscoll!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To watch that coach, Dan. There&#8217;s two girls in it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jack! Miss that there fight!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But Dan, <i>these</i> girls are friends of yours, you met them
+once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone started violently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never mind, I&#8217;ll ask Rube Marmaduke or the Parson.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A pitiful struggle racked Mr. Boone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You, you&#8217;re not fooling me, Din?&#8221; he pleaded.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_390'></a>390</span>&#8220;Sure not.
+It&#8217;s your empress all right. It&#8217;s Miss Burt all right.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then, Lawd help me, I&#8217;ll stay!&#8211;But you&#8217;d best be
+hustling and get to work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just a minute, Shanks, there&#8217;s the other one in the coach. She
+wants to go to Querétero. If she gives her word of honor&#8211;never mind, she
+knows honor from a man&#8217;s standpoint&#8211;if she gives her word that she
+brings nothing that will help &#8217;em inside, then you can escort the coach
+into the town after things quiet down some. All right? Good. Then we&#8217;re
+off!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Demijohn&#8217;s hoofs pelted dust balls with each impact. The Grays were
+ready. They surged behind. The sound of them was a swishing roar. In the apex of
+the blinding tempest, Driscoll sat his saddle as unmoved as an engineer in his
+cab. He looked ahead placidly. Empire and a prince had just triumphed. So he was
+going to readjust fatality. The smile touched his lips as it never had before,
+and hovered there in the midst of battle.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_391'></a>391</span><a id='link_47'></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Blood and Noise&#8211;What Else?</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;On stubborn foes he vengeance wreak&#8217;d,<br />
+And laid about him like a Tartar,<br />
+But if for mercy once they squeak&#8217;d,<br />
+He was the first to grant them quarter.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;Orlando Furioso.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Only for the moment of a cooling breath is Nature gray in Mexico. The
+sun&#8217;s barbed shafts had already ripped away the cloak of dawn when
+Driscoll and his cavaliers swept over the glaring road. But there was no longer
+any battle. The plain swarmed confusion only. Panic cringed before hunger. The
+defeated besiegers panted, stumbled, ran on again, or lay still in trembling.
+The victorious besieged were gorging from fingers crammed full. It was the hour
+for trophies. A prosperous townsman bore a stack of tortillas, and gloated
+leeringly as he hurried to put his treasure safely away. A dashing Hungarian
+with fur pelisse shouted gallant oaths at a yoke of oxen and prodded them with
+his curved sword, as though a creaking cart filled with corn were the precious
+loot of an Attila. Pueblo and soldiery tore ravenously at fortifications that
+had so long kept them from one savory broth. With nails alone they would
+demolish walls and trenches. Some lurched over fugitives in the grass, and then
+pinned them there with bayonets, the lust for food turning fiendishly to a lust
+for blood.</p>
+
+<p>But what most inflamed the Grays were the captured cannon. They counted as
+many as twenty being dragged into the Imperialist lines. The Missourians were
+aggrieved. Never, never <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_392'></a>392</span>had Joe Shelby&#8217;s brigade ever lost a gun. And
+as they galloped, they looked anxiously about for chances of more battle. Just
+then Rodrigo&#8217;s outlaw band caught their eye. These had swerved from the
+road out upon the field, hot to engage anything, everything. A long provision
+train offered first. Many carts had been loaded with Republican stores, and were
+being convoyed to the town by a squadron of Imperialist cavalry. It was the
+clash between this escort and the brigands that attracted the Grays coming on
+behind. But the escort wheeled and fled and the brigands pursued, slashing with
+machetes, and so charged full tilt into the Dragoons of the Empress who were
+sent to retake the abandoned prize. Red tunics mixed with ragged yellow shirts,
+and war-chargers and mustangs swirled together as a maelstrom. Then the Grays
+pounded among them, in each hand of each man a six-shooter. The red spots began
+to fall out of the peppered caldron. The red tunics that were left broke,
+retreated, ran. It became a rout. Only a few of the Empire&#8217;s best survived
+those ten minutes of blood-letting. Fatality? Driscoll&#8217;s lip curled.
+Fatality? The Dragoons, now no more, had twice held him for their bullets.</p>
+
+<p>Grays and brigands chased them back toward Querétero. The fleeing remnant
+began yelling for help. Driscoll rose in his stirrups, and saw just ahead a
+large force of the enemy. It was gathered around the Casa Blanca, a little house
+on the plain. The large Imperialist force there was an army, nothing less,
+though still disordered from the late action and victory. Surrounded by a
+brilliant staff was a tall, golden bearded chieftain, sumptuously arrayed as a
+general of division, regally mounted on a cream-coated horse of Spain. He was
+Maximilian, viewing from there the winning of his empire. The army behind him
+filled his ears&#8211;&#8220;Viva Su Majestad!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But he who had given the cue for that thrilling music now saw the
+convoy&#8217;s fate. He rode up and down anxiously, <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_393'></a>393</span>striving for order in the confused
+ranks. He wore the green sash of a general. He had a moustache and imperial,
+searching black eyes, and an open brow. His fine features showed in the blend of
+French and Castilian blood. He was the real chieftain. He was Miramon.
+Impetuously he made ready to avenge the Dragoons.</p>
+
+<p>These things that he saw ahead brought Driscoll to his senses. With
+reluctance, but instantly, he made up his mind. He held high his sabre and
+halted his own men, turning at the same time to collide obliquely, and
+purposely, against Rodrigo.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not that way, Rod, not that way!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But it&#8217;s the tyrant! It&#8217;s the tyrant!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll got the brigand&#8217;s bridle and swung him around fiercely.
+&#8220;Let the poor tyrant be!&#8221; he yelled. &#8220;We&#8217;ve got to take
+that there Cimatario hill.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A moment later Grays and brigands wheeled to the right and were off. Back at
+the Casa Blanca Maximilian lowered his glasses. &#8220;They surely, they surely
+are not&#8211;yes,&#8221; he cried, &#8220;they <i>are</i> going to attack the
+Cimatario!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Miramon smiled. &#8220;Then they are lunatics,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Why,
+Your Highness knows that we have five thousand of our best men on the
+Cimatario.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; Maximilian agreed uneasily, &#8220;but I thought I
+recognized the man who leads those lunatics. Do you happen to know, general, how
+Tampico fell?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do not worry, sire,&#8221; Miramon replied, willing to humor the
+prince, &#8220;I will take our infantry to the Alameda and strengthen our
+reserve there, should anything really happen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Across the grassy plain raced the twelve hundred cavalry and the two hundred
+outlaws. They raced to attack five thousand brave men who had that morning
+dislodged ten thousand. Five thousand in the trenches above, fourteen hundred in
+the open below, such were the odds of Empire against Republic.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_394'></a>394</span>Grays and
+brigands drew rein under the Cimatario&#8217;s west slope, and the bugle sounded
+to dismount.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But señor,&#8221; Rodrigo protested, &#8220;don&#8217;t we charge
+straight up?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And not have a man left when we do get up? Here Clem,&#8221; Driscoll
+added to Old Brothers and Sisters, the lieutenant colonel of the Grays,
+&#8220;you circle round and up the other side with eight companies. Take all the
+horses, but leave &#8217;em back of the hill as you go. Don&#8217;t that look
+like the best scheme?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The parson&#8217;s cherubic features beamed. &#8220;Good-bye, Din,&#8221; he
+said. &#8220;But pshaw, I reckon&#8211;I reckon we&#8217;ll be meeting up
+above.&#8221; He referred, however, to the top of the Cimatario.</p>
+
+<p>Four companies and Rodrigo&#8217;s band remained. These Driscoll spread out
+in a skirmish line that made a long beaded chain around their side of the hill.
+It was evidently an unfamiliar method, for the Imperialist tiradores fired down
+on them contemptuously. But each time, while the enemy above were reloading, the
+Grays and outlaws below were climbing a few yards, each man of them
+individually, up from behind his own particular rock. The Imperialists, it now
+appeared, had blundered incomprehensibly, since they had actually taken away
+nearly all the cannon captured on the Cimatario. But six-pound affairs from
+batteries in the Alameda soon began to splinter and furrow around the climbing
+men. One loosened boulder rolled and struck Doc Clayburn on the tip of the
+shoulder, bringing him down like a bag of meal. He arose, feeling himself.
+&#8220;Now, by the Great and Unterrified Continental&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; he began, as
+he always did at the monotony of being hit. Then his disgust changed to wonder.
+&#8220;W&#8217;y,&#8221; he cried, &#8220;I&#8217;m not either, I only thought I
+was!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They mounted higher, and the business grew hotter. Each man had to look to
+himself more and more sharply, lest he forget that economy of the individual was
+now the hope of the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_395'></a>395</span>regiment. But for all that, when a Missourian craved
+tobacco&#8211;it is a craving not to be denied, in no matter what danger, as
+most any fireman knows&#8211;he would leave cover to beg his nearest neighbor
+for a chew, and obtaining it, would feel the heart put back into him.</p>
+
+<p>As they drew close under the first of the trenches, they concentrated for a
+bit of sharp in-fighting, and so suffered more. But once they provoked the next
+volley, they meant to rush the works. The Imperialists though were loath to
+squander the one ball to a carbine when Indian-like fighters like these were so
+near. They had one mountain piece, a brass howitzer, and the gunner stood ready,
+the lanyard in his hand. But he hesitated, bewildered. His targets were not
+twenty paces below, yet nowhere crouching behind the rocks were the foe massed
+together. His pride forbade that he waste twelve pounds of death on a single
+man.</p>
+
+<p>But suddenly that happened which the gunner never in this life explained.
+Poised expectant in the lull of the fray, he was trembling under the tense
+silence, when he saw the impetuous Don Rodrigo dart up the slope, full against
+the muzzle. At the same instant he heard shouts of warning behind him, and he
+heard the tiradores there above firing at someone almost at his feet. But the
+figure that had scaled up the back of the hill, crawling around the trench, was
+already on him. He drew back his arm to drive the heavy shot through Don Rodrigo
+in front, but only to feel the cord in his hand part before a knife&#8217;s keen
+edge. With a cry of dismay he sprang to grasp the rope&#8217;s end, but as in a
+vision a head of curly black and an odd smile rose between, and a swinging fist
+of a great bared arm crashed back his chin, and he sank as a brained ox.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lambaste &#8217;em, Din Driscoll!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a rapturous shout, and Cal Grinders, passing Rodrigo, tumbled over the
+earth-heap and joined his colonel against five hundred. Behind swarmed others
+into the newly awakened <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_396'></a>396</span>hell, coatless men of Saxon necks tanned a dark
+ruby, and in the hot Imperialist fire they settled to their work.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;By cracken, lambaste &#8217;em! Why in all hell <i>don&#8217;t</i> ye
+lambaste &#8217;em?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This fury boiled through oaths, unable to spend itself in blows. The tigerish
+rage seized on them every one. Teeth grated vengefully as men struck.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lambaste &#8217;em, Din Driscoll!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lambaste &#8217;em&#8211;<i>good</i>&#8211;Din Driscoll!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The yell swelled to a murderous chorus. These men did not know that they were
+raving. A war cry is just the natural vent. It is simply the whole pack in full
+cry.</p>
+
+<p>But never before&#8211;for now around him there was the contrast of hate and
+panting and passions in ferment&#8211;had Driscoll seemed so distant a thing
+from flesh and the human sphere. In grime, in dust, in smoke, among faces
+changing demoniac wrath for the sharp, self-wondering agony of mortality, his
+face was cool, serene, with just the hint of a smile tugging at his lips. His
+own men would try to look another way, try uneasily to break the fascination of
+this strange warrior who led them.</p>
+
+<p>The battle was short, but of the hottest. Its central point was the little
+brass howitzer. Driscoll, Grinders, Bledsoe, the Doc, all four pushed at the
+carriage or pulled at the trunnion rings, while around them, hindering them,
+swaying back and forth over rocks and in the ditches, the two forces battled for
+possession, hand to hand, with six-shooters and clubbed muskets. Grinders fell,
+cursing angrily. Bledsoe fell, toppling heavily his great length. The Doc fell.
+&#8220;By the&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; he began, but got no further. He was not mistaken
+this time. But the gun was turned at last, and a vicious hand jerked the rope.
+Powder grains pierced the eyes of the nearest Imperialists. The shot tore
+through the mass of them. Yet Driscoll remembered most how wan, how
+<i>hungry</i>, they looked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Death to the traitors! Á muerte! Á mu-erte!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_397'></a>397</span>It was a heavy
+nasal, hurled from the lungs with that force and venom peculiar to the Spanish
+tongue. It came from Don Rodrigo, who had pulled the lanyard, and who now pulled
+it again and again, crazed first with joy, then with rage because the emptied
+gun would not respond.</p>
+
+<p>While the combatants were so confused together, the tiradores in the upper
+trenches had to hold their fire, but when the defenders gave way at last, those
+above could wait no longer. Four thousand and more, they leaped their
+earthworks, and came charging down the slope on what was left of
+Driscoll&#8217;s six hundred.</p>
+
+<p>Grays and brigands faced about, but most of all they looked beyond the
+enemy&#8217;s right flank, to the line of the hill&#8217;s crest there. For just
+beyond that jagged line and somewhere below Old Brothers and Sisters and the
+eight other companies must be toiling up. But they would have to appear in the
+interval of the Imperialists&#8217; downward rush. Driscoll turned to his
+bugler. &#8220;Blow, Hanks! Blow like the <i>very</i> devil!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The blast sounded long and shrill, like a plaintive wail. The six hundred
+pumped lead up the hill mechanically, but their hearts were echoing the
+clarion&#8217;s cry for help, and rather than on the foe sweeping down over the
+rocks to crush them, their eyes were strained on the sun-emblazoned line against
+the sky. But the parson was a man. At last, just over the slope&#8217;s crest, a
+head appeared, a cherubic head with spectacles, and two arms waved for haste to
+others behind. And instantly more heads bobbed up, and more yet, until the
+jagged line was fairly encrusted with mouse-colored sombreros, like barnacles on
+a stranded keel.</p>
+
+<p>From where they were the new comers began their work, lying flat on their
+stomachs. Once over the ridge, down each man fell and joined the chorus of
+musketry. Their fusilade thickened to a blanket of flame, closely woven. The
+host rushing down the slope forgot the tales that were told of the <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_398'></a>398</span>marvelous sixteen-shot
+rifles. They thought instead that an army of Republicans, and not a man less,
+were upon their flank. For how else could volleys be so well sustained, how else
+so deadly? And how fast they themselves were dropping! The thing was not like
+bullets, but as the earth caving under them. The charge turned to panic. They
+plunged on downward, indeed, and even sheer into the cross fire of
+Driscoll&#8217;s six-shooters and the one howitzer. But it was headlong flight.
+At the trench they did not stop to grapple, but fought their way through and
+fled on down the hill, on across the grassy plain, nor paused until they had
+crowded pell-mell into the main Imperialist army drawn up before the
+Alameda.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian and his resplendent staff were there at the Alameda. The Emperor
+was perhaps less astounded than they.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ai, general, if you <i>had</i> known how Tampico fell!&#8221; he said
+to Miramon.</p>
+
+<p>Yet neither was actually dismayed. The Cimatario and five thousand men had
+succumbed to a thousand or fifteen hundred daredevils. It was hard enough to
+believe, in all conscience. But the daredevils could be dislodged, and they must
+be, at once. Miramon&#8217;s orders rose sharply and quick, and the Empire
+sprang to obey. The Alameda batteries were trained on the hill, and a few
+moments later the guns on the roof of the La Cruz monastery were also. At the
+same time, the army, the entire Imperialist reserve, battalion after battalion
+in close, hurried ranks, set out across the grassy plain, straight toward the
+Cimatario&#8217;s front slope. Foot, horse, artillery, the concentrated might of
+the Austrian&#8217;s sceptre, was being hurled against a handful of jaded
+warriors. Maximilian flushed with something like shame at the thought.</p>
+
+<p>Back on the slope Driscoll cried, &#8220;No, no, keep to the trenches, you
+fellows! This ain&#8217;t <i>our</i> promenade.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And soon, when screaming comets began to fill the air and burst around them,
+they were glad of the ditches. There <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_399'></a>399</span>they waited, smoking, spitting tobacco against the
+torrid rocks, but with sullen eyes on the army moving nearer and nearer. Where,
+all this morning, was Escobedo, who, with his thousands of Republicans on the
+north of the town had taken no thought of the Republican stress on the south? He
+had not fired a shot. Yet surely he must know by this time. But no matter. Over
+a hundred outlaws were left, and nearly a thousand Grays. Missourians, brigands,
+and guerrillas of Michoacan, they were a dangerous blend.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Got a match, Harry?&#8221; asked Driscoll of the Kansan, as he filled
+his cob pipe.</p>
+
+<p>They <i>had</i> to wait, you see. Yet haste was all they would have begged of
+the advancing Imperialist host.</p>
+
+<p>The red jackets of the Dragoons&#8211;the few that were left&#8211;brightly
+dotted the van of the attacking thousands. On either side rode the Second and
+Fourth Lanciers. Behind tramped the battalions of Iturbide, of Celaya, and
+regiments of the line. They gained the foot of the hill and the cavalry were
+dismounting before they drew fire. The baptism had a sharpshooter deadliness,
+even at that distance, but the Imperialists waited tentatively. No, there was
+but one volley. When the second came, it was only after an interval long enough
+for reloading. Officers and men glanced at one another more hopefully. The
+terrified fugitives were of course mistaken, they thought. For the force above
+could not be large, nor yet possess the mysterious sixteen-shot rifles. The
+assurance gave the buoyancy of relief. To charge against carbines that made each
+man as sixteen were uncanny, too much like challenging the Unknown. But a
+thousand men who fired only every two or three minutes&#8211;an antagonist like
+that was quite well known to their philosophy. So breathing hard, they valiantly
+marched up the hill. They suffered cruelly under the scattered fusillades, yet
+were not materially resisted. At last they were near enough, and the bugles
+sounded for the final rush.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_400'></a>400</span>Now what was
+odd, the Republicans stopped firing altogether. But they were waiting for
+shorter range, and a moment later, at a hundred paces, their reopening volley
+had all the clockwork dispatch of platoon drill. Yet the Imperialists took the
+dose as a thing expected, and sprang over their wounded to gain the trenches.
+They required only the lull of reloading. But instantly a second volley
+prolonged the first. The column staggered, and faces blanched. In a sudden
+despair they realized the enemy&#8217;s tactics, for the enemy did have those
+terrible rifles, after all. From the trenches a low sheet of flame had spread,
+searing the breasts of rank after rank that pressed against its edge.
+Scarlet-coated Dragoons, the last of them, flecked the rocks, and over them fell
+green uniformed troopers, as grass will cover a bloody field, and the Municipal
+Guards, swaying up from behind, paid out a sprinkling of blue&#8211;a ghastly
+pousse-café, as one grim jester described it afterward. The long massed lines
+wavered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;ve stopped, they&#8217;ve stopped!&#8221; cried Rodrigo.
+&#8220;Now we&#8217;ll close with them, eh, señor&#8211;por Dios,
+<i>now</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All you fellows,&#8221; shouted Driscoll, &#8220;just fill your rifles
+while they wait. Stopped nothing, Rod! And anyhow, who&#8217;d hold the hill if
+we left it? Who?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The answer came at once, and in dramatic form. One of the pickets stationed
+on the flank ran among them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s another big slew of &#8217;em a-coming!&#8221; he yelled
+excitedly. &#8220;Yonder, over yonder!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll rose and followed the man to the east slope. From there he beheld an
+overpowering force, advancing diagonally across the llano below. It came by the
+Carretas road, which skirted Querétaro on that side, and it was hurrying toward
+the Cimatario. The colonel of Grays watched them anxiously through his
+glasses.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shucks,&#8221; he said at last, &#8220;the fight&#8217;s over.
+It&#8217;s Escobedo. He&#8217;s sent his reserve. Don&#8217;t you see those
+black shakos, Jim, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_401'></a>401</span>and those gray coats? They&#8217;re the Cazadores de
+Galeana, and the best yet. Now we&#8217;ll have someone to hold the
+hill!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But getting back to the trenches, Driscoll saw that the help might not come
+soon enough. For however the Imperialists squandered their lives, they would yet
+overcrowd death. Some had already gained the first trench, and were there
+engaged hand to hand, with sabre and pistol. In the trenches above the Grays
+steadily fed the molten flame. But Driscoll chose the in-fighting, and naturally
+became himself the centre of the hottest patch.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Help&#8217;s here! in five minutes, just five minutes!&#8221; he spoke
+right and left to his men, as a carpenter will converse and hammer at the same
+time. For the outnumbered Grays it was the help arrived already.</p>
+
+<p>The Imperialist cannon had of necessity ceased firing, so what should be the
+consternation of the attacking column to have a shell fall among them from the
+rear! All eyes turned, and a murmur of panic rose. It was not that their own
+batteries had made a mistake, but that there had not been any mistake. The
+reserve sent by Escobedo, hearing the battle, had wheeled and rushed straight
+down the centre of the plain on the chance of giving quicker assistance. Once in
+sight of the trenches, though still considerably to the right of the hill, they
+had unlimbered a gun, while cavalry and infantry pushed on to the rescue. Not to
+be caught between trenches and plain, the Imperialists acted with soldiery
+decision. Their clarions sounded retreat.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now it&#8217;s <i>our</i> turn!&#8221; shouted Driscoll, and with the
+parson and the Kansan and the outlaw chief, and guerrillas and Missourians
+pouring out of their ditches, he chased down hill the concentrated might of an
+Empire. So closely was that chasing performed that pistol flashes burned into
+standards and uniforms.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian and Miramon and the high officers of the realm <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_402'></a>402</span>were still at their post
+of observation in front of the Alameda. For the third time that morning they
+faced Imperial cohorts hurled back upon them by a man named Driscoll. Miramon
+reproached himself bitterly. His plans to intercept Escobedo&#8217;s reserve on
+the north had failed. The Emperor&#8217;s pallid features were drawn with the
+tensity of a big loser. Yet in the soft blue eyes there flashed a chivalrous
+wonder at an enemy&#8217;s valiant deed.</p>
+
+<p>On the llano fugitives and pursuers mingled as one in the human wave of
+confusion. Escobedo&#8217;s cavalry had overtaken the mêlée, and blended with
+the rear of the fleeing column, until it seemed likely that both must enter the
+town together. But a charge of grape, fired obliquely from the Alameda, mowed a
+path between them&#8211;a Spartan business, for it reaped Imperialists among
+Republicans. However, a second and third blast were better gauged, and these
+carpeted the new alley-way with Republican bodies. Also, the Imperialists were
+re-forming, and under a withering fire the little band of victors had to draw
+back to the Cimatario.</p>
+
+<p>As Escobedo&#8217;s reserve occupied the hill, Driscoll marched his own force
+behind the same to get his horses there. But the mustangs of the brigands had
+disappeared, and far to the southwest were the brigands themselves, moving
+swiftly over the plain toward the mountains. They hardly numbered two-score now,
+and at that distance seemed a few men herding a drove of empty saddles. The late
+indignant patriot, Don Rodrigo, had changed back to outlaw. As another Cid, he
+might have looked for pardon from a grateful country, but possibly he feared the
+Roman justice of Juarez too much to risk it. Besides, a man will not lightly
+give up his career. That same night Rodrigo lay again among the sierras, quite
+ready for the first bullion convoy or beautiful marchioness passing by.</p>
+
+<p>Shells and minié balls were yet dropping perfunctorily, and <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_403'></a>403</span>the llano between hill
+and town was still a dangerous place enough, but scattered here and there were a
+few of both sides looking for their wounded, and often themselves going down
+before the aim of sharpshooters. Stiffening bodies lay under the trampled grass
+in every varied horror of mutilation, and glassy eyes peered unseeing upward
+through the stalks, like the absurd and ghastly contrast of a horrible dream.
+But among them were the stricken living in as varied an agony, of raw wounds
+stung by gnats, of pain cutting deep to vitality, of thirst, of the broiling
+sun, of a buzzing fly, or of an intolerable loneliness there with death. Groans
+rose over the plain, and guided the searchers. Driscoll had already found many
+of his men in this way. Once he heard his own name. The voice was weak, but
+there was something vaguely familiar to it, and involuntarily he held his pistol
+against treachery as he parted the grass and revealed a wounded man at his feet.
+It was a piteously famished body that raised itself a little by one hand. It was
+a soul-tenanted death-head that crooked gruesomely down on the shoulder and
+lifted its eyes to Driscoll&#8217;s in greeting. They were glowing coals, those
+eyes, glowing with the virile fire of twenty men, however wasted the face or
+tightly drawn the yellow parchment skin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Murgie!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll&#8217;s exclamation was a shudder rather than the surprise of
+recognition. What could it be that had grown so&#8211;so <i>terrible</i> in the
+weazen, craven miser! And to find the abject little coward on a battlefield, and
+wounded! An occasional bomb even then screeched overhead. And he was clothed in
+uniform, a soldier&#8217;s uniform, he, Don Anastasio!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Gra-<i>cious!</i>&#8221; Driscoll muttered.</p>
+
+<p>More and more stupefying, the uniform was not Republican, but Imperialist.
+There were the green pantaloons with red stripes, the red jacket, the white
+shoes, the white kepí, of the Batallon del Emperador&#8211;a ludicrous martial
+combination, but <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_404'></a>404</span>pathetic on an aged, withered man. The Batallon del
+Emperador? Driscoll remembered. They were the troop that had surrounded
+Maximilian during the recent battle in front of the Alameda, and Murguía had
+fallen on the very spot. The venomous Republican was then become one of the
+Emperor&#8217;s bodyguard!</p>
+
+<p>As the Republican, so also was the coward gone. The gaunt little old Mexican
+seemed oblivious of peril, as fever blinds one to every nearest emotion. There
+was even a grimness in the shifting gaze. And a certain merciless capacity, born
+of unyielding resolve&#8211;born of an obsession, one might say&#8211;was there
+also. He could have been some great military leader, cruel and of iron, if those
+eyes were all. Little shriveled Don Anastasio, he had no sense of present
+danger, nor of the red blood trickling.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s bad, that,&#8221; said Driscoll, overcoming his
+repugnance. &#8220;Here, I&#8217;ll get you taken right along to our
+surgeons.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But Murguía shrank from the offer as though he feared the Republicans of all
+monsters.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no,&#8221; he protested feebly, yet with an odd ring of command.
+&#8220;Some one on&#8211;on my side will find me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you called?&#8221; Driscoll insisted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, you&#8211;have heard from Rodrigo Galán? He was to have sent you
+a&#8211;to have sent you something for me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>More and more of mystery! Rodrigo had said that Driscoll would see Murguía to
+give him the ivory cross, and so it had come to pass. But the battle, the old
+man&#8217;s wound, surely these things were not prearranged only that a trinket
+might be delivered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How was I to see you?&#8221; Driscoll asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía started, and there was the old slinking evasion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, there,&#8221; said Driscoll hastily. &#8220;Don&#8217;t move
+that way, you&#8217;ll bleed to death! Here, take it, here it is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía clutched the ivory thing in his bony fingers.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_405'></a>405</span>&#8220;María,
+María de la Luz,&#8221; he fell to murmuring, gazing upon the cross as though it
+were her poor crushed face. In the old days she had made him forget avarice or
+fear, and now, before this token of her, the hardness died out of his eyes and
+they swam in tears. Driscoll gazed down on him pityingly. The old man was
+palsied. He trembled. There passed over him the same spasm, so silent, so
+terrible, as on the night of her death, when he had sat at the court martial,
+his head buried in his arm.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Rod said you would want it,&#8221; Driscoll spoke gently. Then he
+moved away. An Imperialist officer was approaching over the field who would
+bring the help which Murguía refused to accept of the Republicans.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll looked back once. The Imperialist officer was carrying Murguía into
+the town. He was a large man, and had red hair. His regimentals were gorgeous.
+There seemed to be something familiar about him, too. Greatly puzzled, Driscoll
+unslung his glasses, and through them he recognized Colonel Miguel Lopez. Lopez,
+the former colonel of Dragoons, now commanded the Imperialist reserve, quartered
+in the monastery of La Cruz around the person of their sovereign. But Lopez had
+once condemned Murguía to death. A strange solicitude, thought Driscoll, in such
+a high and mighty person for a little, insignificant, useless warrior as poor
+Murgie. A strange, a very strange solicitude, and Driscoll could not get it out
+of his head.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_406'></a>406</span><a id='link_48'></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Of All News the Most Spiteful</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;O poor and wretched ones!<br />
+That, feeble in the mind&#8217;s eye, lean your trust<br />
+Upon unstaid perverseness.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Dante</i>.</p> </div>
+
+<p>Her gestures, her every word, were an effervescence. There was something near
+hysteria in the bright flashes of her wit. However gay, joyous, cynical,
+Jacqueline may have seemed to herself, to Berthe, terrified though the girl was,
+Jacqueline&#8217;s mood was a sham.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The <i>frisson</i>, oh, those few exquisite seconds of emotion, eh
+Berthe?&#8221; she exclaimed. &#8220;Pursued by robbers&#8211;the
+chase&#8211;the rescue&#8211;and the jolting, the jolting that took our breaths!
+Why, Berthe, what more would you have? Hélas, to be over so quickly! And here we
+are, left alone in our coach, robbers gone, rescuers gone! Berthe, do you know,
+I believe they compared notes and decided we weren&#8217;t worth it. But I
+<i>should</i> have thought,&#8221; she went on in mock bitterness, &#8220;I
+should indeed, that at least our Fra Diavolo would have been more gallant, even
+if&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Even if?&#8221; prompted Berthe, then bit her lip.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Even&#8211;Oh Berthe, <i>fi donc</i>, to catch me so because I was
+wandering!&#8211;even if one could expect no such gallantry from the Chevalier
+de Missour-<i>i</i>. There now, do you tell Tobie to drive on&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But mademoiselle&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Say &#8216;Jeanne&#8217;,&#8221; the marchioness commanded, stamping her
+foot.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_407'></a>407</span>&#8220;My
+lady,&#8221; the girl persisted, but added with affectionate earnestness,
+&#8220;and my only friend, I was simply going to say that we are not deserted
+after all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But didn&#8217;t I see him riding away?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Him</i>, yes, but look out of the window. See, he&#8217;s left six
+or eight&#8211;O&#8211;oh&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a joyful cry, which got smothered at once in confusion. Turning
+quickly, Jacqueline beheld a little Bretonne with eyes cast down and cheeks
+aflame. Yet even then Berthe gave a cosy sigh of relief. There was cannonading
+not far away. They had just been taken by brigands, and as suddenly left alone
+on the road. Thus Jacqueline&#8217;s company ever cost her many a tremor. Yet
+somehow one of those chevaliers de Missour-<i>i</i> needed only to appear, and
+she felt as secure as a kitten on the hearth rug. A chevalier de
+Missour-<i>i</i> had but now ridden up to the coach door.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Berthe!&#8221; whispered Jacqueline severely, so that the girl thought
+her dress was awry. &#8220;Quick, tuck your heart away in your pocket.
+It&#8217;s right there on your sleeve.&#8221; Whereat Berthe employed the sleeve
+to hide her higher mantling color.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline turned on the chevalier at the window, and surveyed
+<i>his</i> sleeve. It was covered with dust, but Jacqueline&#8217;s big eyes
+could see through dust. She felt about her a subtle atmosphere that made her an
+outsider.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, Monsieur le Troubadour?&#8221; came her bantering recognition.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone&#8217;s French crowded pleasantly to his tongue tip.
+&#8220;Mademoiselle,&#8221; he returned, &#8220;and,&#8221; he added, with an
+odd glance toward Berthe, &#8220;Madame l&#8217;Imperatrice, uh&#8211;how goes
+it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s lashes raised inquiringly, until she remembered how the
+lank gentleman before her, with the tender heart of a Quixote, had mistaken
+Berthe for the Empress, months <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_408'></a>408</span>before at the Córdova plantation. She liked him
+somehow better now for persisting in it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Her Imperial Highness,&#8221; she explained, very soberly, &#8220;may
+deign presently to observe that you are here, monsieur, though, as you see, her
+thoughts are far away. However, if you can possibly give your own to a humbler
+person, to myself, dear Troubadour, I should very much like to know what is to
+happen next. Use fine words, if you must; even put it into verse, only tell
+me&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; With an impulsive shove she flung open the door and stepped
+into the road. She could still see Driscoll&#8217;s troop, or rather the cloud
+of dust, speeding toward Querétaro, but her arm swept the horizon impersonally.
+&#8220;Only tell me,&#8221; she demanded, &#8220;what&#8217;s happening now,
+over yonder?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pressing business, ma&#8217;am&#8211;mademoiselle, and,&#8221; Daniel
+lied promptly, &#8220;Colonel Driscoll wished me to make you his
+excuses.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The minstrels of old, sir,&#8221; said Jacqueline, &#8220;usually
+accompanied their more gallant fibs with a harp.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her vivacity was rising fast, and for some reason, Berthe darted an angry
+look of warning on Mr. Boone. But the poor fellow was blind to
+Jacqueline&#8217;s jealousy of a distant conflict, and he blundered further.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jack Driscoll&#8217;s just that way,&#8221; he apologized for his
+friend cheerfully. &#8220;<i>Abundat dulcibus vitiis</i>&#8211;he&#8217;s chuck
+full of pleasant faults. When there&#8217;s a clash of arms around, let the most
+alluring Peri that ever wore sweet jessamine glide by, and&#8211;she can just
+glide. While with me&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see. <i>You</i> have stayed. But I, too, like battles, monsieur.
+Tobie, get back up there with the driver. There&#8217;s no admission charge, I
+imagine, to this battle?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Boone gladly offered to take them for a nearer view, but he saw
+Berthe&#8211;his eyes were never elsewhere&#8211;shrink involuntarily.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_409'></a>409</span>&#8220;Stop,
+arretaz! Hey there!&#8221; he ordered, and the driver stopped.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s pretty jaw fell in wonder. The natural order of things was
+prevailing over the artificial. Social status to the contrary notwithstanding,
+it was Berthe who commanded here, and not Mlle. la Marquise. But Jacqueline was
+happy in it, and perhaps a little envious too. Ah, those <i>Missouriens</i>!
+This one, who would rather stay than fight! And that other, who was now fighting
+for quite the opposite reason! They had a capacity for variety, those
+<i>Missouriens</i>!</p>
+
+<p>It was much later, after a lunch from Jacqueline&#8217;s hampers under the
+nearest trees, and after the distant fusillades had quieted to an occasional
+angry spat, that the ladies&#8217; escort of Gringo Grays, bearing a flag of
+truce, set out with their charge toward the town. Daniel rode beside the coach
+window, and the flaps of the old hacienda conveyance were drawn aside. He
+wondered how it happened that the hours had passed so quickly. He would not
+believe that his comrades had been fighting, that many of them had died, so
+blissfully fleeting were those hours to himself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s all according,&#8221; he mused profoundly.</p>
+
+<p>And he could not help singing. He hummed the forlorn chanson of Joe Bowers of
+the State of Pike, which Bledsoe, then lying cold and stiff under a mountain
+howitzer, had so often bellowed forth.</p>
+
+<div class='poetry'>
+<p>&#8220;It said that Sal was false to me,<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;Her love for me had fled,<br /> She&#8217;s got married to a butcher&#8211;<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;The butcher&#8217;s hair was red.&#8221;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But he sung it as a plaint, yet not hopelessly, and Mademoiselle Berthe was
+the maid entreated of his melody.</p>
+
+<p>The sharpshooters on both sides paused as the coach drove into the little
+sweet-scented wood that was called the Alameda, and the Missourians, with sabres
+at salute, transferred their <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_410'></a>410</span>charge to the Imperialists crowding around. Among
+the latter were some of Jacqueline&#8217;s own countrymen, and those, in
+starvation and defeat, were as debonair as the cadets of Gascogne.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A rose, mademoiselle,&#8221; said one, bowing low. He had an arm
+bandaged, and his sword was broken. &#8220;An early merciful bullet plucked it
+for you, so that it fell unhurt, though the petals of all the others are
+scattered everywhere among the leaves, among the fallen branches, among the
+shattered statues of our classic grove here. See, like the rose I tender, you
+come among us poor broken soldiers of fortune. I think, dear lady, there will be
+those above to bless you for it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline smiled behind her tears. &#8220;Always a Frenchman, eh, mon
+lieutenant?&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+<p>The fragrance of the place was smothered under gunpowder and sluggish fumes.
+The pleasant drives, the grass, the flowers, were trampled by gaunt soldiers
+bearing their wounded, but the young officer murmured on in the speech of the
+Alameda&#8217;s one time fashionable promenade.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who is that?&#8221; she interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>She pointed over the heads around her to a man bearing someone off the late
+bloody field, and that moment staggering across the trenches into the Alameda.
+It was an act that moved her, for the rescuer was a richly uniformed officer,
+and the other but a common soldier. With Berthe close behind, she alighted from
+the coach and hurried forward to help. The wounded soldier&#8217;s face lay on
+the officer&#8217;s breast, and she saw only his hair, matted and very white,
+from which a rusty brown wig had partly fallen. But more to the purpose she saw
+that he was bleeding, and the callous warriors there knew that the angels of the
+siege had come at last.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lay him in my carriage&#8211;but carefully, you!&#8221; she said, and
+was obeyed, while Berthe deftly fixed cloaks and blankets around the withered
+form. Someone mounted with Toby <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_411'></a>411</span>and the driver, and the coach rolled slowly away to
+the hospital, leaving behind the two girls staring at the richly uniformed
+officer, and the officer staring tenfold harder at them. He was a large man,
+with big hands and feet, and for a Mexican he had a mongrel floridness of skin.
+His cap was in his hand, and his hair was red and thin. Amazement and a startled
+prying anxiety choked his utterance.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now then, Colonel Lopez,&#8221; Jacqueline addressed him calmly,
+&#8220;may I ask you the way? I have come to speak with Maximilian.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;La Señorita d-d&#8217;Aumerle!&#8221; he stuttered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Faith, no other, who is awaiting your pleasure, señor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You come from, from&#8211;Mexico?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But hardly to chat with you all the afternoon, caballero.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From Mexico! From the capital!&#8221; he kept repeating. The
+man&#8217;s finger nails cracked disagreeably, and his features worked in an
+extreme of agitation. He tried to fix his shifting blue eyes upon first one and
+then the other of the two girls, as though to ferret out what they must know.
+&#8220;You do bring news from there?&#8221; he said huskily. &#8220;What of
+Marquez? Is he coming? Shall we have the aid he went for?
+When&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, the medal for military valor!&#8221; observed Jacqueline.
+&#8220;Indeed, mi coronel, all must acclaim your bravery, as well as&#8211;your
+loyalty. But take me to your beloved Prince Max, for I do assure you, señor, my
+news goes not without myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He visits the hospital every day,&#8221; Lopez advised reluctantly.
+&#8220;Perhaps if I should take Your Mercy there first&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Passing on through the ravaged Alameda, they entered the streets of
+Querétaro.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hear!&#8221; Jacqueline exclaimed. &#8220;Such a quantity of vivas and
+clarins and national hymns and triumphant dianas, one would imagine, for
+example, that there had been a great victory?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Eh? Oh yes, or a hearty breakfast, señorita.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_412'></a>412</span>Which was more
+essential. And why not? Hope&#8217;s bright hue blotted out emaciation. They had
+broken through to food that day. Bueno, could they not do it again? Old croons
+had returned to their stalls and accustomed corners in the market place, and as
+in days of peace were already squatted before corn or beans heaped on the stone
+pavement in portions for a quartilla, a media, or a real, as though the pyramids
+were not so pitifully little, as though the wholesale purchase were not made
+just that morning in heavy terms of blood.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the ponderous Assyrian-like church of Santa Rosa, in the old, half
+ruined monastery and garden, was the hospital of the besieged. A stifling, fetid
+odor, far worse than of drugs merely, sickened the two girls as a foul breath
+when they passed with their guide between thick walls into the large,
+overcrowded rooms. Military medical service was not yet become an institution in
+Mexico, and this place was like some horrible antechamber of the grave. Every
+cot had its ghastly transient, and so had the benches, brought here from the
+different plazas. More and more wounded were arriving constantly, and those
+found to be still alive were laid on the flagstones wherever space for a blanket
+remained. But in spite of the morning&#8217;s fight, in spite of almost daily
+skirmishes for weeks past, the sick outnumbered all others; and those who did
+come with wounds, and survived them, stayed on to swell the longer list. Men
+tossed in fever, craving what they might not have, a cooling draught, a proper
+food, and effective medicine, until, with waking, they craved an easier boon,
+and died. But the hospital fever, the calenturas, the gangrene, were not to be
+all. Out of the diseased air, mid the fumes of pious tapers, the spectre of
+epidemic was taking hideous shape over the many, many upturned faces. The
+spectre was the tifo, a plague more dreaded in high altitudes than black vomit
+in the low.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline found Maximilian bending over a stricken <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_413'></a>413</span>cavalry officer. The Emperor was far
+from a well man, and his fair skin more than ever contrasted as something
+foreign and lonely among the swarthy faces on every side. His ostentation was
+now simplicity, as befitted a monarch in camp. He wore neither sword nor star.
+His garb was plain charro, in which he often walked among citizens and soldiers,
+inquiring about rations, or requesting a light for his cigar, never minding if a
+shell burst and kicked dust over him, and always affable, always ready to smile
+and praise. It was a rôle that came naturally to his gentle soul. One would like
+to believe&#8211;if one could, alas!&#8211;that he had in mind no kingly
+precedent.</p>
+
+<p>Pausing unseen, Jacqueline noted tears in the blue eyes as he pinned some
+decoration on the officer&#8217;s bloodstained shirt. A good heart, she thought,
+yet ever the prince. In his divine right was he even here, presuming to send a
+dying subject to the Sovereign in Heaven with a &#8220;character,&#8221; with a
+recommendation for service faithfully done. His hands trembled from haste, for
+he would have the soldier appear before that dread Throne above as a Caballero
+of the Mexican Eagle. In pity for them both, Jacqueline asked herself what
+precedence awaited the new Caballero of the Mexican Eagle in a Court, not
+Imperial, but Divine.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline had not journeyed her perilous way out of simple friendship for a
+desolate prince, but could she have foreseen how his eyes lighted with gladness
+to behold one friend who remembered, in sweet charity she would almost have come
+for that alone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When Your Highness has finished here,&#8221; she said, glancing at the
+inquisitive Lopez near her, &#8220;or whenever I can speak with Your Highness in
+private&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was beseeching in Maximilian&#8217;s quick scrutiny of her face, as
+though the helpless messenger had aught of power over her tidings.
+&#8220;In&#8211;in a moment, mademoiselle,&#8221; he said tremulously. &#8220;I
+always see the&#8211;new ones, before I go.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_414'></a>414</span>The &#8220;new
+ones&#8221; were still being brought in, until any first aid from the distracted
+surgeons was of the most casual&#8211;the ripping of bandaged cloth, a knot
+tied, and so on to the next. Followed by Lopez, the two girls, and several
+officers of the hospital staff, Maximilian passed from ward to ward. But
+Jacqueline&#8217;s hand seemed always to be threading a needle, or holding a
+ligature, or lightly touching a hot forehead, and in every case the surgeon
+would nod quickly, gratefully, as to a fellow craftsman. Berthe the while gazed
+in tender wonder on her calm mistress, and nerved herself someway to help
+also.</p>
+
+<p>And so they came to the withered form in brave red coat, and green pantaloon
+whom Lopez had carried off the field. One of the nurses had placed a
+handkerchief over his face, because of the stinging flies, but Jacqueline
+recognized the thin white hair and the twisted wig as of the old man whom she
+had sent ahead in her coach. At first he seemed to be dead, for he lay very
+still on the floor, though a surgeon was probing his wound, and his blood was
+fast filling the bowl held by the nurse. But now and again, the straining cords
+in his emaciated wrist twitched with the protest of life. Maximilian stooped to
+raise the handkerchief. Lopez made a movement to prevent, but restrained the
+impulse as useless. And then Maximilian revealed the gaunt, leaden features of
+Anastasio Murguía, the father of María de la Luz.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline fell back with bloodless lips. The father of that dead
+girl&#8211;and Maximilian! They were face to face, these two! But the
+Emperor&#8217;s expression was of pity only. He sank to his knees, the better to
+make the wounded man understand the words of comfort on his lips. For
+Jacqueline, the horror of it chilled her. Surely, surely, she thought, the
+hidden tragedy must now unmask; because of its very awfulness, it must! That the
+prince should be thus oblivious of such a knowledge, and yet kneeling there,
+made the scene ghastly beyond words.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_415'></a>415</span>&#8220;I
+remember him,&#8221; said Maximilian softly, looking up to the others.
+&#8220;One of your orderlies, Colonel Lopez, I believe? Of course I remember
+him, for I see him often. He is always near me. Even to-day, on the llano,
+during the thickest of the battle, there he was at my stirrup, and there he must
+have fallen, in humble, unquestioning loyalty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline drew back in relief, and she imagined that Lopez did also.
+Maximilian had forgotten the hacendado utterly.</p>
+
+<p>With a grunt of satisfaction the surgeon drew forth his forceps from the
+wound and dropped a bullet to the floor. Next he gently rolled the patient over
+on his back, and then it was that Jacqueline saw in Murguía&#8217;s hand, in the
+hand that had been under him, a little ivory cross. Fainting, unconscious, he
+still clutched it, from Driscoll&#8217;s leaving him on the battlefield until
+the present moment. By now the stains of his child&#8217;s blood were washed
+away in his own. Jacqueline&#8217;s quick eyes caught an inscription on the gold
+mounting, and leaning close she read the dead girl&#8217;s name, &#8220;María de
+la Luz.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With the gripping of the bullet and its extraction, or possibly at the sound
+of a voice&#8211;Maximilian&#8217;s&#8211;the old man&#8217;s eyes opened, and
+held the Emperor&#8217;s in a deathly stare. Jacqueline watched the piercing
+beads grow smaller and smaller in their cavernous sockets, and all the while
+they seemed to concentrate their intense fire. The others, except Lopez, thought
+it delirium, but Jacqueline would have named it the very blackest hate.
+&#8220;This man will live!&#8221; she said to herself, and shuddered.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian, seeing consciousness returned, spoke cheerily. &#8220;Ah, doctor,
+you will have him well and sound within a week, I know? Look to it, sir; a
+heroic veteran like this cannot be spared.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A strange distortion wrapped the visage of suffering. &#8220;Could <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_416'></a>416</span>that be a smile?&#8221;
+Jacqueline wondered. But the Imperial party took its leave, and the tragedy
+lurking beneath was not revealed, as yet.</p>
+
+<p>Through the throng waiting outside the hospital to acclaim him again as a
+prince victorious, Maximilian led the two girls to their coach, and went with
+them to the convent of Santa Clara, where he asked that they be received as
+guests by the sisters. Here, in the comfortless <i>parloir</i> of the retreat, he
+learned the reason of Jacqueline&#8217;s daring journey from the capital.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I bring Your Highness,&#8221; said she, &#8220;the most spiteful news
+my feeble sex can ever bring.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again the involuntary plea for fair tidings swept his face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And, and that is, mademoiselle?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;I told you so.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilan&#8217;s cheeks paled to the marble whiteness of his brow. He had
+just heard the answer to the one question, to the one hope, of all
+Querétaro.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You, you mean Marquez?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221; And then she told him, and seeing how stricken he was, her
+exasperation at his vain incapacity changed to pity for his breaking
+pride&#8211;which may be called his breaking heart.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But mademoiselle, I gave my empire into his keeping,&#8221; he
+protested, as though such trust in a man of itself proved that man&#8217;s
+constancy. But the messenger, but Truth, would not recant.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then,&#8221; moaned the Emperor suddenly, &#8220;Marquez is not coming
+back?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nor ever meant to, sire. Listen, Your Highness made him lieutenant of
+the Empire, and sent him to the capital for aid. Bien, he turned out the
+ministers. He broke into homes, and pillaged even the stanchest Imperialists. He
+heard that Puebla was besieged by a Liberal general, Porfirio Diaz, so <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_417'></a>417</span>instead of coming here,
+Marquez marches all his army down there. You will observe, sire, that he wanted
+the road kept open to Vera Cruz.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why? Tell me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ma foi, to sell the capital more easily. In any case to be able to
+save himself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sell the capital?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just a little patience, sire. Now what did Diaz do, but take Puebla by
+assault before Marquez could arrive? Then he turned on Marquez, and Marquez
+turned and ran. Oui, oui, sire, he <i>ran</i>, ran like the little ugly,
+skulking Leopard that he is. To cross a creek, he filled it with all the
+ammunition, and kept on running, leaving his army defenseless behind him. Groan
+if you must, sire; others have died in groans. But the Leopard had done this
+kind of thing before, it should have been remembered. He got back safely though,
+and squandered the army that might have relieved Querétaro to do it. Mon Dieu,
+what that panic must have been! One entire battalion surrendered to fifty
+guerrillas. Yet the Austrian cavalry, the Hungarians, and some others fought,
+fought with their sabres, and won victories too. Hélas, they only proved what
+might have been. They only proved how Marquez, if he had not hesitated, might
+perhaps have saved Puebla and destroyed the Liberals. As it was, they could only
+retreat, and hardly two thousand of them, ragged and bleeding and filthy,
+straggled back into Mexico during the next few days. Now they are besieged
+there. Oui, oui, <i>besieged</i>, by Diaz, by the army of the East, by twelve
+thousand Republicans, formerly called brigands. And inside is the Leopard,
+snarling as ever with his regency of terror. Oh no, he will not come to
+Querétaro. Bonté divine, he cannot. Nor would he. He still holds the
+capital&#8211;for sale.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no, mademoiselle, there you wrong him, surely. Or tell me, then,
+who would buy?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_418'></a>418</span>&#8220;Probably
+no one. At least not Santa Anna. The buyer must have an army.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My friend, this is a cruel jest.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Earnest enough, parbleu, to make the Leopard forget Querétaro, once he
+was safely away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then why doesn&#8217;t he sell out to Diaz?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s eyes snapped contemptuously. &#8220;Young Diaz,&#8221; she
+replied, &#8220;is not a fighter to buy what he can take. It&#8217;s only a
+question of a few weeks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then by all that&#8217;s mysterious, <i>who</i> would buy? I
+cannot.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course you cannot. That is why Marquez wants you out of the way,
+sire. So he left you here. The Liberals will attend to that for him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then who will buy? Who? Who?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The blood shot into the girl&#8217;s cheeks, and one small hand clenched
+tightly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;France&#8211;possibly,&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor started as from an acute shock. His thoughts raced backward, then
+forward, gathering the whole heinous truth about the perfidy of Marquez.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I,&#8221; Jacqueline added calmly, though she was still flushed,
+&#8220;I have forwarded his offer to Napoleon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You, mademoiselle? You, an accessory?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To Your Imperial Highness&#8217;s downfall? Ah no, sire! Your Highness
+is no longer a factor. Your August Majesty will be eliminated absolutely before
+Napoleon can reply to my despatch. As I said, the Liberals around Querétaro will
+attend to that. Your Highness has merely delayed the profit my country might
+have had from his abdication. Meantime Your Highness himself has made his own
+ruin inevitable. But I, sire, I would not see Marquez, nor receive a word from
+him, until we were actually besieged in the capital, and he beyond the hope of
+coming to Your Highness here. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_419'></a>419</span>Now then, if Marquez only holds out until the army
+of France returns&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A deep sigh interrupted her. &#8220;No longer a factor,&#8221; murmured the
+Emperor. Thus quickly, then, could the world take up its affairs again after his
+elimination!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle,&#8221; he cried suddenly, generously, &#8220;you
+are&#8211;superb! Dear little Frenchwoman, you are, you are!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Poof!&#8221; said Jacqueline. &#8220;But don&#8217;t you see,
+sire,&#8221; she hurried on eagerly, &#8220;that we will have to fight the
+Americans? Yes, yes, then they can no longer say they <i>drove</i> us
+out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Indeed they cannot. And I, among the first, and the most heartily, do
+wish you a warlike answer from that firebrand of a Napoleon. But tell me, why do
+you come to Querétaro? How did you come?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How? Easily. All the guerrilla bands&#8211;except one, which I
+escaped&#8211;are concentrated either here or with Diaz.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And Marquez let you come, you who are so important to him
+now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As though he could help it, parbleu! My message to Napoleon was in my
+own cipher, and after he had sent it by a scout to Vera Cruz, I informed him
+that in it I had directed Napoleon to send his answer to me at Querétaro.
+Otherwise Marquez would have kept me in prison rather than let me go. But as it
+was, he assisted me through the Republican lines by a secret way he has arranged
+for his own escape, if need be. So&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why did you wish to come at all?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ma foi, as if I knew! A matter of conscience, I suppose.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Matters of conscience are usually riddles.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Like this one? Bien, I am still trying to get Your Highness to leave
+the country. But this time, sire, it is to save you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To save me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, on account of France.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, on account of France?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why else? If&#8211;if anything happens to Maximilian, France <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_420'></a>420</span>will be blamed. Oh why,
+why did you not escape this morning, while the road was open?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For the first time during the interview the fire of high resolve leaped into
+the prince&#8217;s eyes. &#8220;But could I, in honor?&#8221; he demanded
+sternly. &#8220;Think of the townspeople, abandoned to the Liberal fury. Their
+Emperor, mademoiselle, means to face the end with them, here, in
+Querétaro.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The dignity of his catastrophe was already beginning to appeal to him, to
+exalt him, even as the vision of a Hapsburg winning his empire had so often done
+before.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; protested the girl, &#8220;if they capture Your Highness,
+if they&#8211;if they hold you for trial?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She stopped, for Maximilian was laughing, and laughing heartily. The idea of
+hands laid on him, an Archduke of Austria&#8211;ha, he was grateful to her. Its
+very absurdity had given him the first relaxation of a laugh in months.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nevertheless,&#8221; persisted Jacqueline, whose heritage of a
+revolution was an obstinate bundle of these same absurdities,
+&#8220;nevertheless, I had hoped to save Your Highness with my news, since it is
+news that leaves no hope. Why not, then, escape? Treat for terms, do anything,
+only save your followers and&#8211;yourself, sire?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But she found it impossible to sway him from this, his latest conceit. His
+new rôle, the more desperate it looked, only ensnared him as the more worthy. He
+contemplated the end serenely. As a military captain he was culling laurels
+against theatric odds. His heroic loyalty to a lost cause, with perhaps a little
+martyrdom (of personal inconvenience), how these would count and be not denied
+when he should return to his destiny in Europe!</p>
+
+<p>His was even a mood to consort with lofty traits in others, and in a kind of
+poetic ecstasy he thought of Jacqueline&#8217;s steadfast devotion to her
+country&#8217;s glory. And he was moved again by the vague, chivalrous longing
+to bend the knee, to do her <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_421'></a>421</span>some knightly service. But&#8211;yes, he seemed to
+remember, there <i>was</i> such a service to be done, yet and yet&#8211;no, he
+had forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>Then quite curiously, yet still without remembering, he dwelt in reverie on
+that man named Driscoll who had so filled the morning with valiant deeds.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_422'></a>422</span><a id='link_49'></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Vendetta&#8217;s Half Sister, Better Born</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Emerson</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Just outside Driscoll&#8217;s tent, under the stars, a fragrant steak was
+broiling. The colonel&#8217;s mozo had learned the magic of the forked stick,
+and he manipulated his wand with a conscious pride, so that the low sizzling of
+flesh and flame was as the mystic voice in some witch&#8217;s brew. There were
+many other tents on the plain, a blurred city of whitish shadows against the
+night, and there were many other glowing coals to mark where the earth lay under
+the stars, and the witching murmur, the tantalizing charm of each
+was&#8211;supper. In this wise, and thinking themselves very patient, men were
+waiting for other men to starve to death. The besieged had tried, but they had
+not again cut through to food.</p>
+
+<p>In Driscoll&#8217;s tent there was a galaxy of woolen-shirted warriors, a
+constellation of quiescent Berserkers. For they were Missouri colonels, except
+one, who being a Kansan, required no title. They were tobacco-chewing giants,
+famous for expectoration. Except Meagre Shanks, who tilted his inevitable black
+cigar now toward one eye, now toward the other. Except the Storm Centre, who
+fondly closed his palm over his cob meerschaum and felt its warmth and seemed
+far away, a dangerous poet. Except Old Brothers and Sisters, most austere of
+Wesleyans, who had neither pipe nor quid. He was cleaning his pistols. They were
+men hewn for mighty deeds, but&#8211;cringe must we all <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_423'></a>423</span>before the irony that neither life nor
+romance may dodge&#8211;it was not a mighty deed which that night was to exact
+of them, which yet they were brave enough to do, though sorry the figures they
+thought they made.</p>
+
+<p>Politics was their theme, since men, though busy with war and death, must yet
+relieve their statesmen, especially after supper, and neatly arrange the Tariff,
+Resumption, or whatever else. Like oracles the ex-Confederates held forth that
+the Yankees had only driven out the French to march in themselves, and so tutor
+the Mexicans in self-government. To which the Kansan ventured a minority
+opinion, though being thus a judge of the bench, as it were, he had no need of
+the oaths he took.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why God help me and to thunder with you, the United States ain&#8217;t
+aiming at any protectorate. You unreconstructed Rebs simply cain&#8217;t and
+won&#8217;t see good faith in the Federal government!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Carpet bags?&#8221; Driscoll murmured sweetly. It was the majority
+opinion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes sir&#8217;ee,&#8221; and Daniel took the cue as a bit in the mouth,
+&#8220;there&#8217;s blood on the face of the moon up there, <i>acerrima
+proximorum odia</i>, by God sir! Look at the troops at our elections! Look at
+the Drake Test Oath! Look at&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; Mr. Boone was fast getting
+vitriolic, in heavy editorial fashion, when a famished face, a wolfish face,
+appeared between the flaps of the tent. &#8220;Look
+at&#8211;<i>that!</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Politics vanished, war and death resumed their own.</p>
+
+<p>The whole mess stared.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sth-hunderation, it&#8217;s an Imperialist!&#8221; lisped Crittenden
+of Nodaway. He pointed at the newcomer&#8217;s uniform, which was of the
+Batallon del Emperador.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, bring him on in,&#8221; said Driscoll to the pickets gripping
+the man by either arm.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He was trying to pass through our lines,&#8221; one explained. <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_424'></a>424</span>&#8220;And when we
+stopped him, he begged hard to be brought to the Coronel Gringo, that is, to
+you, señor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The mess turned curiously on Driscoll. Why a half dead soldier of the
+Batallon del Emperador should have a preference as to his jailer was beyond
+them. But they were yet more puzzled to hear Driscoll address the prisoner by
+name.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;See here, Murgie,&#8221; he said, &#8220;is this the occasion Rodrigo
+meant when he talked about my meeting you soon? Is it? Come, crawl out of the
+grass. Show us what you&#8217;re up to. No, wait, feed first. There&#8217;s
+plenty left.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the old man had not once glanced toward the table. Whatever the pangs of
+hunger, another torment was uppermost.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you mean by this,&#8221; Boone demanded, as though personally
+offended, &#8220;you&#8217;ve got the hospital color, dull lead on yellow? Here,
+take a drink. Yes, I know, it&#8217;s mescal, out-and-out embalmed deviltry that
+no self-respecting drunkard would touch, but Lord A&#8217;mighty, man, you need
+<i>something!</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía shook his head irritably. Offers of what his body craved were
+annoying hindrances before the craving of his soul. He twitched himself free of
+the sentinels, and limped painfully to where Driscoll sat. He wore no coat, but
+his green pantaloons with their crimson stripes were rolled to the knee, and the
+white calzoncillos beneath flapped against his skeleton ankles. His feet were
+bare, the better for an errand of stealth in the night. He was a pitiful
+spectacle, yet a repulsive, and the Americans despised themselves for the
+strange impulse they had to kick him out like a dog. They watched him
+wonderingly as he tried to speak. He panted from his late rough handling by the
+sentry, and his half-closed wound gave excruciating pain. The muscles of his
+face jerked horribly, but his will was tremendous, merciless, and at last the
+cords of the jaw knotted and hardened.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To-morrow morn&#8211;morning,&#8221; he began, &#8220;the Emperor
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_425'></a>425</span>will fight. It is
+arranged for&#8211;for daybreak, señores. To to fight&#8211;to break
+through&#8211;to&#8211;to ESCAPE!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y then,&#8221; exclaimed Harry Collins, the Kansan,
+&#8220;<i>good</i> for him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The parson snatched off his brass-bowed spectacles, and his brow lowered
+fiercely over his cherubic eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And so <i>you</i> had to come and tell us?&#8221; he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>But the traitorous old man had not the smallest thought of his shame, nor
+could have.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8211;you will let him <i>escape?</i>&#8221; he challenged them in
+frantic anger.</p>
+
+<p>The mess stole abashed glances at one another. They would, they knew well
+enough, have to act on this information. But they were men for a fair fight, and
+they had no stomach to rob the besieged of a last desperate chance. For a moment
+they were enraged against the informer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll just keep him here,&#8221; said one.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, till morning. Then he&#8217;ll tell no one else, and
+<i>we</i> won&#8217;t. Poor old Maxie!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sure,&#8221; ejaculated Collins, &#8220;give Golden Whiskers a
+show!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The wolfish light in the sunken eyes quickened to a flash. Lust for
+Maximilian&#8217;s capture turned to chagrin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Señores, señores mios,&#8221; he whined, &#8220;you do not know yet,
+you do not know, that if Maximilian is not taken&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, here now,&#8221; growled Clay of Carroll, &#8220;you needn&#8217;t
+worry so much. He&#8217;ll be driven back into the town all right, I
+reckon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what then, señor? No, you do not know. Your general,
+señores&#8211;General Escobedo&#8211;has orders to&#8211;to raise the
+siege.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>What?</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si señor, to <i>raise</i> the siege! The orders are from San Luis, from
+the Señor Presidente there. He&#8211;he thinks the siege has lasted long
+enough.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_426'></a>426</span>&#8220;Great
+Scot!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Precisamente. Yes, it would look like&#8211;defeat. It would,
+if&#8211;you don&#8217;t capture Maximilian by daybreak.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Meagre Shanks brought his boot soles wrathfully to the ground, kicking the
+stool back of him. His whole mien exuded a newspaper man&#8217;s contempt for
+faking. &#8220;Now then, young fellow,&#8221; and he shook a long finger at the
+ancient Mexican, &#8220;here you know all that Maximilian knows. And here again
+you know all that the Presidente knows. All right, s&#8217;pose you just tell us now
+more or less about how mighty little you <i>do</i> know?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s&#8211;it&#8217;s like a message from El Chaparrito,&#8221;
+the parson demurred.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From Shorty?&#8221; Daniel almost roared. &#8220;Oh come, Clem,
+don&#8217;t you go to mixing up the unseen and all-seeing guardian of the
+República with this dried-up, wild-eyed specimen of a dried-up&#8211;of, of an
+old rascal. No one ever hears from El Chaparrito &#8217;less there&#8217;s a crisis
+on, and is there one on now? You know there ain&#8217;t. If there was, someone
+would be hearing from Shorty&#8211;Driscoll there, prob&#8217;bly. But there
+ain&#8217;t. Shucks, this old codger is only plum&#8217; daft. Aren&#8217;t you
+now&#8221;&#8211;he appealed querulously to Murguía, &#8220;aren&#8217;t you
+just crazy&#8211;<i>say?</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But even as the Americans breathed easier, they stared aghast at the old
+man.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Crazy?&#8221; he repeated. &#8220;Crazy?&#8221; he fairly shrieked,
+clutching Boone by the sleeve. &#8220;No, I am not! Señor, say that I am not!
+No, no, no, I am not crazy, not yet&#8211;not&#8211;not before it is done,
+not&#8211;before&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;God!&#8221; Boone half whispered. &#8220;Look at his eyes
+now!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The old man checked himself in trembling. No help for him lay in human
+testimony. But there was his own will, which had driven his frail body. Now as a
+demon it gripped his mind and held it from the brink.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_427'></a>427</span>&#8220;Go, out
+of here, all of you!&#8221; he burst on them. &#8220;Go, I have more to
+tell&#8211;more, more, more, do you understand?&#8211;but I&#8217;ll tell it to
+no one, to no one, unless to Mister Dreescol.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A raving maniac or not, canards or not, there might be in all this what was
+vital. The Americans stirred uneasily, in a kind of awe, and at a nod from
+Driscoll they left the tent.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía grew quieter at once. His faculties tightened on the effort before
+him. He was alone with the man who would understand, so he thought; who had the
+same reason to understand, so he thought.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll had shared nothing of the late emotions. He had smoked impassively.
+His interest was of the coldest. Only his eyes, narrowed fixedly on the Mexican,
+betrayed the heed he gave. When the others were gone, he uncrossed his legs, and
+crossed them the other way, and thrust the corncob into his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sit down!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía dropped to the nearest camp stool.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now then, you with your dirty little affairs, why do you come to
+me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía leaned forward over the table between them, his bony arms among
+candles and a litter of earthen plates. The odor of meat assailed his nostrils.
+But the hunger in his leer had no scent for food.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This <i>is</i> the time I meant, señor, when Rodrigo told you that you
+would see me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;About the ivory cross? But I gave you that a month ago.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A month ago&#8211;a month, wasted! How much sooner I would have come,
+only another had to be&#8211;persuaded&#8211;first.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, had he? Then it&#8217;s not about the cross? And this other?
+Suppose I guess? He was&#8211;he was the red-haired puppy, my old friend the
+Dragoon, who carried you off wounded that day? Humph, the very first guess,
+too!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía darted at him a look of uneasy admiration.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_428'></a>428</span>&#8220;I would
+have told Your Mercy, anyway,&#8221; he said, half cringing. &#8220;Yes, he is
+Colonel Lopez.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you &#8216;persuaded&#8217; him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Events did. Since the siege began I&#8217;ve tried, I&#8217;ve worked,
+to convince him that these same events would happen. Ugh, the dull fool, he had
+to wait for them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I can almost guess again,&#8221; said Driscoll, as though it were some
+curious game, &#8220;but if you&#8217;d just as soon explain&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Listen! You remember two years ago at my hacienda, when Lopez
+sentenced you to death? But why did he sentence you to death, why,
+señor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s an easy one. It was because he didn&#8217;t want my offer
+of Confederate aid to reach Maximilian.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why not? I will tell you. It was because he was trying even then
+to buy the Republic&#8217;s good will, in case&#8211;in case anything should
+happen. But he was <i>afraid</i> to change, the coward! He must first <i>know</i>
+which side would win. I am his orderly&#8211;<i>he</i> knows why I am&#8211;and
+I&#8217;ve tried to drive it into his thick wits that the Empire is damned and
+has been, but he still doubted, even when we were starving again, even when
+every crumb was gathered into the common store, even when it was useless to
+shoot men for not declaring hidden corn, even when forced loans were vain, since
+money could no longer buy. No señor, even with proofs like these, Miguel Lopez
+was stubborn.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;d prob&#8217;bly guess he was a loyal scoundrel, after
+all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;More yet, he has fought bravely, making himself a marked man in the
+Republic&#8217;s eyes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then why&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because so long as the Empire had a chance, or he thought it had, he
+hoped for more coddling. You see, señor, he thought Marquez was coming back with
+relief. There was that&#8211;that Frenchwoman you know of&#8211;who brought news
+from the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_429'></a>429</span>capital.
+But Maximilian dared not make the news public. He forged a letter instead, a
+letter from Marquez, and he had its contents proclaimed. Marquez had been
+delayed, so all Querétaro read, but he had at last destroyed the Liberals in his
+path, and was then hurrying here with his victorious army. This false hope
+blinded Lopez with the others in there. But when Marquez did not come, when
+utter demoralization set in, when we were a starving town against thirty-five
+thousand outside, when there were scores of deserters every day, when any man
+who talked of surrender was executed, and still no Marquez, then Lopez
+began&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see, he began to be persuaded?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Still, he wanted to be a general. But the other generals forced
+Maximilian not to promote him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So he was disappointed?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And persuaded, señor. The sally was already planned for this morning,
+but Lopez argued obstacles, and so got it postponed until to-morrow morning. He
+wanted to&#8211;to act on his&#8211;persuasion. And that is why,&#8221; Murguía
+got to his feet and limped around the table to Driscoll, &#8220;and that is
+why,&#8221; he ended in a croaking whisper, &#8220;why I am here!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And the red puppy, how near here did <i>he</i> come with
+you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again Murguía darted at his questioner that uneasy glance of admiration.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lopez is waiting between the lines,&#8221; he replied. &#8220;As to
+our own lines, we passed them easily, since Lopez commands the reserve brigade
+and places the sentinels himself around La Cruz monastery.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, does he?&#8221; Driscoll whistled softly. &#8220;But what&#8217;s
+your plan?&#8221; He put the question sympathetically, which disturbed Don
+Anastasio vastly more than the American&#8217;s peremptory tone in the
+beginning. &#8220;What&#8217;s your plan?&#8221; he asked again, gently
+coaxing.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_430'></a>430</span>Murguía
+hesitated. This polite drawing-room interest was the most ironical of
+encouragement for villainy. Driscoll frowned impatiently, but at once he was
+smiling again. He placidly filled his corncob, and a moment later, his gaze
+piercing the tobacco smoke, he said, &#8220;Then I&#8217;ll tell you.
+You&#8217;re here to make a dicker, you and your tool between the lines. The
+monastery of La Cruz on top of the bluff is the citadel of Querétaro. Maximilian
+has his quarters there. The troops there are the reserve brigade. This puppy,
+this mongrel, commands the reserve brigade. He places the sentinels. And you are
+his orderly.&#8211;Oh, I haven&#8217;t forgotten how he let you off that time he
+condemned me!&#8211;So now you are his orderly, for your own reasons and his.
+And here you are, talking mysteriously about <i>capturing</i> Maximilian. But you
+don&#8217;t mean that, snake. You are here to <i>sell</i> him! Howsoever,&#8221;
+and smiling a little at the stilted phrasing, Driscoll paused and delicately
+rammed the tobacco tighter in the bowl, &#8220;howsoever, Murgie, you&#8217;ve
+come to the wrong market. No, there&#8217;s no demand for Maximilians just now,
+not in this booth. But why in blazes didn&#8217;t you go to Escobedo? With his
+Shylock beard, I reckon <i>he&#8217;d</i> take a flyer in human
+flesh.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was going to him, but I came to you first, to take us there, to take
+Lopez and myself, I&#8211;I thought you would manage it all, because
+you&#8211;Your Mercy is the strongest, the most resourceful&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Resourceful enough, eh, to dodge the bullets you had fixed up for me
+once? Thanks, Murgie, but I liked your attentions then better than your slimy
+advances now. By the way, how are you going to get to Escobedo?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The tone was honey itself.</p>
+
+<p>Murguía gasped, yet not so much to find himself a prisoner, as to find
+himself mistaken in the American.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now maybe,&#8221; Driscoll suggested, &#8220;maybe you&#8217;ll be
+wondering yourself why you bring your dirty little affairs to me? <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_431'></a>431</span>Lopez may be an open
+book, but you seem to&#8217;ve read <i>me</i> wrong. Prob&#8217;bly the language is
+foreign.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía&#8217;s jaw dropped, and he gaped as one who beholds the collapse of
+high towering walls. It was his system of life, of motives calculated, of
+humanity weighed. It was the whole fabric of hate and passions which quivered
+and crashed and flattened in a chaos of dust before his wildly staring eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mean, señor, you mean you do not want&#8211;as well, as
+<i>I!</i>&#8211;to bring to his end this libertine, this thief of girlhood, this
+prince who scatters death, who scatters shame,
+this&#8211;this&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Man alive, you&#8217;re screaming! Stop it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With his nails the old man combed the froth from his lips.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you too have cause,&#8221; he cried, &#8220;cause not so heavy,
+but cause enough, as well as I! There was my daughter, my little girl! With you
+there is that French wo&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, for he thought he heard the sharp click of teeth. But Driscoll
+was only grave.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, go on,&#8221; he said. &#8220;But&#8211;speak for your daughter
+only.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t go on. I won&#8217;t go on,&#8221; Murguía burst out
+desperately, and flung up his arms. &#8220;If you don&#8217;t understand
+already, then I can&#8217;t make you. It&#8217;s useless. A book? You&#8217;re a
+stone! But any other, who had a heart for suffering, in your place
+would&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh shut up, Murgie!&#8221; cried Driscoll wearily, but in something
+akin to supplication.</p>
+
+<p>With the serpent&#8217;s wisdom, the tempter struck no more on that side. His
+fangs were not for the blighted lover. What, though, of the soldier?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No one doubts, señor,&#8221; he whined unctuously, &#8220;that Your
+Mercy is loyal to the Republic. So it cannot be that Y&#8217;r Mercy
+knows&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;See here, Murgie, I&#8217;m getting sleepy. But I&#8217;ll find you a
+comfortable tent, with plenty to eat, and a polite guard&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_432'></a>432</span>&#8220;Señor,&#8221; stormed the old man, &#8220;I
+tell you you don&#8217;t know what this means to the Republic. Maximilian will
+escape, no matter the cost. At daybreak there is to be a concentrated attack on
+some point in your lines; but where, nobody knows except Miramon. Then
+Maximilian will cut through with the cavalry. The infantry will follow, if it
+can. And after them, the artillery. You Republicans may not even know it until
+too late, because meantime you will be fighting the townspeople, thinking you
+are fighting the whole army.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll roused himself suddenly. &#8220;The townspeople?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si señor, they are to be a decoy. Some volunteered, the rest were
+drafted. They have been armed, but they are only to be killed, they are only to
+draw the Republican strength, while the Emperor and the army escape.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll sprang from his seat, in an agitation that was Murguía&#8217;s first
+hope.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you mean to tell me,&#8221; he demanded, &#8220;that this
+Maximilian who makes speeches about not deserting intends now to sacrifice these
+poor helpless devils? Prove it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Murguía had touched neither lover nor soldier. But what man was here, in
+boots and woolen shirt, puffing angrily at a corncob, yet sitting in judgment
+supreme on the proud Hapsburg himself? Blindly stumbling, Murguía had touched
+the inexplicable man who was of stone, and the baffled fiend that was in him
+leaped up with a cry of glee.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To prove it?&#8221; he cried, &#8220;Ai, then Lopez shall walk with
+you in our outer trenches. For in them you shall see the doomed townsmen
+themselves, a thousand townsmen, sleeping there until the dawn. Afterward, when
+Maximilian is safe, they who are still alive will be free to
+surrender.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And then&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; But Driscoll knew the temper of the siege.
+What with the chief prize lost, there would be scant mercy for surrendered
+townsmen.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;God in heaven,&#8221; he muttered fervently, &#8220;if there&#8217;s
+any to <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_433'></a>433</span>suffer, it
+might as well be the guilty one, and a thousand times better one than one
+thousand! A man&#8217;s a man, or alleged to be!&#8211;Murgie, you wait here,
+I&#8217;m going to call the others.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The others came, and heard. It was the court en banc, five Missourians and a
+Kansan. And the culprit was a Cæsar. But they hewed forth their Justice as
+rugged and huge, and as true, as would the outlaw, Michel Angelo. Like him, they
+were their own law. Nor were they nice gentlemen, these Homeric men who spat
+tobacco. Finding their goddess pandered to by those who were nice gentlemen, and
+finding the gift of these a pretty scarf over her eye, they roughly tore it
+away. For them she was not that kind of a woman.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, this prince is no Christian,&#8221; Crittenden announced in
+querulous discovery.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One thousand loyally dying for their sovereign,&#8221; Daniel mused,
+his romantic soul wavering. &#8220;Sho!&#8221; he cried the instant after,
+&#8220;that thing&#8217;s out-dated!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And the prince there&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; began the Kansan angrily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;May just go&#8211;to&#8211;the&#8211;devil!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>All swung round on one of their number. It was the parson himself who had
+pronounced sentence.</p>
+
+<p>Then they set out under the stars to attend to it.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_434'></a>434</span><a id='link_50'></a>CHAPTER XVII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Under a Spanish Cloak</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;What misadventure is so early up,<br />
+That calls our person from our morning&#8217;s rest?&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Romeo and Juliet</i>.</p> </div>
+
+<p>Just within their own bivouac four Missourians waited with eight horses.
+Driscoll and Boone, and the small limping shadow of Murguía between them, went
+on outside the sentry line toward the Alameda. When they returned, a stranger
+accompanied them, a little distance apart.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s true,&#8221; Driscoll whispered to those who had staid.
+&#8220;The trenches are filled with townsmen. <i>He</i> took me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Americans glanced once the stranger&#8217;s way, and grunted. He was a
+large man, hidden to the eyes in a Spanish cloak. For all the charity of
+darkness, he seemed ill at ease, and held himself from them, a marked figure,
+alone. A leprosy in himself tainted his every thought. He would not willingly
+come near any man. He understood English, unhappily now for him, and
+Boone&#8217;s warning as they mounted seared like vitriol. &#8220;Look out,
+Harry, don&#8217;t touch the filthy skut! It&#8217;ll take the rotting of death
+to clean your fingers.&#8221; After that, even Murguía drew involuntarily away
+from the stranger.</p>
+
+<p>They circled the town widely, having only Republican challenges to quiet, and
+they dismounted under the trees which shade the valley to the northeast, between
+the Sangremal, or mound of La Cruz, and the besiegers&#8217; range of hills.
+Here, under La Cruz&#8217;s steep bluff, the Republican general-in-chief <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_435'></a>435</span>had his quarters, and
+here he kept a hawk&#8217;s jealous watch on the walls above, where slept his
+country&#8217;s invader.</p>
+
+<p>Open battle is clear honor, so reckoned; but it takes a brave man to dive for
+a pearl in slime. Driscoll was the one to conduct Murguía and his gloomy
+companion into the presence of General Escobedo. When he rejoined the other five
+outside the tent, he was alone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, come on,&#8221; he said as he mounted under the trees. &#8220;We
+needn&#8217;t stay for the rest of it, thank God.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For a while they rode in silence back toward their camp. They passed under
+the aqueduct and entered the open plain. Then the parson stretched out his hand
+to the pommel of Driscoll&#8217;s saddle.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well?&#8221; he ventured softly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Clem, it&#8217;s done.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The others crowded their horses nearer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I want to tell you all,&#8221; Driscoll abruptly began again. &#8220;I
+want to tell you that I&#8217;ve just seen the strangest thing of my whole life,
+right back there in that tent. I&#8211;well, it&#8217;s simply flattened me
+out!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mean Lopez, Din?&#8221; one asked tentatively.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lopez? No, no, there&#8217;s nothing strange in him. Any low hound
+will sell out to save his hide. No, Dan, I mean the other. I mean the old man.
+He&#8217;s the one who used to run the blockade off Mobile, and a
+whiter-livered, more contemptible old grandmother I never hope to see anywhere,
+no, never! Yet not a month ago, the day of that Cimatario scrimmage, I found him
+on the battlefield, and he had been wounded. But he didn&#8217;t seem to know
+it. He didn&#8217;t even seem to know that the shells were still banging all
+around him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;An <i>old</i> coward, too!&#8221; someone muttered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But wait. He used to be one thing worse, one thing more, than a
+coward. He was a miser, and such a miser that he <i>made</i> himself face danger.
+You should have seen him running a <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_436'></a>436</span> blockade, with the Yankees chasing behind. He
+trembled&#8211;I tell you, he trembled like a withered cottonwood leaf on a
+broken stem. Yet he whined against stoking with turpentine, because it cost a
+little more. I&#8217;d &#8217;a&#8217; thought, I did then, that the miser was
+in his bones until the last trumpet. But to-night, back in that tent just
+now&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, he <i>refused</i> money! He refused <i>gold</i>! He didn&#8217;t
+seem to know what it was, any more than he did bullets a month ago. Escobedo
+asked him his price, and shoved a glittering heap across the table at him. You
+saw how he acted when we offered him something to eat? Well, he looked the same
+way at the gold. He acted impatient. He didn&#8217;t want to see anything except
+Lopez. But you&#8217;d have called it a miser&#8217;s eagerness, the way he
+watched that Lopez. Only a miser don&#8217;t exult when it&#8217;s someone else
+who pockets the money.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Maybe they&#8217;ll divide?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not much, because Murgie could have had his share over and above. No,
+it wasn&#8217;t that. It wasn&#8217;t the gold. He was greedy&#8211;for a soul!
+He wanted to see Lopez <i>bought</i>, and no hitch. And when it was done, he wet
+those catfish lips of his with his tongue. I believe the devil in hell must look
+just that way when he gets some poor sinner. But to think of that old skinflint,
+to think of that old feeble cowardly shark not <i>knowing</i> danger, not
+<i>knowing</i> money&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come, Din,&#8221; the parson&#8217;s blessed, cheery voice
+interrupted, &#8220;let&#8217;s hurry back and wash our hands. Then we&#8217;ll
+<i>all</i> feel better.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While the six Americans rode gloomily away from what they had done, and from
+their own thoughts as they best could, a stealthy company was forming under the
+trees among the tents of the Republican general. After a time the seeming
+spectres began to move in unison, an undulating wave that <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_437'></a>437</span>spread as the grayish shadow of a low
+hanging cloud. The dim figures slowly swept the little space of valley, on
+toward the steep slope of La Cruz, and soon they were climbing, silently
+creeping, nearer and nearer the dark walls above.</p>
+
+<p>Two seemed the leaders, and the third limped close behind. But one of the
+first two held a pistol ever near the heart of his companion, who was wrapped to
+the eyes in a Spanish cloak.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who goes&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; cried an Imperialist sentry.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your colonel, fool!&#8221; he of the cloak stopped him short.
+&#8220;I, Miguel Lopez. I am changing the guard. Return now to your barracks and
+get what sleep you can before morning. One of these men with me will take your
+place.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In like manner each later challenge was satisfied, and so on to a
+cannon-battered crevice in the wall. The spectres passed through the gap there
+into a field of graves on the mound&#8217;s level summit. The earth had an
+uncanny softness under their tread. The plots were mostly fresh, of slain
+Imperialists still keeping their rank according to battalion. But the living,
+the Reserve Brigade, were here as well, sleeping over the dead. They stirred and
+grumbled at being disturbed, but thought then no more of the intruders. The
+secret plans for the daybreak attack explained everything. Their colonel, whose
+voice they knew, was shifting forces in preparation. But when the dawn came,
+they awoke to find their weapons gone, and themselves defenseless prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the spectral troop fell away to hold the cemetery, but the rest kept
+on, and entered the monastery garden. Here there was a battery of one gun, whose
+muzzle pointed the way to the Republican camp. Without a sound the Imperialist
+gunners were replaced by Republicans. The cannon was one captured during the
+Cimatario fight. It was called &#8220;La Tempestad,&#8221; and bore an
+inscription, &#8220;The Last Argument of Nations.&#8221; Its new possessors
+turned the muzzle squarely on <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_438'></a>438</span>the monastery, not fifty yards away, where
+Maximilian lay then asleep.</p>
+
+<p>The shadowy host did not linger in the monastery itself. They swept through
+hastily, in at the garden entrance, along the corridor, and out by the great
+portico door upon La Cruz Plaza. They had passed the citadel. The town lay
+before them. But in the Plaza were more cannon, which had been taken from the
+trenches and massed for the supreme effort. They lay silent, under the silent
+bells of the church. They lay under the giant Cross of the Apparition, which was
+adorned by the Inditos with garlands in vague memory of pagan rites on that very
+spot. They lay under the splendid Arabian palms. They lay among defenders. To
+take them was like prowling with a torch among broken casks of gunpowder. Not a
+shot must be fired until the thing was done. Otherwise, a quick second shot was
+to find the heart of Lopez. So Lopez was exceedingly cautious. However, he
+commanded here. He was the Emperor&#8217;s favorite. Squad after squad, the
+drowsy Imperialists moved off, letting the strangers relieve them. So the
+critical work was achieved, even as day appeared over the eastern hills. Then he
+who had kept so close to Lopez put his revolver away.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your bargain is fulfilled, señor,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Accordingly,
+here&#8217;s the paper I was to give you. It is your safe conduct throughout the
+Republic. You are free. Go!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez clutched the thing that meant his life, but as his fingers tightened
+over it, his first greed vanished. He stared about him uncertainly. The Plaza
+swarmed with men. They were the gray battalion he had led there. In the dawning
+light they were still gray. They were the Supremos Poderes de la República. De
+la República? Yes, of the enemy, and he had brought them. But it was as though
+he had just awakened, and found them there. The enemy? The enemy was in La Cruz!
+With a sharp cry, he turned and ran back into the <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_439'></a>439</span>monastery. He brushed aside the hateful
+gray uniforms. He ran panting up the stone steps. In the dark hall above he
+stopped at a cell door, and pounded, and tugged frantically at its latch.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Señor, awake! Hurry! We are betrayed! Hurry!
+Escape&#8211;escape&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Within came a startled sleepy voice, &#8220;What, what&#8217;s&#8211;&#8221;
+which changed at once to reproving dignity. &#8220;Can it
+be?&#8211;Lopez!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But señor&#8211;sire&#8211;the Chinacos, the Republicans, they are
+here already!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Colonel Lopez!&#8221; In its shocked surprise the voice was edged with
+rebuke. &#8220;Man, man, where are your years of training near my person? One
+would think you some boorish night-watchman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez outside the door dropped his hands, and fell abjectedly silent, as
+servilely abashed in his lapse of etiquette as though he stood the traitor
+unmasked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now then, Miguel,&#8221; spoke the Emperor more kindly, &#8220;go to
+General Mejía and the others. Let them have the goodness to attend me
+here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lopez turned on down the corridor, stopped at the doors of Generals Mejía and
+Castillo, and the Prince Salm-Salm. At each he tapped lightly, as one dazed, and
+announced that the enemy surrounded them. Then, remembering, he fled.</p>
+
+<p>Within the thick walls that narrowed his state into a friar&#8217;s cell,
+Maximilian rose from his iron couch. &#8220;So,&#8221; he sighed, almost in
+relief, &#8220;Destiny means it to end in this way.&#8221; He was calm, and he
+attired himself carefully. He chose his general&#8217;s uniform, with its rich
+dark blue, and scarlet cordon. Nor did he forget the star of some royal order,
+which to common men seemed a cotillion favor. When he should step forth that
+morning, it was to play a world rôle. The prince must be serene in the moment of
+trial. The nations must know that <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_440'></a>440</span>Destiny had him in hand. And musing thus, he parted
+his golden beard with dainty precision. Within a month Europe would acclaim him
+reverently. He noted that his high boots glistened. Mejía and the other two,
+hurrying to him, fell back in admiration to behold how placid he was.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Gentlemen,&#8221; said he, &#8220;to leave here, or die! There&#8217;s
+nothing else.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He noticed a soft heap at the door, and picked it up.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lopez&#8217;s cloak, a disguise!&#8221; he exclaimed. &#8220;God bless
+the poor fellow, he left it for me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He wrapped the garment about him, took his pistols, and led the way. In the
+dark corridor down stairs a Republican sentry mistook the cool, commanding
+figure for one of his own generals, and presented arms. Maximilian gravely
+saluted, and with his three companions passed out.</p>
+
+<p>The Plaza was a blurred scene of confusion. Men were awakening to find their
+arms gone, and themselves covered by muskets. Shots had been fired. Curses
+abounded. Entire companies were being marched away as prisoners. Republican
+officers either thought that Maximilian was Lopez, from his cloak and height, or
+were too distracted to notice. It is possible, too, that the victors would have
+had him escape, that they might not have the trouble of his disposal, and that
+they preferred that he should not thrust it on them. At any rate, he and the
+three behind pushed their way undisturbed through cannon and brown stolid men in
+gray, and reached the spot where the Plaza narrows into a street that gently
+slopes down into the town. But here a guard was posted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pues, hombre, they&#8217;re civilians, let them pass.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian turned on him who spoke, and beheld the blackmailer, scout,
+deserter, Don Tiburcio. He wore now the uniform of a Republican explorador. His
+crossed eye gleamed so humorously up at the Emperor, it might have been
+insolence, but it was only the proffered sharing of a jest. His matter-of-fact
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_441'></a>441</span>tone prevailed, and
+the guard stood aside. The four passed on down the street. In comical melancholy
+Don Tiburcio looked after them, and then he perceived that a fifth had slipped
+by the guard and was following closely behind.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The saints help us&#8211;help <i>him</i>, it&#8217;s Murguía!&#8221;
+Tiburcio muttered in horror. He recalled the night when María de la Luz was
+found dead.</p>
+
+<p>The old man, coatless, barefoot, in his pantaloons of Imperial green, limped
+desperately to keep pace with the great strides of the four ahead. The broad
+crimson stripe down each pant leg would break, straighten, break again, in
+bizarre accord, with every painful step. It was a lope, and he more like a
+starved wolf, a lean, persistent shadow, ever ready for the chance to
+spring.</p>
+
+<p>By hastening down into the town, Maximilian thought to rally what forces were
+there for a last stand; or, to be more exact, for a last tableau. The end of his
+empire must have éclat. He found the town panic-stricken, since all could see
+the Republic&#8217;s standard over the towers of La Cruz. Dumfounded officers
+had gotten to housetops, and were using their glasses. They beheld the enemy as
+busy as scurrying ants on the surrounding hills. Clouds of men from every point
+were sweeping across the llano toward the town. The advance were already in the
+narrow streets. Killing, looting, had begun. Clanging bells, hoof beats, yells,
+musketry, and in the distance deep-voiced cannon! The Emperor and his three
+companions, with the malignant shadow hovering ever near, quickened their course
+through the town. They paused only to dispatch couriers. Miramon, when found,
+was to come at all speed with every possible man to the Cerro de las Campanas.
+They gained the adobe suburbs on the western edge, leaving behind the fearsome
+rising tide of human sound. An officer forced the Emperor to mount his horse.
+Many joined their flight. They crossed broken fields, and reached the summit of
+the wedge-shaped <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_442'></a>442</span>rock called las Campanas. Close behind, emerging
+from the town, were the first pursuers, who quickly grew to a thick black fringe
+around the hill. Shells were falling. The heavens seemed to flower vengefully,
+with the Campanas knoll as the one focus. The adobe stockade crowning the top
+was soon packed with fugitives, until those within, like shipwrecked creatures
+on a raft, barred out those still coming. The whisper spread that in the town
+Miramon had been taken shot through the cheek after shooting many others. The
+panic grew. Men knew themselves at bay. They recognized the deathtrap. On the
+outlying heights the cannon had their range. Grenades, bombs, grape, and
+canister, fell as hail.</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor turned to General Mejía.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Could we cut our way out?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Mejía put down his glasses. He paused, then shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>Straightway an orderly with a white flag was sent down the hill. But the
+firing did not cease for that. Maximilian, seeing that he could make no terms
+for those around him, seeing them fall by scores instead, himself followed the
+orderly; and following him, was the ever faithful shadow.</p>
+
+<p>From out the dark fringe a man on a white horse, a black bearded man with
+monstrous flapping ears, General Escobedo, rode forth to meet the Hapsburg. Then
+Maximilian forgot the eyes of the world, and thought of her who had suffered
+with him, who had suffered more than he, to hazard this, their dream.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is our throne, Charlotte,&#8221; he murmured, and gave up his
+sword.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_443'></a>443</span><a id='link_51'></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>El Chaparrito</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Meagre were his looks,<br />
+Sharp misery had worn him to the bones.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Romeo and Juliet.</i></p> </div>
+
+<p>A few days later Jacqueline and Berthe attended a performance at the Teatro
+de Iturbide. It was the first held there since the beginning of the siege, and
+to the place late foes were thronging eagerly in what seemed a most inordinate
+thirst for amusement. The playhouse was without a roof. Its metal covering had
+been widely sown in the shape of bullets, and only a canvas overhead kept out
+the sun. But the broiling pit was filled, as well as circling tier over tier of
+loges, and in the street a great crowd jostled and surged, like people who stare
+at the dead walls of a jail because a man is being hanged inside. If the curious
+cannot have both Time and Space to their liking, then the more ghoulish will
+gorge themselves on the coincidence of Time alone. &#8220;Now,&#8221; they
+whisper awesomely, &#8220;his hands and feet are being strapped! What
+<i>must</i> he be thinking this very instant, and we standing here?&#8221; So
+those outside the Teatro de Iturbide sweated patiently. In all evidence it was
+not an ordinary performance scheduled for that day.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Buzzards?&#8221; said Jacqueline, looking up and seeing their
+outspread wings shadowed on the canvas roof, &#8220;Fi donc, <i>that</i> effect
+is long since shabby!&#8221; But it chilled her, nevertheless.</p>
+
+<p>The curtain was up. A drop, showing fields in green and a receding road in
+brown, filled the back. The actors seemed actors solely, and this idea persisted
+with the Frenchwoman, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_444'></a>444</span>as with many another, throughout. Seven military
+characters arranged themselves in a kind of state on the unpainted, slanting
+stage. They might have been supernumeraries, like the &#8220;senators&#8221; in
+&#8220;Othello.&#8221; At least their severe demeanor became them awkwardly.
+They wore uniforms, but not of appalling rank. He who presided was only a
+lieutenant colonel, the other six were captains. Before them, each on a square
+stool, sat two generals, one with a bandaged cheek. There were legal gentlemen
+in plain black, while guards at stiff attention here and there completed the
+grouping. Beyond any doubt, it was a trial scene. And to confirm the surmise,
+one of the legal gentlemen, a very peaceable appearing youth, arose and in the
+Republic&#8217;s name demanded the lives of Miguel Miramon and Tomas
+Mejía&#8211;here he indicated the two generals&#8211;and with impressive
+cadence, also in the Republic&#8217;s name, demanded likewise the life of
+Fernando Maximiliano de Hapsburgo. The lieutenant colonel and the captains
+knitted their seven tawny brows portentously, but they were not in the least
+astounded at such a very extraordinary request.</p>
+
+<p>There was no need of a theatrical production at all. Other Imperialists had
+not been so unnecessarily distinguished, as for instance, General Mendez, that
+ancient enemy of Régules and executioner of Republicans under the Black Decree.
+Caught the day Querétaro fell, he was shot in the back as a traitor. Yet he met
+a legal death. Taken in armed defiance of the Republic, identity established,
+the hollow square and shooting squad, such was the routine prescribed. But the
+lesser official relics of the Empire, six hundred in all, escaped generally with
+a few months of prison. The rank and file of the betrayed army had already
+melted away. But for the three arch-culprits a trial was deemed requisite, and
+President Juarez, in San Luis Potosi, so ordered. Hence the stage setting as
+above described.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian was at first surprised. He had said to Escobedo, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_445'></a>445</span>&#8220;I am ready to go
+whenever you can favor me with an escort to the coast, but first I require
+assurance that my loyal followers shall not suffer.&#8221; But the Republican
+chief had smiled oddly, and locked him up. Later, however, Maximilian had seemed
+content. A trial for his life, that would add the last needed glamour to the
+prestige of his return to Europe. So he affably humored his captors, and was
+rewarded with humiliation&#8211;his judges could hardly be more obscure. So as
+he was genuinely sick abed, he got himself excused from playing his part in the
+Teatro Iturbide.</p>
+
+<p>The soi-disant Emperor had four conscientious defenders, chosen from
+Republican jurists, two of whom were then in San Luis to do what they might
+before Juarez. The other two spent eloquence and acumen on the court&#8217;s
+seven tawny brows. Their first point came from Maximilian himself. It was
+complacent, this point. The naïveté of it was superb.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am no longer Emperor,&#8221; so the defense ran, &#8220;nor was I
+during the siege; because, before leaving the capital, I drew up my abdication,
+which was then countersigned by my ministers. However, it was not to take effect
+until I should fall prisoner.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When the Republic recovered her breath, she felt in her amusement a wounded
+pride. This prince must think her very simple. So, she was to recognize the
+usurper&#8217;s abdication after she had fought and suffered to take the
+usurper? A captured thief draws from his pockets a quit-claim deed to the
+plunder he has stolen, and giving it to the court, would therefore go free! The
+tragedy changed for a spell to comic opera. And matters were not helped greatly
+when next were invoked &#8220;the immunities and privileges which pertain under
+any and all circumstances to an archduke of Austria.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though handicapped by their client&#8217;s arrogance, counsel yet did their
+utmost. They argued law and humanity, with tremulo effects. They prayed that
+&#8220;the greatest of victories <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_446'></a>446</span>be crowned by the greatest of pardons.&#8221; But it
+was of no use. The bloodthirsty stripling persisted in the Republic&#8217;s
+name. This Maximiliano was a Mexican. In many beautiful speeches the said
+Maximiliano had said so. Hence he could not evade responsibility to the laws of
+his adopted country. And there was, for instance, the law of 1862 concerning
+treason.</p>
+
+<p>Well, in a word, the three accused were straightway sentenced to death; and
+Escobedo, approving, named Sunday, June 16th, for the execution. It might be
+mentioned of this Escobedo that on two former occasions, when the circumstances
+were exactly reversed, Mejía had each time saved his life. Since Querétaro,
+there have been comments on the vigor of Escobedo&#8217;s memory.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Poor pliant Prince Max,&#8221; sighed Jacqueline, &#8220;he is still
+being influenced to stay in Mexico! Come, Berthe, we must make all speed to San
+Luis and see the Presidente.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr style='border:none; border-bottom:1px solid silver; height: 1px; width: 80%; text-align: center; margin: 10px auto;' />
+
+<p>In the long hall of the Palacio Munícipal at San Luis Potosi, before the
+old-fashioned desk there, sat an Indian. He was low and squat and pock-marked,
+and there was an ugly scar, livid against yellow, across the upper lip. He had a
+large mouth, high cheek-bones, and swarthy skin with a copperish tinge. He was a
+pure-blooded Indian. At twelve he did not know a word of Spanish. His race, the
+Zapotecas of Oaxaca, had all but been extinguished by the Conquest. Except for
+the ungainly black he wore&#8211;excepting, too, his character&#8211;he might
+have been a peon, or still the servant he once had been. But the homely, heavy
+features of his round head did not, in any sense, repel. On the contrary, the
+countenance was frank, though yet inscrutable. The piercing black eyes were good
+eyes, and indomitable, like his muscled jaw. The flat, square forehead made one
+aware of intellect, and of force. So short and thick, he looked a sluggish man,
+but it was the phlegm of a rock, the calm of strength, and <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_447'></a>447</span>whatever the peril, almost inanimate.
+His country called him Benemérito de América, a title the noblest and rarest in
+its Spartan hint of civic virtue.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian&#8217;s desk was littered with messages from the princes of the
+earth. Like his expiring race, he had fought their order, and they had made of
+him a wandering fugitive. But now they were imploring him for one of their
+number, whose surrendered sword that moment lay across their petitions. Two of
+the letters, but not from princes, he had read with deep consideration. One was
+from the President of the United States, the other from Victor Hugo. But these
+also he shoved from him, though regretfully, and now he was gazing out over the
+Plaza, the line of his jaw as inflexible as ever.</p>
+
+<p>But they were not many, the moments this man had to himself, and it was not
+long before a gendarme in coarse blue, serving as an orderly, disturbed him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, show her in then,&#8221; he said, frowning at the card laid on
+his desk, nor did he rise when an unusually beautiful but very grave young woman
+entered the room.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At your orders, Señorita de&#8211;d&#8217;Aumerle. You come, I suppose, to
+save him?&#8211;But,&#8221; he added with the austerity of a parent, &#8220;it
+is not difficult to imagine why <i>you</i> are interested.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, Señor Presidente,&#8221; he heard himself quietly contradicted,
+&#8220;Your Excellency can not imagine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He looked up, into a pair of honest gray eyes. But her tone had already told
+him enough. He rose to his feet in rugged courtesy. The Indian was a wise man,
+and he knew now that other men had whispered falsely about one exquisite
+Parisienne.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pardon me, child,&#8221; he said gently. &#8220;No, I cannot
+imagine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Impulsively Jacqueline leaned over the desk and gave him her hand.
+&#8220;Thank you,&#8221; she said, in a voice that trembled unexpectedly. From
+that moment, too, she abandoned tactics. The wiles of courts would avail nothing
+against the primitive straightforwardness of the man before her. It seemed,
+moreover, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_448'></a>448</span>good and
+homely, to cast them aside. She took a seat near the window, since he remained
+standing until she did, and waited. He should speak first, and afterward, she
+would accept. For there was nothing, she felt, that she could say. O rare tongue
+of woman, to so respect the leash of intuitions!</p>
+
+<p>As for Don Benito Juarez, he had not meant to speak at all. But knowing her
+now to be not what he had thought, he spoke as he had not to any plenipotentiary
+of any crowned head.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are a Frenchwoman, señorita,&#8221; he began. &#8220;Tell me, your
+coming must be explained by that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now,&#8221; said Jacqueline, smiling on him cordially, &#8220;Your
+Excellency&#8217;s imagination is getting better.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you wish to save Maximilian,&#8221; the Presidente stated, rather
+than questioned, &#8220;because he is a victim of France.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because he will be considered so.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The old Roman smiled. &#8220;My dear young lady,&#8221; he said, &#8220;an
+answer to France is the least of my obligations. Yet you expect it, and ask for
+clemency, though I deny all the great nations?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh señor, what&#8217;s the use? Let him go!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The keen black eyes regarded her quizzically. &#8220;Do you know,&#8221; he
+said, &#8220;this is the second time I&#8217;ve heard that question to-day? One
+of our American officers had himself put in command of the escort for
+Maximilian&#8217;s two lawyers here, and now I believe he did it simply because
+he too wanted to know, &#8216;What&#8217;s the use?&#8217; It was anti-climax, and a
+wet blanket over the fervid eloquence of the two lawyers. But nevertheless, he
+hit the one argument.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In a word, why not brush aside our archduke? He&#8217;s harmless, now,
+he&#8217;s insignificant? Why not take from him the only dignity left, that of
+dying?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, Señor Juarez! Of course!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_449'></a>449</span>&#8220;And at
+the same time win bright renown for ourselves, instead of what will be called
+harsh cruelty?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Surely!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The smile vanished. The large mouth closed tightly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; spoke the judge of iron. &#8220;He dies! That is the truest
+mercy, a mercy to those who might otherwise follow him here. And we, señorita,
+we have already suffered enough from Europe.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the other two?&#8221; pleaded Jacqueline. &#8220;They are
+Mexicans.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They are that, por Dios, and they make me proud of my race. Miramon,
+Mejía, they are the leaven. They redeem Lopez, they redeem Marquez, they redeem
+the deserters who now so largely form my armies, who before had deserted me for
+the French invasion. By the signal example of these two men to die to-morrow,
+the world shall know that Mexicans are not all traitors. And as we grow, we
+Mexicans, we may grow beyond the empty loyalty of glowing Spanish words.
+Remembering such an example, we may come to be, in our very hearts, breathing
+things of honor. We have been shackled because of infamy during the last
+centuries. Can you wonder, then, that we use the treacherous weapon of the
+Conquistadores?&#8211;But that&#8217;s apart. The loyalty of Miramon and Mejía
+has been loyalty to an invader, a wrong their country will not forgive. But our
+cultured gentleman of Europe, our vain fool who would regenerate the poor
+Indito, he will perhaps not feel so ashamed of us, not when he has two such
+companions in death, and not when he learns, though painfully, that the rod of
+Mexican justice respects neither immunity nor privilege of birth. There,
+señorita, I&#8217;ve had to talk more about this one individual than about the
+hundreds of others who have been punished for much less than he.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But it must be terrible to die, señor. And <i>he</i> doesn&#8217;t
+realize, while a delay of only a few days&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_450'></a>450</span>&#8220;Would
+suffice for his escape?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline reddened guiltily. &#8220;No, to prepare for his end,&#8221; she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>The Presidente smiled tolerantly. &#8220;Never fear,&#8221; he answered first
+her confusion, &#8220;our justice stands committed, and to wink at escape now
+would be cowardly. Yet, whether you meant it or not, you are right, and the
+execution stands postponed until the nineteenth. A doomed man may learn much in
+three days to comfort him&#8211;on his way. But the criminal of all is
+lacking.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Marquez, you mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;U&#8217;m, him also. But I was thinking of Louis Napoleon,
+<i>and</i> his wife.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The order of postponement, being openly telegraphed to Escobedo at Querétaro,
+was known at once in San Luis, and caused a fury of excitement. For none doubted
+but that it meant eventual pardon. The tender hearted rejoiced. The rabid ones
+muttered. The wise shook dubious heads. And even as Jacqueline and Berthe were
+hurrying back to Querétaro in the canvas-covered coach, another caller was
+admitted roundly on the president&#8217;s privacy, without so much as being
+announced. Juarez wondered if his orderly had gone crazy, for the newcomer thus
+obsequiously presented looked to be a species of ancient vagabond.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, what is it?&#8221; the President asked, frowning heavily. He was
+curiously irritated. &#8220;Stay,&#8221; he interposed, &#8220;those dusty,
+muddy rags you have on, that green and red, that&#8217;s not a Republican
+uniform?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s of the Batallon del Emperador,&#8221; replied the stranger,
+unabashed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bless me the saints! Well, well, well, I suppose you, too, want to
+save your Maximilian. But how does it happen that you&#8217;re not under guard
+yourself?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For answer the old man came nearer. He limped feebly, <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_451'></a>451</span>and the while he unbuttoned his coarse
+red jacket. Juarez watched him sluggishly, but with a hand upon a revolver under
+the papers on his desk. The stranger, however, drew forth nothing more
+sensational than five or six square bits of parchment. Yet these aroused the
+President more than a weapon could have done. They were blank, except at the
+bottom, and there the President read his own signature, &#8220;Benito Juarez,
+Libertad y Reforma.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your&#8211;Your Excellency remembers?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How well!&#8221; The admission came involuntarily. Juarez was laboring
+under an emotion that he could not at first control. He stared at his visitor in
+a new wonder. So gaunt, so hollow, so utterly insignificant! The
+President&#8217;s wonder grew.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8211;you gained entrance here by one of these slips?&#8221; he
+questioned sharply. The old man nodded. &#8220;And it was countersigned
+by&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Si señor, by El Chaparrito. The slip said, &#8216;Admit bearer at
+once.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then I cannot blame my orderly! But who are you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Anastasio Murguía, to serve Your Mercy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bien, Señor Murguía, and now will you explain what no other messenger
+from our unknown friend has done? Who&#8211;who is El Chaparrito?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But, like the wretched messengers who had gone before, Anastasio Murguía only
+shrugged his shoulders blankly. &#8220;Your Excellency does not know El
+Chaparrito?&#8221; he asked. &#8220;And yet you trusted him, a stranger, with
+your signature?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a crafty stress on his words.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, señor,&#8221; Juarez placidly inquired, &#8220;what if a chief
+magistrate did not know when to trust? You are to be informed, then, that one
+year ago last October, at Chihuahua, I was saved from a French flying column by
+an Indito. The <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_452'></a>452</span>poor
+wretch had run across the desert with his warning. But he could prove nothing.
+He couldn&#8217;t even tell who sent him, except that it was a short gentleman,
+a señor chaparro. Yet it was well for the Republic that I took his word and
+fled. Later, when I reached the Rio Grande, and he wanted my signature to some
+blank squares of parchment, which he was to take back to his señor
+chaparro&#8211;well, señor, I trusted again. That Indito in breech-clout
+obtained my autograph some twenty times over.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The President, however, might have added that every Republican officer was
+advised first to test any warning on any bit of parchment signed &#8220;Benito
+Juarez.&#8221; Yet, as a matter of fact, there came to be such magic in the name
+of El Chaparrito that the name of Juarez thereto was only needed as a guarantee
+that the lesser name was genuine.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, then, Señor Emissary,&#8221; said the President, &#8220;what
+danger hangs over our Republic this time?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;None, señor. I return the parchment squares left over. El&#8211;El
+Chaparrito has no more thoughts for the Republic. He thinks,&#8221; and Murguía
+ground his knuckles into the desk top, &#8220;he thinks of no one, of no
+one&#8211;except Maximilian! And he has never thought of aught else. The
+Republic? Bah, the Republic was only his tool, Señor Presidente. Only his tool,
+but the tool needed sharpening. They say that&#8217;s the way with the
+guillotine, eh, Señor Presidente?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But hombre&#8211;No, our unseen friend of the Republic, our
+Chaparrito, would not ask for Maximilian&#8217;s pardon?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Pardon!</i>&#8221;&#8211;It was fairly a cry of
+rage&#8211;&#8220;Yet you, Señor Presidente, <i>you</i> postpone the execution!
+<i>You</i> mean to pardon him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Indeed?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, I&#8211;I think so. But you shall not, Señor Presidente. I come
+to, to&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_453'></a>453</span>&#8220;Now
+that&#8217;s curious. Possibly I, too, am to be sharpened into a kind of
+guillotine, eh, señor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All the others were,&#8221; Murguía returned stubbornly. &#8220;That
+is, all except one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ha, then El Chaparrito found one man who was incorruptible?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes. But still Your Excellency is mistaken. El Chaparrito did not use
+money to win his agents. That, señor, is the unsafest way of all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You would tell me, señor, that El Chaparrito had a safe
+way?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, and it was absolute. He awakened memory, the memory, Señor
+Presidente, of wrongs. For example, there was Your Excellency&#8217;s savior in
+breech-clout. He once lived in a forest village down in the Huasteca. One night
+Dupin came and burned the huts, and the Indito&#8217;s family perished with
+other women and children there. That village alone gave the Chaparrito many
+another messenger or spy, but memories left by the Empire were plentiful enough
+everywhere, and cheap. The Chaparrito simply drafted them, that was all. But
+once his system failed. Yet&#8211;well the man in that case was an American, and
+<i>they</i> are liable to be exceptions to any rule, to any passion. But in the
+end he was safe enough too, though something else, that I can&#8217;t
+understand, made him so.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what did he do, this American?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He took me to Escobedo.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I took Lopez. That same night Querétaro fell.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>You?</i> Now&#8211;now to what particular wrong in <i>your</i> case,
+señor, does the Republic stand thus indebted?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Juarez put the question lightly, even patronizingly. But his steadfast gaze
+had not once left his gaunt and battered visitor. By design, too, he had not
+asked a second time who the Chaparrito was, because he saw, or felt, that the
+old man <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_454'></a>454</span>knew,
+though former emissaries from that mysterious source had not known. And Juarez
+meant to possess the secret. But with his casual irony he never looked for any
+such kindling of memory as then flashed deep in the cavernous sockets opposite
+him. The eyes of the aged man glowed and darkened, glowed and darkened, and
+seemed the very breathing of some famished beast. It was a thing to startle even
+Benito Juarez, who during many, many years had learned the meaning of civil war.
+The President leaped to his feet, pointing a finger.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are,&#8221; he cried, &#8220;yes, <i>you</i> are the
+Chaparrito!&#8211;No?&#8211;Yes! Ha, I&#8217;ve struck, I&#8217;ve
+struck!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had indeed. The colossal guile and intellect and will, the giant whom men
+in awe called El Chaparrito, was only old, withered Anastasio Murguía. But the
+astute Juarez <i>knew</i> that he was right. He knew it in that one look of
+consuming, conquering hate. He knew the giant in that hate. The feeble flesh,
+Anastasio Murguía, was an incident. Yet even so, only the President&#8217;s
+tenacity held him to where his instinct had leapt. For under discovery Murguía
+was changed to a huddled, abject creature, stammering denial. Yet it must be
+true, it must. The strangest, the most weird of contrasts in the same soul and
+body&#8211;yet it must, it <i>was</i> true!</p>
+
+<p>And Murguía? He might have asked for reward, and had it. But his was rankest
+despair. His work was not finished, his goal not attained. And now his most
+potent instrument of all, the Chaparrito, was miserably identified in his own
+self, was taken from him.</p>
+
+<p>Juarez rose and touched his shoulder, &#8220;Come,&#8221; he said,
+&#8220;there&#8217;s much too much tension here. Now then, sit down, so. Let me
+see, you said your name was&#8211;yes, Murguía. But&#8211;why, Dios mio,
+that&#8217;s the Huasteca miser! Well, well, well, and so you are that rich old
+hacendado who never gave even a fanega of corn to Republic or French either,
+unless <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_455'></a>455</span>frightened
+into it? But hombre, we&#8217;ve had <i>big</i> sums from the Chaparrito, and
+all unasked!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And yet must it still be true, yet must even this contrast accord. El
+Chaparrito had indeed given munificently. But in each case it was to bridge a
+crisis. As the shrewdest general he knew a vital campaign, and aided, if need
+be. But on a useless one the Republic&#8217;s soldiers might starve, might
+freeze, might bleed and die, without ever the most niggardly solace ever
+reaching them from El Chaparrito. Economy was applied to vengeance, and made it
+unspeakably grim.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Once though,&#8221; Juarez pursued, &#8220;you all but lost your
+Maximilian? I mean last fall when he started for the coast. He could have
+escaped to Europe.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I know,&#8221; said Murguía quietly, &#8220;but I was near him. If he
+had not turned back, I would have done it myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The justice which Your Excellency has just postponed three
+days.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dios mio, but our Chaparrito is a dangerous person! He&#8217;d have to
+be locked up if Maximilian were pardoned.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But&#8211;but Your Excellency will not pardon him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To be sure, I had forgotten. I am to be given a memory.
+Well?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Excellency remembers, he remembers Zacatecas?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Last February? Certainly I do. Miramon came, but a warning from El
+Chaparrito, from you, came first, and a last time I escaped. As it was, I was
+reported captured, and I sometimes wonder what Maximilian would have done had
+that report been true.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If I should tell you, señor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, that is beyond even you, since Maximilian has never had the chance
+to decide my fate.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he did decide, señor. He got word that you were taken at
+Zacatecas, and at once he sent orders to Miramon as <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_456'></a>456</span>to your treatment. But Miramon was
+already defeated, already fleeing to Querétaro.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And the orders, the orders from Maximilian?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They never arrived. They were intercepted. They&#8211;yes, here they
+are, but before reading them, will Your Excellency promise to imagine himself in
+Miramon&#8217;s power?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I would, naturally. Come, señor, hand them over.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It made curious reading, that weather-blotched dispatch. For Don Benito
+Juarez it was reading as curious as a man may ever expect to come by. In the
+handwriting of his prisoner, he read his own death sentence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your&#8211;Your Excellency sees?&#8221; Murguía stammered
+hungrily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;H&#8217;m, what, for example?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, that&#8211;that Maximilian would not have pardoned?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;On the contrary, señor mio, that is precisely what the generous
+Maximilian did intend. Listen&#8211;Miramon was &#8216;to delay execution until His
+Majesty should pass upon it.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No&#8211;no, Your Excellency, he would not have&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;O ho, so you think you&#8217;ve missed your last stroke! You think
+that there is no memory for me in this dispatch! But don&#8217;t whine so,
+because, man, there is, there is! It may not be the memory of my intended death,
+but it is the memory of&#8211;intended insult. Oh, what a patriot he must have
+thought me, this good, regenerating prince! He had already offered to make me
+chief justice. But this time he would have saved me from his own Black Decree.
+And I would have been touched by his clemency? I would have accepted, the
+grateful tears streaming from my eyes? And thus I would be regenerated? It
+sounds beautiful. It sounds like the chivalrous Middle Ages, when there were
+Black Princes along with the Black Decrees. My liege lord <i>he</i> would have
+been, but my liege Patria, what of her?&#8211;Well, well, well, he has three
+days in <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_457'></a>457</span> which to
+understand me better, and to think of his own regeneration a little.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then,&#8221; cried Murgía, limping gleefully toward him, &#8220;then
+there will be no pardon?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see,&#8221; said Juarez, suddenly cold and very calm, &#8220;I am
+now corrupted. I am now safe, like the others. Take that chair, wait!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Saying which the Presidente left his desk, clapped his hands for the orderly,
+and seated himself near the window. To the orderly he said, &#8220;Go to the
+diligence office across the Plaza. Ask for Colonel Driscoll, the American
+officer who commands the escort of the two lawyers. Say that I wish to see him
+here at once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When Driscoll appeared, Juarez put to him this question,
+&#8220;Colonel&#8211;I&#8217;ll say &#8216;General&#8217; whenever you decide to be a
+citizen among us&#8211;Colonel, can you reach Querétaro early to-morrow morning
+by riding all night?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not with my own horse, sir. He&#8217;s getting old, and deserves
+better.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then it&#8217;s all right, señor. You will take any horse you want. I
+have telegraphed to stop the execution, but there&#8217;s been no reply. You
+must therefore see General Escobedo yourself. Look on my desk. Do you find a
+packet there?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sealed? Well, break it open. Now read the contents to my visitor
+here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll unfolded a long sheet of foolscap, and began to read. Murguía the
+while fidgeted in an agony, but listening further, his limbs grew tense, and a
+hideous joy overspread his face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;But at sunrise of the nineteenth you will execute the sentence
+already approved.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners were not to be deceived by false hopes. There would be no
+further appeal. The last, the final decision, had been made.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_458'></a>458</span>&#8220;I have
+signed it, I believe, Colonel Driscoll?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then seal it again, and hurry! Good-bye, sir, good-bye.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When Driscoll was gone, the Benemérito of America turned to the grinning
+hyena-like old man who was his visitor. His own dark features were passionless,
+impenetrable.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You observe, señor,&#8221; he said, &#8220;that Justice does not
+require corrupting, nor even a memory. So let El Chaparrito add this to his
+philosophy, that he need not boast again of an infallible spur to civic loyalty,
+for he will never find it, nor I. And yet&#8211;there is patriotism.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_459'></a>459</span><a id='link_52'></a>CHAPTER XIX<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>In Articulo Mortis</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of the soul.... Man cannot be happy and strong until he lives in the present.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Emerson.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For Maximilian it was the eve of execution. The soul feels that there is much
+to decide at such a time, but under the nettling merciless load the soul will
+either flounder pitifully and decide nothing, else lie numb and in a half death
+vaingloriously believe that it has decided everything. So may the condemned be
+open-eyed or blind. Or, according to the police reporter, be either coward or
+stoic. But it really depends in large measure on whether realization be dulled,
+or no.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian had too late come to understand that his anointed flesh was
+violable at all. He learned it only when the death watch was actually set on his
+each remaining breath. And now he was <i>en capilla</i>, in the chapel of the
+doomed; he, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary
+and Bohemia, Count of Hapsburg, Prince of Lorraine, Emperor of Mexico, even
+He!</p>
+
+<p>They had given him the tower room of Querétaro&#8217;s old Capuchin church,
+and against the wall was an improvised altar. But the sacrament waited. The
+tapers on the snow-white cloth were as yet unlighted. Instead the Most Serene
+Archduke&#8211;Emperor no longer&#8211;read from a battered volume of Universal
+History, which, with a book&#8217;s queer vagaries, had strayed into his cell.
+He read how Charles of England had died, then he paused, blinking at the two
+candles on the rough <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_460'></a>460</span>table. They were vague shapes, they were horrors,
+which he now began to see, as the visions of Truth so often are when hazily
+perceived.</p>
+
+<p>He bitterly envied that unhappy Stuart, who, before his palace window, among
+Cavaliers and Roundheads, had died in majesty, the bright central figure in a
+tragedy of august magnitude. But for the Hapsburg how sordid, how mean, it all
+would be! He could see already the gaping, yellow faces, sympathetic in their
+stupidity. <i>They</i> would not really know that a prince was dying. The very
+guard with shouldered bayonet outside his door was a deserter, and it was this
+man, more than aught else, that gave him to chafe against his ignoble lot. The
+fellow never uttered a word, indeed; but he had a heavy, malignant eye, and each
+time he passed the large inner window that opened on the corridor he would look
+into the cell, as though to locate his prisoner. Then Maximilian could feel the
+insolent, mocking gleam upon himself, until for rage he clenched his fist.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the Most Serene Archduke&#8217;s first perception of calamity was not
+that royal blood was to flow, but that it was to flow obscurely. Even the
+ancient raven curse, the curse of the Habicht which had given his House its very
+name, was now fulfilled by unclean buzzards. He saw them each day, perched on
+the neighboring roofs.</p>
+
+<p>He sighed and turned to his book. Universal History? Yes, but for hundreds
+and hundreds of years that history of millions and millions of people was no
+more than the record of his own little family group. Such a course of reading
+for such a man held a terrible grandeur, and it must have been a unique
+sensation of pride that touched the golden-bearded, ultra-refined viking prince.
+A spoilt child he was, and though so cruelly reproved by Life, he yet could
+learn no lesson in the passing footnote that <i>he</i> would add to that family
+record. He could not see that the light which made the printed characters <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_461'></a>461</span> so dazzling, yet
+distorted them. He could not know that the commonest man of the millions and
+millions might read that Universal History by quite a different and a calmer
+light. But he was aware of the sentinel&#8217;s tread back of him, and aware too
+of the fellow&#8217;s coarse, familiar leer.</p>
+
+<p>One consolation he felt he might have had, and this was the dignity of
+martyrdom. But no one, alas, seemed to regard him as a martyr at all. He had
+begged that he alone should suffer. But the play at knightly generosity was too
+shallow. For at the time Maximilian believed that he would not suffer in any
+case. Later, though, when he knew that he must die, then with simple earnestness
+he had pleaded for Miramon and Mejía, and forgot himself altogether. But Juarez
+had hardly more than acknowledged the telegram, and now in the cell next him
+Miramon was confessing, and in the cell on his other side Mejía waited. Each of
+these two men would leave a wife and child.</p>
+
+<p>Someone knocked. &#8220;No, father, not yet,&#8221; Maximilian answered
+gently, although his mood was impatience. The confessor sighed in protest
+against the waste of precious time, but he did not move away, as he had already
+twice before during the night. Instead he came and stood at the corridor window.
+His lip trembled pityingly. There was news, he said.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian pushed back the book, and was on his feet. The priest meeting his
+eager look, shook his head sadly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It comes from&#8211;from Miramar.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian fell back. One hand groped out involuntarily, as in appeal before
+a blow. &#8220;News of Charlotte?&#8221; he asked faintly.</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte was dead, the priest told him.</p>
+
+<p>During a long time, after the priest had gone, his head lay on his arms,
+between the two candles. He heard no more the sentry challenges, nor sensed the
+menace in every slightest <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_462'></a>462</span>sound of the dark night outside. There was something
+else. &#8220;Death?&#8221; At first he did not consciously strive for an answer.
+But the question kept falling, and falling again, as a lash. The vulgar hands
+which plied the scourge, the stupid yellow faces, these no longer mattered. He
+felt the blows themselves, only the blows.</p>
+
+<p>She had died, the poor maniac! She had died, a thing for the lowliest pity.
+And this was true of the haughty child of Orleans because she had wanted a
+throne. Slowly her husband raised his head; and staring at the wall, his
+tear-dimmed eyes opened wider and wider. Because she had wanted a throne?
+Because she had wanted a dais above the meek and lowly, above those who now
+pitied her! His eyes fell on the Universal History&#8211;the family record, and
+there grew in his eyes a look of detestation. Groaning suddenly, he buried his
+head again in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>At dawn he too was to die, and because he too had craved a sceptre. Yet, and
+yet, he had meant to be an instrument of good. Born of kings, anointed by the
+Vicar of Christ, he had come as agent from the Almighty. But God had failed to
+sustain him, God had&#8211;again the blue eyes raised, but dry now, and stark in
+terror. &#8220;Yes, yes, yes,&#8221; so his reeling soul cried to him,
+&#8220;there <i>is</i> a God! There is, there is!&#8221; One sharp breath, and
+the mortal fear passed. In ghastly panic he crept back from the brink, either of
+the atheist&#8217;s despair or of the madman&#8217;s chaos. But the cost was
+heavy. Since God did exist, and God yet had failed him, then it was the
+man&#8217;s Divine Right that must be false. He, only a man, had mistaken his
+Destiny. Nay, had he a Destiny? Or why, more than another man? Here, then, was
+the cost. To keep his hope of Heaven, he stepped down among the millions and
+millions. His Divine Right, crumbling under the grandeur of partition among the
+millions, became for himself the most infinitesimal of shares, neither greater
+nor less than that of any <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_463'></a>463</span> other human being. But glorified now by the holy
+alchemy of Charity, the tiny grain became divine indeed, and he beheld it as a
+glowing spark, his own inalienable share in the rights of man. So, for a moment,
+the poet prince knew again his old-time exultation. Even Truth, he now
+perceived, had her sublimities.</p>
+
+<p>But the pall of horror fell again. To-morrow he was to die. He was to die
+because his life long he had sought to rob others of the tiny grain, of their
+God-given dignity as men, and that too, even as they were awaking to its
+possession. The vanity, the presumptuous, inconsistent vanity of it all! Under
+the dark mediæval cloak he had planned enlightenment, he, who had tried to rule
+without parliament, without constitution! He would have made a people believe in
+God&#8217;s injustice, in God&#8217;s choice of a man like them to be a demigod
+over them. Hence the blasphemous demigod had now to answer to human law. And it
+was meet and right. Purgatory was beginning on the eve of his death.</p>
+
+<p>He, the torch of Progress! Maximilian smiled scornfully on himself. He was
+only a clod of grit caught in the world&#8217;s great wheels. The foreign
+substance had wrought a discordant screech for a moment, and then was
+mercilessly ground into powder and thrust out of the bearings. He pondered on
+the first days of the Family Group, when there was extenuation; more, when there
+was necessity, for a king. At any rate the monarch then earned, or could earn,
+his pomp and state by services actually rendered. And now? The Hapsburg decided
+that there was not a more contemptible parasite on the body politic. The crowned
+head was simply the first among paupers. He had his bowl of porridge, which was
+the civil list.</p>
+
+<p>The doomed prince sank to a depth of shame that may not be conceived. He was
+humanity&#8217;s puny infant. He had dawdled among men centuries older than
+himself. His <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_464'></a>464</span>whole
+being was out of harmony with the universe. Fate had held his soul fast during
+those Dark Ages when he might have striven nobly, and now had cast it forth, an
+anachronism. It was a soul misplaced in eternity. The dire realization grew and
+grew, and with it the tragic agony, until with a sudden and the bitterest of
+cries he flung up his arms and fell heavily across the table.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My life!&#8221; he moaned in piteous begging for something he might
+not have. &#8220;My life, to live my life over again!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the first light of morning Escobedo came. The Republican general unfolded
+a paper, and began to read. But instead of the death sentence, it was reprieve.
+President Juarez had postponed execution for three days.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Three days?&#8221; Maximilian repeated, wearily shaking his head.
+&#8220;If your Republic could give me as many centuries, but three
+days!&#8211;Three days, in which to <i>live</i> my life!&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_465'></a>465</span><a id='link_53'></a>CHAPTER XX<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Knighthood&#8217;s Belated Flower</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Trusting to shew, in wordès few,<br />
+That men have an ill use<br />
+(To their own shame) women to blame,<br />
+And causeless them accuse.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>The Nut-Brown Maid.</i></p> </div>
+
+<p>Later the same morning there sounded the ineffable swish of silken petticoats
+along the corridor and the clinking of high heels on the tiles. La Señorita
+Marquesa d&#8217;Aumerle had obtained permission to visit His Most Serene Highness.
+The sentinel of the evening before was again on duty, and his evil crossed eye
+seemed to lighten with vast humor as he presented arms for the lady to pass. She
+met his insolence with a searching, level gaze.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian hastened to the door of his bare cell, and took both her hands in
+his. &#8220;I am beginning to recognize my friends,&#8221; he said simply.
+&#8220;I know, I know,&#8221; he added, &#8220;you come to tell me that you
+failed to get the pardon. But you do bring reprieve.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He would have her believe that he valued that.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline regarded steadily the tall, slight figure in black, with the
+pinioned sheep of the Golden Fleece about his neck, and she sighed. She was
+disappointed in him. She had thought that pride of race, if nothing more, would
+give him character during these last moments. She allowed, too, for the grief,
+and the remorse, in the blow of Charlotte&#8217;s death. But she was not
+prepared for the roving eyes, the disordered mind, the feverish unrest of the
+condemned prince. Had his <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_466'></a>466</span>soul, then, been a cringing one throughout the night
+just past? It was the first time she had seen him, except at a distance, since
+the day she arrived in Querétaro, for she had chosen, and perhaps maliciously,
+to disconcert the tongue of slander. Hence she could not picture the ravages of
+sickness and anxiety, until now when she beheld his haggard face. It was one to
+bring a pang. The cheeks were hollow, the lines sharply drawn, and the skin was
+white, so very white, with never a fleck of pink remaining. And staring from the
+wasted flesh were the eyes, large and round and faded blue, and in them an
+appealing, a haunted look. But they softened at sight of her, as though
+comforted already.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A reprieve is best,&#8221; he said. &#8220;You cannot think that I
+want a pardon, now that, that <i>she</i> is dead!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But sire&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Sire&#8217;? Ah, my lady, you are a little late, by something like a few
+hundred years. You see our American was right after all; a letter no longer
+makes a king.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a bon mot that Maximilian had always enjoyed, it being his own, but
+this time he was most zealously in earnest.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur, then,&#8221; she said, in no mood for reforms of etiquette.
+&#8220;Only, let me talk! We have three days, three days which are to be used.
+Your Highness must escape!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But now she understood him less than before, for he only smiled wearily. It
+was, then, something else than fear that had broken him so.</p>
+
+<p>Escape? And that guard in the corridor? Passing, ever passing, the diabolical
+humorist seemed to chuckle inwardly, as though to stand death-watch were the
+most exquisite of jokes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That man?&#8221; whispered Jacqueline. &#8220;Why, that&#8217;s Don
+Tiburcio. He was driven out of the Imperialist ranks by Father Fischer. But from
+his lips, this very night, Your Highness will hear that the road is open to Vera
+Cruz. Ah <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_467'></a>467</span>sire&#8211;monsieur&#8211;we have been working, we
+others. There will be horses ready, there will be a long ride, and then, you
+will safely board an Austrian ship waiting for you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian slowly shook his head. &#8220;No,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I am
+ready to die, as&#8211;as ready as I shall ever be.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the remaining years of your natural life, Your Highness counts
+them as nothing! Yet you might live twice your present age!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My life&#8211;over again,&#8221; he murmured dreamily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, why not?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One year to redeem each year that has gone.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Years of Destiny!&#8221; she cried, thinking to touch him there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No!&#8221; he exclaimed, so harshly and quick that it startled her.
+&#8220;But for me they will be years of dearest mercy. Wait, tell me first,
+Miramon and Mejía&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes, we will save them too. Only, the risk is greater.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bien!&#8221; He had almost accepted, but he smothered the word, and
+starting up, began to pace the room. At last he stopped. &#8220;The risk must be
+lessened, for them,&#8221; he said. &#8220;<i>I</i> will remain.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;H&#8217;m&#8217;n,&#8221; the girl ejaculated, &#8220;Hamlet declines? Then
+there will be no play at all, at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian knew how stubborn she could be; and so, reluctantly, he joined the
+plot.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have deserved Marquez and Fischer and Lopez,&#8221; he sighed.
+&#8220;But why there should be friends, even now, that I cannot
+understand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Yet she told him bluntly why she wanted his safety. It was on France&#8217;s
+account. Still, his gratitude was no less profound. She who would give life to
+others, what was her life to be henceforth? The mellowing sorrow, which her
+vivacity could not hide, smote him again, as it had that evening in Mexico when
+he came to her for counsel. He remembered. Out of a useless ambition for her
+country she had squandered <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_468'></a>468</span>her name, blighted her future. He remembered how,
+looking on her saddened face, he had been exalted to a pure devotion, and had
+burned with knightly fervor to do her some impossible service. But what was the
+service? There his memory failed, and he despised the chivalrous ardor which
+could be quenched with feeding on itself. After the fearful vigil of the night
+before, he had found a suit of armor beside him. In a word, he had forgotten
+self. Simple compassion was enough. That service? that service? If he could only
+remember. But he must. And in hot anger he strode back and forth, while
+Jacqueline sat and gazed in wonder. Once, turning from the corridor window, he
+paused. The guard had stopped a man, who now was evidently waiting until the
+prisoner should be unoccupied. Unseen himself, Maximilian recognized in the man
+the American named Driscoll. And then he remembered. He remembered
+Jacqueline&#8217;s secret, betrayed to him that evening in Mexico. He remembered
+that her happiness was lost in the loss of this man&#8217;s respect. Here, at
+last, lay the impossible service!</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian glanced toward her stealthily. No, from where she sat she could
+not see the corridor, could not see the waiting American. A moment later
+Maximilian stood behind her; and when he spoke, she thought it odd that he
+should change from French to halting English.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Miss d&#8217;Aumerle,&#8221; he began, in distinct if nervous phrasing,
+&#8220;yes, it was for France, all, all of which you haf done. Therefore is it
+that you haf come to this country, and here to Querétaro, whatever is to the
+contrary said.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;De grace,&#8221; she laughed, rising abruptly, &#8220;there&#8217;s
+enough to do to-day without discussing&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But he intercepted her even as she opened the door.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Will Your Highness kindly let me pass?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I know, I alone, that nefer haf you toward myself once felt, once
+shown, that which&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_469'></a>469</span>A sharp,
+indignant cry escaped her. Following her gaze he saw the American pass on down
+the corridor and out of hearing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now who,&#8221; exclaimed the chagrined prince, &#8220;would ever have
+imagined such delicacy of breeding!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And don&#8217;t ever again,&#8221; cried Jacqueline furiously,
+&#8220;imagine that <i>I</i> stand in need of being righted!&#8221; Wherewith she
+too was gone, leaving her clumsy knight staring blankly after her.</p>
+
+<p>A few moments later Driscoll knocked.</p>
+
+<p>It was the first meeting of these two men since the memorable afternoon at
+Cuernavaca, when Driscoll had surprised Jacqueline listening to royalty&#8217;s
+shameless suit. Now he beheld Fatality&#8217;s retribution for that day&#8217;s
+bitterness. Retribution, yes. But it was not restitution. The girl he loved had
+just passed him in the corridor with a slight casual nod, and he would not,
+could not, stretch forth a hand to stop her. Instead, the smile so ironical of
+Fate had touched his lips.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was sent by Señor Juarez, sir,&#8221; he addressed the archduke in
+the tone of military business. &#8220;The President is afraid your three days of
+reprieve will be misunderstood. He sent for me as I was leaving San Luis
+yesterday, and I&#8211;I was to tell you&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You need not hesitate, colonel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, that you must not hope for pardon, for the sentence will
+positively be carried out day after to-morrow. That&#8211;I believe that is
+all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But&#8211;&#8221; Maximilian called, staying him. &#8220;Dios mio,
+such news merits a longer telling. It seems to me too, Señor Americano, that you
+should enjoy it the more, since it was partly you who brought me to
+this.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know as I&#8217;d thought of that. How?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You ask how? Do you forget how you took the traitor Lopez to Escobedo,
+the night I was betrayed?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_470'></a>470</span>Driscoll swung
+bluntly round on his questioner. &#8220;No I don&#8217;t,&#8221; he replied.
+&#8220;But you see, there was such a lot of bloodshed scheduled for the next
+day?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Isn&#8217;t that rather a curious reproof from a soldier? Loyal hearts
+would have bled, yes, and gladly. Noble fellows, they would have saved their
+Emperor!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll half snorted, and turned on his heel. But he stopped, his lips
+pressed to a clean, hard line. &#8220;What of those townsmen in the
+trenches?&#8221; he demanded. &#8220;It wasn&#8217;t their fight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian&#8217;s eyes opened very wide, and slowly his expression changed.
+The thick lower lip drooped and quivered. Suddenly he came nearer the American,
+a trembling hand outstretched.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was saved that,&#8221; he murmured earnestly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They were,&#8221; the grim trooper corrected him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The townsmen, yes. But I&#8211;I was kept from murder. God in heaven,
+I would have murdered them! Ah, señor, if I could put to my account a
+night&#8217;s work such as yours, that night, when you used the traitor! I could
+almost thank Lopez. I do thank you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Still Driscoll failed to notice the proffered hand. He might have, had he
+seen his suppliant&#8217;s face, and the tense anguish there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Those innocent non-combatants, then,&#8221; Maximilian went on,
+&#8220;so they counted more than a prince with you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, there were a thousand of &#8217;em.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The other&#8217;s haggard look gave way to a smile, half sad, half amused,
+and taking the American by the shoulder in a grip almost affectionate, he said,
+&#8220;Colonel, did you ever happen to know of one Don Quixote of La Mancha?
+Well, lately I&#8217;ve begun to think that he was the truest of gentlemen,
+though now I believe I could name another who&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And,&#8221; interrupted Driscoll, &#8220;did you ever try to locate
+the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_471'></a>471</span>most dignified
+animal that walks, bipeds not excepted? Well, sir, it&#8217;s the donkey. Take
+him impartially, and you&#8217;ll say so too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The strain was over. Maximilian laughed. &#8220;If Don Quixote had only had
+your sanity!&#8221; he began; &#8220;or rather,&#8221; he added, charmed with
+the conceit, &#8220;if knighthood had had it, then the poor don would never have
+been needed to be born at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ignoring the sincerity of the Hapsburg&#8217;s new philosophy, and how
+tragically it was grounded, Driscoll only smiled in a very peculiar way.
+Knighthood? The word was supercilious cant, and irritated him. During that very
+moment, while listening to Chivalry&#8217;s devotee, the young trooper thought
+of a little ivory cross in his pocket, a cross which was stained with a
+girl&#8217;s blood. Murguía had given it to him, to give to Maximilian on the
+eve of execution. But Driscoll had not promised, and yet Murguía had implored
+him to take it, even without promising. The old man held faith in vengeance as a
+spring to drive all souls alike, and if Maximilian&#8217;s last earthly moment
+could be embittered with sight of a cross, then, he firmly believed, the
+American needed only to be tempted with the means to do it. Moreover, in a
+sudden impulse, Driscoll had taken the holy symbol, &#8220;to do with as he
+chose.&#8221; There was no message, Murguía had explained. The Señor Emperador
+would read the graven name, &#8220;Maria de la Luz,&#8221; and that would
+suffice.</p>
+
+<p>Looking now on the cultured gentleman caressing his beard, Driscoll thought
+again how hellishly distorted was the sign of salvation then in his pocket. But
+he left it there. He, too, had a king&#8217;s pride, incapable of low spite.
+Charity alone, though, would have held him, if he had but known that Maximilian
+was ignorant of the dead girl&#8217;s fate.</p>
+
+<p>The archduke for his part had been amiable and conciliatory, because there
+was a certain delicate question he wished to ask.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh by the way, mi coronel,&#8221; he said abruptly, &#8220;I must
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_472'></a>472</span>extend my excuses
+for keeping you waiting in the corridor just now. But there was another visitor
+here. And as we happened to be talking of&#8211;well, of a rather personal
+matter, not intended for outside ears&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do not worry. When you raised your voice, I turned and
+left.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But perhaps,&#8221; said Maximilian slowly, &#8220;it would have been
+better if you had overheard, either you or another knowing the cruel rumors
+which&#8211;which link my recent visitor&#8217;s name with my own. Then the
+truth would have been made known. That truth, señor,&#8221; he hastened to add,
+despite a hardening frown between the American&#8217;s eyes, &#8220;means first
+that I have been honored, indeed, in my visitor&#8217;s&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He got no further. A broad hand closed over his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Another word of that, and
+I&#8217;ll&#8211;I&#8217;ll&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The threat was left unfinished. Gasping in the chair where he had fallen,
+Maximilian found himself alone. He was vaguely nonplussed. There had been so
+many revelations of late that he thought this one simply a further re-adjusting
+of himself to the modern world of men. The present instance had to do with the
+critical juncture where the woman enters. But he had learned something else,
+too. The American loved her, and that was important. Yet lovers were very
+contrary beings, he mused lugubriously.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Still, I shall try again,&#8221; he decided. &#8220;One humble success
+against my career of distinguished failures should not be too much to
+expect.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The night that followed, a black, favorable night, was the time planned for
+escape. Horses ready saddled waited outside the town under the aqueduct. Certain
+guards were bribed, among them Don Tiburcio. The humorous rascal had driven a
+hard bargain, but only because the money was to be had. He would have sold
+himself as briskly for the cream of the jest.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_473'></a>473</span>Late the same
+night there came a frantic pounding at Driscoll&#8217;s door, where he was
+quartered in the sacristy of the old Capuchin church. &#8220;Well?&#8221; he
+muttered, alert already.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hurry, mi coronel!&#8221; a cracked voice blended with the knocking.
+&#8220;Hurry, you are wanted!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Murgie!&#8221; Driscoll exclaimed, flinging wide the door. &#8220;Back
+from San Luis, and prowling round here as usual, eh? Well, what&#8217;s the
+matter?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quick, señor! Maximilian is sick. Go, go to him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Partly dressed, bootless, unarmed, Driscoll shoved the old man aside, and
+sped through the church, hopping over half awakened soldiers as he went. Once in
+the street, he glanced up at the tower room, which was Maximilian&#8217;s, and
+thought it odd that no light streamed through the narrow slits there. The
+sentinels, too, were gone. But he ran up the steps and darted along the
+corridor, only to strike his head against a heavy wooden door that was ajar. He
+rushed inside the cell, and with arms outspread quickly covered the space of it,
+in the utter dark smashing a chair, crashing over a table, cursing a mishap to
+his toe. But he found no one.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This here&#8217;s a jail-break,&#8221; he mumbled under his breath.
+&#8220;Dam&#8217; that Murgie, he&#8217;s roped me in to stop &#8217;em!&#8221;
+Whereat, all unconsciously, he smiled again at Fatality.</p>
+
+<p>Groping his way back to the corridor, he felt rather than saw three dim
+figures steal past the door. Silently, swiftly, he gave pursuit. He heard a
+fervent whisper just ahead.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hasten, dear friends, and may God&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The next second he was grappling with someone. But his unknown captive did
+not resist.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, señor, loosen your fingers. I am not escaping. I am returning
+to my cell. But I had to make the other two think that I was with
+them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The voice was Maximilian&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_474'></a>474</span>&#8220;Hark! Ah,
+poor souls, they have failed!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The prince spoke truly. A fierce &#8220;Alto ahí!&#8221; sounded below. Then
+there were musket shots and the confusion of many scrambling feet. Murguía had
+routed out the church barracks. And when torches were brought, the soldiers
+discovered that they had hands on Miramon and Mejía. But the false sentinels
+were gone! In leaving the road clear they had used it themselves, already.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You fools!&#8221; suddenly a half crazed wail arose. &#8220;Fools,
+<i>he</i> has escaped! He&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh dry up, Murgie,&#8221; said Driscoll, coming down the steps.
+&#8220;He&#8217;s gone back to his room, I reckon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_475'></a>475</span><a id='link_54'></a>CHAPTER XXI<br /><span class='h2fs'>The Title of Nobility</span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Hear, therefore, O ye kings, and understand.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Wisdom of Solomon.</i></p> </div>
+
+<p>One more sunset, one more sunrise! And then?...</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian again confronted the ghostly enumeration. But this time his last
+day should be the day of a man&#8217;s work, in simple-hearted humility. He no
+more searched the skies to find a supernal finger there. He let Destiny alone,
+and did his best instead. For a man&#8217;s best is Destiny&#8217;s peer.</p>
+
+<p>The fiery June sun was dying in its larger shell of bronze over the western
+sierras, and the self-same blue that vaults beautiful Tuscany was taking on its
+richer, darker hue, when a foreigner in the land, Din Driscoll, walked under the
+Alameda trees, his pipe cold in his mouth, he perplexed before his heavy
+spirits. For he no longer had war to distract, to engross.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian&#8217;s physician, an Austrian, found him in his reverie. Would
+the Herr Americano at once repair to His Highness attend? The señor&#8217;s
+presence would a favor be esteemed, in reason that a witness was greatly
+necessitated.</p>
+
+<p>Wondering not a little, Driscoll hastened back into the town. As the
+physician did not follow, he arrived alone. But in the door of the
+archduke&#8217;s cell he stopped, angry and embarrassed. For his eyes
+encountered a second pair, which were no less angry, which moreover, were
+Jacqueline&#8217;s. Maximilian and Padre Soria, the father confessor, were also
+there, but Driscoll at first saw no one but Jacqueline. As with him, she had
+been vaguely summoned, without knowing why. A last testament <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_476'></a>476</span>was to be signed, she
+imagined, but in his choice of witnesses she thought that Maximilian might at
+least have shown more delicacy. As to cruelty also, she would not confess, but
+cruelty it was, nevertheless. To see again this American was to know memory
+quickened into torture, and days afterward there would still be with her,
+vividly, hatefully, the beloved awkwardness of his strong frame, the splendid,
+roguish head, now so forbidding, and more than all, the way he smiled of late.
+It was a smile so cold, so cheerless, a something so changed in him since the
+old, piquant days of their first acquaintance. Despise herself as she might,
+Jacqueline knew how the sight of the man halted there would leave her whole
+woman&#8217;s being athirst and panting.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian&#8217;s thin white face lighted eagerly when he perceived that
+Driscoll had come. The haggard despair of two days before had given way to a
+serene calm, like that which soothes a dying man when the pain is no longer
+felt. In a gentleness of command that would not be denied, he rose and brought
+the American into the room.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Colonel Driscoll,&#8221; he began, &#8220;you know, of course, that a
+witness is the world&#8217;s deputy. He is named to learn a certain truth, but
+afterward he must champion that truth, even against the world. So you find
+yourself here, but first I wish to thank&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please don&#8217;t mention it,&#8221; Driscoll interposed.
+&#8220;I&#8217;m willing to do anything I can.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then remember,&#8221; said Maximilian, &#8220;that you are a witness,
+and a witness only. Can you bear that in mind, señor, no matter what you may
+hear?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll nodded, but the very first words all but made him a violent actor as
+well. Maximilian had turned to Jacqueline. For a moment he paused, then with a
+grave dignity spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mademoiselle,&#8221; he said, &#8220;reverently, prayerfully, I ask
+your hand in marriage.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_477'></a>477</span>She gasped, and
+so sharp and quick that certainly she was the most dumbfounded there. Her utter
+stupefaction amazed Driscoll as much again as the question itself. He stiffened
+as though struck. If this were a revelation? If it could be&#8211;if it could be
+that she really knew no reason why she should marry Maximilian?</p>
+
+<p>The archduke observed them both, and his eyes shone with kindliness. But
+making a gesture for patience, he hurried on. &#8220;Father Soria here,&#8221;
+he said, &#8220;will come in the morning, just before the&#8211;the execution,
+to perform the ceremony. A judge of the Republic will come too, for the civil
+marriage. As to the banns&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why&#8211;<i>why</i>, parbleu?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline stood before him, stung from her speechless trance by fury. Behind
+narrowed lids the gray eyes hardened as points of steel.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You shall know, mademoiselle,&#8221; he answered softly. &#8220;It is
+a boon I ask of you, the greatest, and the only one before I
+go&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why? Tell me why!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because it is <i>the</i> boon a true knight may crave. It is to right
+before the world the noblest woman a knight can ever know&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sire!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The word was rage and supplication both. It was a hurt cry, piteous to hear.
+Then the glint dying from her eyes blazed to tempestuous life in those of the
+Missourian. But the priest&#8217;s hand touched his arm, and the priest&#8217;s
+voice, low and gentle, stayed him.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian, though, had seen the outburst. &#8220;Ah yes, señor, I
+remember,&#8221; he said, and smiled, &#8220;one may be slapped upon the mouth,
+yes, yes, for even breathing my lady&#8217;s name when one talks of
+rumor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline darted at them a puzzled glance. She did <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_478'></a>478</span>not understand at first. Then she
+divined. And then, wide and gloriously, her eyes opened on Driscoll, her
+defender. But in the instant they sought a safer quarter. She could not, and
+would not, forgive him for being there at all.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;However,&#8221; the obdurate prince continued, &#8220;our witness must
+bear with me this time, for I will&#8211;<i>will</i>, I tell each of
+you&#8211;speak plainly. The false scandal does exist. Deny it, dear lady, if
+you can.&#8211;Nay, señor, <i>you</i> believe it, or did. So, now, as the
+world&#8217;s deputy here, you must be armed to foil those venomous tongues. But
+there is only one way. You shall tell them that they talk of Maximilian&#8217;s
+widow&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline, Driscoll, both spoke at once. But the girl flashed on the man an
+angry command for silence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Enough, enough!&#8221; she cried, &#8220;Let me speak, then end it.
+Whatever others may think, Your Highness extends me his respect? Bien, but that
+gives me a certain right, which is the right to consider just one thing in
+answering the question of Your Highness&#8211;just one lone, little
+thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is&#8211;is whether or not I have the honor to love Your Highness. Oh,
+the shame in such sacrifice, the shame you put on me! You should have known my
+answer already.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her answer? Driscoll stirred uneasily. What, indeed, was her answer?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet later, mademoiselle,&#8221; pursued her inflexible suitor,
+&#8220;when others aspire to your hand, there might come one for whom your
+answer would be favorable. How then, if this suitor, when pausing to hear what
+the world says of you&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;d choke it down the world&#8217;s throat!&#8221; Driscoll
+burst forth. &#8220;He alone need know it&#8217;s a lie.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline started as she heard him speak, but the glad and unintended look
+she gave him changed as quick as thought to haughty resentment. After all, he
+was still there.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_479'></a>479</span>&#8220;But how
+else,&#8221; Maximilian persisted, &#8220;can such a man know so
+much?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then, a captive absolute to his lofty idea, the poet prince pleaded for it as
+one inspired. All things worked, as by Heaven&#8217;s own will, to sanction what
+he proposed. There was Charlotte&#8217;s death. There was his own. Dying, he was
+still a Mexican, and might wed in any station he chose. While if he lived, as an
+archduke of Austria he could not. But he detested life. With it he had bettered
+no one. Yet by his death he hoped to save more than life to another. This other
+was the girl before him. He had wrecked her dearest ambition. For France&#8217;s
+sake she would have lured him from peril. For that, and that alone, she had
+sacrificed her name. Such accounted for their interview at Cuernavaca. Such
+accounted for her coming to Querétaro. Yet through his own blind weakness she
+had failed. France had lost Mexico, he his life, and she&#8211;her happiness.
+But the last could yet be restored. And why not purchase it with his death,
+since he must have died in any case?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Must have,&#8221; Driscoll interrupted, &#8220;must have died in any
+case?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The American had listened perplexed, now with a quick, eager start, now with
+crinkled brows. First of all the old mystery and its anguish had assailed him.
+The hideous, gloomy tangle would wound him round again. Did Jacqueline care for
+this prince? Surely, because he had seen the evidence. But why had she intrigued
+against his Empire, why had she turned Confederate aid from him?</p>
+
+<p>Then, as the ruined monarch spoke, the other man saw. He saw the truth. Truth
+that reconciled all contradictions. That explained what even the theory of her
+wanton heart had only half satisfied before. Explained everything by that heart
+of purest gold. The lover knew now why she had delivered him to Lopez and the
+Tiger, two years ago, though <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_480'></a>480</span>with the act so perversely confessing her love for
+him. He knew why, at Boone&#8217;s Córdova plantation, she had tempted him to
+hold her for his own, though even then she was returning to the capital, to
+Maximilian. No, it was not wanton sport. It was not contradiction. But it was
+conflict. In the contemplation of that conflict he stood unnerved. It was the
+conflict between a wild yet altogether French scheme of patriotic endeavor and
+her own good woman&#8217;s love. His eyes wandered to her, half afraid, and the
+chill of months about his heart was gone, as some great berg of ice sinks in the
+warmth of sunny waters. From siren alluring flesh whose touch was woe, she was
+become a sceptred angel, far, far away, so tantalizingly far away!</p>
+
+<p>Thus Driscoll listened on, happy in his soul of a man, yet abashed as a boy.
+But listening, at the last he was perplexed anew, though for another reason.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Must have died, sir?&#8221; he repeated again. &#8220;But that
+wasn&#8217;t what you thought last night. No sir, last night you thought you
+could escape. But just the same you turned back. You chose to die!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His Highness,&#8221; spoke the gray-haired priest, &#8220;returned for
+the señorita&#8217;s answer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My answer?&#8221; cried Jacqueline. &#8220;You mean, father, for my
+sake?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll started violently, perplexed no longer. &#8220;By God, sir,&#8221;
+he swore, and clapped Maximilian on the shoulder, &#8220;but you are a
+man!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The prince recoiled, his instincts of breeding in arms against the savage
+equality. But then, slowly, a smile that was almost beatific touched his lips,
+and without knowing it, he straightened proudly, as majesty would.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A man?&#8221; he murmured, breathing exaltation. &#8220;Then am I, at
+my last moment, come into harmony with God&#8217;s own <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_481'></a>481</span>ordering of the universe. For he made
+man on the sixth day, not a Hapsburg. Man, and after His Own Image&#8211;Oh, but
+that is the title the hardest of all to win! You&#8211;you don&#8217;t think,
+señor, that you would like to take it back?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll reddened inexplicably. Murguía&#8217;s ivory cross was still in his
+pocket.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No!&#8221; he blurted out with sudden defiance. &#8220;It&#8217;s the
+truth!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then,&#8221; said Maximilian solemnly, &#8220;on your word I stake my
+faith. To-morrow, at the judgment-seat, I shall hope to hear myself called
+so.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Highness,&#8221; questioned Jacqueline in a kind of daze,
+&#8220;Your Highness did not <i>intend</i> to escape last night?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, he did not,&#8221; Driscoll answered for him. &#8220;He got
+Miramon and Mejía started all right, and then, without knowing that your plot
+had failed, he turned back to this cell here, alone.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Highness, you did that for&#8211;for&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her voice broke, and she stopped abruptly and went to the narrow window. With
+her back to them, she groped for the dainty bit of cambric that was her
+handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So you see, my daughter,&#8221; said the priest, drawing near her,
+&#8220;what he would have given, what, before Heaven, he has given, to tell you
+what you so hotly resent. Do you resent it now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The beautiful head shook slowly. She was touching her eyes with her
+handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then you will not let his sacrifice be in vain? You will marry
+him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Impetuously she turned, and faced them. There were blinding drops, clear as
+diamonds, on the long lashes. &#8220;Oh Your Highness, Your&#8211;Oh, there is
+something you can tell me that is&#8211;that is inexpressibly better?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let me know what it is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is if&#8211;if you can forgive me.&#8211;Mon Dieu, why did you
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_482'></a>482</span>need to heap this
+terrible sacrifice on me? Why could you not remember that I tried to drive you
+from your empire? That I plotted against you? That&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hush, you would have saved me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, only incidentally, and you knew it. Yet you
+must&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t! There&#8217;s nothing to forgive.&#8211;But wait, we will
+grant that there really is, but only that I may exact my price of
+forgiveness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The price? Name it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That you will marry me, here, to-morrow morning, before I
+die.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline raised her head. &#8220;Has Your Highness,&#8221; she demanded,
+smiling shyly behind her tears, &#8220;has he forgotten the woman&#8217;s,
+rather my consideration, before such a question?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll straightened, squared his shoulders to take a blow. To his blindness
+her manner looked like awakening love for the other man&#8211;and for the man
+himself, not for the prince! His sense of loss, his agony, were extreme. But of
+the old bitterness he now knew nothing. His rival was putting the question.
+&#8220;And according to that consideration, mademoiselle?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll did not see her swift glance toward himself. He was hurrying out
+lest he might hear her answer. And she let him go&#8211;till he reached the
+door. But there, like one frozen, he halted rigidly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hélas, I do not love you, sire,&#8221; Jacqueline had answered, very
+quietly.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian, however, did not seem heart broken.</p>
+
+<p>His attention was all for the mere witness. He saw the effect on that
+witness. In Driscoll&#8217;s glad face he read his own triumph, his own purpose
+achieved. Jacqueline was righted at last.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; he agreed, &#8220;I could not hope for so much.&#8211;But
+another might.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_483'></a>483</span>Then apropos of
+nothing, he went and flung his arms about Driscoll. The astounded trooper could
+only grip his hand, just once, without a word. Then he was gone.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian watched him go. The priest turned to Jacqueline. She, too, stood
+poised so long as his spurs rang through the corridor. At last silence fell on
+them. For a moment she hesitated. Then, trembling, her eyes moist, she held out
+her hand. &#8220;Good-bye,&#8221; she whispered. But, impulsively, she raised
+her arm and touched the doomed man&#8217;s forehead lightly with her finger
+tips, making a blurred sign of the cross. And, not daring an instant longer, she
+too fled.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian was alone with the priest. The room was growing dark. It was the
+last night.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, father, light the tapers, there on the altar. Yes, I am ready.
+Ready? Blessed Mother in Heaven, it is more than I had thought to be!&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_484'></a>484</span><a id='link_55'></a>CHAPTER XXII<br /><span class='h2fs'>The Abbey of Mount Regret</span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;O, here<br />Will I set up my everlasting rest,<br />
+And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars<br />
+From this world-wearied flesh.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Romeo and Juliet</i>.</p> </div>
+
+<p>It is curious and humiliating, how Nature does not vex herself in the least
+for the dying of a man. And yet, to the man, the event is so very important!
+Each breath of spaceless night, each twinkle from the firmament, though but the
+phantom of a ray quenched ages before, everything, he teases into anxious
+commentary on his own puny end. There could not be more ado if the Universe were
+in the throes, writhing against a reconquering Chaos. Harassed creature, what
+ails him is only the pathetic fallacy, which is a soothing melody and
+stimulating to mortal pride. But the lapses into healthier realization are very,
+very hard to bear.</p>
+
+<p>How cold it was, when Maximilian awoke! The chill seemed creeping nearer his
+heart, nearer the citadel. And how black the night, before the dawn! But where,
+now, were his matches? He had the same monotonous trouble of any other morning
+in getting one to light. Then the two candles guttered fitfully, sordidly, just
+as they had always done. The white cloths of the last communion seemed a ghostly
+intrusion on what was of every day. Maximilian drew his cloak about him. The
+chill was simply of the plateau, of the night, not the portent of death. The
+world without was dark and desolate, but that had no reference to the tomb. The
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_485'></a>485</span>world was merely
+taking its normal sleep. The heavy cloak ought to answer&#8211;but, it did
+not.</p>
+
+<p>He took up the snuffers, coaxing the yellow flames to brighter promise, then
+set the candles before him on the table. A piece of dripping tallow fell upon
+his hand, and the hand jerked back. The man pondered. So, even his flesh was
+part of Nature too, and heeded trivial pain, with no thought of the bullets to
+drive through it shortly.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote two or three letters yet remaining, to friends, to his brother, the
+Emperor of Austria. He penned words of farewell, yet even as the tears welled in
+his eyes, he needed to stop and make sure that he had indeed not more than three
+hours yet to live. It was difficult, though, with the candles spluttering there,
+in the ordinary, every-day fashion. He signed the last letter, to his mother. He
+gazed at the signature, of characters squarely formed. He might have written it
+yesterday, or the year before. It looked the same. But the pen he had just
+dropped had dropped forever. No, no, that should not be! And he snatched it up
+again, and wrote, scribbled, covered paper, fearing to stop. But at last he did
+stop, with a shivering laugh. He must face this thing, he decided. And over and
+over again he told himself, &#8220;I have written my last. Yes, my last!&#8221;
+and steadfastly resisted the taunting, airy quill lying there. So, what was
+harder than farewell to loved ones, he nerved himself to end the small actions
+of his daily existence.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian had his life long been a dreamer, ever gazing wide-eyed as a child
+on the wonderful fantasies that came, whether entrancing or dreadful. But the
+child&#8217;s fantasies are kindred with man&#8217;s philosophies. Often, as he
+lay awaiting sleep, there was one particular thought that would bring him
+quickly, stark, staring awake. And this thought was, how certain things always
+came to pass. No matter how far away, nor how very slow their approach, making
+vague the hope or horror of them, yet the actual, present hour of their
+happening <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_486'></a>486</span>always
+struck at last. There was the eve of the day when he should be of age. Oh, but
+he had longed for that day! He had longed until he craftily suspected it never
+would arrive. And yet, despite those leaden-footed oxen, the minutes, arrive it
+did, in very fact. The eve of that day was a happy bed-time; but over his ardent
+reveries, over the vista of future achievements, there suddenly, darkly loomed
+another thought, a foretoken and clammy shroud, which smote the young prince
+with trembling. For would not the day of his death, however far away also,
+sometime be the present, passing moment, as surely, just as surely, as this
+anniversary of his birth? Here was a terrifying glimpse of mortality.</p>
+
+<p>When, not fifteen years later, Maximilian opened his eyes in the black
+Capuchin cell, and comprehension grew on him of the present day&#8217;s meaning,
+he recalled how the fantasy of a morning of death had first come to him. He was
+a boy, and he was to go on a voyage. The boy had awakened when there was
+scarcely light as yet, and heard his mother at the door. &#8220;It is time,
+dear.&#8221; She spoke low, not liking to break his slumber. But in the silence
+of all the world her voice was clear, and very sweet, and the words stood forth
+against his memory ever afterward. He was to be gone from her for a time, and
+this was in her mind as she called him. The boy, though, could think of nothing
+except that his little excursion among new and strange adventures was to begin,
+actually to begin. But then, quite unaccountably, there fell over his eagerness
+a chilling gloom. The delightful sprite named Expectation, who had whispered so
+piquantly of this same eventful morn, had basely changed herself into a hideous
+vampire, and she muttered at him, in frightful, raucous tones. Yet the
+hag&#8217;s snarls were true promises. There was to come, surely, inexorably, a
+certain other eventful morn, and he would awake, and without his mother&#8217;s
+calling him, he would know&#8211;<i>know</i>&#8211;that it was time!</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_487'></a>487</span>Back in that
+childhood hour he had lain for a while quite inconsolable, until his mother came
+again, and rested her hand on his head, and told him&#8211;&#8220;Why, one would
+think the little goose was going away forever!&#8221; It was broad daylight by
+now, too; and wholly comforted, he had sprung up, joyfully alive. Eternity did
+not worry him any more for a week.</p>
+
+<p>But the awakening of this later morning, in a Mexican prison! And when he
+understood that the old familiar fantasy was become a fact! When he remembered
+how once he had been consoled in his boyhood! For a moment the sense of loss and
+of helplessness was stifling, and he yearned&#8211;yearned frantically, as he
+never had as a boy&#8211;for the touch of his mother&#8217;s hand, for her
+voice, so low and sweet. The horrid cruelty he could not, during that moment,
+bear. He felt that he must cry out for her, like a very child. And though he
+wept, it was the man, and the man&#8217;s despair that his was not now the
+boy&#8217;s need of comfort.</p>
+
+<p>But when they came in the first dawn and knocked at his door, they found him
+serene, untroubled, and only the wonted shade of melancholy on his brow. He
+greeted them courteously, and was desirous that they should have no unnecessary
+difficulties on his account. Being dressed already, punctiliously, and in black,
+he himself went to call Miramon and Mejía, and brought them to his own cell,
+where they received the last sacrament together.</p>
+
+<p>Later the three condemned were at breakfast&#8211;bread, chicken, a little
+wine and a cup of coffee&#8211;when horses&#8217; hoofs rang abruptly in the
+street below, and as abruptly ceased under their window. There was a command,
+and sabres rasped against their scabbards to gain the light. Maximilian raised
+eyes filled with pity to his two companions. Mejía, an Indian thoroughly, made a
+gesture of impatience. The handsome Miramon, of French blood, shrugged his
+shoulders. Then both glanced timidly in their turn at Maximilian, and each <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_488'></a>488</span>finding a hand stretched
+forth, grasped it silently. But the priests of the condemned, who were waiting
+apart, felt their blood turn to icy beads. For them the quick metallic gust of
+strident life down in the street had the merciless quality of hammering upon a
+coffin lid.</p>
+
+<p>Troops filed up the stairs, and along the corridor. They halted, faced the
+door, grounded arms. An officer stepped out, fumbled with a document, and read
+the death sentence. Maximilian gently released himself from one and another of
+those present, and turning to the Austrian physician, handed him his wedding
+ring. &#8220;You will give it to my mother,&#8221; he said. Father Soria&#8217;s
+eyes filled with tears, one plump fist clenched pathetically. Maximilian passed
+an arm over the good man&#8217;s shoulder, and with him walked out among the
+soldiers. He nodded to them encouragingly, and so started on his little
+journey.</p>
+
+<p>Three ramshackle public hacks, set high over wabbling wheels, and drawn by
+mules, waited at the door. Maximilian smiled an apology as he motioned Father
+Soria to precede him into the first. The troops used their spurs. A whip
+cracked. The springs jolted. Everywhere, on the curbs, in windows, on housetops,
+there were people. The archduke had the impression of breath tensely held, and
+of eyes, eyes strained, curious, and awed, like those of children who witness
+suffering and cannot understand.</p>
+
+<p>Passing the convent of Santa Clara, Maximilian peered upward at the windows;
+and, as he hoped, he saw Jacqueline. She was leaning far out, and tremulously
+poised. Tender compassion was in every line of her tense body, but as their gaze
+met she tried to smile, bravely and cheerfully, and until the hack swung round
+the corner, there was her hand waving him farewell. The little journey might
+have been, a fête, and somehow, he was comforted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wonder,&#8221; he mused, &#8220;if I&#8217;ve done very much for
+her, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_489'></a>489</span>after all. Or
+for that American, named Driscoll? Will she&#8211;&#8221; He shook his head, and
+sighed. &#8220;No, she is not the lass to have him, not after my little scene of
+last night. But, the choice does rest with her, now. And for a girl, that is
+everything.&#8211;Alas, poor young man!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His rueful prophecies were that moment interrupted by a woman&#8217;s scream.
+It rose piercingly over the clatter of their march. Maximilian put out his head
+and looked back. The woman was running beside Mejía&#8217;s hack, panting,
+stumbling through the dust, her black hair streaming. She held a babe in her
+rebosa, but with her free hand she clutched weakly at the spokes. To the clumsy,
+pitying soldiers who would force her away, she cried again, &#8220;Mercy ...
+Mercy ... Mercy....&#8221; A low murmuring grew on every side. Maximilian flung
+open his cab door. But the same instant it was slammed against him. He sank to
+his seat, with a stare of dumb pain in his eyes that the priest beside him never
+afterward forgot. The woman back there was Mejía&#8217;s wife. And Maximilian
+had had one glimpse of the husband&#8217;s face. It was a face stretched to
+agony, deadened to the color of lead.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;May I, may I&#8211;<i>pay</i> for this!&#8221; moaned the one-time
+Emperor. &#8220;O God, grant Thou that I do pay for this, hereafter!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the last hovels of the suburbs, at the foot of the Cerro de las
+Campanas, the condemned were told to alight. Here again there was a throng,
+hundreds and hundreds of swarthy faces, blank in awed pity. One gaping fellow
+pointed wonderingly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Look, there they are! There&#8211;los muertos!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian overheard, and a cold shiver crossed his spine. To be identified
+already as &#8220;the dead one!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then he beheld his coffin, there, the longest of the three being borne up the
+hill. They were boxes of cheap wood, unpainted inside, smeared with black on the
+outside. A wavy streak of carmine simulated the drooping cord and golden tassels
+of <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_490'></a>490</span>richer caskets.
+It was the pomp and circumstance that pertains to the humblest peon clay.</p>
+
+<p>Four thousand serried bayonets squared the base of the hill, and made a
+compact, bristling hedge to hold back the common people. Through it marched the
+doomed Imperialists, each with his confessor and a platoon of guards, and so
+toiled on up the slope. The archduke looked about him. There were many
+privileged spectators within the cordon, but nowhere did he see a former friend.
+All, all, had kept away, and in his heart he knew that it was better so. He
+could not ask that much of them. But stay&#8211;yes, a remembered figure caught
+his attention; a shriveled decrepit figure. Here, too, mid every color
+Republican, he beheld in the man&#8217;s garb a last surviving uniform of the
+vanished Empire. It was, however, scarcely to be distinguished as such. The red
+coat was threadbare, and soiled with dust. The ragged green pantaloons, held by
+a knotted rope, were grotesquely faded. Yet the prince, who had once gloried in
+dashing regimentals and mistook them for power, was deeply touched. He
+recognized a lone unit of what had been none other than the Batallon del
+Emperador. He paused, to have a word with the miserable derelict.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So, you would be near me, even now?&#8221; he said. &#8220;Ah, ever
+faithful little old man, but are you brave enough for the horror of it? Are
+you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Red eyeballs rolled upward in their sockets, and for a space met the
+archduke&#8217;s kindly gaze. Then the steady repellant hate in them seemed
+disconcerted, and the withered form cowered under the touch of the pale white
+hand. Inaudible words rattled in the old man&#8217;s throat, and he trembled, as
+though to turn and run. Maximilian regarded him benevolently, thinking it a
+crisis of emotion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, there,&#8221; he said, &#8220;go if you wish. It&#8217;s not
+well, you see, to think of me so much. But you must not imagine that I am
+ungrateful. When you believed yourself unseen, certainly <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_491'></a>491</span>when you had no hope of reward,
+throughout my misfortunes, you have always hovered near me, on the battlefield,
+and more lately under my prison window. Yes, yes, I have seen. And now, and now
+I thank you.&#8221; The bloodshot eyes roved the ground, but did not lift again.
+&#8220;As humble, as loyal as a dog,&#8221; Maximilian murmured as he turned
+away.</p>
+
+<p>They indicated to him that he should take his place before a wall of adobe
+blocks which had been piled together near the crest of the hill, only a little
+lower than those very fortifications built by the Imperialists themselves. With
+a gesture of assent, he complied. The priests fell sorrowfully back behind the
+soldiers, and he and Miramon and Mejía were alone together, three tragic
+isolated figures in a little oblong patch of bare rocky hillside. One end of the
+oblong was the adobe shield. The other three sides were walls of living men,
+massed shoulder to shoulder, with bayonets pointed outward against the jostling
+peering crowd. The three who were to die could now see no human being beyond the
+dense, double row of soldiery. The remainder of earth for them was the hollow
+square, bounded by the slouching backs clothed in blue, by the white flats of
+the képis, by the line of light playing over the thorns of steel. Beyond was the
+early morning sun; above, the mystery of space.</p>
+
+<p>Through the gap of an instant the shooting squads tramped in, nearer and
+nearer, until they halted opposite the condemned. Maximilian then perceived
+which squad was to be his own. It numbered seven tiradores and a yellow,
+beardless officer. The seven were low, cumbersome, tawny, and they shuffled
+awkwardly. Their stripling chief thrust out his stomach, and he handled his
+large sword with an unaccustomed flourish. The pompous severity was, after all,
+only insolence. He had need to keep guard on his importance; he did not wish to
+hear the pounding of his heart. Yet his muscles twitched unbecomingly, which
+jerked his mouth, and sometimes his head.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_492'></a>492</span>Maximilian
+stepped forward and addressed them. To each he gave a gold piece bearing his
+effigy. It was his last expenditure in that coin. He requested them earnestly,
+gently, to aim at his body, not at his head. He was thinking of his mother. He
+would not have her see him with mangled features. Then with a final reassuring
+word, he turned back to the wall.</p>
+
+<p>They were going to place him between the other two, but with a smile and
+shake of the head, he would not have it so. His last act was for precedence.
+Affectionately he drew Miramon to the place of honor, so that Mejía was on the
+right, and himself on the left.</p>
+
+<p>Then the <i>fiscal</i> of the Republic appeared, and read the military law.
+For any who should ask the lives of the condemned, death was prescribed. But if
+there was anything the condemned themselves wished to say....</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian removed his hat. &#8220;Mexicans,&#8221; he said, &#8220;may my
+blood be the last to be spilled for this country&#8217;s welfare. Long live
+Independence! Long live Mexico!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He spoke the words calmly, gravely, and having concluded, he carefully
+adjusted a large handkerchief, so that his beard might not be burned by the
+powder. Then he crossed his arms on his breast, and gazed steadily into the
+barrels of the leveled muskets, waiting.</p>
+
+<p>A wave of motion, of tendons stiffening, passed along the thick wall of
+flesh. Against it the tide without swelled higher, stronger. Tension strained
+upward to the supreme crash. The quiet of a multitude is pain.</p>
+
+<p>But the other two Imperialists had not spoken yet. Mejía shook his head
+passionately. He saw only his young wife with her babe, panting, stumbling
+through the dust. He held a crucifix, and would not take it from his lips.
+Miramon, however, raised his voice to protest against the charge of treason. Of
+that crime he died innocent. But he pardoned, as he hoped <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_493'></a>493</span>for pardon. Then he cried, &#8220;Long
+live Mexico! Long live the Emperor!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian started. These were the words that he thought he should like to
+hear. But now they grated. They recalled the mistake he had lived, the
+anachronism of his life. They were scorpions. They stung like the needle in an
+ulcer. He turned sharply, in tearful reproach. But a sword flashed, the volley
+came, and the three men fell, as under a crushing rock, one against the wall;
+his head broken over upon his breast. The pert young officer pointed his blade
+at three convulsive bodies, and through each a last bullet sped, burying itself
+in the earth beneath. The crowd pressed, surged, stood on tiptoe.</p>
+
+<hr style='border:none; border-bottom:1px solid silver; height: 1px; width: 80%; text-align: center; margin: 10px auto;' />
+
+<p>There was one other among the spectators, but keeping himself hidden, whom
+Maximilian would have been concerned to see there. He was Driscoll. He came to
+watch the shriveled derelict, Murguía. He came to stand guard over a soul,
+Maximilian&#8217;s. What peace that soul had found should not be destroyed. And
+so he screened himself in the crowd, holding ready to crush a viper whose fangs
+were heavy with poison. When Maximilian paused and spoke to the old man,
+Driscoll was very near, near enough to hear, and to strike. But the old man had
+only wheezed and mumbled. Though why that old man did not utter a first word,
+though why he could not, will never be explained. But this much is true, that
+the ambushed soul, moving so calmly toward eternity, then stepping so near the
+coiled serpent, was yet its own guardian, unwittingly.</p>
+
+<p>Until the very end Driscoll staid there alert. The old man, baffled,
+insatiate, might yet cry out what he knew. Driscoll&#8217;s gaze never relaxed.
+He felt as though he watched a murderer while the murder was being done. But the
+old man only listened. Unable to see within the hollow square, he listened, and
+waited. His lower jaw hung open, and over his lip a white <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_494'></a>494</span>froth grew and grew, until it broke and
+trickled down his chin. The red eyeballs gleamed ravenously, as still he
+waited.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When this is over,&#8221; Driscoll said to himself, &#8220;he&#8217;ll
+plump down in a fit and blow out. Else he&#8217;ll go raving crazy. Lord, that
+look!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When it <i>was</i> over, Driscoll went to him. He had but to reach forth a
+hand and fasten on his shoulder. He held him against a scurrying of spectators,
+whom the tragedy&#8217;s close had that instant brought to life.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here, Murgie, here&#8217;s something that belongs to you,&#8221; he
+said. &#8220;Well, what&#8217;s the matter? Take it, I don&#8217;t want
+it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The old man looked up. An ivory cross was dangling from the other&#8217;s
+fingers. The cross still showed bloodstains; no later flowing of blood had
+washed <i>them</i> away. But the father of María de la Luz stared, stared
+vacantly at the trinket. The masterful, consuming rage of two years past was
+gone out of his eyes. Instead they were watery and senile. The brows, and even
+the lashes, had turned as white as the thin strands of hair, and contrasted
+gruesomely against the yellow, mottled skin, which stretched like clouded
+parchment over the bony death&#8217;s head. At last the old man put out his hand
+and took the cross, not comprehending.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, I didn&#8217;t give it to him,&#8221; Driscoll explained bluntly.
+&#8220;I told you I wouldn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Yet no spasm of chagrin distorted the weazen face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This chain here, it&#8217;s&#8211;it&#8217;s <i>gold</i>!&#8221; the
+old man cried.</p>
+
+<p>Then he sputtered, choked. What had he betrayed? Would the strange donor
+reclaim the gift, knowing it was gold? He leered craftily at Driscoll, and with
+a hungry, gloating secrecy&#8211;his old slimy way of handling money&#8211;he
+smuggled the holy symbol under his jacket. But from cunning the leer changed to
+suspicion and quick alarm. He delved into his pockets, one after another. He
+searched greedily, wildly, until the last coin on him lay in his palm. Quaking
+in every feeble bone, <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_495'></a>495</span>he counted his poor wealth again and again. There
+was very little left. He glared at Driscoll. He glared at townsmen, officers,
+blanketed Inditos, all swarming past to gaze on the three corpses. He cried
+&#8220;Thief!&#8221; first at one unheeding passer-by, then at another.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I had more than this!&#8221; he whined. &#8220;More&#8211;more than
+this! There was my hacienda, my peons, my cotton, my mills, my canvas bags.
+There was my blockade runner. She was Clyde-built, she was named <i>La Luz</i>,
+she cost twenty thousand English gold pieces. Who has taken these things from
+me? Who&#8211;where&#8211;&#8211;Curse you, do <i>you</i> know?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dissipating his hoards, sacrificing his last chattel, all that was now a
+blank. But his hoards, his chattels, were all that were now worth while, and the
+miser clamored for them, and them only. Vengeance, however, is an ironical
+bargainer. Vengeance kept her pay, and &#8220;abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly
+hate,&#8221; had dried and left a stranded soul, parched by avarice. Driscoll
+was moved by a pity half ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Look here, Murgie,&#8221; he threatened terribly, &#8220;Do you say
+<i>I</i> stole your&#8211;&#8211;By the Great Horn Spoon, I&#8217;ll&#8211;&#8211;&#8221; He
+flung his hand to his revolver.</p>
+
+<p>The counter-irritant had instant effect. All moisture died out of the rat
+eyes, leaving them two little horrible beads. The miser shrank, groveled, in
+mortal terror of some physical hurt.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_496'></a>496</span><a id='link_56'></a>CHAPTER XXIII<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Contrariness of Jacqueline</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='box'>
+<p>&#8220;Much adoe there was, God wot;<br />
+He wold love, and she wold not.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'><i>&#8211;Ballad of Phillida and Corydon.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Maximiliano I. of Mexico was dead. His dynasty and his Empire were the
+frippery of a past time. Yet there was his capital, still holding out against
+the Republic. Leonardo Marquez, the Leopard, spitefully refused to capitulate.
+But why he would not, no one knew, neither the starving City, nor the patient
+besieger outside. No one, unless it was Jacqueline. The very day of the triple
+execution she called on Escobedo, commander in chief at Querétaro. She desired
+to return to the capital, and she wanted a pass through the Republic&#8217;s
+lines there. She mentioned, in case it were any inducement, that the place would
+fall within twenty-four hours after her arrival. Jacqueline had difficulty to
+speak at all. She could not endure the general&#8217;s monstrous flaps of ears,
+his rabbinical beard, his cruel black eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;María purísima,&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;you cannot mean, señorita,
+that you, all alone, will deliver the City of Mexico into our hands?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It will certainly be an incident of my stay there,&#8221; she
+replied.</p>
+
+<p>The hard, Jewish features lighted cunningly. &#8220;Then, por Dios, you are
+as wonderful as I&#8217;ve always heard! But may&#8211;may one be allowed a
+little curiosity?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I <i>might</i> say,&#8221; and Jacqueline forthwith said it,
+&#8220;that I have just had a cipher telegram from Louis Napoleon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_497'></a>497</span>&#8220;Which,&#8221; breathlessly demanded the
+other, &#8220;will interest Marquez, eh? Will disappoint him? Will cause him to
+surrender?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your Excellency is of course entitled to his own
+conjectures.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the commander-in-chief was satisfied. &#8220;We must hasten your going by
+every means,&#8221; he declared. &#8220;You shall have an escort.
+You&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then I choose the Gray Troop&#8211;because,&#8221; she added
+carefully, &#8220;they&#8217;re the best.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now, why, by all that&#8217;s feminine, was she surprised next morning when
+the Gray Troop gathered round her coach, as though that were a coincidence? At
+least she arched her brows, and lifted one shoulder petulantly, and unmistakably
+showed that she expected a tedious time of it. The sunburned colonel of the
+Grays beamed so with happiness too, as he drew rein to report to her. They met
+for the first time since Maximilian&#8217;s embarrassing little scene for their
+express benefit. Driscoll noted her disdain, and it is likely that he only
+grinned. He did that because he knew how helpless he was, and how merciless she
+could be. For she was not only beautiful, she was pretty&#8211;a demure, sweet,
+and very pretty girl. Some vague instinct of self-defense guided him. His broad
+smile was exasperating in the last degree, and it was not she, but the other
+young woman in the coach, whom he addressed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I got some side saddles, Miss Burt,&#8221; he announced, &#8220;and a
+few extra mustangs, whenever anybody gets tired of traveling behind
+curtains.&#8221; Curiously enough, both girls wore riding habits. &#8220;Oh, by
+the way,&#8221; he inquired suddenly, &#8220;how&#8217;s Miss Jack&#8217;leen this
+morning? Is she well and&#8211;docile?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline&#8217;s chin dropped in astonishment. She seized the old canvas
+window flap and jerked it down. But at once she raised it again, and
+thoughtfully contemplated the trooper.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wonder,&#8221; she mused aloud, in that quaint accenting of <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_498'></a>498</span>the English which cannot
+be described, &#8220;when is it that you are going to grow up,
+<i>ever</i>?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I did start to,&#8221; Driscoll informed her soberly, &#8220;but it
+got tiresome as all creation, and I reckon I&#8217;ve backslided just
+since&#8221;&#8211;a world of earnestness came into his lowered voice.
+&#8211;&#8220;well, just since we had that talk with poor Maximilian.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The old canvas curtain fell for good then, and very abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>A moment later, however, she was avenging her flushed cheeks on Mr. Daniel
+Boone, who rode at the other side, also sunburned, also effulgent with
+happiness.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If it isn&#8217;t the <i>animal disputans</i>!&#8221; she exclaimed.
+&#8220;Look Berthe, and rejoice; our sighing Monsieur le Troubadour!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll hovered near a moment, then reluctantly rode ahead of his battered
+dusty warriors. So he and the wilful maid from France began a second journey
+together, yet far, far apart. But only after many torturing hours did his first
+joy consent to perceive the distance between them.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then, though rarely, and never when he hoped for such a thing, she
+would ride with him. And then he usually stirred up hostilities before he knew
+it, and notwithstanding all that was tender and humble which he meant to tell
+her. There was, however, cause enough for savagery. She made him the least of
+the troop, though he arranged each detail of speed and comfort, laid out
+tempting noon-day spreads, improvised cheer in the cheerless hostelries, and all
+with a forethought showing pathetically how his every thought was of her. But if
+she divined the inwardness of this, which of course she did, outwardly she
+contrived to be oblivious. She thanked him sincerely and simply, the while that
+he craved repayment, as the heart repays. He yearned for only a chance to speak
+his mind, and to force hers. But now craftily she would bring the others
+flocking round, to decide for her if they did not think monsieur absurdly
+mistaken in this or that! <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_499'></a>499</span>The same instant she would conjure up the most
+trivial of arguments, and be vastly shocked over the ridiculous contentions
+which she herself assigned to Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>She grew honestly fond of the other Missouri colonels, with their ranger
+uniforms, and brawn scarred by weather and battle, and they and the marchioness
+became great friends. She was a dainty flower among them, but they were prime
+comrades, and she, the mad-cap tomboy her life long, took to them in the impulse
+that here were her own kind. Driscoll was proud to see it, without need of being
+generous. She gathered Berthe, as a soberer sister, into the merry communion,
+and she rode with Clay of Carroll, with Carroll of Clay, with Reub Marmaduke,
+with Crittenden, with cherubic Old Brothers and Sisters, with Hanks the bugler,
+and she mocked Meagre Shanks, that disputatious animal, because he tried to
+monopolize Berthe and would not dispute at all. She asked them questions. She
+asked Harry Collins if his tribe were the same as that of ces Missouriens-là,
+and the Kansan confessed that the two tribes had been a bit hostile of late, but
+what with raiding, razing, and murdering, he guessed they&#8217;d laid the
+foundation for a mutual self-respect, as behooved valiant redskins. So she often
+got strange answers for her inquisitiveness, but she had grown wary among
+Westerners, and she usually paid them back. They were a happy party. But
+Driscoll wanted a more definite focusing of the joy. And at times, indeed,
+yielding to temptation herself, she permitted him to lose his heart deliciously
+over again. Shadows were lifted now, and she was just a lovable girl, just sweet
+Jacqueline. And he loved her with the boy&#8217;s young strength of adoration
+and diffident awe. Precisely in which state she made him suffer exquisitely. No
+one could be more contrary and capricious than the lovable girl of a moment
+before. Whereat storms brewed within him.</p>
+
+<p>There was one of the rare times when the Missourian and <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_500'></a>500</span>the maid rode up and down the winding
+white ribbon of a Mexican highway, and for awhile both were quiet. This once
+they dared the risk&#8211;she did, rather&#8211;which lurks in the silence that
+requires no words. For him it brought the old time, and the rides of that time,
+when he wondered what was the matter with him, and she knew all along. And he
+thought how during the hard winter in the Michoacan mountains and swamps, he had
+caught himself almost crying aloud, that he wanted her, that he wanted
+her&#8211;wanted again the subtle comradeship of those silences which require no
+words. And here, at last, here she was, riding beside him!</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her furtively. She was in profile. He looked again, to be sure
+that it was not memory, but the breathing girl herself. Yes, for a fact, it was
+the girl herself. And here was her own queenly head, here its regal poise, here
+the superb line of the neck to the shoulder. Reverence grew on admiration, for
+as he gazed he beheld her character revealed, of lines as stately, as womanly,
+and withal as flexible, too, before the cheery glow of each moment&#8217;s life.
+He stirred, and was vaguely restive, and perhaps a little frightened also,
+because of the deep mystery of something within himself which he could not
+understand. The classic outline of her features was softened now in the warmth
+of flesh. Her vivacity was off guard, in the forgetfulness of reverie. The pure
+white of the little tip of ear was tinged with pink. Her eyes were lowered to
+the saddle horn. They were melting. They were almost blue.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jack&#8217;leen!&#8221; He burst out fervently, before he thought, with an
+arm half lifted toward her.</p>
+
+<p>The drooping lashes raised. The eyes were gray again. She regarded him for
+awhile without speaking.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why don&#8217;t you quarrel?&#8221; she asked finally.</p>
+
+<p>The spell was broken. Her pounding heart had vent in a nervous laugh of
+raillery. She touched her horse with the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_501'></a>501</span>riding crop in her gauntleted hand. Somehow she
+would not leave that dumb brute, the horse, in peace. Driscoll&#8217;s old
+Demijohn, however, was used to the game by now. He pointed his ears, and
+checkmated that last move by bringing his master once more to the lady&#8217;s
+side.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You used to,&#8221; she went on, as though there had been no
+interruption, &#8220;nicely. You were of an interest then. In fact, I
+reck-<i>on</i>&#8211;I know no one that I had rather have quarreled
+with.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But still he would not, though that &#8220;reckon&#8221; from her lips was
+most alluring. She stole a mischievous glance at his face, but the fixed look
+there made her lift <i>her</i> hand toward <i>him</i>. Perhaps, if he had seen
+and had spoken then&#8211;But he did see.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Eh bien, since monsieur won&#8217;t fight, won&#8217;t,
+<i>won&#8217;t</i>,&#8221; she cried, &#8220;then it&#8217;s more fun
+to&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Evidently to seek livelier company. For she wheeled the mustang, swerved from
+a grasp at her bridle, and went galloping back to the coach. He twisted in his
+saddle, pushed his sombrero higher on his head, and dubiously watched her flying
+from him, a lithe, trim figure in snug Hungarian jacket, the burnished tendrils
+fluttering on the nape of her neck, the soft white veil trailing like a fleecy
+cloud from her black <i>amazona</i> hat. He bent a perplexed gaze to the road.
+&#8220;It&#8217;s &#8217;way, &#8217;way beyond me,&#8221; he told himself. Then he grew
+aware of a sense of warmth on his forearm. Yes, he remembered. For an instant
+she had laid a hand on his sleeve, and he had thrilled to the ineffable token of
+nestling. He was never immune from her tantalizing contradictions. He felt this
+one yet.</p>
+
+<p>Hoofs pounded behind, and Mr. Boone drew up alongside. &#8220;She came back,
+and made me get away from the coach,&#8221; he announced. &#8220;Prob&#8217;bly she
+wanted to cry some; she looked it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_502'></a>502</span>Yet another of
+her contradictions!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then why in the nation,&#8221; Driscoll demanded, &#8220;do you keep
+hanging round that coach for? Look here Shanks, you make me plum&#8217; weary.
+The idea of you falling in&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No more&#8217;n you, you innocent gamboling lamb of an ol&#8217;
+blatherskite.&#8221; But Daniel&#8217;s steel blue eyes had softened to their
+gentlest. &#8220;Say Jack,&#8221; he added, &#8220;she&#8217;s going back to
+Paris.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t I know it? Lord A&#8217;mighty!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Go on, never mind me,&#8221; said Mr. Boone. &#8220;Groan out loud, if
+you want to. For she sho&#8217;ly is, yes, back to Paris. Now Buh&#8217;the&#8221;&#8211;The
+Troubadour&#8217;s <i>r&#8217;s</i> always liquefied dreamily with that
+name&#8211;&#8220;Buh&#8217;the has been telling me a few things, and I&#8217;m sure
+reporter enough to scout out the rest of the story, and it&#8217;s just
+this&#8211;Jack, she&#8217;s fair broken-hearted.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Miss Burt?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no, the marchioness. She staked out a campaign over here, and
+it&#8217;s panned out all wrong, and it wasn&#8217;t her fault either. Poor
+girl, no wonder she might like to cry a little. She&#8217;s lavished everything
+she had on it too, ancestral château, and all that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; said Driscoll quickly &#8220;she&#8217;ll not suffer.
+There&#8217;s her title&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Title?&#8221; exclaimed Daniel. &#8220;W&#8217;y, she&#8217;s going to
+give that up too, not having any château any more, and she&#8217;ll trip
+blithely down among the people again, where she says it&#8217;s more comfortable
+anyhow. Title? Well, you&#8217;ve suhtinly noticed that she always did take that
+humorously. Her grandfather&#8211;Buh&#8217;the says&#8211;was right considerable of a
+jurist, used scissors and paste, and helped make a scrap-book called the
+Napoleonic code, and Nap the First changed him into a picayunish duke. But
+wasn&#8217;t the nobility of intellect there already? Sho&#8217;ly! Miss Jacqueline,
+though, likes the father of her grandfather the best. He never was noble, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_503'></a>503</span>technically I mean. His
+was the nobility of heart, and he&#8217;d have scorned to be tagged. He just
+baked bread, and fed most half of Saint Antoine for nothing at times, while the
+Dauphin at Versailles was throwing cakes to the swans. Howsoever,&#8221; Mr.
+Boone added hastily, as sop to his softness for princes, &#8220;I reckon that
+there Dauphin was noble too. Both of &#8217;em fed the hungry mouths that were
+nearest.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; demanded Driscoll, &#8220;doesn&#8217;t her title carry
+some sort of a&#8211;a compensation?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not a red sou. The majorat&#8211;that&#8217;s the male line&#8211;died
+out with her father, which means that the annuity died out too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, Great Scot, she&#8217;s&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s tired and disheartened, that&#8217;s what she is, and
+she&#8217;s going back to Paris, and you&#8211;&#8221; Boone paused, and glared
+at his companion, &#8220;&#8211;and you mean to let her!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Old Demijohn felt a spur kicked against his flank, and he lifted his fore
+feet and sped as the wind. It was fully an hour later when Meagre Shanks caught
+up with horse and rider again. Rather, he met them coming back. His conversation
+was guileless, at first.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you know, Din,&#8221; he began, &#8220;those two girls are only
+half educated? Yes sir, gastronomically, they are positively illiterate, and
+it&#8217;s a shame! W&#8217;y, they don&#8217;t know hot biscuits and molasses.
+They don&#8217;t know buttermilk. They don&#8217;t know yams. Nor paw-paws, nor
+persimmons. They don&#8217;t even know watermelon. Now isn&#8217;t France a
+backward place?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t, Shanks!&#8221; Driscoll begged. &#8220;You&#8217;ll have
+me heading for Missouri in a minute. You didn&#8217;t, uh, mention peach
+cobbler?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>And</i> peach cobbler, big as an acre covered with snow. And just
+think, it&#8217;s roastin&#8217; ea&#8217;ah time up there now, <i>now</i>!&#8221; How
+Daniel&#8217;s voice did mellow under a tender sentiment! &#8220;And to
+think,&#8221; he went on, &#8220;of the marchioness living on in <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_504'></a>504</span> such ignorance!
+It&#8217;s a thing that&#8217;s just got to be remedied, Jack.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then suppose you take her to Missouri,&#8221; growled his friend,
+&#8220;and let me alone.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>I</i> take <i>her</i>? Oh come now, Din, I see I&#8217;ve got to
+tell you something which is&#8211;&#8221; The Troubadour&#8217;s accents grew
+low and fond, and the other man respected them, with something between a smile
+and a sigh for his own case. &#8220;Which is&#8211;well, nobody&#8217;s noticed
+it, but the fact is that Buh&#8217;the, that Miss Buh&#8217;the&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dan,&#8221; interrupted Driscoll severely, &#8220;you&#8217;re not
+going to tell me any secret. You mean that you weren&#8217;t mistaken when you
+mistook her for a queen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8211;that&#8217;s it!&#8221; ejaculated Daniel. &#8220;Of
+coh&#8217;se,&#8221; he added soothingly, &#8220;the other one is a&#8211;a mighty
+nice girl, but&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, <i>is</i> she? But Miss Burt is <i>the</i> one you want to take to
+Missouri? Well Dan, why don&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because,&#8221; was the doleful reply, &#8220;those two are just like
+orphan sisters together, and&#8211;well, she won&#8217;t desert. She <i>is</i> a
+queen, by God, sir! Miss Jacqueline might make her, but I haven&#8217;t got the
+heart to ask it. Now, uh, if&#8211;if you would just bring along the other
+one?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So, here was the goal of all of Daniel&#8217;s man&oelig;uvering!</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll cast a leg over the pommel of his saddle, and faced Boone squarely.
+&#8220;Shanks,&#8221; he demanded with tense vehemence, &#8220;do you suppose I
+need your woes for a prod? Don&#8217;t you know how much&#8211;Lord
+A&#8217;mighty, how much!&#8211;I&#8217;d like to oblige you? But&#8211;she
+won&#8217;t let me&#8211;even speak. There&#8217;s, there&#8217;s something the
+matter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Boone&#8217;s lank jaw fell. &#8220;What, I wonder?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And don&#8217;t I wonder too?&#8221; Driscoll muttered savagely.
+&#8220;But it&#8217;s <i>something</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>From which moment until the end of the journey, and afterward, <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_505'></a>505</span>there were two men who
+pondered on what could be the trouble with Jacqueline. But while one pondered
+gloomily and fiercely and with a semi-comic grin under the lash, the other let
+perplexity delve and ferret into the mystery. For Mr. Boone had grown aware that
+an enormous heap of happiness for four depended on himself alone.</p>
+
+<hr class='pb' />
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_506'></a>506</span><a id='link_57'></a>CHAPTER XXIV<br /><span class='h2fs'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Journalistic Sagacity of a Daniel</span></span></h2>
+
+<div class='mbox'>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, my Belovèd, fill the cup that clears<br />
+To-day of past Regret and future Fears.&#8221;</p>
+<p class='ar'>&#8211;<i>Omar.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>At last Jacqueline stabbed a dot after the word &#8220;Finis,&#8221; and so
+rounded out her chapter on &#8220;Failure.&#8221; Beyond doubt that tiny
+punctuation point saved many lives. The besiegers were waxing impatient to
+assault, and within the City famine mobs ran the streets, crying, &#8220;Corn
+and wood! Corn and wood!&#8221; Those who could fled to the Republican camp. The
+Austrians practically mutinied. Starving and dying thousands clamored for
+surrender. Yet the ugly, revolting pigmy who was lieutenant of the Empire held
+them back in the terror of his heartless cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>Then the angel of mercy came. From her Marquez the tyrant learned that his
+speculation in treachery had collapsed. Louis Napoleon wanted no more of that
+stock. Besides, every French bayonet was needed in France. The rabid Leopard
+heard, and that night meanly crept away to save his own loathsome pelt. Bombs
+had begun to fall into the City, when a Mexican general worthier of the name
+took upon himself the heroic shame of unconditional surrender. The Oaxacans
+outside marched in, led by their young chief, Porfirio Diaz, and they fed the
+people, and of &#8220;traitors&#8221; shot only a moderate few.</p>
+
+<p>Renovation became the order of the days that followed. The President of the
+Republic was to be welcomed back to his <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_507'></a>507</span>capital. The stubborn old patriot&#8217;s heart must
+be gladdened by every contrast to the dreary, rainy night years before when he
+fled into exile. Mexico would honor herself in honoring the Benemérito of
+America. So bunting was spread over every façade, along every cornice, green,
+white, and red, a festival lichen of magic growth. Flags cracked and snapped
+aloft, and lace curtains decked the outside of windows. Soldiers put on shoes
+and canvased their brown hands in white cotton gloves, and military bands
+rehearsed tirelessly.</p>
+
+<p>Din Driscoll sat on a bench in the shady Zócalo, and contemplated the Palacio
+Nacional and the Cathedral in process of changing sides from Empire to Republic.
+Innumerable lanterns being hung along their massive outlines were for incense to
+a goddess restored. The Mexican eagle had prevailed over monarchial griffins,
+and held her serpent safely in the way of being throttled. The blunt homely
+visage of Don Benito Juarez, luxuriously framed, looked out from over the Palace
+entrance. It was a huge portrait, surrounded by the national standards. Among
+the emblems there was one other, the Stars and Stripes. The gaze of the
+ex-Confederate was fixed. It was fixed steadily on the Stars and Stripes. Now
+and then he felt a rising in his throat, which he had difficulty to swallow down
+again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Jack?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Boone stood over him. Driscoll&#8217;s eyes were oddly troubled as they
+turned from that flag opposite.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sure it&#8217;s hard,&#8221; said Boone quietly, &#8220;mighty hard,
+to forgive our enemies the good they do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What enemies?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, them,&#8221; and Daniel pointed to a flag as to a nation.
+&#8220;Yes sir, the Yanks have kept faith. Do you see a single one of their
+uniforms down here? Do you notice anywheres that Yankee protectorate we were
+predicting? No sir, you do not! The Yanks&#8211;&#8221; But the term was damning
+to eloquence. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_508'></a>508</span>Mr.
+Boone found another. &#8220;The <i>Americans</i>, I repeat, have hurled back the
+European invader. They have given Mexico to the Mexicans. They have endowed a
+people with nationality. But they have not gobbled up one solitary foot of
+territory. Which is finer, grander, than your Napoleonic glory! And yet
+it&#8217;s selfish, of coh&#8217;se it is. But listen here, there&#8217;ll never be
+any Utopia, Altruria, Millennium, or what not, that don&#8217;t coincide with
+self-interest. And first among the races of the earth, the Americans have
+<i>made</i> &#8217;em coincide, and I want to know right now if the Americans
+are not the hope of the world!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The orator paused for breath. He had to. And then surprise the most
+lugubrious unexpectedly clouded his lank features. &#8220;Darn it, Jack,&#8221;
+he exclaimed in alarm, &#8220;if I ain&#8217;t getting Reconstructed, right
+while I am standing here!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Talked</i> yourself into it,&#8221; Driscoll observed scornfully.
+&#8220;But Dan, you can just put the South along with your Americans. The French
+laughed at the North alone, but later, when&#8211;Well, just maybe it&#8217;s a
+good thing we did get licked.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone gasped. Sparks of indignation darted from his steel blue eyes. The
+recoil needed a full minute to spend itself. Then a greater horror appalled him,
+a horror of himself. &#8220;The Lawd help me,&#8221; he burst forth, &#8220;but
+you&#8217;re right, Din Driscoll! You are! It <i>was</i> for the best. But
+don&#8217;t you ever think I&#8217;m going to admit it again, to nary a living
+mortal soul, myself included. W&#8217;y, it would, it would knock my editorial
+usefulness&#8211;all <i>to</i> smash. There,&#8221; he added,
+&#8220;that&#8217;s decided, we&#8217;re going back. The colonels want their
+mamas. They&#8217;ve been men long enough, and they&#8217;re plum&#8217;
+homesick. All the old grudges up there must be about paid off by now, so&#8217;s
+an ex-Reb can live in Missouri without train robbing. <i>Libertas et natale
+solum</i>&#8211;It&#8217;s our surrender, <i>at</i> last.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll rose abruptly. &#8220;Lay down your pen, Shanks,&#8221; <span
+class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_509'></a>509</span>he said.
+&#8220;You&#8217;re only trying to convert the converted. Of course I&#8217;m
+going too. That there flag, being down here, did it. And don&#8217;t you suppose
+<i>I&#8217;ve</i> had letters from home too?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Meagre Shanks jumped with relief. He straightened throughout his spare
+length. As the smell of battle to the war charger, the pungent odor of
+printer&#8217;s ink wet on galley proofs assailed his nostrils. There were
+visions, of double-leaded, unterrified thunderbolts crashing from the old
+Gutenberg, back in Booneville.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Missouri,&#8221; he breathed in fire, &#8220;Missouri will sho&#8217;ly stay
+Democratic.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Both men glowed. They were buoyant, happy. But these two could not so soon be
+quit of the enervating Land of Roses. A pair of countenances fell together.
+Daniel voiced their mutual thought.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And Miss Jacqueline?&#8221; he queried boldly, with the air of meaning
+to persist, no matter what happened.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll showed weariness, anger.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And Miss Burt?&#8221; he parried.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She won&#8217;t desert, I told you once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mean that she&#8217;s going to Paris too? I say, Shanks,
+they&#8217;re leaving to-morrow.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Shanks knew that much, quite well enough.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have you <i>tried</i> to stop her?&#8221; he demanded sternly.</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll only looked disgusted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But have you&#8211;<i>asked</i> her?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll&#8217;s head jerked a nod, of wrath ascending.</p>
+
+<p>The inquisitor wisely swerved. What her answer had been was, to say the
+least, palpable. But her reason for it was <i>the</i> question with Daniel.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is it,&#8221; he pursued, &#8220;is it because she hasn&#8217;t any
+dot? You know, Jack, that in France, when a young lady&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, it&#8217;s not that. I know it&#8217;s not.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_510'></a>510</span>&#8220;Oh
+ho,&#8221; said Daniel, &#8220;so you&#8217;ve been guessing too! And how many
+guesses did she give you? No, let me try just a few more. It ain&#8217;t
+because, because she&#8217;s an aristocrat?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I <i>want</i> an aristocrat,&#8221; cried the young Missourian,
+&#8220;one to her finger tips, enough of one to be above aristocracy. And
+<i>she</i> is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then,&#8221; said his friend in despair, &#8220;it&#8217;s because she
+don&#8217;t, just simply don&#8217;t care for you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re a long time finding that out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What! You don&#8217;t mean&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fact,&#8221; said Driscoll. &#8220;Even I guessed it at last. I told
+her I had been reckoning that she&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Cared, yes?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll made a wry face. &#8220;And she said I mustn&#8217;t jump at
+conclusions, I might scare &#8217;em.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Troubadour chuckled heartlessly. Neither was Driscoll&#8217;s sense of
+humor entirely gone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Oh, awful goddess! ever dreadful maid!&#8217;&#8221; Mr. Boone
+quoted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s sure a wonder,&#8221; the other owned gloomily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you are a blind dunce, Jack.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t talk axioms at me,&#8221; said Driscoll, with a warning
+light in his eye. &#8220;I don&#8217;t need &#8217;em.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, now,&#8221; drawled Mr. Boone, &#8220;I can&#8217;t help it if I
+associate with you any longer, so I&#8217;ll just mosey round to the flower
+market. As they leave to-morrow, they&#8217;ll be wanting some
+violets.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And he went, and Din Driscoll sat down again and hated him.</p>
+
+<p>Daniel wended his way slowly, an attenuated ranger in gray mid carriages and
+blanketed forms. &#8220;Sho&#8217;&#8221;, he mused, &#8220;that girl&#8217;s
+heart is fair bleeding for him, can&#8217;t <i>I</i> see! Her eye-lashes,
+they&#8217;re <i>wet</i>, every now <i>and</i> then. And whatever the matter
+with her is, it&#8217;s nothing. But nothing is the very <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_511'></a>511</span> darndest thing to overcome in a girl.
+There&#8217;s got to be strong measures. It&#8217;s got to be <i>jolted</i> out
+of her. <i>Archimagnífico, there&#8217;s</i> the point!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Boone drew out a black cigar, and mangled it between his teeth. He
+pondered and pondered, absent-mindedly kicking at natives he bumped into.
+&#8220;Kidnap &#8217;em!&#8221; he cried at length. &#8220;N-o,&#8221; he
+reflected, &#8220;they go in the public stage, and what with the escort,
+somebody&#8217;d get hurt. We don&#8217;t want any dead men at this wedding. Old
+Brothers and Sisters would balk anyhow, and our ecclesiastical officiator is the
+boy we <i>do</i> need. Now what the everlasting&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He meant what salutary jolt he <i>could</i> invent, barring holdups, but in
+the same breath he meant also a most startling scene which revealed itself as he
+turned the corner.</p>
+
+<p>A deafening crash of musketry was the first thing, and he looked up. He had
+come into a small plaza before a church, and against the church&#8217;s blank
+wall a scene was taking place before an awe-stricken throng. He understood.
+Another proscribed &#8220;traitor&#8221; had just been caught; and executed,
+naturally. But no, not executed! For as the officer of the shooting squad
+approached to give the stroke of mercy, the prostrate victim raised himself by
+one hand and knocked aside the pistol at his head. Then he laughed in the
+officer&#8217;s face, the most diabolical and unearthly mirth any there had ever
+heard. There was not a stain of blood on him. He had dropped in the breath of
+eternity before the bullets spattered past. But his uplifted face, with chin
+tilted back, was swollen, black, distorted, corded by pulsing veins, and one of
+the eyes&#8211;a crossed eye&#8211;bulged round and purple out of its socket,
+and <i>gleamed</i>. The demon of pain was tearing at the man&#8217;s tissue of
+life, but by grip of will unspeakable the agony in that grimace changed to a
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, poison! Vitriol!&#8221; he chattered at them hideously.
+&#8220;Adios, imbeciles. It&#8217;s my last&#8211;jest!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_512'></a>512</span>Whereat he fell,
+writhing as the acid burned to his soul. Before the astounded officer could
+shoot, he had grown entirely quiet.</p>
+
+<p>Boone strained and pushed against the crowd until he reached the spot. The
+cadaver was in tight charro garb of raw leather. His sombrero lay near, on which
+was worked a Roman sword, meaning &#8220;Woe to the conquered!&#8221; Boone
+turned inquiringly to the officer. The man, who was pallid, touched his thumb to
+his cap, recognizing the uniform of the Grays.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You should know him, mi coronel,&#8221; he explained. &#8220;His name
+was Tiburcio. He deserted from the Imperialistas at Querétaro, but afterward he
+joined the plot for Maximilian&#8217;s escape. We had his description, and I
+found him. He wanted to take me to Marquez and Fischer, whom we would also like
+to find. He said that he risked himself here, to spy on them, and that he knew
+where they had fled, the Leopard disguised in the padre&#8217;s cloak. But of
+course I paid no attention. I did not delay even to tie his hands. As Your Mercy
+observes, I had the honor to do my duty, at once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see,&#8221; replied Boone dryly. &#8220;Lawd, this <i>is</i> a
+jolt!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then he got himself away from there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A jolt,&#8221; he muttered to himself again. &#8220;But shucks, it
+can&#8217;t&#8211;Yes, it can,&#8221; he decided fervently, &#8220;it can be
+used. We&#8217;ve got to have something terrifying, and poor cock-eyed Don Tibby
+won&#8217;t care. He&#8217;d appreciate it. And anyhow, I don&#8217;t seem to be
+able to stir up inspirations to-day, and this is the only thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was as pallid as the shooting squad he had just left.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No matter,&#8221; he reflected, &#8220;I&#8217;ll need just this
+ghastly state of mind. But here, goodness gracious, I&#8217;ve got to be in a
+sweat,&#8221; with which he began to run, a lank knight in gray dented
+armor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Worse luck,&#8221; his thought pounded along with him, &#8220;this
+here&#8217;s the first time I&#8217;ve ever faked. And it&#8217;s a heap the
+hottest <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_513'></a>513</span>story
+I&#8217;ve ever handled, too. Our little Parisienne will get a frisson all
+right, all right, and such a one she&#8217;ll not be wanting any of again very
+soon. Dixie Land, I mustn&#8217;t smoke, I&#8217;m to be too excited.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He came into the Zócalo, and drew up before Driscoll, who was still there and
+still ruminating.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Listen here,&#8221; Boone panted, &#8220;here&#8217;s your
+cue.&#8211;In ten minutes&#8211;to the second&#8211;arrive&#8211;knock at her
+door&#8211;appear!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With violets?&#8221; inquired Driscoll.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh shut up!&#8211;Quit, don&#8217;t stop me, I&#8217;m getting cooled
+off!&#8211;Only do what I say.&#8211;In just ten minutes&#8211;that is&#8211;if
+you want the girl.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And Daniel was off again, &#8220;with high and haughty steps&#8221; towering
+along.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That Meagre Shanks, there, isn&#8217;t a fool,&#8221; Driscoll
+mentally recorded, and he took out his watch.</p>
+
+<p>The two girls were stopping at a hotel in Plateros Street, for Jacqueline had
+returned to find her beautiful residence, salon and all, ruthlessly dismantled,
+looted, robbed by Marquez while she was in Querétaro, which was a manner of
+levying contributions not unfamiliar to the Lieutenant of the Empire.</p>
+
+<p>In the balcony room of their hotel suite the two girls strove valiantly.
+Crisp gowns and dainty allied mysteries lay spread over the upholstery. They
+were vanishing into cavernous trunks, with crushing indifference if Jacqueline
+seized on a garment, but gently when Berthe rescued it, which she always did.
+Through the double glass doors of the balcony the street sounds below rose to
+their ears, clarion notes and vivas, hurrying feet and prancing hoofs, and the
+National hymn a few blocks away in the Zócalo.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a grim apparition loomed before the glass doors on the balcony.
+Berthe half screamed, in dismay clutching at ruffles and laces to hide them,
+when into the sweet-scented confusion strode Mr. Daniel Boone. He was the grim
+apparition. <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_514'></a>514</span>Jacqueline withheld her opinion, but she had one.
+The intruder&#8217;s spurs were iconoclastic of carpeting, his abrupt presence
+of feminine sensibilities. But the lean, perspiring face drove away all thought
+of the conventions. Jacqueline snatched up a fleecy bank of petticoats, making
+room for him on the sofa. Daniel stared vacantly. The two girls looked very
+pretty. They were just flurried enough, and they wore white lawn, with sleeves
+short to the elbow. His fingers groped, and soon they closed over a small,
+instinctive hand. He kept hold upon that hand for strength, at the same time
+collapsing on the sofa.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, if you please,&#8221; said Jacqueline calmly,
+&#8220;what&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;O Lawd!&#8221; Boone gulped, fighting for breath. &#8220;It
+don&#8217;t matter much&#8211;maybe&#8211;to you all, but&#8211;O Lawd, I got to
+tell somebody!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tell us, tell us!&#8221; cried she of the captured hand.</p>
+
+<p>Daniel had sufficient presence of mind to retain it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know that&#8211;that poor devil Tiburcio?&#8221; he gasped.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes!&#8221; But what anti-climax was here?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, he&#8211;he&#8217;s dead. I saw him.&#8211;Lawd!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh!&#8221; It was a little cry of relief.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But some were&#8211;were killed&#8211;taking him.&#8221; Boone noted
+Jacqueline&#8217;s intake of breath, her first tremor of alarm. &#8220;He fought
+like a&#8211;a wildcat. He had a knife&#8211;and a machete&#8211;and a
+pistol&#8211;and&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Who</i> was killed? Monsieur&#8211;Oh, mon Dieu, what <i>can</i> you
+have to tell me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Daniel almost repented, there was that in her gray eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Among them was my&#8211;&#8221; He nerved himself to it, some
+way&#8211;&#8220;my best friend, that peerless&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who?&#8221; Her command was imperious, her white teeth were set.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Din Driscoll!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The man blurted it out like a whipped schoolboy. He <span class='pagenum
+pncolor'><a id='page_515'></a>515</span>could not look up. He could only feel
+that she stood there, stricken, suffering.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where is he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He could not believe that this was her voice. It was hardened, tearless,
+without emotion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Monsieur&#8211;where is he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The girl at his side sprang up with a sharp cry to her who questioned. Then
+he raised his eyes. Jacqueline was unaware of the sobbing girl who clung to her.
+Her face was changed to marble, her body as rigid.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Take me to him,&#8221; she spoke again, still with that deathly
+authority of the grave.</p>
+
+<p>The man stammered before what he had done. The great beads stood out on his
+forehead. &#8220;You would not&#8211;you must not&#8211;you&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He is mine,&#8221; she said simply. &#8220;Wait, I shall be ready, at
+once.&#8221; She passed into an inner room, the portières falling after her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s&#8211;she&#8217;s getting on her hat,&#8221; Boone
+muttered inanely. &#8220;Buh&#8217;the, she&#8217;s got to be stopped!
+She&#8217;s&#8211;God, why don&#8217;t he come? It&#8217;s shuah ten minutes.
+It&#8217;s&#8211;What&#8217;s that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Someone had knocked. In the instant Boone had the hall door ajar.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Round to the balcony window, hurry!&#8221; he whispered.</p>
+
+<p>Then he turned, caught Berthe by the hand, and drew her quickly out into the
+hall. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the portières rustle, but he
+dared not look back.</p>
+
+<p>Jacqueline stepped into the room, and her hat was upon her head. It was of
+straw, with a drooping brim. She had thrown a long cloak over her thin dress.
+There was ice in her veins on this tropical June day. She paused, for she saw
+that the room was deserted. But no&#8211;there was a shadow between her and the
+balcony door. She stared at it, and her eyes grew big. The cloak slipped to the
+floor, and her fingers worked in the <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_516'></a>516</span>tapestry behind her. She fluttered weakly, like a
+wounded dove on the ground. Her knees trembled under her. And the man there? He
+was gazing about him in a puzzled way, for the glare outside still blinded him.
+Then he saw. He reached her, and caught her as she sank. He felt two soft arms,
+but icy cold, drop as lead around his neck. The white form he held was rigid,
+and he thought of shrouds and the chilled death sweat. With savage despair he
+crushed her to him. After a time her body slowly began to relax.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, oh, my lad, my lad!&#8221; he heard her crying faintly, in a kind
+of hysteria.</p>
+
+<p>He touched her hair dazedly, with unutterable tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, there&#8211;sweetheart!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The word came, though he had never used it before.</p>
+
+<p>Blood awoke, and coursed, sluggishly at first, through her being, until her
+heart tripped and throbbed and pounded against his own. Her head lay on his
+breast, the hat hanging by its ribbons over her back, and with the pulsing life
+the head and her whole body nestled closer. The soft arms grew warm against his
+neck, and tightened fiercely, to hold and keep him. Gently he forced up her
+chin, and her eyes, wet with hottest tears, opened under his. He bent and kissed
+the long lashes. But a small moist hand flattened against his brow and pushed
+back his head, and she raised on tiptoe. He understood, and&#8211;their lips
+met.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tu sais,&#8221; she murmured deliriously&#8211;nothing but her own
+dear French would answer now&#8211;&#8220;tu sais, que&#8211;oh, mon c&oelig;ur,
+que je&#8211;que je <i>t&#8217;aime</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The oddest contrasts fall over life&#8217;s most sacred moments. The tone of
+her words thrilled him, set every fibre tingling, yet he thought of dry
+conjugations and declensions, conned over and over again in school, and he was
+conscious of vague wonderment that those things really, actually, had a meaning.
+Meaning? He believed now that no words in <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a
+id='page_517'></a>517</span>English could tell so much. He did not have to
+understand them. They bore the flesh and blood, the passion and the soul, of a
+woman who told him that she loved him.</p>
+
+<p>With a hesitant gentleness which bespoke the deep and reverent awe in his
+yearning, he pressed her head back against its resting place. A man can do
+without words of any kind. She grew very quiet there. The tense quivering
+ceased, and she crept closer, and at last she sighed, purringly,
+contentedly.</p>
+
+<p>But of course there was more which she simply had to say. And this time, when
+she raised her eyes, they were calm and earnest, and her beautiful forehead was
+white and very grave. &#8220;Do you know, dear,&#8221; she said, &#8220;I should
+not care to live, I would not have lived, if what he said
+were&#8211;were&#8211;&#8221; But the eyes filled with tears, and angry with
+herself, she planted her fists against him to be free, and as impulsively
+crying, &#8220;Oh, my&#8211;my own dear lad!&#8221; she flung her arms about his
+neck again. &#8220;Oh, oh,&#8221; she moaned, &#8220;he said that you were
+dead!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For the first time it dawned on Driscoll that all this must have had a cause,
+and for the first time since entering the room he remembered Boone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>He</i> told you&#8211;He&#8211;&#8211;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But Driscoll did not finish. Putting her from him he sprang to the door and
+flung it open. There he waited. Boone was outside, and Boone walked expectantly
+in. Without a word Driscoll raised his fist, drew it back, his cruel arm muscled
+to kill. Jacqueline saw his anger for her, terrible in murder. She threw herself
+upon him, got hold of the knotted fist, got it to her lips. Another woman, too,
+had darted between him and the other man, and she faced him. The gentle Berthe
+was become a little tigress.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not that, not that!&#8221; It was Jacqueline&#8217;s voice.
+&#8220;Listen, mon cheri, I&#8211;I thank him. Au contraire, I do! And&#8211;and
+you must, too!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_518'></a>518</span>Driscoll stared
+at all three, first at one, then at another. He floundered, stupefied. Here was
+this loving girl, clinging to him as though he might vanish, and he had left her
+that morning a disdainful beauty. Then here was this Meagre Shanks with his
+mysterious ten minutes, and here was this dumfounding product of those ten
+minutes. Driscoll put forth an open hand.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dan,&#8221; he muttered incoherently, &#8220;you&#8217;re a&#8211;a
+wonder, too!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Boone clenched the proffered hand in his own. &#8220;I never once thought,
+Jack,&#8221; he said earnestly, contritely, &#8220;never once, that she cared so
+ever-<i>lastingly</i> much.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; said Driscoll, &#8220;don&#8217;t do it again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not unless,&#8221; ventured Boone, &#8220;not unless she should ever
+want a little antidote for ennui. By the way, mademoiselle, do you thank me for
+the quaver of emotion, for the frisson?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Frisson?&#8221; she repeated scornfully, with loathing. For once she
+had been unaware of the prized knife-like tremor. In the fear of losing one dear
+she had lost consciousness of self. She had <i>lived</i> the tremor, the agony,
+and it was too dreadful, &#8220;No, monsieur,&#8221; she said, &#8220;I want no
+more of art. I&#8211;I want to <i>live</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You needed something, though,&#8221; said Berthe, &#8220;to make you
+find it out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Driscoll looked curiously at the two girls.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, J-Jack&#8217;leen&#8221;&#8211;how quaintly awkward he was, trying her
+old tomboy nickname without the &#8220;Miss!&#8221;&#8211;&#8220;Yes, what was
+the matter with you, anyhow?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Parbleu, I forgot!&#8221; cried Jacqueline in dismay. &#8220;I was not
+to have monsieur, no!&#8221; And Jacqueline&#8217;s chin, tilting back with
+elaborate hauteur, was meant to indicate that she was in her first mind about
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Berthe laughed outright, and softly clapped her hands.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sho&#8217;,&#8221; declared Mr. Boone, &#8220;the matter was nothing,
+nothing <i>at</i> all!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_519'></a>519</span>But before
+feminine caprices and scruples it is wiser to bow low into the dust. Jacqueline
+turned on the editorial personage with vast indignation. &#8220;You leave the
+room, Seigneur Troubadour,&#8221; she commanded, &#8220;and Berthe, you march
+with him. Haste, both of you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They went, meekly. Their attempt to hide content over the dismissal together
+was extreme, but transparent.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What was it?&#8221; Driscoll insisted, when he and Jacqueline were
+alone once more.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mean,&#8221; she exclaimed, &#8220;that you are going to
+quarrel&#8211;now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jack&#8217;leen, what was it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I reck-on,&#8221; she observed demurely, &#8220;that the animal
+disputans was&#8211;was right, after all. It was nothing,
+I&#8211;reck-on.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He noted mockery, defiance. There was much too much independence after her
+late surrender. He went up to her and deliberately reassumed the mastery. He
+held her, by force. &#8220;Mon chevalier,&#8221; she murmured softly. So she
+confessed his strength.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tell me,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you did not guess? You&#8211;Oh, how I hated you! How I never
+wanted to see you, never again! Not after, not after&#8211;Mon Dieu, you were
+two exasperating idiots, you and poor Prince Max! He virtually <i>threw</i> me
+into your arms. But I, monsieur, am not a person to be thrown. That is,
+unless&#8211;unless I do it myself, which&#8211;I did, hélas!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The trooper&#8217;s grip tightened on her arms. &#8220;Then you,&#8221; he
+said earnestly, &#8220;would have let me lose you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She laughed merrily at him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And would not you have followed after me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;W&#8217;y, little girl, I reckon I certainly would of.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t,&#8221; she gasped. &#8220;Let me come&#8211;closer. Oh
+dear, how can the bon Dieu let people be so happy&#8211;s-o happy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MISSOURIAN***</p>
+<p>******* This file should be named 30623-h.txt or 30623-h.zip *******</p>
+<p>This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:<br />
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/0/6/2/30623">http://www.gutenberg.org/3/0/6/2/30623</a></p>
+<p>Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.</p>
+
+<p>Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
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+</pre>
+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,18651 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Missourian, by Eugene P. (Eugene Percy)
+Lyle, Illustrated by Ernest Haskell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Missourian
+
+
+Author: Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 7, 2009  [eBook #30623]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MISSOURIAN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 30623-h.htm or 30623-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30623/30623-h/30623-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30623/30623-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MISSOURIAN
+
+[Illustration: "JACQUELINE"
+"She was the spirit of the enigma, the very personification of the
+Napoleonic sphinx"]
+
+THE MISSOURIAN
+
+by
+
+EUGENE P. LYLE, Jr.
+
+"In my predestin'd Plot of Dust and Soul."--Omar
+
+Illustrated by Ernest Haskell
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Doubleday, Page & Company
+1905
+
+Copyright, 1905, by
+Doubleday, Page & Company
+Published, August, 1905
+
+All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
+languages, including the Scandinavian
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+MY TWO BEST FRIENDS
+
+My Father and my Mother
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PART I.
+
+THE THORN IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+       I.  A Wilful Maid Arrives                      3
+      II.  A Fra Diavolo in the Land of Roses        11
+     III.  The Violent End of a Terrible Bandit      18
+      IV.  _La Luz_, Blockade Runner                 27
+       V.  The Storm Centre                          34
+      VI.  A Bruising of Arms for Jacqueline         45
+     VII.  Swordsmanship in the Dark                 55
+    VIII.  The Thoughts of Youth May Be
+           Prodigiously Long Thoughts                64
+      IX.  Toll-Taking in the Huasteca               69
+       X.  The Brigand Chief                         80
+      XI.  The Cossacks and Their Tiger Colonel      89
+     XII.  Pastime Passing Excellent                 98
+    XIII.  Unregistered in Any Studbook             108
+     XIV.  The Herald of the Fair God               114
+      XV.  The Ritual                               122
+     XVI.  He of the Debonair Sceptre               131
+    XVII.  Rather a Small Man                       140
+   XVIII.  Little Monarchs, Big Mistakes            149
+     XIX.  A Tartar, _and_ a Tartar                 156
+      XX.  In the Wake of Princely Cavalcades       164
+     XXI.  The Red Mongrel                          173
+    XXII.  "Equidad en la Justicia"                 182
+   XXIII.  A Curious Pagan Rite                     188
+    XXIV.  The Man Who Did Not Want to be Shot      193
+     XXV.  The Person on the Other Horse            200
+    XXVI.  The Strangest Avowal of Love             209
+   XXVII.  Berthe                                   219
+  XXVIII.  "Mike"                                   228
+    XXIX.  The Whisper of the Sphinx                238
+     XXX.  The Ambassador                           242
+    XXXI.  Carlota                                  253
+   XXXII.  The Woman Who Did Not Hesitate           258
+  XXXIII.  A Sponsor to the Fat Padre               266
+
+PART II.
+
+THE ROSE THAT WAS A THORN IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+       I.  Meagre Shanks                            273
+      II.  The Black Decree                         284
+     III.  As Between Women                         293
+      IV.  The Lacking Coincidence                  298
+       V.  The Missourians                          306
+      VI.  If a Kiss Were All                       315
+     VII.  A Crop of Colonels                       324
+    VIII.  Royal Resolution                         335
+      IX.  Interpreter to the Almighty              344
+       X.  Alone Among His Loving Subjects          351
+      XI.  Fatality and the Missourian              359
+     XII.  The Rendezvous of the Republic           369
+    XIII.  A Buccaneer and a Battle                 380
+     XIV.  Blood and Noise--What Else?              391
+      XV.  Of All News the Most Spiteful            406
+     XVI.  Vendetta's Half Sister, Better Born      422
+    XVII.  Under a Spanish Cloak                    434
+   XVIII.  El Chaparrito                            443
+     XIX.  In Articulo Mortis                       459
+      XX.  Knighthood's Belated Flower              465
+     XXI.  The Title of Nobility                    475
+    XXII.  The Abbey of Mount Regret                484
+   XXIII.  The Contrariness of Jacqueline           496
+    XXIV.  The Journalistic Sagacity of a Daniel    506
+
+
+
+
+THE PEOPLE OF THE STORY
+
+THE MISSOURIAN, known in every fight as the Storm Centre. His
+real name is John D. Driscoll, familiarly shortened to Din Driscoll. At
+the close of the Civil War he finds himself a lieutenant-colonel in
+General Joe Shelby's brigade of Confederate daredevils, sent by his
+comrades as emissary to the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.
+
+JACQUELINE, who is the Marquise Jeanne d'Aumerle, on a mission
+of high politics from Napoleon III. to the Court of Mexico.
+
+BERTHE, her maid.
+
+MAXIMILIAN, archduke of Austria, occupant of the New World
+throne created for him.
+
+CHARLOTTE OF ORLEANS, the Empress.
+
+ANASTASIO MURGUIA, a Mexican hacendado, who acquires riches by
+running Federal blockades into Southern ports. He is both a coward and a
+miser.
+
+MARIA DE LA LUZ, his daughter.
+
+RODRIGO GALAN, brigand and guerrilla.
+
+TIBURCIO, blackmailer of the highway, scout, and "loyal
+Imperialist."
+
+AUGUSTIN FISCHER, "the Fat Padre," a renegade priest of subtle
+parts.
+
+MICHEL NEY, grandson of the "Bravest of the Brave."
+
+THE MARSHAL BAZAINE, commander-in-chief of the French Army of
+Occupation in Mexico.
+
+MADAME LA MARECHALE, his bride.
+
+COLONEL DUPIN, the "Tiger of the Tropics," chief of the Contra
+Guerrillas.
+
+MIGUEL LOPEZ, colonel of Dragoons, a favorite of the Emperor.
+
+MONSIEUR ELOIN, the Emperor's secretary.
+
+MARQUEZ, MIRAMON, MEJIA, MENDEZ,
+Imperialist officers.
+
+REGULES, ESCOBEDO, Republican officers.
+
+DANIEL BOONE, first scout among the Missourians, one-time
+editor and editor yet to be.
+
+"OLD BROTHERS AND SISTERS," "TALL MOSE" BLEDSOE,
+OF THE COUNTY OF PIKE, and yet more of the Missouri colonels.
+
+BENITO JUAREZ, president of the Mexican Republic.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+ "JACQUELINE" "She was the spirit of the enigma, the
+ very personification of the Napoleonic sphinx"     _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                      Facing page
+
+ "MURGUIA" "He had evidently passed through salty spray, had
+ braved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black"      16
+
+"RODRIGO GALAN" "The fierce stranger, however, seemed
+ undecided. His brow furrowed, and for the moment he only
+ stared"                                                       18
+
+ "JOHN DINWIDDIE DRISCOLL, THE MISSOURIAN" "His cheeks were
+ smooth, but they were tight and hard and brown from the
+ weathering of sun and blizzard"                               38
+
+ "COLONEL DUPIN" "The Tiger of the Tropics ... the chief of
+ Contra Guerrillas"                                            94
+
+ THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN                                       134
+
+ "MARIA DE LA LUZ" "The tapestry behind them parted and fell"
+                                                              146
+
+ "BERTHE" "... brought down the ponderous knocker so
+ terrifically that it abashed her, for all her present
+ agitation"                                                   220
+
+
+
+
+PART FIRST
+
+THE THORN IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+  "Array you, lordyngs, one and all,
+  For here begins no peace."
+            --_The Ballad of the Battle of Otterburn_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A WILFUL MAID ARRIVES FROM FRANCE
+
+
+  "I'll tell thee, it is the stubbornest young fellow of France,
+  full of ambition."--_As You Like It._
+
+
+Jacqueline was a gentlewoman of France. But there was usually mischief
+in her handsome head, for all its queenly poise. Just now, she was
+running away from the ship. Captain and officers of the _Imperatrice
+Eugenie_, Imperial red pantaloons, gilt Imperial eagles, such tokens
+of awe were yet not awful enough to hold Jacqueline. So, with the
+humility of limp things in that sticky air, the sailors shoved closer in
+the small boat and made place for the adjustment of crisp skirts. With
+the lady went her gentle little Breton maid, who trembled with the
+trembling of every plank in those norther-rocked waters. The high sun,
+just showing himself after the late gale, was sucking a gummy moisture
+out upon all surfaces, and the perspiring men felt mean and base before
+the starchy freshness of the two girls.
+
+No one was pleased that Jacqueline was going, except Jacqueline herself.
+But she was keen for it. She had been impervious to their flustered
+anxiety, also to the tributes to her importance betrayed therein. In
+vain they argued no fewer than two emperors to dissuade her. She meant
+to have a walk on the shore and--a demure Parisian shrug settled it.
+
+Jacqueline rested a high-heeled boot on a coil of rope and blithely
+hummed an old song--"Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!" Oh, how she had
+wearied of bumping, heaving, bumping! At first she had enjoyed the
+storm. It was a new kind of play, and the mise-en-scene was quite
+adequate. But ennui had surged in again long before danger had surged
+out. And now she considered that some later sensation was due her, just
+as supper after an evening of fasting. In such a way, her life long,
+Jacqueline had sustained existence. Her nourishment was ever the latest
+"frisson," to use her own word. She craved thrills of emotion, ecstatic
+thrills. Naturally, then, three weeks of ocean had fretted the restless
+lass as intolerable, tyrannical.
+
+During the norther's blinding fury, the liner of the Compagnie
+Trans-Atlantique had groped widely out of her course, to find herself
+off Tampico when the storm abated. But the skipper saw in his ill-luck a
+chance for fresh meat, and he decided to communicate with the port
+before going on to Vera Cruz. And when Jacqueline found that out, she
+decided to communicate with the port too.
+
+Little enough harm in that, truly; if only it were any one else but
+Jacqueline. In her case, though, all concerned would have felt easier to
+keep her on board. Then, when the ship sailed, they were sure to have
+her there. Otherwise, they assuredly were not. For they knew well her
+startling capacity for whims. But never, never, could they know the
+startling next way a whim of hers might jump. Yet did she give herself
+the small pains of wheedling? Not she. The mystery of her august
+guardianship, of no less than two emperors, and the responsibility
+falling on captain, crew, red trousers, and gilt eagles--He bien, what
+then? Neither were they cunning with their dark warnings of outlawry and
+violence. Dreadfulest horrors might lurk in the motley Gulf town held by
+force against bloodthirsty Mexicans. But croaking like that only gave
+brighter promise of the ecstatic shiver. So, parbleu, she went!
+
+The brunt of anxiety fell on poor Sergeant Ney. Here was a young soldier
+whom a month before Louis Napoleon had summoned to the Tuileries, to
+charge him with the lady's safe return to Maximilian's court in the City
+of Mexico, where she was First Dame of Honor about the Empress
+Charlotte. The order was not a military one, else it must have fallen to
+an officer of rank. It was not even official. But no doubt it enfolded
+more of weight for that very reason. Napoleon III. believed that in the
+unofficial, in littleness and dark gliding, lay the way to govern a
+state. Michel Ney regarded his task as a complete enigma. He had only to
+see a girl to the end of her journey. He was a slow-thinking, even a
+non-thinking agent, but in a contingency he could fight, still without
+thinking.
+
+The girl under his escort, however, was another sort of agent entirely.
+She was the spirit of the enigma, the very personification of the
+Napoleonic sphinx. She was the Imperial Secret flung a thousand leagues,
+there to work itself out alone in a new land of empire. Two months ago
+Louis Napoleon had recalled her from the Mexican court to her old
+circle, to the Tuileries, to St. Cloud, to Compiegne, and almost at once
+he had sent her back again. This time she came with the sphinx's
+purpose.
+
+Getting himself into the small boat, Ney stole a glance at the gray eyes
+opposite him--for the moment they were gray, as well as treacherously
+innocent and pensive--and he reflected woefully that she had quite too
+much spirit altogether for an Egyptian dame of stone. She was making it
+very hard for him. What caprice might not possess her while on shore,
+and the ship to sail within a few hours? It was not a predicament for
+sabre play. And he made the mistake of trying to wield his wits a
+little.
+
+"I should take it as an honor, mademoiselle," he faltered, "I should,
+truly, if you'd only believe that I would impose my escort for the
+pleasure it gives me, as well as--as well as----"
+
+But she did not seem to notice that he stumbled. Her eyes were intent on
+the green water, which the oars transmuted into eddying crystals. He
+would go on, she knew, and lay more exposed the place where she meant to
+strike. She had coquetted with him, old play fellow that he was, for
+just a little during the voyage, as with others too, for that matter.
+But she had tired of it, as she had also of the chagrin of wives and
+sweethearts on board, or as she had of Hugo's "Napoleon le Petit," which
+she read purely out of contrariness to the censorship laid on the exiled
+poet. Michel Ney, however, and this she noted carefully, now kept close
+within his soldier's shell. He had that unofficial duty to think on,
+which was enough and over.
+
+"----as well as," he finished desperately, "as a duty to an authority
+over us both. If you would believe that, mademoiselle?"
+
+Then she struck. A word sufficed. "Oh, Monsieur the Sergeant!" she
+exclaimed. Her tone was deprecating, but she lingered wickedly on the
+title. The young Frenchman looked down on his natty uniform. No other
+cut or cloth in the whole imperial army of France was more dashing than
+the sky-blue of a Chasseur d'Afrique, but none of that filled Michel's
+eyes. For him there were only the worsted stripes. He colored and
+winced.
+
+"Forgive me," she said meekly, "I should have said, 'Monsieur the
+Duke.'"
+
+The Chasseur flushed like a boy. "Why _will_ you harp on what a
+grandfather made me?" he blurted out. "And what's a duke----?"
+
+"And a prince?--the Prince of Moskowa!" She courtesied from her slender
+waist.
+
+"Alas for my blunders," she sighed, "for it _was_ more delicate
+after all to call you sergeant. In that I congratulate you yourself,
+Michel, and never a grandfather."
+
+Ney frowned unhappily. "The first prince of Moskowa was once a
+sergeant," he murmured, "and why shouldn't I, in this new country----"
+
+"Mironton, mironton, mirontaine," she sang, and smiled on him.
+
+His eyes flashed, and because of the voice his heart quickened. He had
+heard of "this new country." It was "a gold mine in a bed of roses," but
+with a thorn, to say nothing of a bayonet, for every bud, and like many
+another young Frenchman he hoped to win renown in the romantic Mexican
+Empire, sprung like Minerva from the brain of his own emperor. And now
+here was a girl humming the war song of his fathers and of his race, and
+flaunting his warrior's ambition in it.
+
+    "My Sergeant has gone to the wars,
+    Far off to war in Flanders.
+    He's a bold prince of commanders,
+    With a fame like Alexander's--
+    Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!
+
+    "Mon Sergot s'en va t-en guerre--
+    Ne sais quand reviendra.
+    Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!"
+
+Having thus ousted the crusading hero of the song, and put the slang for
+"sergeant" in his stead, Jacqueline leaned back on the gunwale quite
+contented. She fell to gazing on the transparent emerald of the inshore,
+and plunged in her hand. The soft, plump wrist turned baby pink under
+the riffles. Of a sudden Berthe her maid half screamed, whereat with a
+delighted little gasp of fright, she jerked out the hand. But she put it
+back again, to tempt the watchful shark out there.
+
+"_My_ grandfather was only a duke," she mused aloud, very humbly.
+But she peeped up at Ney in the most exasperating manner. He could just
+see the gray eyes behind the edge of lace that fell from the slanting
+brim of her hat. He would not, though, meet the challenge. He kept to
+sincerity as the safer ground.
+
+"Like mine, mademoiselle, yours made himself one, under Napoleon."
+
+"The _great_ Napoleon," she corrected him gently.
+
+Michel assented with a sad little nod. Then he raised his head bravely.
+"And why not do things _without_ a _great_ Napoleon, and,
+after all, isn't he _a_ Napoleon, and one who----"
+
+"Is lucky enough to bear a name that means seven million votes. _I_
+should rather be a 'sergeant' and congratulate none but myself on it,
+Monsieur the--Duke."
+
+Again, with the wisdom of a slow intelligence, the Chasseur held back
+from her subtleties. If only he might betray her into frankness--a
+compliment she paid to few men and to a woman never--then, just
+possibly, he might make her tractable as to their prompt return to the
+ship.
+
+"Still, it _is_ a name to rally to," he persisted, acknowledging in
+spite of himself the magic that had swayed the Old Guard.
+
+For once she left the poor shark in peace.
+
+"A name, a name?" she repeated.
+
+"Isn't 'France' enough of a name for your rallying, monsieur?"
+
+But the honest mood could not last. In the same breath she hastened on,
+"Yes, yes, France, the beloved of us proud grandchildren of original
+dukes. Of myself, sir, with a chateau in the Bourbonnais, whose floors
+are as well watered as the vineyards outside. And your France too,
+Michel, giving you only your clean linen to disguise the sergeant and
+remind us of the marshal of the First Empire. Of course," she added
+kindly, "there is the bravery. I had forgotten that, O grandson of the
+'brave des braves.' But then?--Bonte divine, there's no rank in courage,
+mon ami! It's not the epaulette of a French uniform--it's the merest
+lining."
+
+"And that," the youth cried doggedly, "is still enough to----"
+
+"To do things for France, eh petit piou-piou?"
+
+"Helas! our France can't expect much from me. But you, mademoiselle, you
+will do things for her!" It was a spontaneous tribute, just that,
+without thought of prying into the secret of her mission, "While I," he
+ended dismally, "can only fight."
+
+"But you forget," she answered gravely, "that after all a woman can only
+give."
+
+That cynicism of life which had become a part of the young girl was yet
+gaiety itself. Youth and health and beauty would not have even cynicism
+otherwise. But now, as she spoke, the irony was bitter, and worn, as of
+age. And behind it was a woman's reluctance before some abhorred
+sacrifice, a sacrifice which would entail the woman's power to give.
+
+Ney stared at her uncomprehendingly. Here lay a clue to her mysterious
+errand in Mexico. But he was not thinking of her as the Napoleonic
+enigma personified. It was of herself he thought, an enigma apart. She
+was a flower of France. Yet many, many flowers blossom there. She might
+be a grande dame, of nobility of womanhood as well as of family. Or
+again, she might be only an alluring, heartless witch, that helped to
+make tempting, and damnable, the brilliant Second Empire. But in any
+case, Jacqueline was truly as dainty as a flower.
+
+"It has already cost us enough to gain this New World," ventured the
+Chasseur, waving a hand toward the desolate shore, "and we made
+Maximilian emperor, but now they say that, that he would--they say so in
+Paris, mademoiselle--that he would rob us of it."
+
+"Indeed, monsieur?" There was warning in the look she gave him.
+
+"But," he plunged on boldly, "our soldiers still hold it, that is,
+until, until someone shall win it for us for our very own, absolutely.
+Ducal grandfathers never did more than that for France."
+
+"Where _are_ you leading, Michel? Please take me with you."
+
+"To a question. Don't you think 'someone' is risking a great deal for a
+little walk on shore?"
+
+Before she answered he knew that she had seen through all his blundering
+wiles.
+
+"Are there guerrillas there?" she asked pensively.
+
+"_You_ should know. But they say, that out of Tampico
+especially----"
+
+She was gazing toward the land, sandy and flat. Once she looked back
+with lively distaste at the rocking ship. Now she interrupted.
+
+"It would be fun traveling overland--and _such_ excitement!"
+
+Ney's shoulders went up in despair.
+
+"Oh, my poor guardian!" she exclaimed contritely. "But why aren't you a
+reader of the poets? Then you would find something to say to make me
+feel--sorry."
+
+"_You_ say it then."
+
+"Why, for example, you might call all the stored vengeance of heaven
+right down on my ungrateful top."
+
+The soldier gazed at the ungrateful top. It was of burnished copper. A
+rebellious lock was then blowing in the wind, and there was a wide,
+rakish crown of rice-white straw. There was also a soft skin of creamy
+satin, lips blood red, a velvet patch near a dimple, and two gray eyes
+that danced behind the hat's filmy curtain. An ungrateful top, out of
+all mercy!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A FRA DIAVOLO IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+
+  "A haunter of marshes, a holder of moors."--_Beowulf._
+
+
+The torpid, sordid and sun-baked port of Tampico gave little promise of
+aught so romantic and rare and exotic as the young French woman's
+coveted thrill of ecstasy. There was first the sand bar, which kept
+ships from coming up the deep Panuco to the town. Beyond there were
+lagoons and swamps mottling the flat, dreary, moisture-sodden,
+fever-scourged land. There were solemn pelicans, and such kind of
+grotesque bird as use only one leg, it being long enough for two, and
+never that to walk upon, so far as anybody had ever noticed. Such an old
+fellow would outline himself against the yellow loneliness, like a lump
+of pessimistic philosopher impaled on the end of his own hobbling
+crutch. Tarpons and sharks and sword-fish, monstrous, sinister, moved
+slothfully in the viscid waters. From scrubby growth on the banks a
+hundred or a hundred thousand crows had much ado with rebuking the
+invaders of their solitude.
+
+Next, clusters of thatch roofs appeared, and in an hour the party from
+the _Imperatrice Eugenie_ gained the wharf of the port. The sailors
+managed to steer through a tangle of shipping and dugout scows, the
+latter heaped high with fruits and flowers of many colors, or hides or
+fish of many aromas. Before the small boat could touch the worm-eaten
+quay, Jacqueline had poised herself on its edge, caught her skirts, and
+hopped lightly over the stretch of water yet remaining. Then she gazed
+curiously around on Mexico.
+
+And Mexico was there in various forms to greet her, though in no form
+animated. Sluggish creatures under peaked sombreros of muddied straw
+seemed to be growing against the foreground of wharf and dingy
+warehouses, and fastened to the background of sallow blazing streets and
+sallow reflecting walls there were still the same human barnacles. But
+no creature seemed ever to move. They all looked a part of the decay, of
+putrefying vegetable and flesh and fish everywhere, which grew so rank
+in life that in death their rotting could never keep pace.
+
+A lazy town stretched up a lazy street. On a hill farther up the river a
+fortress basked in peace, and had no desire to be disturbed. In the town
+the buildings were of warped timber, and a few of stone. Parasitic
+tumors, like loathsome black ulcers, swelled abundantly on the roofs.
+They were the buzzards, the only form of life held sacred. To clean up
+nature's and man's spendthrift killing was a blessed service in Tampico.
+It saved exertion.
+
+A strange region, by all odds! But at least one could walk thereon, and
+Jacqueline thought it droll. An outlandish corner of the earth such as
+this was something never experienced before. But as to that, the
+outlandish corner might have said the same about Jacqueline. Men stared
+like dazed sheep on the astounding apparition of a lady. Some among them
+were entirely clothed, in sun-yellowed white. There was a merchant or
+so, a coffee exporter or so, a ranchero or so, and hacendados from the
+interior. But they were all hard, typical, and often darkly scowling,
+which seemed an habitual expression inspired by the thought of a foreign
+Hapsburg emperor so mighty and proud, far off in their capital. There
+was not an officer among them; nor, quite likely, a gentleman. Never a
+bit of red was to be seen from the garrison on the hill. The French
+invaders up there, with pardonable taste, kept to themselves. Their
+policing ended with the smothering of revolt. So against the stain of
+tainted mankind, the vision of delicate femininity contrasted as a fleck
+of spotless white on a besmeared palette. But crows, scavengers, men,
+they were all so many "creatures" to Jacqueline--the setting of a very
+novel scene, and she would not have had it otherwise.
+
+She turned to her maid, who shrank hesitating in the boat. "Berthe, you
+pitiful little ninny, are you coming? Then do, and do not forget the
+satchel." For a promenade of an hour the inhabitants of two imperial
+courts must needs have a satchel, filled of course with mysteries of the
+toilet. The maid obeyed, and followed her mistress up the lazy ascending
+street. They passed through the Alameda of dense cypresses, an inky blot
+as on glaring manila paper, while the shade overhead was profane with
+jackdaws. The lady tripped on, and into the street again. Ney and a
+sailor hurried to overtake her. The other sailors meantime went on their
+errand for fresh meat, but Michel had said to the steward in charge, "If
+there should be any need, I'll send this man to you. Then you come, all
+of you, quick!"
+
+Jacqueline pushed on her voyage of discovery, and her retinue trooped
+behind, single file, over the narrow, burning sidewalks of patched
+flagstone. The word "Cafe" on a corner building caught her eye. It was a
+native fonda, overflowing with straw-bottomed chairs and rusty iron
+tables half-way across the street, making carts and burros find their
+way round. Mexico's outward signs at least were being done over into
+French. Hence the dignity of "Cafe."
+
+"Here is Paris," the explorer announced. "And this is the Boulevard."
+She seated herself before one of the iron tables that rocked on the
+egg-like cobblestones. She made Ney sit down also, and included Berthe
+and the sailor. An olive barefoot boy took their order for black coffee.
+Jacqueline's elbows were on the table and her chin on two finger tips,
+and she disposed herself placidly, as though this were the Maison Doree
+and Tout Paris sauntering by. The town was beginning to stretch after
+its siesta. That is to say, divers natives manifested symptoms of going
+to move in the course of time.
+
+"Look!" exclaimed Jacqueline. "Only give yourself the trouble to look!"
+
+She was pointing to a man, of course. The Chasseur stirred uneasily. One
+could never see to the end of Jacqueline's slender finger. "There,
+Berthe," she cried, "it's Fra Diavolo, just strayed from the Opera."
+
+The stranger she meant was talking darkly to another man in the door of
+the Cafe. If a Fra Diavolo, he was at least not disguised in his monk's
+cowl, either because the April day was too hot or because he had never
+owned one. But he stood appareled in his banditti role, very picturesque
+and barbaric and malevolent. And though he posed heavily, he yet had
+that Satanic fascination which the beautiful of the masculine and the
+sinister of the devil cannot help having. His battered magnificence of a
+charro garb fitted well the diabolic character which Jacqueline assigned
+him. Spurs as bright as dollars jangled on high russet heels. His
+breeches closed to the flesh like a glove, so that his limbs were as
+sleek as some glossy forest animal's. The cloth was of Robin-Hood green,
+foxed over in bright yellow leather. From hip to ankle undulated a seam
+of silver clasps. More silver, in braided scrolls, adorned his jacket,
+and wrapped twice around the waist was a red banda. Jacqueline would
+have preferred the ends dangling, like a Neapolitan's. The ranchero, for
+such he appeared, wore two belts. One was a vibora, or serpent, for
+carrying money; the other held his weapons, a long hunting knife and a
+revolver, each in a scabbard of stamped leather embroidered with gold
+thread. His sombrero was high pointed and heavy, of chocolate-colored
+beaver encircled by a silver rope as thick as a garden hose.
+
+"Now there's realism in those properties," Jacqueline noted with an
+artist's critical eye. "See, there's dry mud on his shoes, and his
+bright colors are faded by weather. That man sleeps among the rocks,
+I'll wager, and he's in the saddle almost constantly too. My faith, our
+Fra Diavolo is exquisite!"
+
+The other of the two men was a withered, diminutive, gaunt and hollow
+old Mexican. He quailed like a frightened miser before Fra Diavolo.
+
+"The risk? Coming to this town a risk!" Fra Diavolo was echoing the
+ancient man. "Bah, Murguia, you would haggle over a little risk as
+though it were some poor Confederate's last bale of cotton. But I--por
+Dios, I get tired of the mountains. And then I come to Tampico. Yet you
+ask why I come? Bien, senor mio, this is why." A gesture explained. Fra
+Diavolo unctuously rubbed his thumb over his fingers. The meaning of the
+gesture was, "Money!"
+
+The old man recognized the pantomime and shivered. He shrank into his
+long black coat as though right willingly he would shrink away
+altogether. His parsimony extended even to speech. He pursued his
+fugitive voice into the depths of the voluminous coat and there clutched
+it as a coin in a chest. Then he paid it out as though it were a coin
+indeed.
+
+"But----" he stammered.
+
+"No buts," the fierce ranchero growled thunderously. "Not one, Don
+Anastasio, not while our country bleeds under the Austrian tyrant's
+heel, not while there yet breathes a patriot to scorn peril and death,
+so only that he get the sinews of war."
+
+The curiously unctuous gesture grew menacing, brutal. Don Anastasio
+twitched and trembled before it. Under the towering and prismatic Fra
+Diavolo he cowered, an insignificant figure. The unrelieved black of his
+attire accorded with his meagre frame. It was secretive, miserly. A
+black stock covered a withered collar. A dingy silk tile was tightly
+packed over a rusted black wig. Boots hid their tops under the skirts of
+his coat, and the coat in turn was partly concealed under a black shawl.
+But there was one incongruous item. Boots, coat, hat and all were
+crusted with brine. He had evidently passed through salty spray, had
+braved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black. Just now his
+eyes, normally moist and avaricious, were parched dry by fear, as though
+a flame had passed over them. They might have rattled in their gaping
+sockets. Fear also helped him clutch his voice, which he paid out
+regardless of expense.
+
+"You know, Don----" But Fra Diavolo scowled, and the name died on his
+lips. "You know," he went on, "why you haven't seen me for so long. It's
+the blockade up there. It's closer than ever now. This time I waited
+many nights for a chance to run in, and as many more to run out again."
+
+"And you squeezed the poor devils all the harder for your weevily corn
+and shoddy boots?"
+
+Jacqueline, who could not hear a word, told her companions with a
+child's expectancy only to wait and they would see Fra Diavolo eat up
+the poor little crow.
+
+The crow, meantime, was trying to oust the notion that had alighted in
+the brain of Fra Diavolo. "Of course I ought to ask the Confederates
+higher prices as the risks increase," he said, then paused and shook his
+head and wig and hat like a mournful pendulum. "But how can I? The South
+hardly grows any more cotton. It cannot pay high, and----"
+
+"And that's not my affair, but----" Again the business of thumb and
+fingers--"but this is. Quick now!"
+
+"Senor, I--Your Mercy knows that I always pay at--at the usual
+place--near the forest."
+
+[Illustration: "MURGUIA"
+"He had evidently passed through salty spray, had braved the deep,
+this shrinking old man in frayed black"]
+
+"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.
+
+Murguia gripped his arm. "My daughter?" he cried. "It has been weeks
+since I--but you must have seen her lately. Oh tell me, senor, 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 meson, 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE VIOLENT END OF A TERRIBLE BANDIT
+
+
+  "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 eat _us_!" 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!
+
+[Illustration: "RODRIGO GALAN"
+"The fierce stranger, however, seemed undecided. His brow furrowed,
+and for the moment he only stared"]
+
+ Now 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
+senorita, 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. He 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, senor," 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 senorita 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.
+
+He 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 senor," 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 Senorita 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.
+
+"Eh bien," returned the senorita, "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
+senor 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 Galan."
+
+"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?"
+
+"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 senor 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 senorita 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 Galan, and all his band,
+who infested the district aforesaid, known as the Huasteca. The Captain
+Maurel would take note that this Rodrigo Galan 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. But 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 senorita's party could travel
+with his friend's caravan as far as the stage.
+
+"Voila!" 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!"
+
+"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. "_I_ am 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
+Pere Francois. 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 door of the Cafe,
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LA LUZ, BLOCKADE RUNNER
+
+
+  "For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring."
+                                    --_Romeo and Juliet._
+
+
+"Meson" 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 "meson" 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 Murguia 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 meson 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 and horses 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 Murguia 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 meson, 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!"
+
+Murguia 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 made tyranny 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,
+Murguia 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 Senor 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 Murguia's own boat, where Murguia
+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 why _don't_ we 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, senor."
+
+"Good! Then to-night it is, eh?--Can't you speak out, _my_
+gracious!"
+
+"_You_ might 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. "But _I_ can't go
+to-night, senor. I--I have to see--someone--first."
+
+The trooper betrayed the least impatience. "Now look here--usurer,
+viper, blanketed thief, honorable sir, you _know_ I'm in a hurry!"
+
+That his haste could be any concern of Murguia's was preposterous, and
+Murguia would have liked nothing better than to 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, Senor 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, Senor 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
+the _Imperatrice Eugenie_ off her course. Murguia'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 Murguia 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 passenger through 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," Murguia 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, senor."
+
+"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, senor. Fare in advance, seven hundred dollars." Murguia
+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 "Senor 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 Murguia 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 Murguia read the paper handed him. It was signed:
+"Jefferson Davis, President C. S. A." Therein Mr. Anastasio Murguia 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 order again,
+hesitated again, and at last handed it back, his mind made up.
+
+"Have the goodness, senor, 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 Murguia 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, senor! Or must I have you kicked off?"
+
+The senor, however, with his charger behind him, was foraging over the
+deck to find a stall, and in a fury Murguia 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 he had 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 Murguia 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 was _La Luz_, his fleet
+L20,000 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.
+
+Murguia looked venomous, but the plank was drawn on board.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE STORM CENTRE
+
+
+  "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; and _La
+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 Murguia 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 Luz_ had full speed
+on. Then, knifing the higher and higher waves, she made a dash for it.
+
+For 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 Murguia 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 Murguia. "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's course. Hurriedly the
+_Luz's_ quartermaster 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."
+
+As _La Luz_ had 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 Murguia 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 into his 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.
+Murguia 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
+the _Luz's_ two 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 out _what_ it 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. There was 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.
+
+Murguia 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.
+
+[Illustration: "JOHN DINWIDDIE DRISCOLL--THE MISSOURIAN"
+"His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight and hard and brown from
+the weathering of sun and blizzard"]
+
+ Various items on the _Luz_ struck 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. "_Who_ said life was all beer and
+skittles?" he demanded defiantly, and glared at Driscoll as though
+_he_ had. But getting no answer, he seemed mollified, as though
+this proved that the man who _had_ said it was an imbecile.
+Murguia, 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 save _my_ cargo, off Savannah, and didn't I lose 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 Murguia 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 Murguia 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.
+
+Murguia 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, "_I_ don'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, say, 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 Murguia 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. The _Luz_ swung 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'm_ a thinkin'. But I s'y, w'at if you and me go down
+to my cabin and have a _noggin_?"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus _La Luz_ ran her last blockade, and came safely into port. She
+reached Tampico some two days before the _Imperatrice Eugenie_.
+Whereupon Din Driscoll, as he was called anywhere off the muster roll,
+informed Don Anastasio that he would continue with him on into the
+interior. And as seen already, Murguia 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 meson
+he still hovered near, and ventured more questions.
+
+"How was it that, that _you_ happened to be sent, senor?" 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,
+Senor Coronel?"
+
+"They raised me in Missouri," said the colonel. "But I learned to talk
+Pan-American some on the Santa Fe 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?"
+
+The 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 senor, 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, and
+_those_ things 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.
+
+"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 cafe,
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A BRUISING OF ARMS FOR JACQUELINE
+
+
+  "Then John bent up his long bende-bowe,
+  And fetteled him to shoote."
+                              --_Robin Hood._
+
+
+Into the crowd before the cafe, 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 safety he
+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 swirling round, 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 role, 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 cafe 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.
+
+Jacqueline 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--Helas! 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, senorita?"
+
+"Mais--why, better than I thought," she returned in English; and in
+English that was piquant because it could not help 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, senor," 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.
+
+"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 senorita--still wished to
+go by land.
+
+"If monsieur will have the condescension," returned Jacqueline.
+
+Then 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 cafe, 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 cafe 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 all the 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, "our _spirituelle_
+little marquise will find that one may have wits, and not read her dense
+old poets, either."
+
+He opened the cafe 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, senor!"
+
+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, senor?"
+
+"To this meson 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 cafe 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, senor, not Maximilian's?" he repeated. "Dios mio,
+caballero, I'll wager you have forgotten her already." Which, to tell
+the truth, was fairly exact.
+
+At the meson 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 Senor Murguia would be starting in the morning.
+
+"Si senor," 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
+Senorita Jacqueline and her maid."
+
+Murguia'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 meson will hear you,
+including that Gringo."
+
+"That Gringo? He, he is one of your friends?"
+
+"Friend! For Dios, he nearly ruined my little plans for Jacqueline.
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SWORDSMANSHIP IN THE DARK
+
+
+  "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 cafe, and
+the landlord's wife was knocking on her door and calling "Nin-a, nin-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 fete out of it this way in the middle of the night?"
+
+"Nin-a," the unctuous nasal rose higher, "if Your Mercy goes with Don
+Anastasio, she must hurry. It is late. It is four o'clock, nina."
+
+"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 nina, there is Don Anastasio, he is ready to start."
+
+"And who is Don Anastasio, pray?"
+
+"The trader, nina, at the meson. 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 told me 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, senora,
+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. "Nina, it is not
+here. I believe, nin-a, it is at the meson, 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, senora, 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 worth while." 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 meson, where the
+street was filled with torches and laden burros and blanketed shadows.
+Murguia's caravan was forming, making a weird, stealthy scene of
+activity. Jacqueline picked up a lantern, and searched here and there.
+
+"Now where _can_ it 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 meson.
+
+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, senorita, we must be starting."
+
+"And similarly with permission, senor, who are you?"
+
+"Anastasio Murguia, the servant of Your Mercy."
+
+"Ah, the poor little crow? Perhaps you will tell me, sir, why neither
+the Senor 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 Senor Ney would meet them out
+of 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, senor?"
+
+Murguia would not answer. He repeated the question to the Mexican woman,
+who took up explanations with a glib readiness. "Si, nina, I saw the
+capitan, not more than an hour ago. He was riding by the cafe, to meet
+his--Contra Guerrillas. But he stopped and woke me. He said that I was
+to bring Your Mercies here to the meson, and to say that he would meet
+Your Mercies--yes, surely, before you had gone very far, nina." Her tone
+was a sugared whine, and more than once she peered around at Murguia;
+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 senorita does not know?" asked Murguia.
+
+"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 might _not_ go, seemed to possess
+him. "But senorita," he protested, "what will Your Mercy do? The ship,
+yes, senorita, 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.
+
+"Another quarter gone by!" Murguia exclaimed nervously. "Come,
+senoritas, 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 meson.
+
+"Gracious, Murgie, off so early?" the newcomer observed cheerily.
+
+Murguia 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, why _should_ I 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 Murguia if it were the senoritas,
+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 American _gentleman_--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 going (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 Murguia 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
+"touchee!" Instead she caught at the point to turn the blade aside.
+"Responsibility? Truly sir, you _are_ considerate. 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
+Murguia 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?"
+
+Murguia 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 her words 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 Murguia.
+
+Driscoll nodded indifferently.
+
+"But Senor Coronel, when you do, you--you will remember that I said
+nothing to--that is, to persuade the senoritas 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
+cafe, stood before him. There was a warning on her stolid countenance.
+Murguia 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 short ribs 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 Murguia. 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--senor," 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 Murguia, 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 soon narrowed 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 Murguia. 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH MAY BE PRODIGIOUSLY LONG THOUGHTS
+
+
+  "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 rather enjoyed 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 role
+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 reliable telling 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, aesthetic 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 were plumed 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 empire she meant to gain.
+But in her, who might suspect the consummate diplomat? Even then she was
+speaking to Murguia, 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TOLL-TAKING IN THE HUASTECA
+
+
+  "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 the other
+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. Murguia, 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.
+
+Murguia 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," said he of the
+crossed eye, with a head cocked sideways and tilted. The evidence was
+against it, but Murguia 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 Galan."
+
+"But," weakly protested Murguia, "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, Senor Murguia," 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.
+
+Murguia took alarm immediately. "Not so large as usual, Don Tiburcio.
+The crops up there----"
+
+"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 Murguia stifled his wrath, again
+drew out the belt, and more Napoleons changed hands. Murguia 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." Murguia dared not
+refuse, and he paused for the return of hospitality from his own 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, Murguia 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?"
+
+Murguia 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,
+senor, 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?"
+
+Murguia'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."
+
+Murguia 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
+Murguia's cries to stop by all the saints, heedless of the saints too.
+Murguia 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. Murguia 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 Murguia's silk tile and
+poured into it from the slouch a shimmering stream of coin and a mass of
+crumpled paper.
+
+"To be robbed while I'm along, now that makes me _mad_," 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 Murguia'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 Driscoll
+and Murguia. 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, _you_ have robbed
+_them_!"
+
+"What the devil----"
+
+"Si senor, robbed _them_! 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 Maria, they will be in
+force and they--they will take the very horse from under me!"
+
+"Tough luck," Driscoll observed.
+
+Murguia 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?" Murguia
+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----"
+
+Murguia 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."
+
+Murguia'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. Murguia paid him
+lest he inform the government of tribute also paid to Don Rodrigo. Now
+Rodrigo Galan 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 the highway 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, Murguia 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, senor, 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 Senor Coronel is most valiant," sneered Murguia.
+
+"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 Murguia
+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." Murguia 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 Murguia 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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE BRIGAND CHIEF
+
+
+  "Don Rodrigo de Vivar,
+  Rapaz, orgulloso, y vano."
+                 --_El Cid._
+
+
+Imagine an abnormally virtuous urchin and an abnormally kindly farmer.
+The urchin resolutely turns his back on the farmer's melon patch, though
+there is no end of opportunity. But the farmer catches him, brings him
+in by the ear, makes him choose a big one, and leaves him there, the
+sole judge of his own capacity. Driscoll had tried to dodge a fight, but
+Fate was his kindly farmer.
+
+"Better fall back a little, Murgie," he said. "You'd only scare 'em, you
+know."
+
+He himself passed on ahead. But it was mid-afternoon before anything
+happened. Jacqueline meantime had shown some pettish ill-humor. Those
+who had fought to be her escort were now singularly indifferent.
+Driscoll was idly curious and quietly contemptuous, but he detected no
+fright in her manner. "Fretting for her silver-braided Greaser," he said
+to himself. "A pretty scrape she's got herself into, too! Now I wonder
+why a girl can't have any sense." But as the answer was going to take
+too long to find, he swerved back to the simpler matter of a possible
+fracas.
+
+"Well, well," he exclaimed at last, rising in his stirrups, "if there
+isn't her nickel-plated hero now!"
+
+A quarter of a mile ahead, mounted, waiting stock-still across the
+trail, was Fra Diavolo. The American put away his pipe and barely moved
+his spurred boot, yet the good buckskin's ears pointed forward and he
+trotted ahead briskly. From old guerrilla habit, the cavalryman noted
+all things as he rode. To his left the blue of the mountain line, being
+nearer now, had deepened to black, and the Sierra seemed to hang over
+him, ominously. But the dark summits were still without detail, and
+midway down, where the solid color broke into deep green verdure and was
+mottled by patches of dry slabs of rock, there was yet that massive blur
+which told of distance. Foothills had rolled from the towering slide,
+and mounds had tumbled from the hills, and a tide of giant pebbles had
+swept down from the mounds. These rugged boulders had turned the trail,
+so that the American was riding beneath a kind of cliff. To his right,
+on the east of the trail, the boulders were smaller and scattered, like
+a handful of great marbles flung across the cactus plain. He may have
+glanced toward this side especially, at the clumps of spiny growth over
+the pradera, and caught glimpses behind the strewn rocks, but his look
+was casual, unstartled. He breathed deeply, though. The old familiar
+elation set him vaguely quivering and tingling, with nervous, subtle
+desire. The young animal's excess of life surged into a pain, almost.
+Even the buckskin, knowing him, took his mood, and held high his
+nostrils.
+
+Fra Diavolo's peaked beaver, his jacket, his breeches, his high pommeled
+saddle, his great box stirrups, the carabine case strapped behind, all
+be-scrolled with silver, danced hazily to the magic of rays slanting
+down from the lofty Sierra line. Like himself, his horse was a thing of
+spirited flesh, for glorious display. The glossy mane flowed
+luxuriantly. The tail curved to the ground. A mountain lion's skin
+covered his flanks. He was large and sleek and black, with the metal and
+pride of an English strain. He was a carved war-charger. The man astride
+was rigid, stately. Man and horse had a heroic statue's promise of
+instant, furious life.
+
+"Oh, la beaute d'un homme!" cried Jacqueline, perceiving the majestic
+outline silhouetted against the rocks. "Why, why--it's Fra Diavolo!"
+
+"It--it is!" confessed Murguia. There was dread, not surprise, in his
+exclamation. The waiting horseman, and a lonely hut there behind
+him--none other than a brigand "toll-station"--these were but too
+significant of an old and hated rendezvous. Don Anastasio got to his
+feet and nervously hurried his caravan back a short distance. Then he
+ran ahead again and overtook the two Frenchwomen. "Senoritas, wait!
+Neither of you need go. But I will--I must, but I can go alone, while
+you----"
+
+"Why, what ails the man?"
+
+"Back, senorita, back, before he sees you!"
+
+Jacqueline looked at the imploring eyes, at the palsied hand on her
+bridle. "Berthe," she said, "here's your little monsieur getting
+constitutional again."
+
+"You _will_ go, senorita?"
+
+"Parbleu!" said the girl, and lashed her mustang.
+
+"Dios, Dios," gasped the little monsieur, hurrying after them, "when
+Maximiliano hears of this----"
+
+"You should see Maximilian when he is angry," Jacqueline called over her
+shoulder. "It is very droll."
+
+Din Driscoll had vaulted to the ground in the instant of halting.
+Immediately he led his horse behind the solitary hut, which was a
+_jacal_ of bamboo and thatch built under the cliff, and left him
+there. Demijohn was a seasoned campaigner, and he would not move until
+his trooper came for him. When Driscoll emerged again, his coat was over
+his left arm, and the pockets were bulging. Fra Diavolo had already
+saluted him, but gazed down the trail at the two women approaching.
+
+"How are you, captain?" Driscoll began cordially.
+
+Fra Diavolo looked down from his mighty seat. "Ai, mi coronel, I was
+expecting Your Mercy."
+
+"Honest, now? Or weren't you worrying lest I'd got left back in
+Tampico?"
+
+One of the ranchero's hands rose, palm out, deprecatingly.
+
+"But someone might have told you I didn't get left at all," Driscoll
+pursued. "Segundino maybe? Or was it Juan?"
+
+"Or Don Tiburcio?" suggested the captain. He dismounted and doffed his
+big sombrero. "Good, I see you brought Her Ladyship safely."
+
+"Or I myself, rather," said Jacqueline, reining in her pony at the
+moment, "Ah, the Senor Capitan as an escort knows how to make himself
+prized by much anticipation."
+
+"Senorita!" The Mexican bent in heavy ceremony, the sombrero covering
+his breast. "I am honored, even in Your Mercy's censure. Those who
+deserve it could not appreciate it more."
+
+"Forward then, captain. On with the excuses, I promise to believe them."
+
+"Those sailors, my lady, who fight with kicks. Ugh!--they attacked some
+of my men this morning in Tampico. I had to call at the fort for aid."
+
+"Oh, but Maximilian shall hear of this!"
+
+"I think he will," and Fra Diavolo bowed again, hiding the gleam of a
+smile. "But I forget, your compatriot----"
+
+"Monsieur Ney?--Yes?"
+
+"He meant to help the sailors----"
+
+"But he was not hurt?"
+
+"Oh, no, no! But he had to be held in the fort."
+
+"That poor Michel!"
+
+"So," the syllable fell weightily, as if to crush Ney out of her
+thoughts, "here I am at last, to claim the distinguished pleasure of
+seeing Your Ladyship to the stage at Valles."
+
+Din Driscoll had been gazing far away at the mountains, his thumbs
+tucked in his belt. He stood so that the Mexican was between him and the
+scattered boulders on the right of the trail. Now he addressed the
+mountains. "The stage at Valles? There is no stage at Valles---- And,
+captain," he dropped Nature abruptly, and turned on the man, "who are
+you, hombre? Come, tell us!"
+
+If Fra Diavolo were a humbug, he was not nearly so dismayed as one might
+expect. For that matter, neither was Jacqueline. She inquired of
+Driscoll how he knew more about stage lines than the natives themselves.
+Because the natives themselves were not of one mind, he replied. For
+instance, Murgie's muleteers had assured him fervidly that there was
+such a stage, whereas passing wayfarers had told him quite simply that
+there was not, nor ever had been.
+
+Jacqueline's gray eyes, wide open and full lashed, turned on Fra
+Diavolo. "You are," she exclaimed, noiselessly clapping her hands as at
+a play, "then you are--Oh, _who_ are you?"
+
+The Mexican straightened pompously. "Who?" he repeated deep in his
+chest, "who, but one at Your Mercy's feet! Who, but--Rodrigo Galan
+himself!"
+
+"The _terrible_ Rodrigo?" She wanted complete identification.
+
+He looked at her quickly. The first darkening of a frown creased his
+brow. But still she was not alarmed. Berthe, however, proved more
+satisfying. "Oh, my dear lady!" she cried, reining in her horse closer
+to her mistress.
+
+"And who," drawled the American at a quizzical pitch of inquiry, "may
+Don Rodrigo be?"
+
+"What, senor," thundered the robber, "you don't----" He stopped,
+catching sight of the timorous Murguia hovering near. "Then, look at
+that old man, for he at least knows that he is in the presence of Don
+Rodrigo. He is trembling."
+
+But Jacqueline was--whistling. The bristling highwayman swung round full
+of anger. Driscoll stared at her amazed. Then he laughed outright.
+"Well, well, Honorable Mr. Buccaneer of the Sierras, now maybe---- Yes,
+that's what I mean," he added approvingly as Fra Diavolo leaped astride
+his charger and jerked forth two pistols from their holsters, "that's
+it, get the game started!"
+
+Jacqueline's red lips were again pursed to whistle, but she changed and
+hummed the refrain instead:
+
+"Mironton, mironton, mirontaine!"
+
+Driscoll stared at her harder. The words were strange and meant nothing.
+But there was a familiarity to the tune. That at least needed no
+interpreter. The old ballad of troubadours, the French war song of old,
+the song of raillery, the song of Revolution, this that had been a folk
+song of the Crusader, a Basque rhyme of fairy lore, the air known in the
+desert tents of Happy Arabia, known to the Jews coming out of Egypt,
+known to the tribes in the days without history or fifes--why, if this
+wasn't the rollicking, the defiant paean of Americans! But how came she
+by it, and by what right?
+
+"'And we won't go home till morning,'" he joined in, inquisitively.
+
+The girl paused, as explorers singing it have paused when savages never
+before seen by white men joined in with barbarian words. But she went
+on, letting the miracle be as it might.
+
+  "'The news I bear, fair lady----'"
+
+she sang, and nodded at the bandit, to indicate that here was _his_
+line,
+
+  "'The news I bear, fair lady,   Will cause your eyes to weep.'"
+
+"'----Till daylight doth appear,'" Driscoll finished it with her. Then
+both looked up like two children, to the awful presence on horseback.
+
+Don Rodrigo was at some pains to recover himself. A helpless girl and
+one lone trooper were practising a duet under his very frown. Only a
+glance toward the boulders and cacti reassured him.
+
+"Well, what next?" Jacqueline demanded sweetly. "Is it to be the--the
+'game' at last?"
+
+"One word," said the Mexican solemnly. Straight in his saddle, he fixed
+them with keen eyes, keen, black eyes under shaggy brows. The syllables
+fell portentously. His voice deepened as far away thunder. "One word
+first," growled the awakening lion. "You know now that I am Don Rodrigo
+Galan. Yes, I am he, the capitan of guerrillas, the rebel, the brigand,
+the hunted fugitive. Such names of ignominy a true patriot must bear
+because he dares to defy his poor country's oppressors." Here Fra
+Diavolo scowled; he was getting into form. "But to His Majesty in our
+own Mexican capital, to His Glorious Resplendent Most Christian, Most
+Catholic, priest-ridden, bloodthirsty, foppish, imbecile decree-making
+fool of a canting majesty--to this Austrian archduke who drove forth the
+incarnation of popular sovereignty by the brutal hand of the foreign
+invader--to him I will yet make it known that the love of liberty, that
+the loyalty to Liberal Reforms, to the Constitution, to Law and Order,
+to--uh--are not yet dead in these swamps and mountains of our Patria.
+And he will know it when he--when he hears my demand for your ransom,
+Senorita Marquesa. He will know it, too, when he learns that Captain
+Maurel--a Frenchman, senorita, not a Mexican--now lies stark in death in
+the brush near Tampico, where he came to take and to hang the steadfast
+patriot, Rodrigo Galan. But his Tender-Hearted Majesty will grieve less
+for that than for the loss of you, Senorita--Jacqueline. For is it not
+known that you, the first lady of honor to the Empress, that you are
+also His Majesty's----"
+
+"My faith," said Jacqueline, "he speaks Spanish well!"
+
+Thus she stopped the insult. Also she stopped an unforeseen champion at
+her side. Driscoll, with pistol half drawn, was willing to be checked. A
+shot just then, placed as they were, would mean a bad ending to the
+game. That he knew. So he was thankful for Jacqueline's hand on his
+wrist.
+
+Forked eloquence was silenced by now. Yet the patriot had been in
+earnest, under the spell of his own ardor. Don Anastasio, with head
+bowed, had listened in sullen sympathy. But both Mexicans started as
+though stung at Jacqueline's applauding comment. Don Rodrigo purpled
+with rage. She only looked back at him, so provokingly demure, that
+something besides the ransom got into his veins. He wet his lips, baring
+the unpleasant gleam of teeth.
+
+"Come!" he said thickly. "You and your maid go with me."
+
+Driscoll's jaw dropped. "Diablos," he exclaimed, bewildered, "you don't
+mean---- Look, Don Roddy, you're crazy! Such things----"
+
+"Come!"
+
+"But I tell you it's foolish. Such things do not happen, unless in
+melodrama."
+
+For reply the guerrilla chief wheeled his charger and caught the bridles
+of the two horses that the girls rode. He pulled, so as to leave exposed
+the troublesome American behind them.
+
+"Grands dieux," exclaimed Jacqueline, "have the men in this country
+nothing to do except catch my bridle! But really, sir, this situation is
+forced. It is not artistic. As--as Monsieur the Chevalier says, it's
+quite impossible."
+
+She looked around for Monsieur the Chevalier to make it so, but to her
+dismay, to her disgust, he had taken to his heels. He was running away,
+as fast as he could go. Then her horse reared, for musket firing had
+suddenly, mysteriously begun on all sides of her. Many fierce pairs of
+eyes were bobbing up from behind the boulders on the right of the trail;
+yellow-brown faces, like a many-headed Hydra coiled in the cacti. They
+were shooting, not at her, but at the fleeing American. She felt an
+object in her hand, which Driscoll had thrust there, and she remembered
+that he had whispered something, though she had forgotten what.
+
+Her captor was straining at the bridle. In his frenzy he leaned over, to
+lift her from the saddle, and then she struck him across the face with
+her whip. And then, with what the American had put in her other hand,
+she struck again. The weapon was Driscoll's short hunting knife. The
+blade grazed Rodrigo's shoulder. He loosed his hold, and before he could
+prevent, both she and Berthe were in the shack under the cliff. The maid
+sank to the floor. The mistress stood in the doorway. There was a glint
+in the gray eyes not lovable in man or woman, but in her it was superb.
+
+Fifty feet back up the trail she saw Driscoll scaling the cliff. That
+demon yelling, which is the first spasm of Mexican warfare, had not
+ceased, and each demon was shooting as fast as he could reload. She saw
+the white dust spurt out from the bullet peppered rock. But either the
+sun slanting down from the mountain line was in their eyes, or they were
+disconcerted at the American's change in their plans; at any rate their
+laboriously ascending target did not drop. Up he climbed. Jacqueline
+wondered why he still clung to the jacket over his arm, as people will
+cling to absurd things in time of panic.
+
+"To go through that peril, and yet a coward!" she murmured. "It's a
+waste----"
+
+The runaway gained the top of the embankment, and fell behind a rock.
+And now a half dozen of the little demons were coming across the trail
+to the shack--to take her.
+
+"Oh, the frisson, the ecstasy!" she cried. There was a certain poignant
+sense of enjoyment in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE COSSACKS AND THEIR TIGER COLONEL
+
+
+  "Ah, Captain, here goes for a fine-drawn bead;
+  There's music around when my barrel's in tune."
+                      --_Song of the Fallen Dragoon._
+
+
+Din Driscoll tumbled himself over among the rocks. "There, I'm fixed,"
+he grunted, as he squatted down behind his earthworks. "Plenty of
+material here"--he meant the cartridges which he poured from his coat
+pockets into his hat--"and plenty out there too"--indicating the Hydra
+heads--"and my pipe--I'll have a nice time." He got to work busily.
+
+In the door of the shack Jacqueline saw the campaign for her possession
+begin. Don Rodrigo had fled to the corner of the shack, taking his horse
+with him. The hut of bamboo and thatch was no protection against
+Driscoll's fire, but the two girls, though inside the hut, were between
+and afforded a better screen. Jacqueline did not, however, hold that
+against her Fra Diavolo. To save himself behind a woman was quite in
+keeping with his sinister role. And she, as an artist, could not
+reproach him, and as a woman she did not care. But the American's
+running away--now that was out of character, and it disappointed her.
+
+She heard Rodrigo bellowing forth an order, and she saw five or six
+guerrillas rise out of the cacti and spring toward her. But the constant
+shadow of self-introspection haunted her even then. In her despair, and
+worse, in her disgust, feeling already those filthy hands upon her, she
+yet appraised this jewel among ecstatic shudders, and she knew in her
+heart that she would not have had it otherwise.
+
+"Oh, am I ever to _live_!" she moaned in startled wonderment at
+herself. "Always a spectator, always, even of myself!--God, dost thou
+know? It is a robbery of living!" And the vagabonds were twenty paces
+away!
+
+Something hurt her hand, she opened her clenched palm; it was the horn
+handle of Driscoll's knife. Had she really thought to defend herself
+with that inadequate thing? "Poof!" She tossed it from her, vexed at her
+own unconscious heroics. Then two dark arms reached out, nearer and
+nearer, and ten hooked fingers blurred her vision. But the arms shot
+upward, the fingers stiffened, and a body splashed across the doorway at
+her feet with the sound of a board dropped on water.
+
+"Ai, poor man!"
+
+She was on her knees, bending over him. But a second of the vermin
+lurched against her, and he too lay still. A pistol report from the
+cliff was simultaneous with each man's fall. Both were dead. A third
+sank in the trail with a shattered hip, and another behind knew the
+agony of a broken leg. The marksman's mercy was evidently tempered
+according to distance. For, having the matter now under control, he
+nonchalantly cracked only shin bones. Fra Diavolo from his shelter
+roared commands and curses, but not another imp would show himself.
+Crouched jealously, they chose rather to besiege their lone enemy on the
+cliff.
+
+"Must have howitzers," muttered Driscoll. The soft lead, bigger than
+marbles, went "Splut! Splut!" against the rock on all sides of him,
+flattening with the windy puff of mud on a wall. But he was well
+intrenched, and as the guerrillas were also, he lighted his pipe and
+smoked reflectively. But after awhile he perceived a slight movement,
+supplemented by a carabine. One of the besiegers was working from
+boulder to boulder, parallel with the trail. He did it with infinite
+craft. At first the fellow crawled; then, when out of pistol range, he
+got to his feet and ran. Still running, he crossed the trail at a safe
+distance beyond the hut, and began working back again, this time along
+the cliff, and toward Driscoll. When about a hundred yards away, he
+disappeared; which is to say, he lowered himself into a little ravine
+that thousands of rainy seasons had worn through from the foothills. But
+almost at once his head and shoulders rose from the nearer bank, and
+Driscoll promptly fired. The shot fell short. A pistol would not carry
+so far; which was a tremendously important little fact, since the other
+fellow was aiming a rifle. The bullet from that rifle neatly clipped a
+prickly pear over Driscoll's head. The strategist certainly knew his
+business. There was a familiar shimmer of silver about his high peaked
+hat. Yes surely, he was Don Tiburcio, the loyal Imperialist of the
+baleful eye. No doubt the malignant twinkle gleamed in that eye now,
+even as the blackmailer bit a cartridge for the next shot. A victim who
+had only pistols, and at rifle range, and with not a pebble for shelter
+from the flank bombardment--it was assuredly a situation to tickle Don
+Tiburcio.
+
+Now Driscoll's point of view was less amusing. To change his position,
+he must expose himself to a fusilade from across the way. And if he
+tried to rush his friend of the gully, the brigands meantime would carry
+off the two girls. A gentleman's part, therefore, was to stay where he
+was and be made a target of. But he varied it a little. At Don
+Tiburcio's second shot, he lunged partly to his feet and fell forward as
+though mortally wounded. He lay quite still, and soon Don Tiburcio came
+creeping toward him. Don Tiburcio was thinking of his lost toll-moneys
+that should be on the corpse. Driscoll waited, his nerves alert, his
+pistols ready. But just beyond range, the blackmailer paused.
+
+"Go for the women, you idiots," he yelled. "The Gringo's dead."
+
+The idiots verified the title straightway, for up they popped from
+behind their boulders and started for the shack.
+
+"'Possuming's no use," Driscoll muttered, then fired. The guerrillas got
+back to cover quickly enough, and so did Don Tiburcio, grinning over his
+stratagem. In his arroyo again, he proposed to make the Gringo as a
+sieve. Each bullet from his carabine twanged lower and lower. "Ouch!"
+ejaculated Driscoll. One had furrowed his leg, and it hurt. He looked
+anxiously, to see if the Mexican were lowering his aim yet more. An inch
+meant such a great deal just then. But a tremendous surprise met him.
+For Don Tiburcio had changed his mind. The rascal was firing in another
+direction entirely, firing rapturously, firing at his very allies, at
+the little imps themselves among the boulders and nettles. And the
+little imps were positively leaping up to be shot. They ran frantically,
+but straight toward the traitor, and on past him up the trail. The Storm
+Centre could not shoot lunatics any more than he could babies. He only
+stared at them open mouthed.
+
+"Los Cosacos!--El Tigre! Los Cosacos!" they yelled, scrambling out upon
+the road, bleeding, falling, praying, and kissing whatever greasy amulet
+or virgin's picture they owned.
+
+Then there beat into Driscoll's ears the furious clatter of hoofs. It
+deafened him, the familiar, glorious din of it. The blood raged in his
+veins like fiery needle points. To see them--the cavalry, the cavalry!
+Then they were gone--a flashing streak of centaurs, a streamer of red in
+a blur of dust, maniac oaths, and pistol shots, and sweeping sabres.
+Hacked bodies were sucked beneath the swarm as saplings under an
+avalanche. Driscoll sprang up and gazed. Through eddying swirls he still
+could see red sleeved arms reach out, and lightning rays of steel, and
+half-naked fleeting creatures go down, and never a jot of the curse's
+speed abate.
+
+"Lordy, but Old Joe should 'a seen it!" he fairly shouted. He was
+thinking of Shelby, of the Old Brigade back in Missouri; daredevils,
+every one of them.
+
+Don Tiburcio had sighted the vengeful horde from afar, and had
+recognized them, since he was, in fact, one of their scouts. They were
+the Contra Guerrillas, the Cossacks, the scourge wielded by the French
+Intervention and the Empire. And they were Don Tiburcio's cue to
+loyalty. For seeing them, he began firing on his late friends, the
+brigands. Yet he spared their Capitan. At the first alarm Fra Diavolo
+had vaulted astride his black horse, and Tiburcio darting out, had
+caught his bridle, and turned him into the dry bed of the arroyo. Others
+of the fugitives tried to escape by this same route, but Tiburcio fought
+them off with clubbed rifle, and in such occupation was observed by him
+who led the Cossacks, who was a terrible old man, and a horseman to give
+the eye joy. At the gully he swerved to one side, and let the hurricane
+pass on by.
+
+"Sacred name of thunder," he cursed roundly, "a minute later and----"
+
+"Si, mi coronel," the faithful Tiburcio acknowledged gratefully, "Your
+Excellency came just in time."
+
+The colonel of Contra Guerrillas frowned a grim approval for his scout's
+handiwork of battered skulls. He was a man of frosted visage, a grisly
+Woden. The hard features were more stern for being ruggedly venerable.
+His beard was wiry, hoary gray, through whose billowy depth a long black
+cigar struck from clenched teeth. If eyes are windows of the soul, his
+were narrow, menacing slits, loopholes spiked by bristling brows. Two
+deep creases between the eyes furrowed their way up and were lost under
+an enormously wide sombrero. This sombrero was low crowned, like those
+worn farther to the south, and ornately flowered in silver. His chest
+was crossed with braid, cords of gold hung from the right shoulder to
+the collar, and the sleeves were as glorious as a bugler's. His
+brick-red jacket fell open from the neck, exposing the whitest of linen.
+His boots were yellow, his spurs big Mexican discs. Altogether the blend
+in him of the precise military and the easy ranchero was curiously
+picturesque. But Colonel Dupin, the Tiger of the Tropics, was a curious
+and picturesque man. His medals were more than he could wear, and each
+was for splendid daring. But on a time they had been stripped from him.
+It happened in China. He had made a gallant assault on the Imperial
+Palace, but he had also satiated his barbarian soul in carnage and
+loaded his shoulders with buccaneering loot. And though he wondered at
+his own moderation, a court martial followed. However, Louis Napoleon
+gave him back his medals, and sent him to Mexico to stamp out savagery
+by counter savagery.
+
+"There were two accomplices in this business," the Tiger was saying,
+"one a trader, Murguia----"
+
+"Killed him my very first shot," lied Tiburcio. He would save his golden
+goose of the golden eggs.
+
+"And the other, an American?"
+
+"Got away with the others, senor." Again Tiburcio's reason was obvious.
+The American, if taken, might tell things.
+
+"And"--Dupin gripped his cigar hungrily--"and Rodrigo?"
+
+For answer the scout waved a hand vaguely up the trail.
+
+"None went that way?" and the Colonel jerked his head toward the ravine.
+
+"No, none. Your Mercy saw me driving them back."
+
+"Quick, then, on your horse! We're losing time."
+
+Don Tiburcio was reluctant. He had not yet recovered his money
+from the American. "But the women, mi coronel? They are there, in that
+shack. Hadn't I better stay----?"
+
+"Jacqueline, you mean? Of course the little minx is in trouble, the
+second she touches land. But you come with me. She shall have another
+protector."
+
+Tiburcio knew the Cossack chief. He obeyed, and both men galloped away
+after the chase.
+
+[Illustration: "COLONEL DUPIN"
+"The Tiger of the Tropics ... the chief of Contra Guerrillas"]
+
+ They had not gone far when they passed Michel Ney swiftly returning. He
+was the protector Dupin had in mind. He had seen Jacqueline in the
+doorway of the hut as he stormed past with the Contra Guerrillas, but he
+had been too enthusiastic to stop just then. He was a Chasseur
+d'Afrique, and to be a Chasseur d'Afrique was to ride in a halo of
+mighty sabre sweeps. And Michel had fought Arabs too--but the good
+simplicity of his countenance was woefully ruffled as he turned back
+from that charge of the Cossacks.
+
+"Michel!" cried Jacqueline, stepping over the forms of men before the
+hut, and forgetting them. The natty youth was torn, rumpled, grimy. The
+sky-blue of his uniform was gray with dust. But to see him at all proved
+that he had escaped Fra Diavolo's web in Tampico. And the relief! It
+made her almost gay. "Ah, Michel--le beau sabreur!--and did you enjoy
+it, mon ami?"
+
+He alighted at her feet, and raised her hand to his lips.
+
+"Monsieur," she demanded quick as thought, "my trunk?"
+
+"Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, I did well to bring myself."
+
+"You should have brought my trunk, sir, first of all. Deign to look at
+this frock! No, no, don't, please don't. But tell me everything. What
+could have happened to you last night? Why did you not meet me this
+morning?"
+
+His story was brief. Of his contemplated strategy at Tampico, there had
+been a most lugubrious botching. The night before, when he started to
+the fort for aid, Fra Diavolo's little Mexicans had waylaid him, bound
+him, and dragged him back to the cafe, where Jacqueline that very moment
+reposed in slumber. And there, in a back room without a window, he had
+gritted his teeth until morning. As for the sailors, who were to return
+to the ship for her trunk; well, more little Mexicans had fired on them
+from the river bank. The small boat, riddled with shot, had sunk, and
+the sailors, splashing frantically to keep off the sharks, had gained
+the shore opposite. But they could neither get word to the ship, nor
+cross back to Tampico.
+
+"Yet," demanded Jacqueline, "how could you know all this, there in your
+prison room?"
+
+"Am I saying I did, name of a name? Well, those poor sailors wandered
+about all night in the swamps across the river, and this morning they
+ran into Colonel Dupin and his Contras, and the colonel was frothing
+mad. He had only just stumbled on the bodies of Captain Maurel and some
+of his men, who had been ambushed and murdered. Poor Maurel was dangling
+from a tree among the vultures. Others were mutilated. Some had even
+been tortured. And all were stripped, and rotting naked. Mon Dieu, mon
+dieu, but it's an inferno, this country!"
+
+"Yes, yes, but how did they find you?"
+
+"Colonel Dupin simply brought the sailors back to Tampico and searched
+that cafe, and got me out. The proprietor wasn't thought to be any too
+good an Imperialist, anyway. They shot him, and then we came right along
+here."
+
+"Very nice of you, I am sure."
+
+"Not at all. Dupin isn't thinking of anybody but your Fra Diavolo, who
+must have killed Captain Maurel.--Was he here?"
+
+"Who? Don Rodrigo?"
+
+"Don Rodrigo?"
+
+"Of course. He's the same as Fra Diavolo."
+
+"You mean that bandit," cried Ney, "that terrible Rodrigue? But he is
+dead, don't you remember, Fra Diavolo said so?"
+
+"Stupid! Fra Diavolo is Don Rodrigo himself."
+
+"Not dead then? And I'll meet him yet! But," and his sudden hope as
+suddenly collapsed, "Dupin will get him first."
+
+"I think not, because Rodrigo did not take the trail."
+
+"Then which way did he go? Quick, please, mademoiselle, which way?"
+
+"He turned off into that arroyo."
+
+"Oh, what chance, what luck!" But the boy stopped with his foot in the
+stirrup. "No, mademoiselle, I can't leave you!"
+
+"Oh yes you can. I daresay there's another champion about." She glanced
+up at the cliff. "And besides, all danger is past. The donkey caravan is
+still here, and for company, I have Berthe, of course."
+
+"Really, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Yes, Michel, really."
+
+"Good, I'm off! But we will meet you at--Dupin just told me--at the next
+village on this same trail. Now I'm off!" He was indeed. "I say,
+mademoiselle," he called back, "I'm glad we left the ship, aren't you?"
+
+Jacqueline turned hastily her gaze from the cliff. He startled her,
+expressing her own secret thought.
+
+Chasseur and steed vanished in the ravine, and she smiled. "The God of
+pleasant fools go with him," she murmured.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+PASTIME PASSING EXCELLENT
+
+
+  "Il y a des offenses qui indignent les femmes sans les deplaire."
+                                                    --_Emile Augier._
+
+
+Like another Black Douglas, Din Driscoll rose among the crags, the dark
+tufts curling stubbornly on his bared head. He looked a sinewy,
+toughened Ajax. But he only spoiled it. For, raising his arms, he
+stretched himself, stretched long and luxuriously. His very animal
+revelling in the huge elongation of cramped limbs was exasperating. Next
+he clapped the slouch on his head, and clambered down.
+
+Jacqueline might have been surprised to see him. Her brows lifted. "Not
+killed?" she exclaimed. "But no, of course not. You gave yourself air,
+you ran away."
+
+Driscoll made no answer. He was thinking of what to do next. She knew
+that he had run because of her, and she was piqued because he would not
+admit it. "So," she went on tauntingly, "monsieur counts his enemy by
+numbers then?"
+
+"Didn't count them at all," he murmured absently.
+
+"But," and she tapped her foot, "a Frenchman, he would have done it--not
+that way."
+
+She was talking in English, and the quaintness of it began to create in
+him a desire for more. "Done what, miss?" he asked.
+
+"He would not have run--a Frenchman."
+
+"Prob'bly not, 'less he was pretty quick about it."
+
+She looked up angrily. Of course he must know that he had been splendid,
+up there behind the rocks. And now to be unconscious of it! But that was
+only a pose, she decided. Yet what made him so stupidly commonplace, and
+so dense? She hated to be robbed of her enthusiasm for an artistic
+bric-a-brac of emotion; and here he was, like some sordid mechanic who
+would not talk shop with a girl.
+
+"I wager one thing," she fretted, "and it is that when you bring men
+down to earth you have not even at all--how do you say?--the martial
+rage in your eyes?"
+
+"W'y, uh, not's I know of. It might spoil good shooting."
+
+"And your pipe"--her lip curled and smiled at the same time--"the pipe
+does not, neither?"
+
+His mouth twitched at the corners. "N-o," he decided soberly, "not in
+close range."
+
+She gave him up, he had no pose. Still, she was out of patience with
+him. "Helas! monsieur, all may see you are Ameri-can. But there, you
+have not to feel sorry. I forgive you, yes, because--it wasn't dull."
+
+"Hadn't we better be----"
+
+"Now what," she persisted, "kept you so long up there, for example?"
+
+Driscoll reddened. He had lingered behind the screen of rock to bandage
+his furrowed leg. "S'pose you don't ask," he said abruptly, "there's
+plenty other things to be doing."
+
+He turned and invited the little Breton maid to come from the shack. She
+was white, and trembled a little yet. "I knew, I knew you would not
+leave us, monsieur," she was trying to tell him. "But if you had--oh,
+what would madame----"
+
+"Now then," the practical American interrupted, "where's Murgie?"
+
+Jacqueline pointed with the toe of her slipper. There were prostrate
+bodies around them, with teeth bared, insolent, silent, horrible. One
+couldn't be sorry they were dead, but one didn't like to see them.
+Jacqueline's boot pointed to a man lying on his face. A silk hat was
+near by in the dust. A rusty black wig was loosened from his head. The
+girl invoked him solemnly. "Arise, Ancient Black Crow, and live another
+thousand years."
+
+Driscoll lifted the shrunken bundle of a man, held him at arm's length,
+looked him over, and stood him on his feet. The withered face was more
+than ever like a death's head, and the eyes were glassy, senseless. But
+as to hurt or scratch, there was none. The beady orbs started slowly in
+their sockets, rolling from side to side. The lips opened, and formed
+words. "Killed? yes, I am killed. But I want--my cotton, my burros, my
+peons--I want them. I am dead, give them to me."
+
+"You're alive, you old maverick."
+
+The gaze focused slowly on Driscoll, and slowly wakened to a crafty
+leer. Believe this Gringo?--not he!
+
+With an arm behind his shoulders Driscoll forced him down the trail to
+his caravan. Most of the animals were lying down, dozing under their
+packs. Murguia's eyes grew watery when he saw them, but he was still
+dazed and his delusion was obstinate. The leer shot exultant gleams. "A
+rich man _can_ enter heaven," he chuckled with unholy glee.
+
+"Oh wake up, and give me two donkeys for the girls. Their horses got
+hit, you know."
+
+Then the stunned old miser began to perceive that he was not in heaven.
+His tyrant's voice! "You get my horses killed," he whined, "and now you
+take my burros."
+
+Driscoll said no more, but picked out two beasts and bound some
+cushioned sacking on their backs for saddles. Then with a brisk hearty
+word, he swept Berthe up on the first one.
+
+"Next," he said, turning to Jacqueline.
+
+But the marchioness drew back. Next--after her maid! It nettled her that
+this country boy, or any other, could not recognize in her that
+indefinable something which is supposed to distinguish quality.
+
+"What's the matter, now?" he asked. "Quick, please, I'm in a hurry."
+
+"It's too preposterous. I'll not!"
+
+"You will," he said quietly.
+
+Her gray eyes deepened to blue with amazement. She stood stock still,
+haughtily daring him. She even lifted her arms a little, leaving the
+girlish waist defenseless. Her slender figure was temptation, the pretty
+ducal fury was only added zest. Up among the rocks Driscoll had found
+himself whispering, "She's game, that little girl!" But at the same time
+he had remembered Rodrigo's innuendo, the linking of her name with
+Maximilian's. She was so brave, and so headstrong, so lovably
+headstrong, and her beauty was so fresh and soft! Yet he could not but
+think of that taint in what nature had made so pure. Of a sudden there
+was a something wrong, something ugly and hideously wrong in life. And
+the country boy, the trooper, the man of blood-letting, what you will,
+was filled with helpless rage against it; and next against himself,
+because the girlish waist could thrill him so. "A silly little
+butterfly," he argued inwardly. Before, he had been unaware of his own
+indifference. But now he angrily tried to summon it back. He set his
+mind on their situation, on what it exacted. It exacted haste, simple,
+impersonal haste. And keeping his mind on just that, he caught her up.
+
+"Oh, you boor!" she cried, pushing at him.
+
+His jaw hardened. His will was well nigh superhuman, for he battled
+against two furious little hands, against the dimple and the patch so
+near his lips, against the fragrance of her hair, against the subtle
+warmth of his burden.
+
+"No, no!" she panted. "Monsieur, do you hear me? I am not to be
+carried!"
+
+"Maybe not," said he, carrying her.
+
+A moment later she discovered herself planted squarely on the burro.
+
+"Bonte divine!" she gasped. But she took care not to fall off.
+
+He drew a long breath.
+
+"Now whip 'em up," he commanded.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first village beyond, where Dupin had promised to meet Jacqueline,
+was a squatting group of thatched cones in a dense forest of Cyprus and
+eucalyptus. Its denizens were Huasteca Indians, living as they had
+before the Conquest, among themselves still talking their native
+dialect. The name of the hamlet was Culebra.
+
+The coy twilight waned quickly, and the caravan was still pushing on
+through the thick darkness of the wood, when a high tensioned yelping
+made the vast silence insignificant, ugly. But as the travelers filed
+into the clearing where the village was, the curs slunk away with coyote
+humility, their yellow points of eyes glowing back on the intruders.
+
+With a forager's direct method, Driscoll roused the early slumbering
+village. He would not take alfafa, he declined rastrojo. It was human
+food, corn, that he bought for his horse. He housed his dumb friend
+under a human roof too. After which he prepared a habitation for the
+women. He swept the likeliest hut clean of ashes, brazier, and bits of
+pots and jars. He carpeted the earth floor in Spanish moss, as King
+Arthur's knights once strewed their halls with rushes. It was luxury for
+a coroneted lass, if one went back a dozen centuries. There were chinks
+between the sooty saplings that formed the wall, but over these he hung
+matting, and he drove a stake for a candle.
+
+Supper followed. The trooper chose to change Don Anastasio from host to
+guest, and he exacted what he needed from the Inditos. They, for their
+part, were alert before his commands. None of them had been overlooked
+in his preliminary largesse of copper tlacos and they made the teaming
+wilderness contribute to his spread. Kneeling, with sleeves rolled from
+his hard forearms, he broiled a steak over hickory forks. The torches of
+gum tree knots lighted his banquet, and the faces of the two girls, rosy
+in the blaze and mysterious in the shadow, were piquant inspiration.
+Even the sharp features of Don Anastasio stirred him into a phase of
+whimsical benevolence. He knocked two chickens from their perch in a
+tree and baked them in a mould of clay. There was an armadilla too,
+which a Culebra boy and the dogs had run down during the day. Its dark
+flesh was rich and luscious, and the Missourian fondly called it
+'possum. Crisply toasted tortillas, or corn cakes, served for bread, and
+for spoons as well. But to Driscoll's mind the real feast was
+coffee--actual coffee, which he made black, so very good and black, a
+riotous orgie of blackness and strength and fragrance. Here was a feast
+indeed for the poor trooper. He thought of the chickory, of the parched
+corn, of all those pitiful aggravations that Shelby's Brigade had tried
+so hard to imagine into coffee during the late months of privation along
+the Arkansas line.
+
+And the Marquise d'Aumerle? Learning to eat roasting ears, which somehow
+just would leave a grain on her cheek with every bite, the dainty
+Marquise thought how much finer was this than the tedious bumping ship.
+How much more tempting than the ultra-belabored viands on white china
+that had to be latticed down! Here was angel's bread in the wilderness.
+And the appetite that drove her to ask for more, that was the only
+sauce--an appetite that was a frisson. A new sensation, in itself!
+
+And later, sleep too became a passion, a passion new and sweet in its
+incantation out of the lost cravings of childhood. When the nearer
+freshness of the woods filled her nostrils, there from the live-oak moss
+in her night's abode, she smiled on the grave young fellow who had left
+her at the door. And both girls laughing together over the masculine
+notions for their comfort, knew a certain happy tenderness in their
+gaiety.
+
+"Eh, but it's deep, madame," said one.
+
+"It's the politeness of the heart," the other explained.
+
+Outside Driscoll spread his blanket across the doorway where his horse
+was sheltered, and wrapped in his great cape-coat, he stretched himself
+for a smoke. But Murguia came with cigars, of the Huasteca, gray and
+musty. Driscoll accepted one, waving aside the old man's apologies. He
+puffed and waited. Conviviality in Don Anastasio meant something.
+
+"Ah, amigo," the thin voice cracked in a spasm of forced heartiness,
+"ah, it was a banquet! Si, si, a banquet! Only, if there were but a
+liqueur, a liqueur to give the after-cigar that last added relish,
+verdad, senor?"
+
+Driscoll tapped his "after-cigar" till the ashes fell. "Well? he asked.
+
+"Ai de mi, caballero, but I am heavy with regrets. I can offer nothing.
+My poor cognac--no, not after such a feast. But whiskey--ah, whiskey is
+magnifico. It is American."
+
+He stopped, with a genial rubbing of his bony hands. But his sad
+good-fellowship was transparent enough, and in the darkness his eyes
+were beads of malice. Driscoll half grunted. A long way round for a
+drink, he thought. "Here," he said, getting out his flask, "have a pull
+at this."
+
+Murguia took it greedily. He had seen the flask before. The covering of
+leather was battered and peeled. "Perhaps a little--water?" he faltered.
+Driscoll nodded, and off the old Mexican ambled with the flask. When he
+returned, he had a glass, into which he had poured some of the liquor.
+The canteen he handed back to the trooper, who without a word replaced
+it in his pocket. Murguia lingered. He sipped his toddy absently.
+
+"I, I wonder why the friends of the senoritas do not come?" he ventured.
+
+"Want to get rid of them, eh, Murgie?"
+
+The old man shrugged his shoulders. "And why not? You may not believe
+me, senor, but should I not feel easier if they were--well, out of the
+reach of Don Rodrigo?"
+
+"Out of----Look here, where's the danger now?"
+
+"Ai, senor, don't be too sure. Colonel Dupin still does not come, and it
+might be--because the guerrillas have stopped him."
+
+"Man alive, he had 'em running!"
+
+"H'm, yes, but there's plenty more. This very village breeds them, feeds
+them, welcomes them home. Don Rodrigo can gather ten times what he had
+to-day. And if he does, and if, if he is looking for the senoritas
+again----"
+
+Driscoll shifted on his blanket. "I see," he drawled. "F'r instance, if
+the senoritas vanish before he gets here, he won't blame you? Oh no, you
+were asleep, you couldn't know that I had up and carried 'em off.
+Anyhow, you'd rather risk Rodrigo than Colonel Dupin----Yes, I see." He
+tucked his saddle under his head, and lay flat, blinking at the stars.
+"This trail go on to Valles?" he inquired drowsily.
+
+Murguia's small eyes brightened over him. "Yes," he said, eagerly.
+
+"Correct," yawned the American, "I've already made sure."
+
+"And if----" But a snore floated up from the blanket.
+
+When Murguia was gone, the sleeper awoke. He carefully poured out all
+the remaining whiskey. "It may be what they call 'fine Italian,'" he
+muttered, with a disgusted shake of the head, but he neglected to throw
+the flask away as well. Next he saddled Demijohn and two of the pack
+horses, then lay down and slept in earnest, as an old campaigner
+snatches at rest.
+
+The night was black, an hour before the dawn, when his eyes opened wide,
+and he sat up, listening. He heard it again, faint and far away, a
+feeble "pop-pop!" Then there were more, a sudden pigmy chorus of battle.
+He got to his feet, and ran to call the two women.
+
+"So," said Jacqueline, appearing under the stars, "monsieur does not
+wish to be relieved of us? He will not wait for his friends?"
+
+"Get on these horses! Here, I'll help you."
+
+Soon they three were riding through the forest, in the trail toward
+Valles. Behind them the fairy popping swelled louder, yet louder, and
+the man glanced resentfully at his two companions. He was missing the
+game.
+
+Back in the village of Culebra a demon uproar hounded Don Anastasio out
+of serape and slumber. All about him were fleeing feet. They were
+shadows, bounding like frightened deer from the wood, across the
+clearing, and into the wood again. Some turned and fired as they ran.
+Screaming women and children hurried out of the _jacales_, and
+darted here and there. Dogs howled everywhere. A storm of crashing brush
+and a wild troop of horsemen, each among them a free lance of butchery,
+burst on the village. A second crashing storm, and they were in the
+forest again. They left quivering blots in their wake, and a moaning
+gave a lower and dreadfuller note to the wailing of women. Only the
+leader of the pursuers, with a few others, drew rein.
+
+"Death of an ox!" the French oath rang out, "We're in their very nest.
+Quick, you loafers, the torch, the torch!"
+
+Flames began to crackle, and in the glare Murguia was seen frantically
+driving burros and peons to safety. The leader of the troop leaned over
+in his saddle and had him by the collar.
+
+"Who the name of a name are you?"
+
+Don Anastasio looked up. His captor was a great bearded man. "Colonel
+Dupin!" he groaned.
+
+"Who are you?--But I should know. It's the trader, the accomplice of
+Rodrigo. Sacre nom, tell me, where is she? We can't find her here. Where
+is she?"
+
+"How can I know, senor? She--perhaps she is gone."
+
+"With Rodrigo--ha! But he'll have no ransom--no, not if it breaks
+Maximilian's heart.--Now, Senor Trader----"
+
+He stopped and called to him his nearest men. Murguia sank limp.
+
+"But he hasn't got her! Rodrigo hasn't got her!"
+
+"Who has then?"
+
+"The other one, the American."
+
+"Which way did they go?"
+
+"If Your Mercy will not----"
+
+"Shoot him!" thundered the Tiger.
+
+"But if he will tell us?" someone interposed.
+
+It was Don Tiburcio, still the guardian angel of the golden goose.
+
+"Bien," growled the Tiger, "let him live then until we find the
+American."
+
+"Which way did they go?" Tiburcio whispered in Murguia's ear.
+
+"To, to Valles," came the reply.
+
+The blazing huts revealed a ghoulish joy on the miser's face. The
+Gringo, not he, would now have to explain to the Tiger.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+UNREGISTERED IN ANY STUDBOOK
+
+
+  "La belle chose que l'aristocratie quand on a le chance d'en etre."
+                                                        --_Voltaire._
+
+
+That garish daub which was sopped up from the burning homes of men and
+bespattered over the forest's dark crest was already mellowing under the
+gentler touch of dawn, when the three travelers gained the open country.
+
+"Poor, dirty, little Inditos," Jacqueline mused aloud. Berthe struck her
+pony in a tremor of fright. The American was riding ahead. "Fire and
+sword," Jacqueline went on, and her voice lowered to intense scorn,
+"they make the final tableau, but--it's gaudy, it's cheap."
+
+The trail had broadened into a high road, and now it wound among the
+hills like a soiled white ribbon. Driscoll turned in his saddle. "I
+shouldn't wonder," he observed in the full-toned drawl that was peculiar
+to him, "but what we'd better be projecting a change of venue. This
+route is too public, and publicity around here strikes me as sort of
+prejudiced. S'pose we just stir up an alibi?"
+
+A certain stately old judge back in Missouri would have smiled thus to
+hear the scion of his house. But the marchioness, confident in her
+mastery of English, thought it was the veriest jargon. What was the boy
+trying to say? His next words grew fairly intelligible. "We are now
+headed for Valles. Well, we've decided not to go to Valles."
+
+Perhaps they had, but she at least had ceased deciding anything, since
+the overruling of her veto in the matter of precedence when one is
+hoisted upon a burro.
+
+A narrow pony path crossed the road. "First trail to the left, after
+leaving the wood," Driscoll said aloud, "and this must be it."
+Campaigner in an unfamiliar country, he had informed himself, and it was
+with confidence that he led his little party into the bridlepath. But he
+looked anxiously at the forest behind. He did not doubt but that
+Rodrigo, if it were he back there, would terrify Murguia into betraying
+their destination, or their supposed destination, which was Valles.
+
+"Can't you hurry 'em up a bit?" he called back.
+
+"We do try," protested Jacqueline, holding aloft a broken switch, "but
+they only smile at us."
+
+Driscoll got down and undid the spurs from his boots. One of the immense
+saw-like discs he adjusted to mademoiselle's high heel, passing the
+strap twice around the silk-clad ankle. Jacqueline gazed down on the
+short-cropped, curly head, and she saw that the back of his neck was
+suddenly red. But the discovery awakened nothing of the coquette in her.
+Quite the contrary, there was something grateful, even gravely maternal,
+in the smile hovering on her lips for the rough trooper who took fright
+like a girl over a revealed instep. Still, the interest was not
+altogether maternal as she watched him doing the same service for
+Berthe. Perhaps he was too far away, or perhaps practice brought
+indifference, but at any rate, his neck was no longer tinged in that
+fiery way.
+
+"Now dig 'em!" said he. "We want to make that clump of mesquite yonder,
+now pretty quick."
+
+The trees he pointed to were two or three miles away, but the travelers
+covered the distance at an easy lope. Driscoll kept an eye on the road
+they had just left, and once hidden by the mesquite he called a halt. As
+he expected, a number of horsemen appeared at a trot from the direction
+of the forest. They did not pause at the cross trail, however, but kept
+to the highway in the direction of Valles. The American and the two
+girls could now safely continue their journey along the bridlepath.
+
+"Monsieur," Jacqueline questioned demurely, and in her most treacherous
+way, "how much longer do we yet follow you up and down mountains?"
+
+"W'y, uh--_I'm_ going to the City of Mexico."
+
+"And we others, we may tag along, n'est-ce pas? But the city is far,
+far. And, to-night?"
+
+"Of course," said Driscoll, "if you should happen to know of a good
+hotel----" He paused and gazed inquiringly over hills covered with
+banana and coffee to the frost line. He would not have tried a frailer
+temper so, but to provoke hers was incense to his own.
+
+"You others, the Americans," she said tentatively, as though explaining
+him to herself, "you are so greedy of this New World! You won't give us
+of it, no, not even a poor little answer of information. Alas,
+Monseigneur the American, I apologize for being on this side the ocean
+at all--in a tattered frock."
+
+Driscoll looked, but he could see nothing wrong. She seemed as crisp and
+dainty as ever. If there were any disarray, it was a fetching sort, with
+a certain rakish effect.
+
+"Oh that's all right," he assured her heartily, "_you_ can stay."
+
+"Really, and after you've been writing us notes from Washington to--to
+'get out'? We French people do not think that was polite."
+
+"I never wrote you any notes, and," he added in a lowered tone, "the
+devil take Washington, since Lee didn't!"
+
+Jacqueline's lips pursed suddenly like a cherry. "Oh pardon me," she
+exclaimed. "I did not know. And so you are a--a Confederate? But," and
+the gray eyes fastened upon him. She rode, too, so that she could see
+his face, just ahead of her, "but your faction, the--yes, the South--she
+is already vanquis--no!--whipped? I--I heard."
+
+He did not reply, but his expression disturbed her unaccountably. She
+could almost note the whimsical daredeviltry fade from his face, as
+there came instead the grimmest and strangest locking of the jaws. She
+tried to imagine the French beaten and her feelings then, but it was
+difficult, for her countrymen were "the bravest of the world, the
+unconquered." They had borne victory over four continents, into two
+hemispheres. But this American, what must he feel? He was thinking, in
+truth, of many things. Of his leave taking with his regiment, with those
+lusty young savages of Missourians whom perhaps he was never to see
+again. He was thinking of his ride through the South to Mobile, of the
+misery in stubborn heroism, of the suffering everywhere, matching that
+in the dreary fever camp of the Old Brigade. He was thinking of all the
+beautiful Southland torn and ravaged and of the lowering cloud of
+finality. Of the Army of Northern Virginia so hard pressed; of the doom
+of Surrender, a knell already sounded, perhaps. Never had Jacqueline
+seen such bitterness on a human face. It was a man's bitterness. And
+almost a desperado's. At least there was the making of a desperado in
+the youth of a moment before. She caught herself shuddering. There was
+something so like a lurking death astride the yellow horse in front of
+her.
+
+But over her also there came a change, and it grew as she saw and
+appreciated the man in him. Her caprices fell from her, and she was the
+shrewd woman of the world, a deft creature of courts, a cunning weaver
+of the delicate skeins of intrigue and politics. A glint of craft and
+purpose struck from the gray eyes, as in preparation for battle. Her
+mischievous bantering had really been fraught with design, and by it she
+had revealed to herself this man. But the change in her came when he
+proved an antagonist, as she now supposed him to be. For in the
+uncloaking he stood forth a Confederate. His cause was lost. He was in
+Mexico. He was on a mission, no doubt. One question remained, what could
+the mission be?
+
+Abrupt frankness, with its guileful calculation to surprise one into
+betrayal, was the subtlest diplomacy. "Let us see," she mused aloud,
+"you, your comrades, monsieur, you have no country now? Bien, that
+accounts for your interest in Maximilian?"
+
+"And what is your interest, Miss--Jack-leen?"
+
+She staggered before the riposte. The "Jack-leen" was innocent
+blundering, she knew that. He had heard Rodrigo address her so, and he
+used it in all respect. But there was her own question turned on
+herself. By "her interest" he of course meant the interest she was
+showing in himself; he was not referring it to Maximilian. And yet the
+double meaning was there, just the same. He had struck back, that was
+certain, but because she could not tell where, nor even whether he had
+wounded, she was afraid to parry, much more to venture another thrust.
+Those who had sent the rustic evidently knew what they were about. He
+could shoot well, which was exhilarating. To redeem one's country's
+discredited bills, was quixotic. She rose to that, because she was
+French. But to fence with herself--well, that was quality. Instinctive,
+inbred, unconscious, and unregistered in any studbook of Burke or
+Gotha--but quality. And she recognized it, for there was deference in
+the silence which her baffled diplomacy now counseled.
+
+They passed many natives plodding on to Valles with market stuff, going
+at the Inditos' tireless foxtrot, now a man in loincloth stooped under a
+great bundle of straw or charcoal, or a family entire, including burro
+and dog. Of a gray-bearded patriarch with a chicken coop strapped to his
+back, Driscoll inquired the distance to an hacienda of the region which
+had the name of Moctezuma. "Probablemente, it will be ten leagues
+farther on, senor," the Huastecan replied.
+
+"We are going," Driscoll now informed his companions, "to drop in on
+Murgie--the hospitable old anaconda."
+
+They acquired a pineapple by purchase, and stopped for their morning
+coffee at a hut among numberless orange trees, and at another farther on
+for their midday lunch, where they learned that the Hacienda de
+Moctezuma was only just beyond the first hill, and only just beyond the
+first hill they learned that they had six leagues more to go. They
+covered three of these leagues, and were rewarded with the information
+that it was fully seven leagues yet. Geography in Mexico was clearly an
+elastic quantity. But towards three o'clock a young fellow on a towering
+stack of fagots waved his arm over the landscape, and said, "Why, senor,
+you are there now." Yes, it was the hacienda, but how far was it to the
+hacienda house? Oh, that was still a few little leagues.
+
+In the end, after nightfall, they rode into a very wide valley, where
+two broad, shallow rivers joined and flowed on as one through the
+lowland. Here, on the brow of a slope, they perceived the walls and the
+church tower of what seemed to be a small town. But after one last
+inquiry, they learned that it was the seat of Anastasio Murguia's
+baronial domain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE HERALD OF THE FAIR GOD
+
+
+  "Les grenouilles se lassant
+  De l'etat democratique,
+  Par leur clameurs firent tant
+  Que Jupin les soumit au pouvoir monarchique."
+                                --_La Fontaine._
+
+
+A wide country road swept up the slope of the hill, curved in toward the
+low outer wall of the little town on the brow, then swept down again.
+The portico of the hacienda house was set in the wall where the road
+almost touched, so that the traveler could alight at the very threshold
+of the venerable place. Mounting the half-dozen steps, Driscoll crossed
+a vast porch whose bare cement columns stood as sentinels the entire
+length of the high, one-storied facade, and on the heavy double doors he
+found a knocker. Visitors were infrequent there, but at last a surprised
+barefoot mozo answered the rapping, and in turn brought a short man of
+burly girth and charro tightness of breeches. This chubby person bowed
+many times and assured Their Mercies over and over again that here they
+had their house. Driscoll replied with thanks that in that case he
+thought that he and the other two Mercies would be taking possession,
+for the night at least.
+
+The man was Murguia's administrador, or overseer. He took it for granted
+that the French senor (in those days Mexico called all foreigners
+French) and the French senoras were friends of his employer, and
+Driscoll did not undeceive him. The trooper's habits were those of war,
+and war admitted quartering yourself on an enemy. He brought the news,
+too, that Murguia had come safely through his last blockade run, which
+alone insured him a welcome without the fact that ranchero hospitality
+may be almost Arabian and akin to a sacrament.
+
+Plunging into apologies for every conceivable thing that could or might
+be amiss, Don Anastasio's steward led them into the sala, a long front
+room, the hacendado's hall of state. To all appearances it had not been
+so used in many years, but the old furnishing of some former Spanish
+owner still told the tale of coaches before the colonnade outside and of
+hidalgo guests within the great house. There was the stately sofa of
+honor flanked by throne-like armchairs, with high-backed ones next in
+line, all once of bright crimson satin and now frazzled and stained. The
+inevitable mirror leaned from its inevitable place over the sofa, but it
+was cracked and the gilt of the heavy frame had tarnished to red. At the
+other end of the sala, a considerable journey, there hung a token of the
+later and Mexican family in possession. The token was of course the
+Virgin of Guadelupe in her flame of gold, as she had gaudily emblazoned
+herself on the blanket, or serape, of a poor Indian. Murguia's print was
+one of thousands of copies of that same revered serape.
+
+Urging them to be seated, clapping his hands for servants, giving
+orders, ever apologizing, the overseer finally got the travelers
+convinced that it was their house and that supper would be ready now
+directly. With a glance at his two companions, Driscoll inquired for the
+senoras of the family, whereupon a sudden embarrassment darkened the
+administrador's fat amiable features.
+
+"Dona Luz, Your Mercy means? Ai, caballero, you are most kind. And you
+tell me that her father will come to-morrow, that he will--surely come?"
+
+"Might we," Jacqueline interposed, "pay our respects to Senor Murguia's
+daughter?"
+
+The poor fellow begged Their Mercies' indulgence, but Dona Matilde, the
+senora aunt of Dona Luz, lay sick in the house. As for Dona Luz, yes,
+Dona Luz had gone to the chapel, as she often did of an evening lately,
+to pray for her aunt's recovery. Dona Luz had vowed to wear sackcloth
+for six months if her dear patron saint, Maria de la Luz, would but hear
+her petition. Out of compassion, Jacqueline said no more.
+
+Next morning Driscoll was astir early. He wandered through a
+thick-walled labyrinth of corridors and patios, and came at last into a
+rankly luxuriant tropical garden, where the soft perfume of china-tree
+blossoms filled his nostrils. Keeping on he passed many of the hacienda
+buildings, a sugar mill, a cotton factory, warehouses, stables with
+corrals, and entered a tortuous street between adobes, where he found
+the hacienda store. Here the administrador was watching the clerks who
+sold and the peons who bought. The latter were mostly women, barefooted
+and scantily clothed. Their main want was corn, weevil-eaten corn, which
+they carried away in their aprons. They made tortillas of it for their
+men laboring in the hacienda fields, or on the hacienda coffee hills.
+The store was a curious epitome of thrift and improvidence. One wench
+grumbled boldly of short measure. She dared, because she was comely and
+buxom, and her chemise fell low on her full, olive breast. She counted
+her purchase of frijoles to the last grain, using her fingers, and
+glaring at the clerk half coaxingly, half resentfully. But an intensely
+scarlet percale caught her barbarian eye, and she took enough of it for
+a skirt. A dozen cigarettes followed, and by so much she increased her
+man's debt to the hacienda.
+
+A shrunken and ancient laborer was expostulating earnestly with much
+gesturing of skeleton arms, while the administrador listened as one
+habituated and bored. The feeble peon protested that he could not work
+that day. He parted the yellow rags over one leg and revealed decaying
+flesh, sloughing away in the ravages of bone leprosy. He showed it
+without emotion, as some argument in the abstract. And he was arguing
+for a little corn, just a little, and he made his palm into a tiny cup
+to demonstrate. The administrador opened a limp account book, held his
+pudgy forefinger against a page for a second, then shut it decisively.
+"No, no, Pedro, not while you owe these twelve reales. Think, man, if
+you should die. You have no sons; we would lose."
+
+"But, mi patron, there's my nephew."
+
+"True, and he has his own father's debt waiting for him."
+
+"Just a wee little," begged the man.
+
+The overseer shook his head. "When you've worked to-day, yes. Then you
+may have six cents' worth, and the other six cents of the day's wages
+counted off your debt. There now, get along with you to the timber
+cutting."
+
+The administrador brightened on perceiving Driscoll. "How was His Mercy?
+How had His Mercy passed the night? How----"
+
+"Where," interposed Driscoll, "might one find the nearest stage to
+Mexico?"
+
+Almost nowhere, was the reply. What with the French intervention and
+guerrillas, the Compania de Diligencias had about suspended its service
+altogether. "Then," said Driscoll, "could we hire some sort of a rig
+from you?" The administrador believed so, though he regretted
+continuously that Their Mercies must be leaving so soon.
+
+With a nod of thanks Driscoll turned curiously to the loaded shelves,
+and gazed at the bolts of manta, calico, and red flannel. "Jiminy
+crickets," he burst forth, "is there anybody on this ranch who can sew?"
+
+Yes, the wife of one of the clerks was a passable seamstress. She did
+such work for the Donas at the House.
+
+"And can she do some to-day, and can you send it on to overtake me by
+to-morrow?"
+
+Most certainly.
+
+Then Driscoll invested in a number of varas of calico print. It was the
+best available. But the light blue flowering was modest enough, and
+there was even a cheery freshness about it that called up mellowing
+recollections of bright-eyed Missouri girls. Yet each time he thought of
+the costumes he had ordered, he blushed until his hair roots tingled.
+
+Intent once more on departure, Din Driscoll hastened back to the House.
+But he only learned that Jacqueline and Berthe were not up yet. He
+mumbled at such looseness in discipline, until he remembered that they
+were not troopers, but girls. And since girls are to be waited for, he
+did it in his own room. From his saddlebags he laid out shaving
+material. The Old Brigade had advised these things, while speculating
+with dry concern on what was correct among emperors. After much sharp
+snapping of eyes, for the razor pulled, the clean line of his jaw
+emerged from lather and stubble. "Just in case any emperor should happen
+in," he tried to explain it, taking a transparently jocose manner with
+himself.
+
+Eight o'clock! Even civilized people do not stay abed that late! Yet he
+found only Berthe in the dining room. She had come on a foraging
+expedition. He watched the little Bretonne's deft arranging of a
+battered tray, and offered droll suggestions until she began to suspect
+that he really did not mean them. Berthe was a nice girl with soft brown
+hair, and a serious, gentle way about her.
+
+The maid found mademoiselle not only still abed, but stretched on a rack
+of torture as well, her helpless gaze fixed on a Mexican woman with a
+hot iron. It was a flatiron, and it was being applied to Jacqueline's
+poor rumpled frock. The dress was spread over a cloth on the floor, and
+the woman strove tantalizingly, and Jacqueline was trying to direct her.
+
+"Madame is served," Berthe announced.
+
+Madame raised herself on an elbow and looked at the tray, at the sorry
+chinaware, at the earthen supplements. "Served?" she repeated. "Berthe,
+exaggeration is a very bad habit. But child, what are you about? This is
+not a petit dejeuner!"
+
+"I know, madame, but he told me to bring it. He said we'd be traveling,
+and there wouldn't be time for a second breakfast."
+
+"_He?_ Who in the world----"
+
+"Why, the, the American monsieur. He said just coffee wasn't enough, and
+for me to bring along the entire contest of marksmanship--the, the whole
+shooting match--and for madame to hurry."
+
+"Berthe! one would say you thought him a prince."
+
+"He--he is a kind of prince," said the little Bretonne doggedly.
+
+Madame whistled softly. Still, she ate a hearty breakfast.
+
+Meantime, outside two resplendent horsemen were galloping up the curving
+sweep of the wide road. Their haste smacked of vast importance, and the
+very dazzling flash of their brass helmets in the sunlight had a certain
+arrogance. The foremost jerked his horse's bit with a cruel petulance
+and drew up before the hacienda house. Several natives were basking on
+the steps, and he cut at them sharply with his whip.
+
+"Wake, you r-rats!" A Teutonic thickness of speech clogged his
+utterance, and he turned to his companion. "Tell this canaille," he
+snarled in Flemish, "to go fetch their master here at once."
+
+The administrador came hurrying, and was overcome. His hospitable flow
+gushed and choked at its source before the splendor of the two
+cavaliers. They were Belgians. The first wore a long blue coat bedecked
+with golden leaves and belted with a sash. Crosses and stars dangled on
+his breast. His breeches were white doe, and his high glossy boots had
+wrinkles like a mousquetaire's. Heavy tassels flapped from his sword
+hilt. A brass eagle was perched on his helmet. Altogether, here was a
+glittering bit of flotsam from the new Mexican Empire. But a narrowness
+between the man's eyes affected one unpleasantly. It was a mean and a
+sour scowl, of a fellow lately come into authority. The other man graced
+the ornate uniform of an aide in Maximilian's imperial household.
+
+"Your Mercy is--is the Emperor?" stammered the poor fat administrador.
+
+He had, indeed, heard rumors of Maximilian on one of his ostentatious
+voyages. The first Belgian, however, was in no way embarrassed at the
+question. It was a natural mistake, in his opinion.
+
+"Explain to this imbecile," he ordered, "since there's no better here to
+receive us."
+
+The aide explained. His Imperial Majesty, Maximiliano, was returning to
+his capital. Fascinated by the beauty of the tropics, as well as ill of
+a cough, he had lingered for a week past at the adjoining hacienda of
+Las Palmas. He had also been deep in studies for the welfare of his
+people. But now the business of the Empire demanded that he relieve the
+Empress of her regency. Accordingly, His Majesty and His Majesty's
+retinue had left Las Palmas that very morning, and would shortly pass by
+the hacienda of Moctezuma. His Majesty, when en voyage, always took a
+loving interest in his subjects, and a sincere ovation never failed to
+touch his heart. So Monsieur Eloin--here the aide glanced with some
+irony at the first Belgian--so Monsieur Eloin thought that the master of
+La Moctezuma would be grateful to know of His Majesty's approach, in
+order to gather the peons from the fields to welcome him. It would be as
+well, perhaps, to reveal nothing to the Emperor of this thoughtful hint.
+
+"To make it quite plain," concluded the speaker, "can you assemble
+enough men within an hour to do a seeming and convincing reverence to
+your ruler?"
+
+"And tell him," interrupted Monsieur Eloin, "not to forget the green
+boughs waving in their hands. Make him understand that there will be
+consequences if it's not spontaneous."
+
+As they galloped back to rejoin Maximilian, the imperial aide was
+thoughtful. "I can't help it," he said aloud, "I feel sorry for him. How
+his blue eyes glisten--there are actually tears in them--when he talks
+to these Indians of freedom and a higher life! He thinks they love him!
+And all this elegance--no wonder they believe that the Fair God is come
+at last to right their sorrows."
+
+"The loathsome beasts!"
+
+"But I do feel sorry. He really believes that he will verify the
+tradition and be their savior. It's his sincere goodness of heart. Man,
+how exalted he is!"
+
+"But where's the harm?"
+
+"Because, because the poor devils were fooled once before. And their new
+Messiah may deceive them as bitterly with unwise meddling as Cortez did
+with greed and cruelty."
+
+"Messiah for these pigs!" Eloin sneered. "What pleasure it gives him,
+_I_ can't see."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE RITUAL
+
+
+  "... a bearded man,
+  Pamper'd with rank luxuriousness and ease."
+                                      --_Dante._
+
+
+The Emperor was coming--elaborately, by august degrees.
+
+First, and far in advance, arrived a haughty pack liveried in the royal
+green of ancient Aztec dynasties. New tenants might have been moving on
+this bright May day, for the flunkies attended a small caravan of
+household stuff, which they crammed through the gaping doorway as nuts
+into a goose's maw. The stuff was all royal, of royalty's absolute
+necessities. There were soft rugs, and finely spun tapestries, and
+portieres to smother a whisper. There was a high-backed chair, and a
+velvet-covered dais for the high-backed chair. There were brushes, whose
+stroke caressed gently and purringly the Hapsburg whisker. There was a
+Roman poet, fastidiously bound, and then--there was the Ritual.
+
+The Ritual was a massive tome, of glazed, gilt-edged paper, of print as
+big for the proclaiming of truth as the Family Bible, of weight to
+burden a strong man, of contents to stagger a giant brain, unless the
+giant brain had in it the convolution of a smile. Maximilian and
+Charlotte had reigned a year, and so far the Ritual was the supreme
+monument to the glory and usefulness of their Empire. It decreed, by
+Imperial dictation and signature, the etiquette that must and should be
+observed in the courtly circle. But alas, you can't codify
+genuflections, nor yet a handshake.
+
+The next degree in the imperial advent was the imperial courier, who
+proclaimed from a curveting steed what everybody suspected. "Our August
+Sovereign" was approaching.
+
+Several hundred peons stared with open mouths. Gathered before the
+house, they prattled to one another in childlike expectancy of the Senor
+Emperador. Most of them were learning for the first time that they had
+an emperor. Still, it sufficed to know this was an occasion for
+auto-inspiring vivas, like once when the Ilustrisimo Bishop came. They
+took new hold on the green boughs they were to wave. A handkerchief here
+and there fluttered from a bamboo pole. Down in an adobe village by the
+river junction, every gala scrap of calico print, whether shirt or
+skirt, pended from cords stretched across the street; and cotton
+curtains, some of crude drawn work, hung outside the windows. All the
+poor finery of the Indians was on exhibition to do honor to a gorgeous
+Old World court. But the fiesta air had already gotten into the
+susceptible native lungs, and that alone, with only a trumpet's blare,
+would make for a hurrah in genuine fervor.
+
+The roomy porch of the old mansion was crowded with the chief people of
+the hacienda, clerks, foremen, house servants, besides the administrador
+and the chaplain. Behind a remote column were the three wanderers in the
+wilderness; the Storm Centre, the Marchioness, and the Maid. They were
+to have been gone by now, and yet it was not the coming of the emperor
+that had stopped them. The cause was nearer at hand. Smoking a long
+black cigar, "grizzled and fierce, as ornate in braid and decorations as
+a bullfighter," Colonel Dupin had delayed them.
+
+His Cossacks thronged the colonnade. The brick-red of their raw leather
+jackets splotched every other color with rust. The Contra Guerrillas
+were many things. They were Frenchmen and Mexicans. They were Americans,
+Confederate deserters, Union deserters. They were Negroes and Arabs.
+They were the ruined of fortune, now soldiers of fortune. They were
+pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters, gamblers, swindlers.
+They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from the
+guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was
+not a softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity
+could lead them, could hold them.
+
+They surrounded the Missourian on the hacienda portico. If only for his
+debonnaire indifference, they knew him for a "bad man" such as none of
+them might ever hope to be. And they watched him like lynxes, though he
+was unarmed. Yet he did not look "bad." He merely looked bored. He was a
+prisoner, but not the only one. Anastasio Murguia fidgetted among the
+Cossacks on his own porch. His restless eyes roved incessantly over the
+crowd, seeking his daughter, but they were steadily baffled.
+
+Down in the valley, where the Rio Moctezuma joined its course with the
+Panuco, a dusty mist moved nearer along the old Spanish highway, and
+faintly there came the sound of clarions. An eager murmuring arose from
+the throng on the hillside. It swelled more confidently to a buzz as the
+far-away dust lifted at the ford and revealed the beaded stringing of a
+numerous company. The distant bugles rang clearer on the pure air. "Yes,
+he comes," the people cried, "There! Seest thou, hombre?--_There!_
+Viva el Senor Emperador!"
+
+For Colonel Dupin the cloud of dust would shortly evolve into a staying
+hand of mercy, into the exasperating stupidity of mercy. He had captured
+the American not ten minutes before, and here was interference in a
+gauzy haze of dust. He signed to one of his men to follow with Murguia,
+and he himself placed a gauntleted hand on Driscoll's shoulder. "Now,"
+he said.
+
+But a white figure of Mexican rebosa and silken instep moved swiftly
+from behind a column and touched the Tiger's arm. Both Jacqueline and
+Berthe had been watching the Cossack chief rather than the spectacle in
+the valley. And as he turned on his prisoner, Berthe half screamed and
+clutched at the bosom of her dress. It was Jacqueline who gained his
+side. She addressed him sharply as one who hates to reopen a tedious
+argument.
+
+"Monsieur Dupin," she cried, "have I not already permitted myself to
+tell you--yes, I repeat, you are mistaken. He is in no sense whatever an
+accomplice of Rodrigo Galan."
+
+The Tiger heard, no doubt, but he did not stop. He kept on toward the
+door, Driscoll beside him, and his men around him. He meant to pass
+through the house. Some secluded corral in the back would do for the
+execution. Driscoll seemed as indifferent as ever, though there was a
+lithe, alert spring in his step. Behind him Murguia was moaning, praying
+to see his daughter. Berthe followed, bewildered, and silently wringing
+her hands. But the death march was so business-like, and every one else
+was so intent on the approach of a royally born person, that the crowds
+shoved aside by the little group never once suspected that they had just
+brushed elbows with tragedy in the making.
+
+Jacqueline caught her breath, sucked it in rather, in a pang of angry
+despair; and plucking up her skirts she ran ahead until she could oppose
+her slender figure squarely in front of the burly Frenchman. If he were
+to move on, he must trample her down. Her eyes, usually so big and round
+and shading to a depth of blue with their lively mischief, were all but
+closed, and through the narrowed lashes they gleamed like white steel.
+Her voice, though, was clear and even, of a studied courtesy.
+
+"Yes, I know, Monsieur le Coronel, suspicion with you is quite enough.
+But," she went on in contempt and feigned surprise at his dullness,
+"this rage of yours at being outwitted by Rodrigo Galan blinds you to
+something else.--Pardon, monsieur, a Frenchman does not jostle a
+woman.--Thank you."
+
+"But the jostling by a woman's tongue, mademoiselle.--Well, what is it?
+Have mercy, be brief, since I am not even to breathe while my lady
+talks."
+
+"I was thinking, dear monsieur, of the feelings of an artist, to which
+you are very, very blind."
+
+"Feelings, artist? Name of a name, mademoiselle!"
+
+"Precisely, Maximilian's feelings. You know how he abhors the sight of
+blood. Ma foi, and I agree with him."
+
+"Go it, Miss Jack-leen!" Driscoll abetted her. Never a word of their
+French did he understand, but he knew that she had a power of speech.
+Dupin evidently knew it better yet, for though he laughed, he did not
+laugh easily.
+
+"Never fear," he said, "His Majesty's delicate prejudices are safe. It
+will be all underground before he comes, and no muss at all."
+
+"But you forget," Jacqueline cried testily, "you forget the imagination
+of a poet."
+
+"And he will imagine----"
+
+"Yes, because I shall tell him."
+
+"Sacre----"
+
+"And possibly he would brace his feelings to a second aesthetic horror as
+a rebuke for the first. In a word, my colonel, there will be one more
+body to follow--underground. Now is this quite clear, or--do you require
+my promise on it?"
+
+The savage old brow manifested the desire to make her a victim as well,
+but in this extra blood-thirst she knew that Driscoll was safe. "I
+understand, Mademoiselle la Marquise," he said, laying on heavily the
+suave gallantry of a Frenchman. "Yes, I understand. Prince Max values
+Your Ladyship's good taste so highly---- Pardi, I believe he would
+certainly shoot me if you told him to."
+
+"Exactly," Jacqueline coldly assented.
+
+"And Monsieur l'Americain may congratulate himself on the influence of
+mademoiselle, the arbiter elegantiarum--with His Majesty."
+
+"As Monsieur le Tigre may congratulate himself that the American does
+not understand this insult, sir."
+
+Behind her rose a dry hysterical cackle of renewed hope. "The Little
+Black Crow!" she exclaimed. "See, my colonel, he is not worth an
+execution all to himself, so do we all go back to contemplate Prince
+Max's loving ovation."
+
+"The Emperor arrives!" she cried gayly, returning to the porch. With the
+others she was once more behind the remote column, an end of the rebosa
+hanging over her arm ready to be flung across her face. "But
+what--Helas, I haven't my Ritual with me."--The Ritual classified every
+movement, every breath of the Court, as rigidly and with as little
+consciousness of humor as Linnaeus did his flowers.--"It can't be a Minor
+Palace Luncheon of the Third Class," she mused, "and it isn't Grand
+Court Mourning of the First Degree. Ha, I have it, He--that 'H' is a
+capital, please, not as a sacrilege, but to be Ritualistic--He is out on
+a voyage of the Minor Class, Small Service of Honor, Lesser Cortege. Now
+then, all's comfortable; no room for plebeian misconceptions."
+
+On they came, each rigidly after his kind, a Noah's procession of
+Dignitaries with the August Sovereign first of all. To bring on the
+majestic climax so early was illogical, of course, but dust having
+happened to be created before precedence, the Cortege was changed the
+other way round for a voyage, so that the First Category people breathed
+what the August Sovereign kicked up and kicked up some additional for
+the Second Category, and the Second did the same for the Third, and so
+on down to the Ninth, or "And all others," who breathed the best they
+could and paid the bill.
+
+Nothing preceded the royal coach except the royal escort, and that by
+exactly two hundred paces, in which interval a canonical obligation was
+laid on the dust to settle. It was a particularly gallant royal escort.
+The Empress's Own, or the Dragoons, or Lancers, or Guardsmen, or
+Hussars, or whatever they were, were picked Mexicans; and they were
+frankly proud of their rich crimson tunics; also, perhaps, of their
+heavily fringed standard worked by Carlota herself. A cavalry detachment
+in fur caps with a feather completed the body guard. Mexico is a hot
+country, but that was no reason why an Austrian regiment should
+sacrifice its furry identity.
+
+"Belgians too!" exclaimed Jacqueline. "And the Mexican emigres! They
+came back when we made it safe for them. But where, oh where, are the
+French?"
+
+"Everywhere," growled the Tiger, "in mountains and swamps, dying
+everywhere, fighting for this Austrian archduke. But he doesn't like to
+be seen with them."
+
+Behind eight white mules of Spain, four abreast, rolled the coach of the
+Emperor, solitary and marked as majesty itself. There were postilions
+and outriders and footmen arrayed in the Imperial livery with the
+Imperial crown. And on the coach door flashed Maximilian's escutcheon,
+his archducal arms grafted on the torso of his new imperial estate.
+There were the winged griffins with absurd scrolls for tails. They had
+voracious claws, had these droll beasts of prey, and they clutched at an
+oval frame ruthlessly, as though to shatter it and get at a certain bird
+within. Poor bird, his shelter looked very fragile, and he about to be
+smothered under an enormous diadem as under an extinguisher. He was none
+other than the Mexican eagle perched on his own native cactus, and he
+desired only peace and quiet while he throttled the snake of ignorance
+in his talons, which snake had been his worry ever since the Aztec
+hordes from the north had first caged him in. Beneath the Imperial arms
+was the motto, "Equidad en la Justicia," but it seemed an idle promise.
+
+In the huge traveling coach, with a greyhound at his feet, sat one lone
+man. He had a soft skin, rosy like a baby's, and blue eyes, and what
+some called a beautiful golden beard. The huzzas swelled and surged from
+all sides, and he smiled on the people. But he gazed beyond them, and
+into the blue eyes came the light of exaltation such as is inspired by
+music that starts a heartstring in vague trembling.
+
+The Cortege followed in carriages one hundred paces apart. The first
+held the First Grand Dignitary, the only Dignitary of Third Category
+rank, and hence the only one who could stand near the throne after
+Highnesses, Grand Collars, and Ambassadors. He was the Grand Marshal of
+the Court and Minister of the Imperial Household. His privileges
+consisted of seeing "His Majesty when called for," and of "communicating
+with Him in writing." But he could not see Him when not called for. In
+reality the Grand Marshal was a quiet old Mexican gentleman who seemed
+ill at ease. He was General Almonte, one of those conservatives who had
+sought their country's tranquillity in foreign intervention. But
+Maximilian had bespangled him into a Dignidad, and thus lost to himself
+an able politician's usefulness. The real man of affairs was an obscure
+Belgian who openly and insolently despised everything Mexican. He also
+sang chansonettes. He was the sour-browed Monsieur Eloin already
+mentioned.
+
+Dignidades enough to make up the Lesser Cortege were not lacking. Riding
+alone was the Chief of the Military Household, who could return no
+salutes when near His Majesty except from First and Second Category
+personages. Under the circumstances, recognition of his own father would
+have been rank heresy. Then there was the Grand Physician, the Grand
+Chaplain, and Honorary Physicians and Chaplains, who could wear Grand
+Uniforms and a Cordon and eat at the Grand Marshal's table; and there
+were Chamberlains and Secretaries of Ceremony and Aides. Many
+surreptitiously peeped into a monster volume as they rode. It was not a
+mass book nor a materia medica. It was the Ritual.
+
+The Sixth Grand Dignitary of Cabellerizo Mayor helped His Majesty to
+descend from His coach. He did it mid vociferous cheering and waving of
+boughs and agitation of handkerchiefs on bamboo poles. Aides and Deputy
+Dignitaries worked industriously driving back the simple Inditos.
+
+"'The General Aide de Camp,'" Jacqueline quoted reverently, "'will keep
+the people from the Imperial coach, but without maiming them.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+HE OF THE DEBONAIR SCEPTRE
+
+
+  "And let us make a name."--_Genesis._
+
+
+The flame of lofty resolve burned with a high, present heat in
+Maximilian's dreamy eyes. But the thing was not statesmanship. The
+danger dial pointed to some latest darling phantasy.
+
+When the young prince--he was but thirty-three--descended from his
+carriage, he signed that the Cortege should not form as yet. And instead
+of mounting the colonnade steps, he turned and mingled with his humble
+subjects. A pleased murmur arose among the Indians. "Que simpatico!"
+they breathed in little gasps of admiring awe.
+
+The unusually tall and very fair young man, in the simplicity of black,
+with only the grand cross of St. Stephen about his neck, moved about
+among the ragged peons. Now and again he spoke to one and another,
+questioning earnestly. Anxious orderlies were quick to brush aside the
+touch of an elbow, but to those outside the circle, watching what he
+would do, he seemed alone with his people. And in thought, he really
+was. There was a great pity upon his face, and it was the more poignant
+because these timorous children could not comprehend the wretchedness
+which so appealed to him.
+
+"And thou?" he demanded of an aged man whose tatters hung heavy in
+filth.
+
+A look of poor simple craft came into the Indian's face. "I, senor?
+Maria purisima, I am cursed of heaven. But the rich senor wishes to
+know--see!" and ere Monsieur Eloin could prevent, he bared a limb of
+rotting flesh. "If it were not for my leg, Your Mercy----"
+
+"_Animal_," snarled Eloin in his ear, "can't you say 'Your
+Majesty'?"
+
+"Your--Majesty, or if I had children, I could make my debt--oh, grande,
+grande, twenty reales, maybe. And then, and then I should have a red and
+purple scrape, with a green eagle, like my nephew Felipe has.--He owes,"
+the man added in a kind of pride, "thirty reales, my nephew Felipe
+does."
+
+But his wiles failed. The rich senor turned toward the colonnade, his
+sailor's easy swing giving way to a tread of determination. Also, the
+pure flame burned consumingly.
+
+From the top of the steps, between files of dismounted Dragoons,
+Maximilian looked over the people, beyond, in some far away gaze of the
+spirit.
+
+Jacqueline hid the golden gleam of her hair under the rebosa.
+"Silencium!" she whispered, laying a finger across her lips. "For now
+we'll have the mountains to frisk, and the little hills to skip. In all
+the Orient there blooms no flower of eloquence like unto his."
+
+The monarch's inspired look promised as much. "Mexicans," he began. The
+peons huddled closer, their responsive natures quickened. His sonorous
+voice was electrical, despite an accent, despite the German over-gush of
+stammering when words could not keep pace with the vast idea. But the
+one word of address gave the peons a dignity they had never suspected.
+
+"Mexicans: you have desired me. Acceding to the spontaneous expression
+of your wishes, I have come to your noble country--our dear patria--to
+watch over and direct your destinies. And with me came one who feels for
+you all the tenderness of a mother, who is your Empress and my August
+Spouse."
+
+"But not," murmured the sententious lady of the rebosa, "august enough
+to appear before Him unless He sends for Her."
+
+Proceeding, the speaker solemnly told them of his divine right as a
+Hapsburg, as one of the Caesars, and of his anointment by the Vicar of
+God at Rome, so that to God alone was he responsible. As a Mexican he
+gloried with them in their liberties, in the True Liberty he brought,
+for had not the Holy Father said to him, "Great are the rights of a
+people, but greater and more sacred are the rights of the Church?" Hence
+he burned with Heaven-given fire to lift them, his subjects, into the
+vanguard of Nineteenth Century Progress.
+
+Here Maximilian paused mid cheers, and thinking on his next words, his
+delicate hand of a gentleman clenched.
+
+"Mexicans," he began again, now in the vibrant tone of an overpowering
+emotion. "I pray to fulfil the mission for which God has placed me here.
+There are six millions of you, a sober and industrious race. Cortez
+found you so, and you astounded him with your civilization. But the
+conditions that followed have enslaved you. Enslaved, I repeat, for you
+are bound by debt. Your hacendado master contrives that you cannot pay
+even his usurious interest. The food you eat, you must buy from him, at
+his prices, of the quality he prescribes. And if your debt be not
+sufficient, that is, if there seems a chance of your paying it off, then
+you must increase it to obtain your daily bread. Your very children are
+slaves at birth, since with their first birth they inherit your chains.
+And if you or your children run away, you or they may be brought back as
+runaway slaves. It is thus that I find you, Mexicans. And I find you
+awaiting a liberator, waiting vainly through the centuries. But now, at
+last, the reward of your suffering and your faith has come. In a word,
+which shall be formally recorded in the Journal Official, We this day
+decree----"
+
+"I knew it," exclaimed Jacqueline, "he always coins his inspirations."
+
+"----We this day decree your debts extinguished, and each and every peon
+in all our beautiful country--a free man!"
+
+"Yet with not," said Jacqueline, "a foot of land to be free on. But you
+know, messieurs, that Utopia is an asylum for the blind."
+
+"It's a spider on his ceiling," muttered Colonel Dupin, touching his own
+head significantly.
+
+The emancipator's face was beatific. He heard the peons acclaim him, as
+gradually they began to understand that there was to be no more
+unhappiness. But it was curious how far, far away the sweet music
+sounded, even when some belated "Viva el Senor Emperador!" cracked in
+ludicrous falsetto. For the poet-prince these human chords might have
+been the strings of a harp, softly touched. And as far away as
+posterity.
+
+Jacqueline fell to clapping her hands noiselessly. "Oh, la-la," she
+cried, "if we are not to have an epic flight from Monsieur Eloin!"
+
+It was true in a degree. Five minutes of stupendous history making had
+just elapsed, and some graceful tribute was due. The royal favorite had
+foreseen the need, and he was prepared; but whether by borrowing or
+originating, it is impossible to say.
+
+  "'Vous l'avez releve; votre main souveraine
+  L'a rendu d'un seul coup a la famille humaine.
+  De ce premier bienfait, Sire, soyez content:
+  L'Indien fera de vous MAXIMILIEN LE GRAND!'"
+
+"Parbleu, why not?" demanded Jacqueline. "If only he were as great as
+his decrees, poor man!"
+
+Maximilian by this time remembered that he must be somebody's guest.
+"Who receives Us here?" he asked. But none of his court knew. Even
+Monsieur Eloin could only point to the administrador. "Why is your
+master not present?" inquired General Almonte. The administrador opened
+his mouth, and it stayed open. Colonel Dupin had promised to shoot him
+if he breathed a word of Don Anastasio being a prisoner.
+
+[Illustration: THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN]
+
+But someone whispered something to a person on the outskirts of the
+entourage, who passed it on to the very centre till it came to the ear
+of Col. Miguel Lopez of Her Majesty's Dragoons. The someone who
+initiated the message was Don Tiburcio, the watchful herder over one
+golden goose. As a result, an aide rescued Murguia from the claws of the
+Tiger.
+
+Maximilian looked the weazened old man over in disappointment. Here,
+then, was the lord of Moctezuma, an hacendado, and hence one of the
+heavy timbers for his empire building. Don Anastasio scraped awkwardly
+and craved many pardons for not being on hand to welcome His Majesty.
+Overcoming a curious aversion to the man, the emperor straightway
+invested him with the newly created order of Civil Merit, and Don
+Anastasio, without a peon to till his fields or to oil his machinery,
+quaked under the honor of a copper medal.
+
+"And," pursued the monarch, "We find a need of stout officials, for We
+have been grieved to learn of hacendados who secretly aid the prowling
+rebellious outlaws that infest our country.--And as We must have a
+prefect in this district of an integrity like your own, it pleases Us,
+dear caballero, to name you jefe politico."
+
+The new jefe's greenish eyes contracted in terror. He thought of the
+brigands whom magistrates were supposed to discourage, and he tried to
+frame excuses.
+
+"Accept, you fool," someone whispered. "Mexicans can't refuse
+office--that's decreed." It was Don Tiburcio, his sombrero against his
+breast. To Murguia the Roman sword on the crown seemed more than ever
+emblematic of "Woe to the conquered." In a veritable panic he accepted.
+
+As it was fitting that this day of a people's emancipation should be
+commemorated by public praise to Almighty God, the Lesser Cortege
+formed, and careful of precedence, went to worship their Maker. The
+freedmen trooped after, waving jubilee branches.
+
+The little church of the hacienda stood on a barren knoll, mid chaparral
+and graves. The curate's white adobe adjoining was the only near
+habitation. A stone walk as wide as the church itself approached for a
+hundred yards, sloping up from a pasture below. The one tower opened on
+four sides for the better ease of the bell ringers. Its bright mosaic
+peak rose peaceful and still in the clear air.
+
+The Emperor and suite arranged themselves within, and the Inditos gaped
+stolidly outside, to hear the Te Deum for their broken shackles. At the
+most solemn moment, the Grand Chaplain availed himself of his exclusive
+privilege, which was to present the Gospel to the royal lips. Assisting
+him in the general service was the hacienda curate. This curate,
+obscurely found in the Huasteca wilds and yet not a Mexican, was a large
+sleek man whose paunch bulged repulsively under the priestly surplice.
+His flabby jowls hung down, and gave his head the shape of a pea, in the
+top of which were the eyes set close together. They were restless
+fawning little eyes and they roved constantly. But more than aught else,
+they were adventurous; two bright, glowing beads of adventure. From the
+folds of dull yellow flesh they peered forth at the august worshipers.
+They hovered first over the Emperor before his cushioned
+_prie-dieu_. Then, in hungry search, they began to roam. They
+lingered with General Almonte for a moment, but darted on, unsatisfied.
+They fluttered yet longer over Miguel Lopez, the gorgeously uniformed
+colonel of Dragoons, and left him only reluctantly. But when they
+lighted on Monsieur Eloin, they gleamed. There was no longer
+uncertainty. They laid bare the man as the print of a mass-book, and
+found him profitable reading. After that, the adventurous orbs returned
+to their larger prey, the Emperor, and gorging themselves, scintillated
+more adventurously than ever.
+
+And such a feast as the unconscious Hapsburg afforded the ghoul of a
+priest! It was a loathsome surgery; greedy fingers trembling on the
+knife, the victim's soul flayed, each nerve of a vanity, or tendon of an
+ambition, or full-throbbing vein of hope, each and all lifted one by one
+from the clotted mass and scrutinized exultantly. There was not a
+feature but held a revelation as sure as vivisection. The high, broad
+forehead of a gentle poet was often shaded by a dreamy melancholy, but
+never once did it furrow in either craft or cruelty. In that the priest
+knew his man for a devout mystic, knew him for a child confidingly
+looking to a Destiny to inspire his every footstep. Then there was the
+beard. It was too great a wealth of whisker, its satin, glossy flow of
+too dandified a precision. The delicate finger tips stroked it softly,
+affectionately, to the left; then softly, affectionately to the right;
+and always dreamily. But the most shameless traitor of all was the lower
+lip. It was the Hapsburg lower lip, heavy and thick and sensuous, and
+ill-fated. Hanging partly open under the silken drooping moustache, it
+revealed the spoiled child of royalty, who mistakes obstinacy for
+decision, and changes whims with despotic petulance. Maximilian believed
+in his star. But a lower lip is more potent than predestination. He need
+only have leaned close to his mirror. Then he might have seen what the
+priest saw so clearly.
+
+Maximilian paused on coming out. The freedmen were just rising from
+their knees among the thorns and stones. Then it occurred to the
+liberator that their participation in the rejoicing was not exactly,
+ah--conspicuous. "Would you not think it well, father," said he to the
+Grand Chaplain, "that these poor people partake of the holy communion on
+this day that has been so eventful for them? If you approve, let it be
+ordered that----"
+
+"But Sire----"
+
+Maximilian turned quickly, a pleased smile on his lips. The interruption
+came in his own tongue, in German. And he who had spoken was a German.
+It was the hacienda curate. His voice was soft, and purring with
+deference. He wished to say, with permission, that the holy sacrament
+for the Inditos was out of the question; scarcely one of them had been
+baptized.
+
+"Not baptized!" Maximilian exclaimed. "And this, is this fulfilling your
+sacred obligations?"
+
+The curate bowed his head. He had found them thus, when he first came, a
+few weeks ago.
+
+"And you came----"
+
+"From Durango, sire, where as secretary I served His Senoria
+Ilustrisimo, the Bishop of the state." But, as he meekly explained, he
+had sought the Lord's service among the Huastecans. Pastors were said to
+be needed, yet never had he imagined----He stopped short, in naive
+embarrassment.
+
+Maximilian appreciated his delicacy in not wishing to reflect on the
+Huasteca bishop. But from others he learned that neither baptism nor
+other spiritual office had been performed in the community for years and
+years, and that the bishop resided in the capitol, because among his
+flock he had neither comforts nor a befitting state.
+
+"But why," Maximilian demanded sternly, "have you not put to use the few
+weeks you have been here?"
+
+The curate's small eyes leaped to adventure. But he lowered them
+hastily, and folded his hands over his rounded soutane. He had heard
+that His Majesty might come, he said, and he had presumed so far as to
+hope that His Majesty might deign to act as godfather for the poor
+Indians, and so he had waited.
+
+Nothing could have pleased Maximilian more, and he looked at the good
+priest with an awakening favor. "Then let it be this afternoon," he
+commanded. "I will stand their sponsor."
+
+"----Before God, who will bless Your Majesty," murmured the priest.
+
+And to be brief, let it be recorded that they were baptized by the
+hundred, with hurried pomp--"pompes a incendie," as the godfather
+himself described it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+RATHER A SMALL MAN
+
+
+  "Besides the queene, he dearly loved a fair and comely dame."
+                                --_The Ballad of Fair Rosamond._
+
+
+Jacqueline was protesting to a worried personage in Grand Uniform. The
+personage was the Cerberus of the Emperor's antechamber, and he barred
+her way. He was newly a personage, and did not know Jacqueline.
+
+"But, Senor Oficial de Ordenes," she insisted, "don't you see that if I
+put my name in your old register there, the man will be shot while your
+Dignitaries are deciding to grant my audience!"
+
+"Shot?" vaguely repeated the monarchial flunkey. He was a Mexican, and
+took his unfamiliar responsibilities seriously. He turned to the Book of
+Court Etiquette on the centre table.
+
+"I tell you," exclaimed the impatient girl, "you won't find any
+precedence for shooting in that thing. A doomed man hasn't any, take the
+word of the Dama Mayor."
+
+"Dama Mayor?" This was more tangible, and the Grand Uniform seized on it
+gratefully. "But," and he quoted from the Ritual in triumph, "no Dama
+can present herself except on matters of service."
+
+Jacqueline hedged guilefully. "Of course not," she agreed, "and it's
+precisely that why I must see His Majesty. It's about, about a piece of
+valencienne he wished me to bring the Empress from Europe."
+
+The Oficial de Ordenes hesitated. "But the man to be shot?"
+
+"No matter, the lace is my business."
+
+With which assurance, the Grand Uniform presumed to announce la Senorita
+Marquesa d'Aumerle. He reappeared at once from the inner apartment. The
+Emperor's order to admit her that instant rather disturbed his faith in
+the Ritual and the leisurely decorum it prescribed.
+
+Hardly had she stepped within the portieres than someone caught her
+hand, and she saw Maximilian bending over it. There was an involuntary
+warmth in his formal courtier grace. The only other occupant of the
+hacienda sala was Bebello, the greyhound. He sprang up from a Hungarian
+bear rug, and frisked about her joyfully. Her greeting to him was
+equally sincere. Quietly releasing her hand, she patted him fondly, and
+cooed endearing French. "My little Tou-Tou! Pauvre petite bete!" Then,
+raising her head, she seemed to perceive His Majesty, "Isn't a bit
+older, is he, sire?"
+
+"Mademoiselle!" the man exclaimed reproachfully.
+
+All the time he was staring at her. He stared at the tempestuous
+ruffling of her petticoat, which had a wanton air that was most
+disturbing, at the rebosa tossed rakishly over her shoulder, with the
+waistline beneath as languorously suggested as though she were
+Spanish-born to rebosas, and lastly, at a freckle on the very tip of the
+creamy nose. He admired extravagantly, but he was no less amazed to see
+her at all. A moment before he had supposed her demurely breaking hearts
+at St. Cloud, and Paris under her feet. He knew how capable she was. It
+had happened to him. How he had sought her, before she left! And how
+maddening she was! He could recall nothing of encouragement, and yet,
+blind, susceptible fool, he had never ceased to be encouraged. She was a
+master craftsman, since her art was hidden. Then she had gone back to
+France; some said because of a note from Napoleon. But he was of the
+gloomy opinion that she had simply ceased to amuse herself. Yet for all
+that, here she was again, and the astonished prince was eager to suffer
+yet more, if it amused her still.
+
+She explained in a word, as though their meeting in the Huasteca were
+nothing extraordinary. Away from Mexico, she had discovered that she
+wanted to return to Mexico. The man left in Mexico would have augured
+much from this, but at her matter-of-fact tone the glad light faded from
+his eyes. Jacqueline, by the way, was a good manager. She reminded him
+that she had no mother nor father nor other relative in France--which
+disposed of France. Then, though he winced, she added that the
+experiment of a New World court was a novel spectacle and she enjoyed it
+more than the conventional affairs in Europe. Accordingly she would
+resume her place as first lady of honor. At Tampico she had wearied of
+ocean travel, and--well, that was all.
+
+Maximilian shuddered. He imagined the terrors she must have encountered.
+"But, mademoiselle, the bandits? You did not come alone through that
+terrible coast country?"
+
+"Of course not, sire. And that's why I reveal myself to Your Majesty.
+You are to save the person that brought me."
+
+"Have mercy, mademoiselle. One must leap too far who hopes to understand
+you."
+
+"But there's nothing to understand. Your Majesty has only to keep
+Colonel Dupin from shooting him."
+
+Maximilian frowned heavily at the Frenchman's name.
+
+"On the porch just now," Jacqueline explained, "when you finished
+speaking, he--the man I am speaking of--announced that he wanted to see
+you, but the Tiger drew his pistols to shoot him if he moved."
+
+"Then naturally your friend did not move?"
+
+"Your Majesty does not know him. But he stopped for me."
+
+"Were you so afraid Dupin would lose his prisoner?"
+
+"I had no desire to see the prisoner commit suicide. But I had to
+promise him that he should see Your Majesty later."
+
+"To beg----"
+
+"He is not one to whine for his life, sire. It is other business he
+means. But Your Majesty need not hear his business. Your Majesty need
+only _see_ him. Besides, it would hardly be court usage, granting
+him an audience so informally, would it?"
+
+"N-o, but if I am not to hear him, why should I see him?"
+
+"To save his life, parbleu!"
+
+"And why, since he is not concerned about that?"
+
+"But I am, sire, and I count on Your Majesty to help me repay an
+obligation."
+
+Maximilian was quick at clemency, but no one likes to have his
+weaknesses played upon.
+
+"Mademoiselle, who is this man? What has he done?"
+
+"An American, sire." Maximilian frowned. "A Confederate, I believe." The
+frown vanished. "And Colonel Dupin believes him to be an accomplice of
+Rodrigo Galan. But he is not. He fought Rodrigo Galan, in--in my
+behalf."
+
+Maximilian frowned again. "And so," he said, trying to do it lightly, "I
+have this unknown American to thank for the pleasure of seeing you,
+mademoiselle? Otherwise, I should not have known that you were here,
+and----"
+
+He stopped. The gray eyes were laughing at him. Was his jealousy then so
+apparent? And was it jealousy? Evidently, since she had discovered it.
+And that vexed him, because he had supposed that he was hiding his pique
+under a great self control. Angrily he stepped toward her, but the saucy
+eyes only grew merrier. Then his mood changed. He resolved grimly on
+open fighting. He meant to have either decisive honors or a decisive
+repulse. For it was his tantalizing doubts of her that made her laugh at
+him. Yet, when he spoke, he could not help the quaver of entreaty in his
+voice.
+
+"Mademoiselle, tell me, _why_ have you returned?"
+
+The question was so abrupt and so stern, she thought in a flash that he
+must have penetrated that Napoleonic intrigue which had flung her back
+upon the Western shores. But Maximilian believed he knew another reason
+for her pallor, and was encouraged.
+
+"You have already given one answer, mademoiselle," he hurried on, "and
+in too great a humility to dare hope it otherwise, I took you at your
+word. But now that you mock me--ah, you shall confess, you are back in
+Mexico on _my_ account!"
+
+"And would that merit this august displeasure, sire?"
+
+Her words sprang from relief; he suspected nothing of her secret
+mission. So the color might flood to her cheeks again, the mischief to
+her eyes, and with it a most perilous daring.
+
+For the Hapsburg, it was coy surrender.
+
+"Mademoiselle--Jacqueline!"
+
+Her name! The old nickname fondly given her in childhood, when she was a
+torment, and an anarchist to all law, and got innumerable scoldings, and
+basked unperturbed in love and adoration! Her name, that only Mexico had
+tainted! For the first time it passed his lips. But the sweet, quaint
+syllables had long been in his thoughts, with something, too, of the
+early worship in their bestowal.
+
+Curiously enough, a whimsical hardy figure in homespun gray took acute
+shape in her mind's eye. The features were oddly sharp and clear. There
+was even the rough trooper's disdain, which had been in his expression
+when first he saw her, but which she had not noticed at the time. She
+brushed the vision aside haughtily, as she would have done had the man
+himself intruded. But she could not stem so easily the wave of self
+disgust that swept her back from this other man, a prince of Europe. And
+when she smothered that self-abasement, it was a matter of will. She
+recalled her interview with the Sphinx in the Tuileries. She recalled
+her country, and the empire she meant to win, a gift to France, worthy
+of Napoleon, of the Great Napoleon. Then her will became as a master
+outside of self, and horrid in its iron cruelty. She half lifted her
+hand, and allowed the royal prince to possess it.
+
+The tapestry behind them parted and fell. A light step crossing the room
+was suddenly arrested, and a low bewildered cry, half stifled in the
+utterance, arrested them.
+
+"Fernando!"
+
+The Emperor straightened and wheeled. Turning round, Jacqueline placidly
+surveyed a young girl, and her brows arched. She was not deceived. There
+was recognition in the startled gaze of the newcomer, and of Maximilian
+too. Only for Jacqueline did the situation hold aught that was amusing.
+
+She was Mexican, a beautiful Mexican. She might have been Spanish too,
+or Moorish even, or perhaps to say that she seemed a gentle, drooping
+Egyptian would give the better idea of her dark loveliness. Under her
+skin, under a faintest tinge of brown, the rich blood drove its color
+through, and blending with that other shade, made the cheeks a dusky
+ruby, and seemingly softer and warmer. Her figure had prettily rounded
+curves, and her wine-red dress and the filmy black shawl over her
+shoulders deepened the tender, trusting depths of two large black eyes.
+The long lashes were wet with tears. She looked once at the calm French
+woman, as though afraid of her, and then at Maximilian, and at
+Maximilian alone. Her gaze was vacant, groping, non-comprehending, yet
+with a something of heartbreak in the beginning of comprehension.
+
+To the Hapsburg came the dignity of proud generations, exalted above
+mere human scrutiny. He turned to Jacqueline, "As you see,
+mademoiselle," he said coldly, "the stupid lackeys outside have admitted
+a second visitor. If you will excuse us----"
+
+"But Fernando----"
+
+This time the girl's moan throbbed with questioning. She was as far from
+understanding as before. But she noted unconsciously his princely
+bearing, his European dress, and the luxury about him in the transformed
+hacienda sala. Her eyes, in spite of grief and doubts, shone with timid,
+admiring love. "Que elegante!" she breathed. "Oh, is he not, truly, a
+caballero!"
+
+"Fernando?" murmured Jacqueline. "Bonte divine, this _is_ bucolic!"
+
+"But Fernando," the girl persisted, "who is there to--to admit me? I
+only come from my room." With a tremulous gesture she indicated a door
+which the imperial scene shifters had covered with portieres.
+Maximilian's surprise at the existence of such a door was genuine. "And
+I find," she cried, "I find you here, you, Fernando?"
+
+"There, there, senorita," said Jacqueline kindly, "His Majesty, I
+imagine, can explain----"
+
+"Majesty?" exclaimed the girl. "Don Fernando--Majesty?" Yet a third time
+she repeated it, as by rote; and, very slowly, understanding grew into
+the words, and with understanding, terror. The dark innocent eyes went
+appealingly from one to the other, and the lids began to flutter wildly
+in a kind of spasm. "Majesty? Majesty?" Then, suddenly, she flung both
+hands to her face, and a piteous shivering racked her body.
+
+"Catch her, stupid!" cried Jacqueline. "Don't you see, the child is
+fainting!"
+
+But it was into Jacqueline's readier arms that she fell, and it was
+Jacqueline who let her slip gently into the high-back chair that was the
+imperial throne en voyage, under the claws of the oaken Hapsburg
+griffins.
+
+"Get water! quick--Majesty, you--your cologne flasks!"
+
+[Illustration: "MARIA DE LA LUZ"
+"The tapestry behind them parted and fell"]
+
+A mist was in the prince's eyes. "Pobrecita, pobrecita," he muttered
+helplessly.
+
+On Jacqueline depended what was next to be done. She ran to the door by
+which the girl had entered. "See, there's a corridor here," she cried,
+"and that must be her room, there at the end, where the door is open.
+Help me carry her--unless," and she deliberately punctuated her scorn,
+"unless Your Majesty desires to call for aid?"
+
+But His Majesty was so far from desiring anything of the kind that he
+nodded gratefully, impatiently. So to her own room they bore her between
+them, and laid her on the bed there. A pewter waiter with napkin and
+coffee service was on a little table. But the tiny loaf of pan de huevo
+lay untouched. Her thoughts rather than appetite had possessed the girl
+when she awoke that morning, and they had kept her until she emerged to
+stumble upon an emperor in her father's house.
+
+"Out of here," ordered Jacqueline. "I am going to call the servants."
+She had no sympathy for his wistful, forlorn gazing.
+
+"It's the end, the end of my idyl," he murmured.
+
+"_Are_ you going?"
+
+He came nearer instead, and looked in profound melancholy at the girl.
+The ruby flush was no longer there, and the face was olive and waxen.
+The lips were parted, baring teeth that were marvelously white. The
+shawl had fallen to the floor, and an ivory cross on a chain about her
+neck caught his eye. He turned it over in his hand, and on the gold,
+where the chain was attached, he saw an inscription.
+
+"Maria de la Luz," he read. "So, that is her name. But I never asked it.
+Identity would have blighted the idyl."
+
+"Sire," Jacqueline protested angrily, "this poor child needs help. I
+shall----"
+
+"One moment, mademoiselle, I wish to say that I still do not know who
+she is."
+
+Then, with a last sorrowful look, he turned back to his apartment of
+state.
+
+Jacqueline's lip curled as she watched him go.
+
+"And you wish me to find out who she is?" she apostrophized his back.
+"But I shall not tell you. And she--no, she is not the kind that would,
+knowing who _you_ are."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+LITTLE MONARCHS, BIG MISTAKES
+
+
+  "How now, good fellow? wouldst thou speak with us?"
+  "Yea, forsooth, an your mistership be emperial."
+                                --_Titus Andronicus._
+
+
+For the moment, Colonel Dupin had established headquarters in the
+granary, which was a long, low adobe among the stables, with a pasture
+between it and the House. The pasture opened on the highway through a
+wide gap in the hacienda wall, and the coaches and steeds of the
+imperial party which had passed in that morning gave the old cow lot a
+gala air. The colonel was seated before a box, improvised into a desk,
+and his rusty jacketed Cossacks lounged everywhere. Tiburcio and other
+scouts were reporting on the dead and wounded of yesterday's raid. A
+maimed enemy brought a chuckle deep in the Tiger's throat, but any
+mishap to one of his own darlings got the recognition of a low-growled
+oath. He was busy over this inventory of profit and loss when Jacqueline
+appeared with the Emperor.
+
+Dupin arose and saluted after the grim manner of an old soldier. The
+half-dozen of obsequious courtiers he did not see at all, but to
+Jacqueline he bent from the waist with a duellist's punctilio. His
+countrywoman was the one adversary whom he never thought of cursing.
+
+There was an opening innuendo. "No, Colonel Dupin," Maximilian reproved
+him sternly, "I have not come to interfere with justice. I merely desire
+to see what prisoners you have here."
+
+Driscoll and Murguia were brought in. Maximilian stared dumfounded at
+his new magistrate in the role of criminal. Don Anastasio looked
+apologetic. They had locked him up in his own stable, bronze medal and
+all. Dupin explained. This Murguia, like many another hacendado, had
+long been suspected of aiding the guerrillas, and yesterday morning he
+had actually set him, Dupin, on a false trail. The Contras were tracking
+one of Rodrigo Galan's accomplices in the abduction of Mademoiselle
+d'Aumerle. The accomplice was the other prisoner, the American, whom
+they had found at last taking refuge at Murguia's own hacienda. Here he
+had had the effrontery to welcome them as mademoiselle's rightful
+escort, had even seemed surprised when a dozen Contras pounced upon him
+from behind and disarmed him. Dupin added that mademoiselle herself was
+deceived by the American's cunning, and he did not doubt but that she
+still persisted in his innocence. He might speak further of the fellow's
+part in the ambush and murder of Captain Maurel near Tampico, but he
+confessed that that required further investigation.
+
+No one could say that Maximilian had so much as listened. Such tangles
+had long since become irksome, though he never ceased plunging into the
+mesh. To unravel details, and incidentally confuse them more, was a
+notorious mania with the poet-prince. But his thoughts now were all for
+a girl who had fainted. Murguia he would leave to a court martial. If
+guilty, the medal should be torn from his breast. Don Anastasio's
+terrors, however, ran on the other penalties of court martial.
+
+"Now you," Maximilian turned to the American, "I understand that you
+wish to see me. But you must know that law prevails in Mexico at last,
+and that even the Emperor may not keep a man from trial."
+
+Driscoll's chin lifted eagerly. "Certainly not, but my business with
+you, sir----"
+
+"Not 'sir,'" whispered Jacqueline. "You must call him 'sire.'" Little
+she cared for etiquette, but she did not propose that Driscoll should
+broach his errand.
+
+Maximilian overheard and smiled. "Yes," he said, "one tiny letter added,
+and you change a man into a sovereign."
+
+Now Jacqueline, for her purposes, had thought to disconcert the man
+unused to courts. But it struck her at once that nothing of the kind
+would happen. His easy naturalness was too much a part of him, was the
+man himself. And she was glad of it. She was glad of the something
+distinguished which his earnestness gave to the clean-cut stamp of jaw
+and forehead. He had stopped and looked at them inquiringly, as an eager
+speaker will when interrupted. Then his brown eyes deepened, and there
+was a tugging at the corners of his mouth. He seemed to comprehend. If
+this was their humor, he would play to it. A diplomat must be all things
+to the people he is after.
+
+"'Sire?' W'y," and his drawl was exquisite, "that's what we call the
+daddy of a horse."
+
+Jacqueline turned quickly, clapping her hand over her mouth. Maximilian
+was always uneasy when Jacqueline did that.
+
+"To be sure," he observed affably, "our American friend is not so far
+wrong. Listen, am I not the father of my people?"
+
+The entourage buzzed admiringly at the imperial cleverness; all except
+Jacqueline, who now that she should laugh and relieve the situation,
+obstinately pulled a long, blank face.
+
+Maximilian's tone changed. He meant to wound now, and did. "So," he
+added, with chilling stress, "it's 'sire,' if you will be so good as to
+remember."
+
+Driscoll flushed as though struck. He became aware that it was all some
+patronizing rebuke.
+
+"There is one," he answered gently, "who taught me manners at her knee,
+or tried to, and _she_ never hurt a mortal human being by a word in
+her life, but that, that, sir, seems to be where _you_ have missed
+it. Now look here," he went on, kindling in spite of himself, "I respect
+any man who has grounds--discoverable grounds--for respecting himself,
+and if you are a man, then 'sir' won't overtop you any."
+
+Colonel Lopez of the Dragoons nudged him anxiously. "Don't say 'you';
+say 'Your Majesty.'"
+
+"Better let him alone," Maximilian interposed wearily. "He recognizes in
+me a man, and--it's not unpleasant. But which," he added, "gives me
+leave to hope that as a man himself he will not cringe before the
+drum-head."
+
+"May I," said Driscoll quietly, "have one minute with you alone? It's
+not about myself, I promise you that. But for you, sir, it's of the very
+greatest importance."
+
+Instantly all stirred with curiosity, except Maximilian. All there were
+keenly affected by the stranger's mysterious business with the Emperor,
+except the Emperor himself. And each man's wits were straightway alert,
+according to the hates and ambitions of each. Even Miguel Lopez, dense
+of understanding, had his suspicions. Murguia's yellow features darkened
+malevolently. The hacienda priest whispered to M. Eloin, and M. Eloin,
+brushing the man of God aside as though he had been thinking of the very
+same thing himself, tried to get a word with Maximilian. But Jacqueline
+spoke first to the Emperor. She knew the susceptibility of the royal
+ear. Maximilian nodded at what she said, and Eloin bit his lip.
+Maximilian glanced at the American's clothes. Homespun did not
+correspond with pressing business of state, to his mind.
+
+"My good man," he said, caressing his beard, "it's not regular, you
+know. Another time, perhaps, when you can have yourself inscribed by Our
+Grand Chamberlain and when your application for an audience----"
+
+"But if these senores shoot me before then?"
+
+Maximilian shrugged his shoulders. In any case, the Ritual would suffer
+no outrage.
+
+"But I tell you," cried the exasperated Missourian, "this thing is
+serious. And it can't wait either, not if it's to help you any. I may be
+too late now. I don't know what's happened since I started down here
+three weeks ago. Richmond was in danger then. And the Army of Northern
+Virginia--General Lee----"
+
+"Have surrendered," calmly interposed the Emperor.
+
+Driscoll stiffened as he stood, his lips parted as his last word had
+left them. He wondered why these foreign, unsympathetic beings of
+Austria and France and Belgium and Germany and Mexico looked so blurred
+to him. He never imagined that there were tears in his eyes.
+
+"It is really true," continued Maximilian, addressing them all. "A
+courier brought me the news this morning. Yes, my friends, the North is
+free at last to attack our Empire. But," he added blandly, "let us not
+fear, not while we are sustained by the unconquered legions of France."
+
+"How he remembers us now!" thought Jacqueline.
+
+She thought too of him who had sent the legions. The entire fabric of
+Napoleon's dream of Mexican empire was builded on the dismemberment of
+the American Union. But, as the Southerners began so well by themselves,
+Napoleon had left them to do his work alone. He just failed of genius.
+
+"Oh, mon petit, _bien_ petit Napoleon," she cried in her soul, "how
+terribly you have miscalculated!"
+
+The room had filled with murmurs, with awed whispering, with frightened
+questioning looks at one's neighbor, with ambitions and hates gone
+panic-stricken. Driscoll came forward. The fellow of homespun held the
+Empire in his hand, if they but knew it. "Now let me deliver my
+message," he said earnestly. "And, afterward, on with the drum-head,
+I'll not complain."
+
+"There, there," spoke the unseeing monarch, though affected by the
+dignity of sorrow, "you shall have no cause. I came here, meaning to
+pardon."
+
+"Pardon?" came the Tiger's growl. "Your Majesty saves so many enemies,
+does he fear that soon he will have none left?"
+
+"Perhaps, Colonel Dupin, since my imperial brother, Napoleon, sends me
+so efficient a bloodhound. But I thought the prisoners were already
+tried and condemned. That must come first, of course. Yet We are
+constrained to find another judge, one without preconceived notions of
+guilt, to hold the court martial. Ah yes, as Monsieur Eloin here
+suggests, I name Colonel Lopez.--Colonel Lopez, you will stay behind
+with a company of your own men. Finish the trial to-night, if you can,
+and overtake me before I reach the city.--Colonel Dupin, I have to
+request yourself and men as escort, to replace the Dragoons left with
+Colonel Lopez. And you, Mademoiselle d'Aumerle, shall have a carriage.
+We start this afternoon. You will be ready, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Is Your Majesty quite resolved," Jacqueline asked in French, "that the
+American must be tried? He can easily be found guilty, I warn Your
+Majesty."
+
+"And is that not reason enough?"
+
+"Reason enough that he should not be tried, since he is not guilty. But
+perhaps Your Majesty has thought of sending him under guard to the
+frontier, back to his own country, where he would not longer be an
+annoyance?"
+
+"My dear young lady," returned the Emperor, "it seems that you expect me
+to blot out the processes of law simply because even I cannot make them
+infallible. But you do not answer my question. I offer you protection to
+the City?"
+
+"He must stand trial then?"
+
+"Yes--but will you be ready to start this afternoon?"
+
+"Your Majesty should know that I cannot accept."
+
+"Does this trial interest you so much, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Thanking Your Majesty," said Jacqueline coldly, "I should rather not
+accompany him."
+
+Maximilian swung on his heel and called Lopez aside. "Mi coronel," he
+said, "when you follow to-morrow, you will offer to bring the Senorita
+d'Aumerle, if she desires it.--And Lopez, you remember the young Mexican
+girl we used to meet near here, during the last few evenings?"
+
+"When you and I, sire, would ride over from Las Palmas incognito?"
+
+"Yes. She was able to--to tell me much about the peon life, and I should
+like to reward her in--in some way. Do you know, Miguel, I suspect she
+lives on this very ranch. It was at the church here that we would meet
+her, you know? And now, since I must leave, I wish you to find her.
+Induce her to come with mademoiselle to the City under your escort.
+Assure her that she shall have an honored place at court.--Jove, there's
+my new order of San Carlos for women! She shall have that for--for
+aiding my researches among the peons. Now, Miguel mio, do your best!"
+
+With which words Maximilian turned back alone, and as he went, he
+thought how as a simple man he had won a maiden's heart. He had been
+learning that a prince may miss one or two very dear things in life.
+"It's ended, the little ranchero idyl," he murmured. "But there's been
+no harm. She shall not regret it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+A TARTAR _AND_ A TARTAR
+
+
+  "But all's brave that youth mounts and folly guides."
+                                      --_As You Like It._
+
+
+As Maximilian crossed the pasture, he suddenly had to jump aside with
+considerable sprightliness. A brace of horsemen came swerving through
+the gateway from the highroad and tore down upon him as though the Day
+of Judgment galloped behind. They were abreast, ten feet apart, but the
+oddest thing was a lariat that dangled between them, from saddle-horn to
+saddle-horn.
+
+The thunder of hoofs brought Dragoons and Cossacks and Dignitaries, and
+emptied the granary. Even insane horsemen could see that the Empire was
+encamped over that cow lot. And as nearer they rushed, the two maniacs
+seemed to recognize the fact. One was straightway more anxious to
+arrive; a directly opposite effect was apparent in the other. And there
+was the rope between them, from saddle-horn to saddle-horn. Their
+opinions on destination, unexpectedly diverging, promised something. And
+since one wanted to stop and the other to hasten, the something was not
+long in happening.
+
+One of the horsemen--he wore a sombrero--leaned back frantically. The
+other--who wore a battered soldier cap--passed ahead like the wind. The
+lariat twanged, but held. Sombrero's horse got its feet planted. The
+horse of Soldier Cap slowed to a standstill, and panted. Sombrero flung
+out his pistol, Soldier Cap his. They aimed at each other, the triggers
+snapped, no report. They looked amazed, embarrassed; and tried again.
+Same result. "Por Dios!" "Sacre nom!" They hurled the pistols, each at
+the other's head. Both ducked. Sombrero wheeled, drove home the spurs,
+and headed for retreat. Soldier Cap and horse braced themselves against
+the shock. The spectators, running nearer, now perceived that the lariat
+was tied round each man's waist as well as wrapped over his pommel.
+Soldier Cap weathered the jolt, next plunged suddenly closer, and in the
+instant of the slack, unwound the rope from his saddle and leaped to the
+ground. In two leaps more he had Sombrero about the neck. They fell
+together, rolling and fighting, while Sombrero's horse reared and plowed
+the soil with them. Dragoons and Cossacks heaped themselves on all
+three. It was quite an energetic mystery altogether.
+
+Under the soldier cap, under dust and blood and scratches, Jacqueline
+caught glimpses of a happy face.
+
+"Oh la-la, it's--it's Michel!"
+
+"Rodrigo Galan!" roared the Tiger, in his turn recognizing Sombrero.
+"Here, up with him! Six of you, quick there, in line, shoot him!"
+
+It was near the sweetest moment of the old warrior's life.
+
+"One moment, colonel!" someone spoke quietly. "Is it a Huastecan custom,
+by the way, to shoot a cavalier the instant he--ah--dismounts?"
+
+"But this scoundrel is Rodrigo Galan, Your Majesty. And that black
+horse, sacre tonnerre, that is Maurel's horse. Captain Maurel, sire,
+whom he murdered!"
+
+Don Rodrigo straightened pompously. "Your Most Opportune Majesty--" he
+began.
+
+"Also, Colonel Dupin," Maximilian continued, "he waylaid the Belgian
+ambassador, sent by Leopold, brother to Our August Spouse."
+
+"The more reason to shoot him, pardi!"
+
+"Without doubt, monsieur. But his execution must have eclat. Europe must
+know that Mexican outlaws do not go unpunished.--Colonel Lopez, you will
+take charge of Our prisoner. Guard him well, and bring him with you to
+the City. He shall be tried there, with every ceremony."
+
+Colonel Dupin, that policeman of the backwoods forced upon Mexico by
+Napoleon, could only grind his teeth, which he did.
+
+"Now then," said His Majesty, "let Us see this brigand-catcher who
+excels the redoubtable Contra Guerrillas.--As I live, the young man is a
+Chasseur d'Afrique! Step nearer, sir, and tell Us who you are."
+
+"Michel Ney, at Your Majesty's service."
+
+"The Prince of Moskowa!" exclaimed the Emperor. In his court, he was
+grateful for even a Napoleonic prince.
+
+"Sergeant, Your Majesty." It looked as though Ney were hinting to be
+made something else.
+
+"I see," said Maximilian. "And so Our Empire of romance is to hold a
+baton for another of the family of Ney. But to start more modestly, how
+would a lieutenancy suit, do you think?"
+
+"Your pardon, sire, but I report to His Excellency, Marshal Bazaine."
+
+Maximilian's white brow clouded. The French occupation was ever a thorn
+in his side. He could never quite be Emperor in fact. He could not even
+promote a likely young man. He had to "recommend" to one Bazaine, who
+had carried a knapsack.
+
+"Quite so," he answered coldly. "I shall inform Our dear Marshal how
+well you deserve."
+
+"The fact is, Your Majesty," said Ney in some confusion, "I did
+not--exactly--capture him. It was, uh, sort of mutual."
+
+Everybody stared curiously. There was the rope, the unloaded pistols. It
+was a queer puzzle. How did it happen? Ney began with an apology. Would
+Mademoiselle d'Aumerle forgive him? But he had worried though! He should
+not have left her, day before yesterday!
+
+"Because of a greater attraction?" the young woman suggested.
+
+Ney demurred so earnestly that Jacqueline laughed outright. "Don't make
+it worse, Michel," said she. "I know how you regretted the death of the
+terrible Rodrigo. Then you learned that he was alive. Oh no, I couldn't
+have held you.--But go on. Did he prove interesting?"
+
+The Frenchman told his story. It appeared that, on deserting
+mademoiselle two days before, he went at the best speed of his horse up
+the ravine she had so graciously indicated. He hoped to overtake the
+fugitive bandit, and after an hour, at a turn in the arroyo, did meet
+him, face to face. Both were equally astounded. Rodrigo was retracing
+his steps, having been blocked by a dried waterfall. Either man drew and
+covered the other. The Mexican did not fire. Seeing Ney, he supposed the
+Contras at no great distance, and a shot would bring them on his heels.
+But after a time the thing commenced to grow ridiculous, and Ney
+laughed.
+
+"Monsieur Rodrigue," he said, "I hope you will come along quietly."
+
+Fra Diavolo mistook the Gallic humor for an assurance of armed backing
+near at hand. "Where to?" he asked.
+
+"The devil take me if _I_ know! Where would you suggest?"
+
+It dawned then on the puzzled brigand that the other knew nothing of the
+country, and accordingly they struck up an armistice; which, for the
+rest, the alert revolver of each made imperative. Their protocol's chief
+clause required the prisoner to conduct his captor to some neutral
+point. Rodrigo suggested Anastasio Murguia's ranch, and Ney agreed. But
+as to what might happen on arriving, they left in blank. Michel had a
+duel in mind, if honest seconds were to be had. The craftier Rodrigo
+hoped to find some of his own men lurking about the hacienda.
+
+A cessation of hostile moves was further stipulated, though treachery of
+course warranted the instant drawing of weapons. Should the prisoner try
+to betray the captor to guerrillas, this was to constitute treachery.
+Ney for his part insisted on his rights as captor. That is, he could
+call for help if he got the chance. Rodrigo assented willingly. He knew
+the neighborhood. He would avoid the Cossacks, and the Frenchman might
+shout to his heart's ease. To do him justice, the outlaw had no desire
+to kill Ney, even if Ney gave him leave. A duke and prince in one was
+too valuable. A pretty ransom loomed brightly. Ney suspected as much,
+but not being ingenuous enough to obviate the risks, took a huge delight
+in them.
+
+Conforming to the terms of the truce, each man, simultaneously, put his
+gun in his holster. Then, good company enough one for the other, though
+with eyes ever on the watch, they proceeded along tortuous bridle paths
+until twilight, meeting no one. They camped in the same forest which
+that same moment held Murguia, Driscoll, and the two girls. They
+tethered their horses together and made a bed of leaves for themselves.
+Each laid his pistol a comfortable distance away, so that if either
+tried to arm himself while the other slept, there would be much snapping
+of twigs under his feet. Again simultaneously, they sat down and talked,
+and smoked cigarettes in lieu of supper. Ney progressed in his Spanish
+that evening. Fra Diavolo wished to impress on the companionable
+Frenchman that he, Rodrigo Galan, was a more terrible person than
+Colonel Dupin. He seemed envious, even of the compliment implied in the
+Tiger's nickname.
+
+During a pause the brigand said, "Now don't jump, caballero, because I'm
+only getting out my flask."
+
+"The beautiful idea!" returned Ney. "I'll do the same."
+
+But each stopped with the liquor at his mouth. It was consolation for
+lack of food, but if one refrained and the other partook--well, there
+would be a light sleeper and a heavy sleeper. With the tempting fumes in
+their nostrils, they waited, each for the other, to quaff first. And
+neither did. Finally Rodrigo proposed that they equalize the perils of
+indulgence. Accordingly each lowered the contents of his flask by three
+swallows, after which they compared the extent of the ebb tide in either
+bottle.
+
+"But, voyons," Ney objected, "you haven't taken as much as I have!"
+
+Rodrigo admitted the impeachment, and amiably took another draught. But
+the swallow proved too large, and Ney in his turn tried to balance that
+one, only to fail likewise. This entailed another effort from Rodrigo,
+which resulted in still another exaggeration.
+
+"Now you've had _more_ than I have," Michel complained, growing
+vague on the real point at issue.
+
+"Bien, senor, suppose you try a little of this. It's catalan, genuine,
+too, smuggled at Tampico."
+
+"Mine's cognac," said Ney. "Have some?"
+
+They exchanged flasks, and that night in the forest their snores were
+discordant and loud. Ney half awoke once, and remembered that he seemed
+to have heard the tramp of many horses. Toward morning, when it was not
+yet light, he was aroused for good by a savage tightening around his
+waist and a tremendous pull. He sat up, and heard his prisoner scuffling
+and swearing near him.
+
+"You've tied me, you sneaking animal without shame!"
+
+"It's you that's tied me, tete de voleur!"
+
+But as Rodrigo wrested in the dark, Ney found that the brigand's
+stumblings corresponded with the tightening about himself. He clutched
+at his waist, and discovered a rope.
+
+Both men groped vengefully forward with the line, and lurched into one
+another's arms. Each had thought to come on a tree, only to discover
+himself tied to the other. In the first start of suspicion, and in no
+good humor from splitting headaches, one reached for his knife, the
+other for his sabre. But the knife was gone, the sabre was gone.
+Forthwith they grappled and strained and breathed by jerks and tumbled
+and rolled and wound themselves in the lariat, until at last they lay
+exhausted on their backs and blinked up at the beautiful innocent morn
+peeping through the trees.
+
+"Now don't you untie yourself till I get untied," ordered Ney.
+
+"Or you yourself," retorted the other.
+
+"Let us both untie at the same time."
+
+"But one might finish first," objected Rodrigo. The brigand had grown
+amiable again. He saw advantages in the rope. It was well to have his
+prospective ransom never more than a few feet away.
+
+They discussed the problem at length, but were not equal to it. So the
+modus vivendi was stretched a rope's length, and the treachery clause
+expanded to include any untying or attempted untying before their
+arrival at Murguia's. Scrupulously simultaneous, they arose, found their
+pistols, and mounted their horses. To guard against any sudden varying
+in rapidity of travel and its consequences, each wrapped the lariat once
+about his saddle-horn. Where necessary, the brigand rode in front, since
+Ney insisted that the other way would reverse their roles of prisoner
+and captor. Rodrigo got some tortillas from a charcoal burner, and they
+lunched and rested within the forest's edge till dark. But they traveled
+all that night in the open country, and approached Murguia's before noon
+of the next day. Hoping to find friends about the hacienda's stables,
+Rodrigo suggested that they race up the highway into the pasture. He was
+thinking that then the Frenchmen might be overpowered the more easily.
+Ney fell into the trap. He accepted the challenge and was keen for the
+sport. Thus it happened that they all but ran down the Emperor of Mexico
+himself, and instead of guerrillas, Rodrigo saw Cossacks and Dragoons.
+But the mystery of the rope, added to that of the unloaded pistols,
+rested unexplained.
+
+Jacqueline was delighted. "If it were just conventional heroism," she
+exclaimed, "one might talk of lieutenancies. But sire, this----"
+
+"Never fear," replied Maximilian. "I cannot make him captain, but he
+shall have his reward.--Monsieur le Prince, I will leave you a half
+company of my Austrians, if, though a Chasseur, you will deign to
+command them. In a word, I desire you to have the honor of escorting
+mademoiselle to the City."
+
+"And I thank you, sire. Parbleu, the sergeant is happier with such an
+order than--than the captain without it."
+
+"Michel," cried Jacqueline, "and where in the world now did you get
+that?"
+
+"Why--out of my own head. Really, mademoiselle."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+IN THE WAKE OF PRINCELY CAVALCADES
+
+
+  "... Now swell out, and with stiff necks
+  Pass on, ye sons of Eve! vale not your looks,
+  Lest they descry the evil of your path."
+                                        --_Dante_.
+
+
+The Grand Equerry was again the Dignitary of the hour. He held the
+Emperor's stirrup, while the Emperor, fittingly attired, swung
+gracefully astride a curvetting charger. Behind was his coach, ready for
+him when he should tire of the saddle. It was already late in the
+afternoon, and he meant to travel all night. Flatterers begged him to
+consider the importance of his health, which but made him unyielding.
+Some slight martyrdom for his country appealed to Maximilian. No, he
+said, grave affairs might be afoot since the Confederacy's surrender.
+The capital needed his presence, and he reminded them that the State
+came first, as always.
+
+The retinue climbed into carriages. The escort, Dragoons, Austrians and
+Contra Guerrillas, formed in hollow square about their prince. Colonel
+Dupin scowled because he was going. Colonel Lopez, when unobserved,
+scowled because he was left behind. And Monsieur Eloin, at the Emperor's
+side, thought well of himself in substituting for a rival favorite one
+so distant from favoritism as the Tiger. The Dragoons and Austrians who
+were to remain presented arms on the hacienda porch, and Lopez gave them
+the cue for a parting viva. The emancipated peons, still wet from
+spiritual grace, swelled the din gratefully and stridently, lured to it
+by their thoughtful pastor, the hacienda curate.
+
+But Maximilian still lingered. He looked from window to window under the
+colonnade, and seemed expectant. But Lopez signaled to the buglers, and
+the trumpet call and the redoubled huzzas of a people thrilled him out
+of his melancholy. With a sigh he gave over his private loves and poesy.
+He breathed deep and his eyes flashed. And as the grand monarch and
+good, he departed with the acclaim of posterity in his ears, conscious
+that the superb figure he made was for History's contemplation.
+
+At this time the Marquise d'Aumerle was half way up a ladder in the
+garden. She was picking the fragrant china blossoms, tossing them down
+to Berthe's apron, and humming "Mironton, mironton, mirontaine" in
+blissful indifference to many things, to princes among them.
+
+Nor was the other girl behind the hacienda shutters. Yet she, at least,
+saw him ride away. High up in the chapel tower, between the bell and the
+masonry, crouched a sobbing little figure. She gazed and gazed, with
+straining eyes. Over there below, in front of her father's house, were
+glittering swords and dazzling helmets, and the sheen of gilded
+escutcheons on coach doors. And as the beautiful pageant wound its way
+along the highroad, she watched in fawn-like curiosity. The sobs were
+only involuntary. She was not thinking, then, that this was matter for
+grief. Her dark eyes, that had been weeping, and were now so dry, held
+to a certain one among the cavaliers, to the very tall and splendid one
+with the slender waist, and they kept him jealously fixed among the
+others, and were ever more impatient of the blurring distance. But when
+finally he was lost for an instant in the general bright haze of the
+company, and she could not be quite sure after that which was he, then
+indeed the eyelids fluttered in a kind of despair. Yet only after the
+last carriage had vanished under the giant banana leaves of the hill
+beyond, did the tears come and tremble upon her lashes.
+
+"He is married, the Emperor," she told herself, as though the fact were
+that second written across the burning sky. At last, full, grim
+comprehension was hers.
+
+The stones of the tower glowed like a brazier in the sun, but the girl,
+with her head on her arm against the parapet, shivered as with cold; and
+a numbness at her heart grew heavier and heavier, like weighted ice.
+
+Below her the barren knoll, where an hour before swarthy stolid hundreds
+had crowded awaiting baptism, was lonely as the grave. The peons were
+dispersing to their village down by the river junction, or to their huts
+near the hacienda store, and on the air floated the falsetto nasal of
+their holiday songs, breaking ludicrously above the mumbling bass of
+loosely strung harps. Nearer by, the only life was an old man with a
+fife and a boy with a drum, who marched round and round the chapel,
+playing monotonously, while a second urchin every five minutes touched
+off a small cannon at the door. They did these things with solemn
+earnestness. It was to achieve an end, for San Felipe's day would come
+soon, and meantime each and every lurking devil had to be driven off the
+sacred precincts. But there was one hideous fiend who grinned, and
+pinched, and shrieked. His abode was the girl's heart, and he shrieked
+to her gleefully, that she could never, never in life, wed the man she
+loved. The fife and drum and the stupid little cannon simply made him
+the merrier.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The imps were left in peace for the night, and all about the chapel was
+dark and silent and desolate. But a man was working stealthily at one of
+the rear windows. It was a square, barred window, near the ground. The
+man chipped away at the granite sill with short, quick blows. The butt
+of his chisel was padded in flannel, so that even a chuckling that
+escaped him now and again made more sound than the steel. Soon he
+dropped his tools, and wrapping either hand around a window bar, he
+braced both feet together against the wall, and pulled. The two bars
+scraped slowly toward him across the stone. Then, with a sharp, downward
+jerk he tore them out. Quickly he climbed inside and cut the ropes of a
+man who lay bound on the floor. Both men emerged noiselessly through the
+window.
+
+"Have a care how you step," whispered the rescuer. "Your faithful guards
+are busy sleeping and don't want any disturbance."
+
+"That candle-stinking sacristy!" grumbled the rescued.
+
+"But it's the only stone calaboose on the ranch. In fact, _I_
+suggested it, since Don Rodrigo should be kept tight and safe. That's
+why Dupin left me behind." The rescuer chuckled as before. "Careful,
+hombre, there's a guard there, lying right in front of you!"
+
+Rodrigo made out the prostrate form, and lifted a boot heel over the
+upturned face. But his liberator jerked him aside.
+
+"Fool, you'll wake the fat padre, and he doesn't like my jests, says
+they're inspired of the Evil One."
+
+"Thinking of the Bishop of Sonora's waiting maid, was he?"
+
+"Well, what of it? Didn't he elope here with her?"
+
+"And you, Don Tiburcio?"
+
+"Of course; she naturally wanted to correct her first bad taste."
+
+"By running away with you? If you call that good taste----"
+
+"I call that a good joke on the padrecito."
+
+Having by this time come safely to the front of the church, Rodrigo was
+for making certain his escape at once. But Tiburcio interposed. "There's
+some talk still due between you and me," he said. "Sit down, here in the
+doorway."
+
+"Well?" said the brigand uneasily.
+
+"Well?" repeated his jocular friend.
+
+"Well, there isn't even a moon and we can't deal monte, as if that
+weren't the same as giving you what you want, anyway."
+
+"I risk my hide saving you for money, then?" Don Tiburcio's tone was
+aggrieved.
+
+"Oh no, for friendship," the sardonic Rodrigo corrected himself, "and I
+think as much of you in my turn, amigo mio. Not half an hour ago I was
+wrapped in anxiety, imagining you trying to collect blackmail, and I not
+near to keep my patriots from your throat. Oh, the sorrow of it!"
+
+"God be praised that a dear friend came and eased your worries! But you
+are not an ingrate. Since the Confederate Gringo took all my money the
+other morning----"
+
+"Tiburcio, on oath, I haven't had money either, not since our last game
+at cards. There was Murguia, I know, but I let him off for bringing me
+that French girl. She was good for a big ransom, only your same
+Gringo--curse the intruder! If ever the Imperialists catch him, and
+Murguia is there to testify against him----"
+
+Tiburcio moved nearer on the church step. "And then?"
+
+"That's our secret, Murguia's and mine."
+
+"But Rodrigo, he _is_ caught. They are trying him and Murguia both
+this very minute. And do you know what for? For being your accomplices."
+
+The outlaw started exultantly. "Then, if you want him shot----"
+
+"Well?--Oh don't be afraid, maybe I can help."
+
+"Were you with Captain Maurel when we ambushed them near Tampico?"
+
+"I can't remember," said Tiburcio tentatively.
+
+"If you will hurry down to this court martial, perhaps you will remember
+better. Go, and I'll leave you."
+
+"Not quite so fast, Rodrigo. You forget that your devoted rescuer is
+penniless."
+
+"So am I, I tell you. We'll both have to go to work, Don Tiburcio."
+
+"What's the lay? Tell me." The humorist's tone was unmistakable.
+
+Rodrigo looked about him in the dark. "Listen," he whispered, "there's a
+bullion convoy out of San Luis before long, but--you shall hear no more
+unless it is agreed that I am to meet them first."
+
+"Of course, hombre! How else could I threaten to expose them for
+contributing to the rebels?"
+
+"Bien, it's next week. You will meet them this side of Valles, some time
+Thursday or Friday.--Now I'm off. Adios."
+
+"Stay. You'll find your horse down by the river. The administrator is
+waiting with it. And Rodrigo, don't you want your pistol? Be more
+careful another time, and keep it loaded."
+
+Something in his tone nettled the brigand. "What do you mean? Give me my
+pistol."
+
+Tiburcio pointed it at him instead. "When you cool a little, yes.
+But it takes a good marksman to hit a Frenchman with an empty
+pistol--especially when one wakes up and finds himself tied."
+
+Rodrigo stiffened. This was menacing to his dignity.
+
+"Both lassoed," Tiburcio went on, "and no telling which was heifer and
+which vaquero, stampeding down on poor Max.--Ai de mi, I never thought
+it could be so funny!"
+
+"Give me my pistol!"
+
+"Slumbering like two babes in the wood, and your sweet innocent breaths
+perfuming the woody forest. I'd have covered you with leaves, like the
+little robins, only----"
+
+"Was it you tied us, you----"
+
+"Just like two babes, but," and Tiburcio pointed his thumb to his mouth
+and shook his head sorrowfully, "that's bad, very bad. Why didn't you
+leave me some? Of the cognac, especially?"
+
+"If you don't explain----"
+
+"Softly there, amigo. Yes, I tied you."
+
+"Another of your jokes----"
+
+"Inspired of the Evil One? Oh no, it was--precaution. Yes, that was it,
+come to think; just precaution. You see, I and Dupin had scattered your
+guerrillas, and I was scouting ahead, to stir up any ambush waiting for
+us--which I did later, when we chased them, and burned Culebra. But
+going along, I heard snoring, and found you two, like two----Now sit
+still!"
+
+"Why didn't you wake me? Then we could have roped the Frenchman."
+
+"And have him identify me after we'd gotten the ransom? Oh, no, I'm a
+loyal Imperialist. Now listen a minute, will you?--Our Contras were
+following me not a half mile behind. That meant I had to work quick. You
+see, I wanted to find you both there when I could come back alone. And
+meantime, I didn't want you to hurt each other. If either got killed,
+there'd be no ransom. So I took your knife and his sabre. Then I tied
+you both with my lariat. I was going to get your lariat too, and tether
+the pair of you to a tree, hoping you'd hold each other there till I got
+back. _You_ would do it, for I meant to pin a note on your sleeve,
+explaining. But just that minute the Frenchman stirred, for the Cossacks
+were getting into his ears, so I had to run back and turn them into
+another path."
+
+"So long as it wasn't any of your infernal farces?"
+
+"Well, it _was_ worth a ransom, the way it turned out.--Sit still,
+will you? You _know_ I take you too seriously ever to think of any
+joke with _you_! Here's your artillery and cutlery. Quick now,
+clear out!"
+
+Both rose to go, each to his respective deviltry, but not six steps
+ahead in the black night Tiburcio stumbled over a soft, inert mass. He
+recovered himself, half cursing, half laughing.
+
+"One of your guards, Rodrigo," he muttered. "He must have got this far
+before the drug worked into his vitals."
+
+"Your mescal probably killed him," said Rodrigo indifferently. "But a
+little knife slit will look more plausible in the morning, for you it
+will."
+
+Getting to his knees on the stone walk the outlaw groped over the body
+for a place to strike, holding his knife ready. But all at once he
+stopped and got up hastily, without a word. He only rubbed his left hand
+mechanically on his jacket.
+
+"Well, what ails you?" asked Tiburcio.
+
+Rodrigo gave a short, apologetic laugh. "It--it's a woman!" He quit
+rubbing his hand, seeming to realize. "There's blood," he added.
+
+"Here," said Tiburcio, "you keep back, and run if anybody comes. I'm
+going to strike a match."
+
+By the flare they saw that it was a girl and that her head was crushed.
+Kneeling on either side, they peered questioningly, horrified, at each
+other. Their great sombreros almost touched. Their hard faces were
+yellow in the flickering light between, and the face looking up with its
+quiet eyes and dark purplish cleft in the brow was white, white like
+milk. With one accord the two men turned and gazed upward at the tower,
+whose black outline lost itself far above in the blacker shadows of the
+universe. They understood.
+
+Tiburcio shrugged his shoulders, a silent comment on the tragedy from
+its beginning to this, its end. He threw the match away and arose, but
+Rodrigo still knelt, leaning over her, holding the poor battered head in
+his hands, half lifting it, and trying to look again into those eyes
+through the darkness. He would touch the matted hair, as if to caress,
+not knowing what he did, and each time he would jerk back his hand at
+the uncanny, sticky feeling. Roving thus, his fingers touched an ivory
+cross, and closed over it. With no present consciousness of his act, he
+placed the symbol in his jacket, over his breast.
+
+Tiburcio touched him on the shoulder. "I'll go now, and bring her
+father," he said.
+
+"Yes," returned the other vaguely, stumbling to his feet.
+
+"It's going to kill the old man," murmured Tiburcio, "or--God, if it
+should _not_ kill him! He is a coward, but once he slapped you,
+Rodrigo, for so much as looking at her. And now, the Virgin help--may
+the Virgin help whoever's concerned in this!--But here, you must go, do
+you hear?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then go, go!"
+
+"Yes," said Rodrigo again, moving slowly away.
+
+"By the river, remember. You'll find your horse there."
+
+"Captain Maurel's, the fine black one?"
+
+"Yes, I slipped it out of the stables for you."
+
+"The fine black one?"
+
+"Yes, yes, hombre!"
+
+"And--and she never--she never saw--how magnifico I look on--on that
+fine black horse."
+
+He was still muttering as he reeled and staggered down the hill.
+
+When he was gone, and no alarm of sentinels rang out, Tiburcio took off
+his serape and laid it over the dark blot on the stones. Then he too
+stole away, to tell her father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE RED MONGREL
+
+
+  "Be this the whetstone of your sword; let grief
+  Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it."
+                                            --_Macbeth_.
+
+
+"Where," inquired Din Driscoll, with a benevolent interest in their
+doing the thing right, "is the judge advocate?"
+
+Colonel Miguel Lopez resented what he took for a patronizing concern. It
+festered his complacency, for his was the code of the bowed neck to
+those above and the boot-tip for those below. Luckily for him, he did
+not strike the helpless prisoner. He turned to his judge's bench
+instead, which was none other than the frayed and stately sofa of honor
+from the hacienda sala, deemed requisite to his dignity. The satin
+upholstery contrasted grotesquely with the adobe walls. Pungent tallow
+dips lighted the granary to a dull yellow, and mid the sluggish tobacco
+clouds were a shrinking prisoner in clerical black, and the mildly
+interested prisoner in gray, and red uniforms surrounding.
+
+Lopez flung his sword across the empty box that was to serve as desk,
+and filled the crimson seat with pompous menace. Lopez was a Mexican,
+but did not look it. He had red hair and a florid skin, and he was
+large, with great feet and coarse hands. Yet the high cheek bones of an
+Indian were his. The contrast of coloring and features unpleasantly
+suggested a mongrel breed. The eyes had red lids, out of which the
+lashes struck like rusted needles, and the eyes themselves, of a faded
+blue, seemed to fawn an excuse for Nature's maladjusting. But he had a
+goodly frame on which to hang the livery of a king's guardsman. And as
+the cross of the Legion of Honor ticketed his breast, he must have been
+a goodly man too, and his Maker's insignia only a libel. Once Maximilian
+had said, "What, Bebello, and art thou a better judge of men than I, thy
+master and the master of men?" For it seemed that Bebello, the simple
+hound, had read Nature's voucher instead of Napoleon's, and being thus
+deceived, would ever snarl at the Colonel of Dragoons. Maximilian of
+course knew better. What looked like toadying was only profound
+deference for himself. The royal favorite could discriminate. He could
+also be the thick-headed, intolerable martinet. The sandy lashes
+bristled as the American inquired a second time if he were to have
+counsel.
+
+"Being president of this court," Lopez announced, "I am judge advocate."
+
+In the tone of congratulation Driscoll blandly said, "Well, then, I
+challenge the president."
+
+"Challenge?"
+
+"Certainly, Your Honor. It's my right, either on the ground of
+inexperience, malice, or--but I reckon the first two will do."
+
+"This is insolence!" cried the president, and glaring angrily, he
+maintained that it was a regular court martial for the field, and that
+as he was the ranking officer at hand, there could be no appeal beyond
+himself.
+
+"A regular drum-head," Driscoll observed. "Well, let it go at that. I'm
+in a hurry."
+
+Lopez called a lieutenant of Austrian cavalry to his right upon the
+sofa, and the Dragoon color sergeant to his left, and the three of them
+sat thenceforth in judgment. The charges were read, and next a
+deposition, gathered that day from Michel Ney. Therein appeared the
+American, reinforcing Rodrigo Galan at Tampico, and in so far aiding the
+abduction of Mademoiselle d'Aumerle.
+
+"The complicity is evident," stated Lopez, and his colleagues, blinking
+at the candles on the box, nodded wisely.
+
+"It's straight so far," Driscoll agreed, "but the story goes a little
+further. Does the ma'am'selle herself happen to have left any
+deposition?"
+
+She had, admitted the president, but it merely corroborated the
+foregoing. Driscoll, in sole charge of his own defence, insisted that
+her deposition be read, but Lopez would permit no such waste of time. He
+was brooding on Monsieur Eloin usurping his own place near the Emperor,
+and he wanted to finish the present business so as to overtake them
+both.
+
+Dupin's written evidence provided the rest of the abduction story,
+seemingly, and there remained only the other charge, that of assisting
+at the ambush of the murdered Captain Maurel. For this there was no
+evidence, and the accused himself was examined.
+
+"Your name?" asked the court.
+
+"Driscoll."
+
+"Your full name, hombre?"
+
+"John Dinwiddie Driscoll, Your Honor."
+
+"Din--whatever it is--that's not a Christian name?"
+
+"It was, when I got it. Maybe I've paganized it since."
+
+"Devil take you, this is solemn!"
+
+"Yes, this is solemn."
+
+Lopez cracked his long nails irritably against each other.
+
+"You came here via Tampico," he began anew. "What days were you in
+Tampico?"
+
+"From about the twenty-third or twenty-fourth, till we left a few days
+ago."
+
+All three judges bent over a memorandum which the president pointed out
+among his notes. Captain Maurel was killed about April 26th.
+
+"How did you occupy yourself while in Tampico?"
+
+"Mostly trying to persuade Murgie here that it was his move."
+
+"But your horse needed exercise. Did you at any time ride across the
+river?"
+
+"I didn't notice. Have you anyone who saw me cross?"
+
+"Goot!" blurted out the Austrian who was one of the judges, so suddenly
+that everybody half jumped. "Ya, das iss die cosa, sabe! Who has him
+seen cross?"
+
+The court floundered. The witness demanded by the accused was lacking.
+Murguia, a restless, huddled form on a straw-bottomed chair, was
+watching hungrily every step in the examination. Now he shifted
+excitedly, and his sharp jaws worked with a grinding motion. Then his
+voice came, a raucous outburst.
+
+"Search him, Your Mercy!"
+
+Lopez browbeat the meddler, and--took his advice. Driscoll submitted
+tolerantly to their fumbling over him, and all the while Murguia looked
+on as a famished dog, especially when they pulled out the whiskey flask.
+But when they tossed the thing aside, he sank deep into his black coat
+and gave vent to mumblings.
+
+"Of course we find nothing," Lopez complained, "since his accomplice
+recommended the search."
+
+It seemed, too, that the state's case must fall.
+
+"The Captain Maurel charge cannot hold," announced the court.
+
+"Ya, goot--mucha bueno!" exclaimed the Austrian with enthusiasm, while
+the color sergeant, who had a red nose, wet his lips hopefully. He
+believed that an acquitted outlaw, if a gentleman, would stand a bottle.
+
+"And as to the first charge," continued the president, "here is the
+deposition of the Senorita d'Aumerle, which I have held till now for
+this purpose. Read it, and you will note that though the marquesa bears
+out the Senor Ney, she further testifies to the prisoner having later
+saved her from this very Rodrigo Galan at peril to himself. Bien,
+senores, have you any further questions?"
+
+The Austrian crinkled his brow, and after a momentous pause, shook his
+head till his cheeks rattled. The Dragoon promptly replied, "No, mi
+coronel." Then the three withdrew, and when they came back, the Dragoon
+wiping his lips, they informed the accused that he was not guilty.
+
+"Which isn't news," said Driscoll as he thanked them.
+
+Murguia's turn came next. The proof of the old man's guilt blossomed
+almost of itself. Jacqueline, to clear her protector, had been forced to
+depose how Murguia had willingly betrayed her into Rodrigo's hands. But
+she described the old man's reluctance. He would have saved her, except
+for his terror of the outlaw. The sole case for the defence was
+Murguia's character for stinginess; such a miser could not be accused of
+aiding the guerrillas. But this very point seemed to heighten Lopez's
+prejudice against him. Driscoll, being held to testify, only talked
+sociably, and told nothing, and when under the quizzing he finally lost
+patience, he said, "Oh, let him go! What's the use?"
+
+But they were so far from any such thing that they condemned him to be
+shot.
+
+Then a voice was heard at the door. The sentinel there stumbled back,
+and Don Tiburcio brushed by him into the room.
+
+"Old man," he called, "come with me! Your daughter----"
+
+Murguia started up, weakly swaying. The senile eyeballs, so lately
+parched by fear, swam in a moisture not of avarice. Someone was speaking
+to him of his daughter. He had not seen her yet. They would not let him.
+And now he must think of her in this new connection, which was his
+death. And her misery to learn it, and her misery, afterward! On the
+morrow they would be taking him to the capital, his sentence would be
+confirmed, he would be shot. Nothing of this he doubted. And he would
+never see her again.
+
+Murguia stretched out his arms toward the president of the court, "You
+will let me go to her, senor? Your Mercy will let me go to her?" He
+murmured her name over and over, "Maria de la Luz! Maria--Luzita mia!"
+until the words became a kind of crooning. Then he would break forth
+again, entreating, commanding, "Your Mercy will let me see her? Senor,
+you _will_ let me see her!"
+
+At the first note of intrusion Lopez had brought the pommel of his sword
+down upon the box in front of him. But the syllables of the girl's name
+seemed to get into his memory, and he began to stare with a puzzled
+frown at the half-crazed old man. Lifting his eyes, he met Tiburcio's,
+and Tiburcio himself nodded in some deep hidden significance. Lopez
+straightened abruptly, as at an astounding revelation.
+
+"Tell me, Senor Murguia," he said, "your daughter--Yes, yes, man, you
+shall see her!--But listen, what is she like? Has she large black eyes?
+Does she wear red sometimes? Come, senor, answer!"
+
+The father gazed, wonderingly, jealously. How should an elegant officer
+from the City and the Court know aught of Maria de la Luz?
+
+Tiburcio crept behind the sofa, and bending to Lopez's ear, he
+whispered, "Si, si, mi coronel, she is the one you have in mind, and she
+is his daughter."
+
+Lopez swung round and searched the blackmailer's face. "And now----"
+
+"You will let him come," said Tiburcio. "But bring two guards. And have
+four others with--well, with a stretcher."
+
+Again Lopez searched the dark crescent that was Tiburcio's eye, and
+again Tiburcio nodded with deep significance. "Bring him," he repeated,
+"but tell him nothing. Seeing will be enough."
+
+Murguia went, unknowing. He would see her, thanks to some freakish
+kindness in Don Tiburcio. He was torn between the joy of the meeting and
+the sharp grief of the parting that must follow. At the time he never
+noticed that they led him up the chapel walk instead of toward the
+hacienda house. Tiburcio was ahead with a lantern, but when near the top
+of the hill he turned back to them, yet not before the expectant Lopez
+had seen a black something on the pavement under the swinging light.
+
+"You first, mi coronel," said Tiburcio.
+
+"I, you mean!" cried Murguia, "I, senor!"
+
+"But we wish to see first if she is here," said Lopez. "Don Tiburcio
+thought she might be at vespers."
+
+"Vespers? There are no vespers to-night. Yet we come here! Why? Why do
+we come here?"
+
+Tiburcio motioned to the guards. "Hold him until we return," he ordered.
+
+A Dragoon reached out a hand indifferently to Murguia's collar, and that
+second the old man's ten fingers were at his throat. They overpowered
+him at last, but they would have fared better with a wildcat.
+
+Tiburcio and Lopez went alone. They stopped before the covered thing
+near the church door.
+
+"So," mused the colonel, "she ended it _this_ way."
+
+"From the tower," Tiburcio grimly added.
+
+"His----"
+
+"Well, say it. You mean His Majesty?"
+
+"His Majesty need know nothing of the--of the finale."
+
+"Who is there to tell him, por Dios? I won't. You won't."
+
+"But you forget a third, Don Tiburcio. I mean the man who was with you
+several evenings ago, when you----"
+
+"When I was carrying off the padre's sweetheart?"
+
+"When somehow you two happened in this desolate neighborhood. Since you
+took his name out of my mouth just now, you must have recognized that it
+was His Majesty whom you saw talking to her almost where she now lies. I
+was near by, guarding his privacy, but you both escaped before I could
+stop you. Now then, who was that other intruder?"
+
+The other was Rodrigo Galan, but Tiburcio replied, "The other will not
+have much to say. Poor Captain Maurel!"
+
+"Bueno, bueno!"
+
+"Not yet, mi coronel. Only we two know of Maximilian's part in this, but
+we must keep it from her father above all others. I am a loyal
+Imperialist, Don Miguel."
+
+"What difference does that make?"
+
+"The Empire faces a crisis."
+
+The royal favorite started guiltily. Since the news of the Confederacy's
+surrender, Lopez's ambitions were clouded by a growing fear of the
+fugitive Mexican republic. The Republic would have a good memory for
+royal favorites, and he had been thinking on it. "Will Lee's surrender
+make such--such a difference?" he faltered.
+
+"So much," retorted Tiburcio, "that to-morrow we will have more rebels
+yet. So much, that what with freeing peons and confiscating nationalized
+church lands and giving them back to the church--well, a very little
+more might decide between Empire and Republic."
+
+"A little more? What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean money for the rebels. Luz's father is rich. If he knew that
+Maximilian----"
+
+"Hombre, hombre, he's a miser!"
+
+"Just the same, I'm a loyal Imperialist, and if you are, too, you will
+take good care to tell nothing to Don Anastasio."
+
+"You forget, senor, that I am the one to say that to you."
+
+"Then don't forget, Colonel Lopez. Do not forget that she fell, that it
+was a simple accident."
+
+"Yes, a simple accident. Wait here, I am going to bring her father."
+
+On returning Lopez sent the guards away, and he and Murguia were alone
+together. The old man stood dazed, unresisting.
+
+"One minute more," said Lopez. "First, I must tell you something. And
+afterward, you will remember. Yes, you will remember--afterward. You
+know who I am, that I command the Dragoons of the Empress.--Are you
+listening? But do you know that, in a way, I am Maximilian's confidant?
+Whenever he walks or rides, incognito, dressed as a ranchero, I alone go
+with him, as I did during the past ten days while we stopped at Las
+Palmas, three leagues from here. The very first evening there, we two
+rode out, with our cloaks about us. He likes to commune with nature, and
+gather curious flowers which he pastes in a book and labels with Latin
+names. But this time he was interested in peons, yet as he had a
+delicacy about prying into his host's business, we rode until we left
+Las Palmas behind us. His Majesty would gaze on the hills and look at
+the sunset, and he talked to me of a poetic calm about them which made
+him long for he knew not what. And Murguia----"
+
+Here the speaker paused abruptly, and his faded eyes shifted and
+hardened.
+
+"And Murguia, we came here, and--he met your child. He met her here, at
+this chapel, where she had been to pray for her aunt. Old man, do you
+hear me, the Emperor met your daughter! Then, next day, instead of going
+on with his journey, he complained of a cough, and stayed at Las Palmas.
+But every evening he rode here, he and I. Once I found a chance to ask
+her her name, but she would only tell her given name.--There, you will
+remember? Yes, you will--after you have seen her. Come, she is not far
+away."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+EQUIDAD EN LA JUSTICIA
+
+
+  "... and I think I shall begin to take pleasure in being at home
+  and minding my business. I pray God I may, for I finde a great
+  need thereof." --_Pepys's Diary_.
+
+
+An hour later the candles were still guttering in the court room, and
+here Colonel Lopez assembled his minions of justice a second time. In
+his manner now there was nothing of the uncertainty, nor the feigning of
+penetration, which had before marked his handling of the trials. He
+pounded the box with his sword.
+
+"In the light of new evidence," he announced shortly, "the two cases of
+a while ago are reopened."
+
+Din Driscoll strolled in. "I've come for my belt and pistols. Dupin took
+them," he said.
+
+Lopez signed to the Dragoons to close round him. Then he gave vent. Did
+the Senor Gringo laugh so much at Mexican justice, since instead of
+escaping while he had the chance, he came back, coolly demanding his
+property? It was insolence!
+
+"_Gra_-cious," exclaimed Driscoll in his counterfeit of a startled
+old lady, "what's the matter?"
+
+But Lopez put on a mien of dark cunning, and replied that he would find
+out later.
+
+Murguia's case came first. The stricken father was there, dragged from
+his dead by the petty concerns of this world which cannot bide for
+grief. He was as a sleep-walker. He had come into another universe. The
+hacienda sala, where his child lay mid tapers, where mumbled prayers
+arose, or this adobe, where uniformed men fouled the air with cigarettes
+and looked after the Empire's business--the one or the other, both
+places were of that other universe, dark and silent, in which his dazed
+being groped alone.
+
+The new element in the court martial was Tiburcio, and Tiburcio had in
+mind one golden goose to save and one meddling Gringo to lose. He
+riddled the foregoing evidence with refreshing originality. He testified
+to the brigand attack for possession of the marquise. Had he not found
+Don Anastasio stretched upon the ground? Had not the dauntless anciano,
+the self-same Don Anastasio, fallen in defence of the two French
+senoritas? And yet, did he not keep Rodrigo at bay? Si, senores, he had
+indeed, until Colonel Dupin and the Contras arrived. He, the witness,
+was with them. He had seen these things. Now, let anyone say that the
+loyal Senor Murguia was an accomplice of that cut-throat without shame,
+Rodrigo Galan; whom he, the witness, loathed from the innermost recesses
+of his being; whom he, the witness, should be greatly pleased to strike
+dead. But let anyone again besmirch the character of Don Anastasio!
+
+"No, no," vociferously growled the Austrian.
+
+Lopez opposed nothing. He had a clear notion this time as to what he
+wanted. Driscoll marveled, and enjoyed it. Pigheadedness had made Don
+Anastasio guilty, why shouldn't perjury make him innocent? And it did.
+The mountain of suspicion and some few pebbles of evidence melted away
+as lard in a skillet. The verdict was acquittal.
+
+Driscoll knew well enough that the presence of the loyal Imperialist
+with the baleful eye meant a reversal in his own case too. But the
+recent and very definite animus of Lopez against him he could in no way
+fathom. The blackmailer testified again. The prisoner, this Americano,
+had waylaid him in the wood two days before, and had robbed him of his
+last cent.
+
+"Which you stole from Murgie," suggested the prisoner.
+
+"I? I steal from Murguia?" cried Tiburcio indignantly. "Ask him! Ask
+him!"
+
+Murguia was asked. Had the witness ever, on any occasion, robbed him?
+They repeated the question several times, and at last the rusty black
+wig, which was bowed over a chair, slowly shook in the negative. Perhaps
+he had settled a debt with the witness? The wig changed to an
+affirmative.
+
+Tiburcio gleamed triumphantly. "An audacious defence!" he exclaimed.
+"But luckily for me, Don Anastasio is here."
+
+"Oh, hurry up!" protested Driscoll.
+
+Asked if he knew anything more of the prisoner, witness could not swear
+for certain, except that he recognized in the American one of the
+guerrillas who had ambushed and slain Captain Maurel near Tampico. Yes,
+witness was scouting for the murdered captain at the time. Naturally,
+witness was present.
+
+"You wanted proof, Senor Americano, that you crossed the river?" said
+Lopez. "Well, are you content now?"
+
+"Go on," Driscoll returned. He was bored. "Some people on earth are
+alive yet, but while Tibby is on the stand maybe I killed them too. I
+wouldn't swear I didn't."
+
+Murguia was called next, but he did not seem to hear. His body was bent
+over his knees, silently trembling. A Dragoon pressed a hand on his
+shoulder, but a sobbing groan racked his frame, as of a very sick man
+who will not be awakened to his pain. The pause that followed was
+uncanny--a syncope in the affairs of men like a gaping grave under
+midnight clouds. Lopez spoke again. He regretted that they must intrude
+on a fresh and poignant sorrow, but the case in hand was a matter of
+state, before which the individual had to give way. It was very logical
+and convincing. But the feeble old shoulders made no sign.
+
+Tiburcio leaned over and shook him gently, and whispered in his ear.
+Still Murguia did not move. Tiburcio gripped his arm. "You and Rodrigo,"
+he said, so low that none could hear, "there was something arranged
+between you. What was it? Tell me! Tell me, I say, if you want the
+Gringo shot!"
+
+He bent nearer, and against his ear came a muffled sound of lips. When
+he straightened, it was to address the court.
+
+If he might ask a question, had they searched the prisoner? They had.
+But thoroughly? Thoroughly. But not enough to find anything? No. Then he
+would suggest that they had not searched thoroughly. The court seemed
+impressed, and Driscoll was fumbled over again. Still they found
+nothing.
+
+"Whose flask is that?" Tiburcio demanded, pointing to where it had been
+tossed and forgotten. The prisoner's. "Look that over again," Tiburcio
+insisted. A guard handed it to Lopez, who squinted inside. "There is
+nothing," he said. It was only an old canteen whose leather covering was
+dropping apart from rot.
+
+Murguia's head raised, and his eyes fixed themselves on the judge, and
+in their intense fixity glittered a quick, keen lust. It was hideous,
+loathsome, fascinating. The eyes were swimming in tears, but their
+hungered, metal-like sheen made the sorrow monstrous, and was the more
+foul and ghastly because it distorted so pure a thing as sorrow.
+Driscoll felt queerly that he must, must remove from the world this
+decrepit old man who bemoaned a dead child. The itch for murder
+terrified him, and he turned away angrily from the horrid face that
+aroused it. But Murguia's stare never relaxed while Lopez toyed with the
+canteen. And when Lopez, as though accidentally, thrust a finger under
+the torn leather and brought out a folded paper, the bright points of
+Murguia's eyes leaped to flame. But the head went down again, as once
+more his grief swept over him, and another sob caught at the
+heartstrings of every man there.
+
+Lopez spread out the paper, and as he read, he started violently. He
+passed it on to the Austrian and the color sergeant, and they also
+started. But the most amazed was Driscoll, when he too had a chance to
+read.
+
+"Ha, you recognize it?" exclaimed the president.
+
+"Sure I do. It's an order from Colonel Dupin to Captain Maurel. Rodrigo
+had it in Tampico, making people think that _he_ was Captain
+Maurel."
+
+But the court was not so simple. "How came you by it?" demanded Lopez.
+"Have occasion to be Maurel yourself sometime, eh?"
+
+With wrath, with admiration, Driscoll faced round on Don Anastasio. "Oh
+you pesky, shriveled-up gorilla!" he breathed. He was no longer amazed.
+This accounted for Murguia's borrowing his flask the night they were in
+the forest. It accounted for Murguia and Rodrigo plotting together in
+Tampico. But why tell such things to the court? The Missourian was not a
+fool like King Canute, who ordered back the waves. "Hurry up," he said
+wearily to the waves instead. Since he could not hold the tide,
+anticipation chilled more than the drowning bath itself.
+
+The tide assuredly did not wait. It rolled right on, nearer and nearer.
+Murguia was lifted to his feet. He was remembering already what Lopez
+had told him, about his daughter and Maximilian, as Lopez had said he
+would. The American's easy, stalwart form in gray filled his blurred
+eyes. Here was a Confederate emissary come with an offer of aid for that
+same Maximilian. Such had been Murguia's suspicion from the first, and
+now it moved him with venomous hate. Yes, he would testify. Yes, yes,
+the prisoner had ridden out alone at Tampico. Yes, yes, yes, the
+prisoner was with Rodrigo there.
+
+"But why, Don Anastasio," asked Tiburcio purely in fantastic mischief,
+"did you bring such a disturbing man to our happy country?"
+
+"That will do," Lopez interposed. "The Senor Murguia could not know at
+the time that this fellow was Rodrigo's agent."
+
+"And," Murguia added eagerly, "I was helpless, there at Mobile. The
+Confederates could have sunk my boat, and he held an order from
+Jefferson Davis."
+
+"What's that?" cried Tiburcio, his humor suddenly vanished. "What's
+that, an order from Jefferson Davis?"
+
+Tiburcio's was a new interest, now. He possessed a mind as crooked as
+his vision, and being crooked, it followed unerringly the devious paths
+of other minds. So, they had made a tool of him! Rodrigo and Murguia
+wanted the Gringo shot to help the rebel cause. And he, Tiburcio of the
+cunning wits, had just sworn away, not only the Gringo's life, but the
+possible salvation of the Empire. Coming from Jefferson Davis, the
+Gringo with his mission could mean nothing else. Then there was Lopez.
+Tiburcio did not love this changeling Mexican who had red hair. But what
+could be the mongrel's game? Why had he freed Murguia, if not to unleash
+a small terrier at Maximilian's heel? Why was he trying the American
+over again, if not to poison a friendly mastiff? And why either, if Don
+Miguel Lopez were not seeking to make friends with the Republic? Or
+perhaps he was at heart a Republican. Thus Don Tiburcio, a loyal
+Imperialist, read the finger posts as he ambled down the crooked path.
+
+Yes, and here was Lopez putting on the final touch. Here he was, the
+traitor, pronouncing the death sentence, and poor impotent Don Tiburcio
+gnawing his baffled rage, as one would say of a villain. The execution
+was to take place the very next morning. His Majesty the Emperor would
+be asked to approve, afterward.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+A CURIOUS PAGAN RITE
+
+
+  "E un peccato che se ne va con l'acqua benedetta."
+                                        --_Machiavelli_.
+
+
+The Storm Centre looked round, about and above. He was as a fly in a
+bottle. A massive rough-hewn door, jammed tight, sealed him within adobe
+walls two feet thick. There was one window, cross-barred, as high as his
+chin, and only large enough to frame his head. They had brought him to
+the carcel, or dungeon, of the hacienda, where peons were constrained to
+docility. A wide masonry bench against the wall approximated a couch,
+but it was as blocked ice. By the flickering of a lone tallow dip, Din
+Driscoll noted these things with every sense delicately attuned to
+strategy. But his verdict was unpromising.
+
+"Tough luck!" he observed.
+
+The adobe was built among the stables that bordered on the pasture, and
+when not needed as a calabozo, it served snugly for the administrador's
+best horse. From the one stall came a tentative whinny. Driscoll jumped
+with delight. "Demijohn! W'y, you good old scoundrel, you!" The night
+before, he remembered, he had seen the horse bedded here. "Say howdy as
+loud as you want," he cried, slapping him fondly on the flank, "you'll
+not betray us. _That's_ been done already."
+
+Driscoll was cavalryman to the bone, and it heartened him unaccountably
+to find his horse. If, only, he could have his pistols too! Ever since
+the Federals had cut him off from his furloughs home, those black ugly
+navies were next to the nearest in his affections. The nearest was the
+buckskin charger. And now, only the buckskin was left, which simply made
+the dilemma more poignant. The condemned man gazed critically at the
+walls, the rafters, the ground, and shook his head. Supposing a chance
+for escape, could he bring himself to leave Demijohn behind? He got his
+pipe to going, sat down, and frowned ruefully at the candle.
+
+"I don't want to be shot!" he burst out suddenly, with a plaintive
+twang. Then he grinned. The boy still in him had prompted the absurdity.
+And the rough warrior had laughed at it. Boy and warrior faced each
+other, either surprised that the other existed. The boy flushed
+resentfully at the veteran's contemptuous grunt. His eyes still had the
+boy's naively inquisitive greeting to the world before him. Next, quite
+abruptly, the warrior knew a bitterness against himself. If he could,
+but once, whimper as the lad about to be soundly strapped! He took no
+pride in his irony, nor in his hardened indifference to the visage of
+death. How far, how very far, had the few past years of strife carried
+him from the youngster who used to gaze so eagerly, so expectantly, out
+on life!
+
+First, he was home from the University, from the pretty, shady little
+Missouri town of Columbia. But the vacation following he spent in
+bloodily helping to drive the Jayhawkers back across the Kansas line.
+And soon after, when the fighting opened up officially, and his State,
+at the start, had more of it than any other battle ground, how many
+hundreds of times did his life bide by the next throw of Fate? During
+one cruel winter month he had lain with other wounded in a hospital
+dug-out in the river's cliff, and there, wanting both quinine and food,
+he would peep through the reeds, only to see the merciless Red Legs
+prying about in search of his hiding place.
+
+And then there was the wild, busily dangerous life with Old Joe's
+Brigade, with that brigade of Missouri's young firebrands. Once,
+stretched on the prairie, where he had dropped from exhaustion and
+hunger and loss of blood, the Storm Centre awoke to find a Pin Indian
+stooping over him for his scalp. On that occasion, the deft turning of
+the wrist from the waist outward, with the stripping of the pistol's
+hammer simultaneously, had enabled him later to restore to relatives
+certain other scalps already dangling from the savage's girdle.
+
+And now here he was in an adobe with walls two feet thick, and numerous
+saddle-colored Greasers proposing to shoot him first thing in the
+morning!
+
+"I'll be blessedly damned," he drawled querulously, "I object!"
+
+It was the warrior who spoke now, and with him the boy joined hands.
+They became as one and the same person. The common foe was without. They
+would see this through together, with grim stoicism, with young-blooded
+daredeviltry.
+
+The door opened, and one of the common foe, bearing a tray, came within.
+
+"Well, Don Erastus, how goes it?" With a pang of homesickness the
+Missourian thought of darkies who carried trays.
+
+"Juan Bautista, at Y'r Mercy's orders," the Dragoon corrected him.
+
+"Don John the Baptist then, como le whack?"
+
+"Bien, senor, bien."
+
+"Any theory as to what you've got there?"
+
+"Y'r Mercy's supper. The Senor Coronel Lopez does not desire that Y'r
+Mercy should have any complaint."
+
+"Oh, none whatever, Johnny, except what I'm to die of. Set it down, here
+on the feather bed."
+
+There were a few native dishes, with a botellon of water and a jar of
+wine. Driscoll tipped the botellon to his lips. His whiskey flask had
+contained poison, though the poison of ink, and as he drank, he pondered
+on why water should not be an antidote for the poisons that lurk in
+whiskey flasks. Then he wondered why such foolish conceits at such times
+persist in shouldering death itself out of a man's thoughts. And
+meanwhile, there stood the precursor of his end, in the emblematic
+person of a very brown John the Baptist. The fellow's gorgeous red
+jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a sordid dirty shirt. He was officer of
+the guard, and had a curiosity as to how a Gringo about to be shot would
+act. He waited clumsily, lantern in hand. But he was disappointed. There
+seemed to be nothing out of the commonplace. Some condemned Mexican,
+though a monotonously familiar spectacle, would yet have been more
+entertaining.
+
+Driscoll looked at him over the botellon. That earthen bottle had not
+left the prisoner's lips. It had stopped there, poised aloft by an idea.
+
+"See here," Driscoll complained, "where's the rest of the water I'm to
+have?"
+
+"Of what water, senor?"
+
+"For my bath, of course. Don't I die to-morrow?"
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"Here, this wine is too new for me. Drink it yourself, if you want."
+
+"Many thanks, senor, with pleasure. But a bath? I don't understand."
+
+"No? Don't you Mexicans ever bathe before you die?"
+
+"We send for the padre."
+
+"Oh, that's it! And he spiritually washes your sins away? But suppose
+you couldn't get your padre?"
+
+The Indian shuddered. "Ai, Maria purisima, one's soul would go to
+everlasting torment!"
+
+"There! Now you can understand why I count so much on ablution. It's
+absolution."
+
+The native readily believed. Like others of his class, he thought all
+Protestants pagans, and none Catholic but a Mexican. "Must be something
+like John the Baptist's day, verdad, senor?" he said. "On that holy day,
+once a year, we must all take a bath."
+
+"Quite right too," Driscoll returned soberly. "A man should go through
+most anything for his religion.--Haven't noticed my horse there, have
+you, Johnny?" The guard pricked up his ears. "Of course not," Driscoll
+went on, "you're worrying about my soul instead. Well, so am I. We
+Americans, you know, save our yearly baths for one big solemn final one,
+just before we die. And if I don't get mine to-night, I'll be
+associating with you unshrived Mexicans hereafter, and that would be
+pretty bad, wouldn't it? It's what made me think of my horse there. That
+horse, Johnny, is heavy on my soul. He's most too heavy to wash away.
+Now, I'm not going to tell you that I actually stole him; but just the
+same, if a good man like you would take him, after I'm gone--why, I'd
+feel that he was washed off pretty well."
+
+The Mexican's sympathy grew more keen.
+
+"But the other sins," Driscoll added, "they'll need water, and a great
+plenty, too."
+
+Juan Bautista was feeling the buckskin's knees. Driscoll longed to choke
+him, but instead, he drove again at the wedge. "Another thing, I'll have
+to leave my money behind." He mentioned it casually, but his breath
+stopped while he waited for the effect. The guard straightened.
+Demijohn's knees seemed to be all right. He took up the tray, and opened
+the door, yet without a word. Driscoll's fist doubled, to strike and run
+for it. Then the fellow spoke.
+
+"Does Y'r Mercy want soap too?"
+
+The fist unclenched. "No," came the reply, almost in a joyful gasp,
+"this is for, for godliness only."
+
+"One jar, senor?"
+
+"Bless me, no! Two big ones, bigger'n a barrel."
+
+With a parting glance at Demijohn, the guard stole forth to gratify the
+heathen's whim.
+
+"I'll give him enough to _buy_ a horse," Driscoll resolved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO BE SHOT
+
+
+  "A horse and a man
+  Is more than one,
+  And yet not many."
+          --_Taming of the Shrew_.
+
+
+"Now Berthe--why, what in the world----" Jacqueline began.
+
+It was her second morning to awake in the hacienda house, and the little
+Bretonne tripped into her room under a starchy mountain heaped high.
+"Clothes, madame," she replied.
+
+"He mais----"
+
+"They were made yesterday by some of the ranchero women. Madame will
+look?"
+
+"Calico! Grands dieux!"
+
+There were two dresses, one for each girl. The native seamstresses had
+slyly taken stock of mademoiselle the day before, only to discover that
+a "simple" frock from Paris was a formidable thing to duplicate. The
+marchioness smiled, and the maid also.
+
+"But, for example, Berthe, who inspired this?"
+
+"He did."
+
+"He?"
+
+"The American monsieur, of course."
+
+"Oh, the American monsieur, of course! So, monsieur permits himself to
+observe that I need a wardrobe? But you, Berthe, you surely did not----"
+
+"Oh, no, madame! I knew nothing, till just now, when the woman brought
+them. The monsieur ordered them yesterday, she said. And naturally,
+madame, if he could have found better material, I do not doubt----"
+
+"There, child, I'll not be reproached by your even thinking it necessary
+to defend----"
+
+"And madame will see, too, that they will do nicely." She spread the
+frocks on the bed, and began snipping here and there with the scissors
+and taking stitches everywhere. "By letting it out this way--voila, if
+madame will kindly slip it on?"
+
+"Berthe, you can't mean--Oh nonsense!"
+
+None the less the skirt passed over her head, and the maid's deft
+fingers kept on busily. "And why not?" she talked as she worked, "unless
+one likes rags better. And who will see? Only men. Poof, those citizens
+do not know percale from a Parisian toilette."
+
+Jacqueline began to wax angry with the quiet tyranny of it. She looked
+at the horror and shuddered, then with both hands pushed the calico to
+the floor, gathering up her own lawn skirt instead. It was rather a
+woebegone lawn skirt. She gazed ruefully at the garment, then down at
+the blue flowering heaped about her ankles. Berthe, kneeling over the
+dress, raised her eyes. The puckered brow of her mistress spelled fury,
+and the maid tried not to laugh, at which Jacqueline stamped her foot.
+"Berthe," she cried, "shall I slap you?"
+
+"Mais oui, madame. And madame, I was thinking, what will he say if you
+do not wear it?"
+
+Jacqueline gave her a keen look. "Child, child," she exclaimed, "you
+seem to imagine that whatever _he_ wants----"
+
+"Oui, madame.--I think you can try it on again now."
+
+And madame submitted petulantly. But to herself she had to confess the
+magic in Berthe's fingers. Though she pouted over the fresh, rustic
+effect, yet on her slender figure there was witchery in it.
+
+An orderly knocked. He was one of her Austrian escorts come to say that
+everything was ready for departure. She gladly hailed the chance to
+escape this house of mourning. All night long old women in the death
+chamber had mumbled incantations, and the droning was in her ears as she
+slept. It was not nice. Because she could not blot out the inartistic
+shock of ugly mortality, in very self-hate she yearned to get away. The
+evening before, even while she loaned common sense to the crazed
+household, even while she pressed down the icy eyelids, she
+wondered--obstinately wondered, despite herself, what the dead girl
+could have thought, what she could have felt, during that one horrid,
+thrilling second of flight downward, and what, in anticipation of the
+second after. It was gruesome, this being always and always the
+spectator. Yet Jacqueline knew that, had it been she herself plunging
+from the tower, she still would have been that spectator. Too well she
+knew that she would have analyzed what she thought and felt. She would
+have rated even the second before eternity in its degree as a frisson;
+and, no doubt, would have been aware of a voluptuous satiety, while
+anticipating the second after. She hated herself, and she hated too the
+smart, ultra-refined life that had brought her to it. How many of those
+past years, or of the years to come would she not give to shed a few
+tears without interrogating them!
+
+Ney met the two girls under the colonnade. At the steps was the coach
+and eight mules left by Maximilian for their use, and drawn up in
+stately line were Messieurs the Feathers and Furs, as Jacqueline called
+His Majesty's Austrian Imperial Guards. When she appeared, out flashed
+their curved blades. The queenly little lady in blue-flowered calico and
+a rakish Leghorn hat returned the salute with a smile.
+
+"Where are the Dragoons, Michel?" she asked.
+
+Ney did not know. But a Mexican with a crossed eye approached, doffing a
+silver-lettered sombrero. He had been waiting for her, he said. There
+was time. Otherwise he would have forced his way to wherever she was.
+
+"Indeed, Seigneur Farceur?" said Jacqueline.
+
+She recognized that most sinister of jokers, Don Tiburcio. He was eyeing
+her narrowly, and there was a vigilance in the baleful gleam, as though
+of late he might have been deceived by his fellowmen.
+
+"But," he coolly proceeded, "only a few minutes are left now."
+
+"My good man, whatever are you talking about?"
+
+"And after the few minutes, we'll have the shooting. I came to invite
+Your Mercy."
+
+"Shoot whom?"
+
+"There is but one prisoner."
+
+"You mean Senor Murguia? The American was acquitted, I believe."
+
+"It's the other way, senorita. They were both tried over again, and
+then, the American was condemned."
+
+"Mademoiselle," ejaculated Ney, "you are deathly----"
+
+"I am not!" Jacqueline protested furiously. "It's the powder."
+
+But Berthe knew better. Her mistress used it not, for all the roguish
+freckle on her nose-tip. Tiburcio, too, was satisfied as to her sudden
+pallor. She would save him the American, he decided. "Your Mercy had
+best hasten," he urged her frankly.
+
+Jacqueline ran to the end of the portico, from were she could see the
+pasture. Within, a platoon of red jackets were filing toward the carcel.
+
+"That scoundrel Lopez!" exclaimed Tiburcio, "he has advanced the time on
+us!"
+
+Only for an instant did Jacqueline wring her hands.
+
+"Michel, your horse!" she cried. "Quick, quick! Now hold the stirrup!"
+
+But Tiburcio was the quicker. He bent his knee, on it she stepped, and
+up she jumped, and kicked her heel as a spur. The charger leaped, and
+down the road clattered girl and horse, she swaying perilously.
+
+It was a hundred yards to the pasture gate, and as much again to the
+adobe inside. When her horse rose in his gallop, she caught glimpses
+over the wall. The Dragoons were drawing up before the carcel. Sentinels
+tugged at the huge wooden door, and Lopez goaded them on. He saw her
+coming, and would have it over with before she could interfere. He
+bellowed an order, and the shooting squad threw up their guns at aim.
+They would not wait. They would fire on their victim the second the door
+opened. The heavy oak began to give. But that moment swinging in through
+the gate, Jacqueline could see only the carcel's blank adobe wall. Yet
+she pictured the man just behind. She pictured the door opening.
+And--too late! Dieu, the muskets had volleyed already!
+
+But--what made the shots scatter so? Scattered and flurried, they
+sounded. And no wonder! She saw a miracle in the doing. It was the most
+astounding sight of all her life long. Straight through the blank adobe
+wall, for all its two feet of thickness, she beheld a man on a
+great-boned yellow horse, both man and horse plunge mid a sudden cloud
+of dust, plunge squarely into the light of day.
+
+The dumfounded shooting squad had blazed crazily against the half-open
+door; and for the critical quarter minute following, their weapons were
+harmless. Other Dragoons ran wildly out into the pasture, and as wildly
+fired at the horseman. Only one of the sentinels had happened to be on
+the side of the magic exit, but as the solid wall dissolved into a
+powdered cloud and the apparition hurtled past him, down upon his head
+crashed a gigantic water jar filled with earth. He who had sympathized
+with pagan ablutions the night before stood now with mouth agape. Some
+heathen god was having a hand in this, he knew.
+
+Jacqueline wheeled to Driscoll's side as he dashed toward her. He was
+coatless. His woolen shirt was open at the neck, the sleeves were rolled
+to the elbows. His slouch hat sat upon the back of his head. The short
+cropped curls, gray with dust, fluttered against the brim. She had never
+seen a face so buoyantly happy.
+
+"Morning, Miss Jack-leen! Race you to the river?"
+
+They galloped through the gate together. He was for turning down the
+road, but she blocked his horse with her own. During a second the flight
+was stopped.
+
+"I'm in a hurry just now," he panted, but made no effort to get by her.
+
+"Up that way!" she cried. "Up that way, past the House!"
+
+"But those pretty boys----"
+
+"The Austrians? They'll not stop you, I promise."
+
+"Then it's our move. Careful, little girl, don't fall!"
+
+Jacqueline, waving her arm, signaled the Feathers and Furs to make room,
+and Tiburcio and Ney saw to it that they did. Man and girl raced through
+them.
+
+"Wait here, Michel!" called Jacqueline, leaving Ney still with thumb to
+cap at salute. Tiburcio gazed after them.
+
+Lopez ran across the pasture to the colonnade. His red face was redder
+than ever before. Tiburcio sardonically regarded him. Lopez glared at
+Ney.
+
+"Why aren't you in pursuit?" he demanded hotly.
+
+"And you, monsieur?"
+
+"And I, and I! Who are you to question me, senor? Every girth has been
+cut!"
+
+"Caramba, mi coronel," cried Tiburcio in dismay, "you don't say so!"
+
+"And it will take ten minutes to tie up the cords, while you, you, Senor
+Frenchman, you stand there, your men mounted and ready! Obey me, I tell
+you!"
+
+"Can't," said Ney doggedly. "Against orders."
+
+"Orders? Whose orders?"
+
+"Of Mademoiselle la Marquise, monsieur."
+
+"Who runs away with a convict. A fit commander, por Dios!"
+
+Off came the Frenchman's gauntlet, but he paused in the gesture of
+striking. Too quick at this, and not enough at wits, he might ruin her
+plans.
+
+"As fit," he retorted instead, "as another who lets prisoners escape. I
+advise Monsieur the Colonel to look to his girths."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE PERSON ON THE OTHER HORSE
+
+
+  "Yet am I sure of one pleasure,
+  And shortly, it is this:
+  That, where ye be, me seemeth, parde,
+  I could not fare amiss."
+           --_Ballad of the Nut Brown Maid._
+
+
+Din Driscoll had never remotely imagined that there could be such
+intoxication in a horseback ride. The person on the other horse made for
+the difference. How the joy of her filled him that instant of his
+bursting through the black prison wall into the bright morning of the
+world! She, the splendid first thing to gladden his eyes! Could liberty
+be really so glorious? Ravishing horsewoman, she was coming to save him.
+He had supposed her on her way to Mexico, and 'twas she whom he saw
+first of all.
+
+And now, she rode beside him. They two, they were riding together,
+alone. The smell of the wild free air of the universe thrilled them both
+with an exquisite recklessness. Vague, limitless, subtle in mystery, the
+seduction of it was ineffable. Out of the corner of his eye he peeped at
+her. But wasn't she perched entrancingly on that dragoon saddle, wasn't
+she, though? The richly heavy coils of burnished copper had loosened,
+and they were very disconcerting in their suggestion of flowing wealth.
+If they _would_ but fall about her shoulders! And the lace from the
+slanting hat brim, and the velvet patch near the dimple--the velvet
+patch called an assassin. And--what dress was that? Flowered calico?
+Yes, and light blue. His cheeks burned as of one surprised in crime, but
+the self-possessed young woman herself was oblivious. So was it this, a
+blue flowered gown, that made her so suddenly tangible, so tangible and
+maddening? The haughty Parisienne of imperial courts was gone. In fact,
+she had become so distractingly tangible that--well, he didn't know. But
+a lump got into his throat. She might be a Missouri girl, this moment.
+And there came to him the vision of one, of a Missouri girl molding
+biscuits, patting them, and her arms were bared, in a simple piquancy
+just like Jacqueline's now. He even saw the pickaninnies in the shade of
+the porch outside, worshiping the real Missouri girl from the very
+whites of their eyes. How he had loved to tease her! He could not help
+it; she was so daintily prim. That he should thus think of his sister,
+the while gazing on the one-time gilded butterfly--to say the least, it
+was a pertinent comment on the transmuting magic that lurks in blue
+flowered percale.
+
+They slowed to a trot.
+
+"Monsieur is my prisoner, yes," said she in her wonderful English.
+
+He took the other meaning. "I don't know--_yet_," he returned
+soberly.
+
+She laughed, and he realized that he had spoken aloud.
+
+He turned on himself in dismay. "What's the matter with me?" he
+muttered.
+
+"I think, monsieur," said Jacqueline demurely, "that I have the guess."
+
+"You haven't--you can't guess either! I don't know myself."
+
+"Just the same, I wish I knew so well my chances for heaven."
+
+"But you're mistaken, I tell you. I'm not!"
+
+"Not what, monsieur?"
+
+"In, in--w'y, in love."
+
+Jacqueline's laughter was the merriest peal. In the end he half grinned.
+Little use trying to convince the little witch! He had much to do
+convincing himself.
+
+On the farther slope of a hill where coffee grew and the giant
+sheltering banana hid the road, they paused at a trail that crossed the
+highway and wound on down toward the Panuco river, where tropical stuff
+for Tampico was transferred from burros to dugout barges. Jacqueline
+listened. There were no sounds of pursuit as yet, nor was there any one
+in sight. Making up her mind, she changed to the path. Driscoll
+followed, with a delight in this new leadership over him.
+
+When they gained the river, she stopped again, and he did too.
+
+"But you must go, on, on!" she protested. "They may not be deceived, no.
+They may have you to overtake here." She held out her hand. "There, this
+path, you follow it to Tampico. Good bye. Yes, yes, you have not one
+minute!"
+
+Driscoll took the little gauntleted hand readily enough. He saw that the
+lines of her face were drawn, but her manner was inexorable.
+
+"How do you like your dress?" he inquired.
+
+Had she been on her feet, she would have stamped one of them.
+"Monsieur," she cried, "here is no time to observe the replenishment of
+a lady's wardrobe. Do you go? I insist. I wish you bon voyage to your
+own country, monsieur."
+
+"But it's so far away. I reckon I'd better rest a spell first. A month
+or so, prob'bly."
+
+She watched him clamber down and tie Demijohn to the low branch of a
+live oak on the river's bank.
+
+"There you are, getting stubborn again," she said. But the lines in her
+face had vanished.
+
+"Of course I mean to see you back to your friends," he explained.
+
+"Merci bien. But you will not. You will have this river straight to
+Tampico. I say yes!"
+
+She turned her horse as she spoke, whereat he started to remount his
+own.
+
+"I think, sir----" she began haughtily.
+
+"The road is free."
+
+"Oh, why have you to be so, so quarrelsome?"
+
+"The temptation, I reckon."
+
+"You really will go back with me?"
+
+"I might be going back along about the same time. It's a public trail."
+
+"Then _I_ will stay, and you _must_! I will not permit you to
+go back there now. I will see that you do wait here so long until Lopez
+has the time to start to Mexico after you. Then you will be behind him.
+Have the goodness to hold my bridle. I think I shall take me a rest a
+little also."
+
+Together they sat on a huge live-oak root and watched the sluggish
+Panuco flow by.
+
+"No hurry now," Driscoll observed comfortably. "Our scarlet upholstered
+colonel won't get away for years yet."
+
+Years, at least, were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her
+quaintly inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned
+it in London long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her
+father played France's diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers,
+then, was as broad as Mayfair, and to the Missourian doubly foreign, and
+doubly alluring.
+
+"I cannot understand," she said, "why it is the Dragoons have not
+followed you immediately?"
+
+"Tibby's the reason, I reckon. That Tibby is a deep one."
+
+She made him explain, and he told her. The blackmailing humorist,
+Tiburcio, had paid him a visit at his dungeon window during the night.
+Being chief witness for the prosecution, Tiburcio could pass the sentry
+unchallenged.
+
+"Come for your money?" Driscoll had inquired, and Tiburcio seemed hurt.
+
+"What is the matter," Tiburcio demanded, "with pointing a revolver at
+the Senor Americano right now, and making him deliver?"
+
+Driscoll had not figured out what the objections might be, but he
+reckoned some would materialize.
+
+"But," said Tiburcio, "I'm not doing it, and why? Simply because I want
+to know if you care to escape?"
+
+"W'y," returned Driscoll, "I'll think it over, and let you know in the
+morning," at which lack of confidence Tiburcio was more hurt than ever.
+
+"What's the use," Driscoll objected, "they'd catch me again?"
+
+"Not if I fixed their horses, and if I do, will you promise to get out?"
+
+And thus the bargain had stood, and thus it was fulfilled, though at the
+last the anxious Tiburcio had called in Jacqueline to help.
+
+"Now," said the marchioness, settling herself for a treat, "I
+_must_ know. Tame for me the miracle, explain it. I cannot longer
+hold my curiosity. But it was fine--exquis--however you have done it!"
+
+"Weren't they a surprised lot, though?"
+
+"But the miracle, monsieur! The miracle!"
+
+"Well, it was this way. Being on the yawning brink--as old Meagre
+Shanks, friend of mine, would say--I figured it out that lacking in
+godliness, I'd try to get the next best thing."
+
+"Please, monsieur!"
+
+"That I'd try to get a bath."
+
+"Of dust and mud, for example?"
+
+At that Driscoll ceased all miracle taming and brushed himself off. But,
+putting him back into his dungeon, one will recall how he plotted to
+obtain two jars of water. This water he used simply to soften the hard,
+sun-baked adobes. First he hung his coat over the window. A suspicious
+guard naturally wanted to know why, and Driscoll appeared at the bars
+stripped to the waist. To keep out the cold air while he bathed, he
+said, and his teeth chattered. Then he went back to work. He handled his
+precious water with desperate economy. He began at the exposed end of
+one adobe brick, soaking it as needed and digging it out with a chip of
+earthenware knocked off one of the jars. The wall was two adobe lengths
+in thickness, but after he had gotten out his first brick, it was easy,
+by tugging and kicking, to tear out the others of the inside tier, since
+luckily they did not dovetail in with the outer ones. Soon he had an
+arch-shaped niche in the wall almost as high as his head when mounted on
+Demijohn. The really tedious part remained, and it was an all night job.
+
+To deepen the niche without breaking through, he had to scrape it out
+piecemeal, wetting the dried mud as he toiled. He measured carefully
+just how much of the thickness to leave, because the weed stalks in the
+adobe could not be trusted to hold too thin a crust, and also he had to
+take care that the water did not soak entirely through and make a
+tell-tale blot on the outside when daylight should come. It was an
+infinitely laborious task, and even with completion at last, there was
+yet the question--which would break first, bone or masonry?
+
+But he would learn when he should dash his horse's skull and his own
+against the shell that remained. He saddled Demijohn, filled an empty
+jar with the soft earth of his excavations, and waited. His dramatic
+appearance at the instant of the door's opening was not a coincidence.
+It was minute calculation. Already mounted, he faced the wall, with the
+heavy jar poised over his head in both hands, his spurs drawn back to
+strike. He waited until sentinels and shooting squad had gathered at the
+door. He waited to draw their fire, to empty their muskets. But he did
+not wait until the door should open enough to give them unimpeded aim.
+In the second of its opening he drove back the spurs, hurled the jar
+against the wall, and--crashed through his dungeon as easily as breaking
+a sucked egg.
+
+"But," demanded Jacqueline eagerly, "how is it you did feel?" She was
+disappointed that the personal equation had had so little prominence.
+
+"I don't recollect," said Driscoll, puzzled, "there was nothing hurting
+especially."
+
+"No, no! Your sensations facing death, then escaping?"
+
+He brightened. "W'y yes," he replied, happy to catch her meaning. "I
+felt toler'ble busy."
+
+She sighed despairingly. Yet there was plenty left her for wonderment,
+and in it she revelled.
+
+"Ingenuity!" she mused. "I declare, I believe the first human being to
+stand up on his hind legs must have been an American. It simply occurred
+to him one day that he didn't need all fours for walking, and that he
+might as well use his before-feet for something else."
+
+"And a Frenchman, Miss Jack-leen?"
+
+She flung up her hands.
+
+"_He!_" she exclaimed. "If ever a compatriot of mine had gotten
+that idea into his--how you say?--pate, would he not carry it out to the
+idiotic limit, yes? He? _He_ would try to walk without any feet
+whatever, and use _all_ of them for other things. Already you have
+seen him doing the, the pugilat--the box--with every one of his fours.
+Voila!"
+
+But time was passing. Lopez had certainly repaired his girths by this
+time. Driscoll arose. "There's a shorter way back," he announced. "The
+river junction can't be far down stream, and I'll wait for you there,
+Miss Jack-leen, while you scout on ahead to the hacienda house. If all's
+clear, you signal and I will advance with the heavy cavalry."
+
+"C'est bien, mon colonel."
+
+"Whatever that means, I hope it ain't mutiny."
+
+At best it was only mock compliance. Jacqueline also knew that time was
+passing, but she had not mentioned the fact. Now the reason transpired.
+She harked back on their separation, with a grave earnestness and a
+saddened air of finality. He was to leave her here, she said. He was to
+go back to his own country. How badly had his reception fared so far?
+Why not, then, leave Mexico to ingratitude, and have done? The romantic
+land of roses was notoriously a blight to hopes. Why should he seek to
+thrive despite the mysterious curse that seemed to hover over all things
+like a deadly miasma?
+
+Driscoll shook his head. "You know I have come to see Maximilian."
+
+"But you are under sentence. You will lose your life."
+
+"Miss Jack-leen, you said a while back that I was your prisoner. You
+have the Austrian escort. All right. You will deliver me to the
+Emperor," and he waved his hand as though the matter was arranged.
+
+"But monsieur," she cried, "may not others have plans as vital as yours?
+And, perhaps--yes, you interfere."
+
+He did interfere, in grimmest truth. Leaving the Sphinx of the
+Tuileries, she had come with her mission, and with an idea, too, of the
+obstacles that must be vanquished. But here, almost at landing, she
+encountered a barrier left out of her calculations, and which alone,
+unaided, she had to surmount. It was the surrender of the Confederacy,
+and what this upsetting complication meant against her own errand was
+embodied in the man before her. For in him lay the results of the
+Surrender as affecting the Mexican empire. In a word, he brought aid for
+Maximilian at the moment when Maximilian might be discouraged enough to
+give way to France; when the forgetful prince might gladly leave all to
+the generous nation which had placed him on his throne and which by him
+was cheated of the reward of its costly empire building. Should the
+French threaten to withdraw, should they in reality withdraw, still he
+would not abdicate, not with Confederate veterans to replace the
+pantalons rouges. Like the dog of the fable, Maximilian would cling to
+the manger.
+
+"Oui, oui, monsieur," she repeated sharply, "you interfere!"
+
+"In that case," said Driscoll quietly, "I will leave you at the river
+junction. When I see that you are safely at the hacienda----"
+
+"You will go back to America?"
+
+"That need not worry you."
+
+"Then you are _not_ going back, back to your own country?" He would
+keep on to the City alone. She would have no chance to intercept him.
+After all Fate had been good to her--no, cruel!--to cast him in her
+path. "You might find the Austrian escort safer than going alone," she
+said enticingly.
+
+He hesitated. What all this was about, he could not imagine. He knew
+nothing, naturally, of the dark intrigues of an enigmatical adventurer
+far away in the Tuileries, nor how they could affect him. And so he put
+away as absurd the fancy that she in her turn might interfere with him.
+Besides, he was tempted.
+
+"It's a go!" he said.
+
+She for her part was thinking, hoping, rather, that perhaps she was
+mistaken. Perhaps he only bore the offer of a paltry few hundred, a
+handful of homeseekers from his regiment. She hoped so. She would have
+prayed for it, had praying occurred to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+THE STRANGEST AVOWAL OF LOVE
+
+
+  "Nae living man I'll love again,
+  Since that my lovely knight is slain."
+               --_Lament of the Border Widow._
+
+
+Back once more at the hacienda, Driscoll recovered his coat still
+hanging over the dungeon window. Lopez would have called it insolence,
+had he been there instead of scouring the country toward Mexico.
+Jacqueline and Berthe settled themselves in the traveling coach left for
+their comfort by Maximilian. Driscoll's effects, including his gray
+cape-coat and the bundle he had carried behind his saddle, were found in
+his room at the House. Jacqueline took them into the carriage with her,
+along with that absurd little valise that she had brought from the ship
+for an hour's jaunt on shore. Driscoll rode with Ney and the Austrians,
+and was once again headed toward the capital, still sixty fair Mexican
+leagues southward.
+
+For six days it was an uneventful journey, seemingly. By day there were
+sierras, and valleys, and wayside crosses marking violent deaths. By
+night they accepted either ranchero hospitality or put up at some
+village meson. But within himself, adventures were continuous and
+varying for the Storm Centre. He could not account for the strange,
+curious elation that possessed him, especially when Jacqueline would
+take Ney's horse and ride at his side, perhaps for an hour, when the sun
+was not too hot. Driscoll never knew how long these occasions lasted. He
+did not know that they were long at all. As a matter of fact, he had
+ceased using ordinary standards of measurement. The universe, and sordid
+accessories such as time, radiated entirely about one little velvet
+patch near a dimple satellite.
+
+There came to be long silences between them as they rode, either boy or
+girl content to have it so, and neither the least bit lonesome. And they
+talked too, naturally, though this was not so significant. She would
+slyly provoke him. To her mind, there was never anyone quite so
+satisfying at a quarrel. She would pause in delighted expectancy to see
+his eyes grow big when she thrust, and then to see his mouth twitch at
+the corners as he caught her blade on his own keen wit. She had
+forgotten that he was rustic, except for the added zest it gave. Nor was
+there a false note in him, so happily and totally unconscious was he of
+self. And as for a certain gaucherie, that was the spice to his whole
+manner.
+
+They talked of many things; rather, she made him talk. She learned that
+his name was John, as hers was Jeanne, and she wanted to know why the
+horse was Demijohn.
+
+"Because, Miss Jack-leen," he answered, "he's my other half, and
+sometimes the better one, too." He remembered that once, when he had
+drooped limp over the saddle, the buckskin had carried him out of the
+fighting to the rear. "You see," he added, "we were both colts when our
+little shindy up there broke loose."
+
+"And you both went? Ah, Monsieur the Patriot, you did go, you did
+affront the tyrant? Yes!" She had the explorer's eagerness. Perhaps she
+might discover in him her own especial demon of self-introspection.
+
+"N-o," he replied, "I reckon we went mostly for the fun of the thing."
+
+"Fi donc!" she cried. "But wait till you are old. Oh yes, we have them
+too, those blessed, over-petted veterans of the Grande Armee. They are
+in the Hotel des Invalides, with medals to diagnose their glory. Oh, la,
+la, but there's a pleasant fashion! The people, the politicians, they
+forget the hot blood that fought simply because there were pretty blows
+to strike. They see only the gray hairs. 'Honneur aux patriotes!' You
+wait, monsieur. You, too, will be made into the hero, ex post facto, and
+you will believe it yourself. Yes, with the wolves, one learns to howl."
+
+"N-o," said the young Confederate, "we--we got licked."
+
+They talked--he rather--of Missouri. He was not reluctant to have
+stirred the memories of his home, not with one who could listen as she
+did. In his heart settled a warmth that was good, and the glow of it
+shone on his face. He became aware that the gray eyes were upon him,
+taking conscious note of his hair, his mouth, his chin, as though she
+were really seeing him for the first time. What made a girl do that way?
+He felt queerly, it being thus brought to him that he had awakened
+interest in a woman, but the tribute she paid him was ennobling, and a
+deep thankfulness, though to whom or for what he had not the least idea,
+made more kindly and good the cheery warmth around his heart. The gray
+eyes had never sparkled on him in coquetry as they sometimes did on
+other men, and now they were grave and sweet. It was a phase of
+Jacqueline that only her maid had known.
+
+The marquise gathered that Missour-_i_, as she called it, was an
+exceedingly strange and fascinating region. She learned that it was a
+state, like a department in France, like her own Bourbonnais for
+instance. But there the comparison ended. The rest was all startling
+versatility. For the inhabitants had not only taken both sides during
+the Civil War, but through their governor had proclaimed themselves an
+independent republic into the bargain. They must be unusual citizens,
+those Missourians.
+
+But they were strangest because they did not seem to be actors. They did
+not refine living into a cult, with every pleasure and pain classified
+and weighed out and valued. No, they actually lived. It was hard to
+realize this, but in the end she did, and with ever increasing wonder,
+with also a beginning of envy and hunger. But there was still another
+thing even more indefinable. It centered in the word "home," which she
+knew neither in French nor Spanish, but which she came to know now, as
+its meaning grew upon her. It was more than a "maison" or a "casa," or a
+"chez nous." It was a manner of temple. And the high priest there was a
+grim lord. How very grim, indeed! There was no compromise, no blinking,
+no midway gilded dais between the marriage altar and the basest filth.
+As grim, this was, as that original Puritanism which has become a
+synonym of American backbone. Grim, yes; but the woman there, where the
+high priest blinked not, was a divinity. She was a divinity in the
+tenderest and most devoted sense of the word. And the Puritanism was
+purity enshrined, as a simple matter of course. The longing, if only to
+know more of this odd country, rose in her mysteriously, and stronger
+and stronger.
+
+When on one occasion she went back to the coach, she found that Berthe
+also was enjoying the change to horseback. Jacqueline was glad of it.
+Now she could be alone, and she believed that she wanted to think. But
+she could not pin down what she wanted to think about; because, no
+doubt, there was so very much. Instead, she looked vacantly at the Storm
+Centre's cartridge belt and pistols on the seat in front of her. They
+were grim, too, these playthings of a boy.
+
+Dupin had left the weapons with Ney, back at the hacienda, and Ney had
+turned them over to Jacqueline as to the real strategic chief of the
+expedition. And Jacqueline had kept them, perhaps to look at, perhaps
+because of a whim that a prisoner should not be armed. She liked to hear
+Driscoll mourn for them, not knowing where they were, and she held back
+the surprise as one lingers before an anticipated pleasure. She picked
+up the great, black revolvers with a woman's fascinated respect for the
+harsh, eternal male of her species, who is primeval and barbaric yet,
+and ever will be, to hold his mate his very own. Her touch was gingerly,
+but there was a caress in her fingers on the ugly things.
+
+She lifted the belt. How heavy of metal it was! Idly, she thought she
+would count the leaden missiles. When finally she laid the belt aside, a
+bullet remained in her lap. It had fallen there out of its shell.
+Starting to fit the bullet in again, she suddenly dropped both bullet
+and cartridge. Her hands trembled. This particular shell contained no
+powder. But it contained a tightly rolled slip of oiled paper. The
+cartridge was a dummy, a wee strong box for some vital document.
+
+It was not for scruples against looking that she paused. On the
+contrary, it was that she must look, absolutely, in sacred, patriotic
+duty bound, that finally decided--nay, compelled her to look. Still she
+hesitated before drawing out the paper. She dreaded what it might tell
+her. Concealed thus, and revealed only by a hazard, the paper held, she
+felt certain, the secret and the significance of the American's errand
+to Mexico. And she did not want to know. She reviled bitterly the cruel
+chance that had thrust it on her.
+
+She read. The paper was a communication addressed to the Emperor
+Maximilian by the Confederate generals of the Trans-Mississippi
+department. Foreseeing Lee's surrender, they had gathered from
+Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, at a place in the latter state named
+Marshall, and there they had decided that they would not surrender. They
+would seek homes and a country elsewhere, swords in hand. At this
+meeting, which had been inspired by Gen. Joe Shelby, they had deposed
+the cautious general commanding, Kirby Smith, and they had put in his
+stead Simon Bolivar Buckner. The Trans-Mississippi department numbered
+fifty thousand men. There would also be fugitives from Lee's and
+Johnson's corps, besides Jefferson Davis in person, should he contrive
+to pass the Federal lines. Many thousands of veterans would shortly be
+marching across the Rio Grande. In Texas, at the Confederate arsenals
+and depositories, they would seize what they needed: guns, ammunition,
+horses, provisions, money. In Mexico they would become citizens, and
+they would defend their new homes against outlawry, rebellion, or
+invasion. The signatory generals prayed the Emperor Maximilian to
+consider this, and "to do it quick."
+
+Jacqueline put the letter back in the cartridge, and everything looked
+as before. But no genii, once out, can ever quite be bottled up again.
+That stray bullet had wounded her to the heart.
+
+"As bad as fifty thousand!" she cried half aloud. "And they will become
+citizens, too--Mon Dieu, _that_ is a nation!"
+
+With them Maximilian would have a people behind him, and his throne
+would be as a rock. He could, and most certainly would, disdain the
+French army of occupation with its thirty thousand bayonets. The French
+might go back home. He would speed them cheerfully, and henceforth be
+Emperor in fact.
+
+"But our treasure and our dead," sighed Jacqueline bitterly, "we cannot
+take _them_ back. No, nor our hopes, though they weigh little
+enough now, for that matter. Oh dear, and _I_ am one of those
+hopes!--Help me Heaven, else I shall hate my own country. Oh, I must be
+true!--Now, _why_ couldn't those Missourians have sent--someone
+else?"
+
+That evening she held a pen, but it would not move, not while her
+thoughts were upon it. So, by sheer will, she nerved herself not to
+think, and wrote mechanically. She wrote a message to Lopez, and another
+to Dupin, and yet a third. The third brought the tears long before it
+was finished. An Austrian took the first two, and rode all that night.
+She kept the other one herself.
+
+This was the fifth day of their journey since leaving Murguia's
+hacienda. They had taken pains to keep behind Lopez. Their pursuer,
+ahead of them, had not made twenty miles the first day, for he had
+delayed in order to search here and there. But the second day, he had
+evidently accepted failure, and hastened on to overtake the Emperor. The
+Emperor himself, after traveling constantly for a night and a day, had
+rested a night and half a day to reflect on his late energy, and
+thereafter he was proceeding as roadside ovations would permit.
+Accordingly on this, the fifth night, Lopez was close behind the
+Emperor, and both were within a day of the capital, and less than a day
+ahead of Driscoll, Jacqueline and Ney.
+
+All the next day Jacqueline kept to her coach. She was cross or
+nervously excited or melancholy, and by erratic turns in every mood that
+was hopelessly downcast, until her maid became well nigh frantic. At
+first Ney would hover near in helpless concern, but she ordered him away
+angrily. However, the storm broke at last when Driscoll reined in and
+waited at the roadside. She could see him through the little front pane
+of glass as the carriage drew nearer, and she watched with a fierce
+hunger in her eyes. All the time she stirred in greater agitation, and
+her breath came more and more quickly. At the very last moment, when a
+second later he might have seen her, she sprang to the window, looked
+once again, then in a fury snatched at the shade and jerked it down.
+Driscoll paused uncertain, but wheeled and galloped back to the head of
+the column. Berthe turned to her mistress. She was lying weakly against
+the cushions, staring at nothing and panting for air.
+
+Toward dusk they reached Tuxtla, a little pueblo on the highroad set mid
+maguey farms that made the rolling hill slopes of Anahuac look like a
+giant's cabbage patch. In the distance, under two snow-capped peaks
+beyond, the mosaic domes and sandstone towers and painted walls of the
+capital glittered in the setting sun like some picture of an Arabian
+city vaguely known to memory. The travelers were not a dozen miles from
+their destination, but Berthe announced that madame her mistress would
+rest at Tuxtla for the night.
+
+The Austrians were quartered in the village, and Ney and Driscoll found
+accommodations for the two girls and themselves farther down the road,
+at the house of a maguey grower whom they persuaded to vacate. While it
+was still light Driscoll amused himself strolling alone between the rows
+of the great century plants. Under their leaves, curving high above his
+head, he watched peons with gourds suck out the honey water from the
+onion-like bulbs into goatskin bags. After a time he wandered through
+the hacendado's primitive distillery and on back to the house, with a
+feeling for supper.
+
+As he entered, he heard the clanking of a sabre in the dark room. He
+thought nothing of it, but almost at once something cut through the air
+and a noose fell over him. He swung round, but the rope jerked tight
+about his knees, and he lurched and swayed as an oak before the axe. He
+struck with his fist and had a groan for reward, but a second lariat
+circled his shoulders and bound his arms to his body. As he went down
+under the weight of men, the shutters were thrown open, and he looked up
+into the red-lidded eyes of Colonel Lopez. A troop of cavalry was
+passing on the road outside, and he caught the sound of wheels
+departing.
+
+"You hear?" said Lopez. "The marquesa is going to the City, having
+decided not to wait for you. But she leaves a note, pour prendre conge,
+eh? You will perhaps have time to read it before the shooting."
+
+Once more Driscoll found himself in an adobe with a sputtering candle
+for company. But he also had her note. It was the third of the messages
+which she had written the night before.
+
+"Monsieur," it began, "I cannot let you die without telling you that it
+was I who betrayed----"
+
+He jumped to his feet. "Oh--the pythoness!" he breathed fervently.
+
+"----who betrayed you," the letter read. "That you know this, monsieur,
+that your last thought shall be a curse at me, such will be my
+punishment. It is a self inflicted one, because you need not have known
+what I have done. The telling of this to you is my scourge, but it is
+not penitence. Worse and more unbearable is my sorrow that the penitence
+will never come, that I can feel no remorse, no more than if some
+inevitable thing, like the fever, had taken you. I would always do again
+what I have just done; as pitiless as I must be for you, Fate is for me.
+Your life, monsieur, is but added to the hundreds already snuffed out in
+this country for France's sake. Those hundreds are my countrymen, and
+you, if you lived till to-morrow, would make _their_ offering
+useless. I have tried to save you, monsieur, but you would not permit.
+You would not return to your own country, and--there was no other way.
+But do not think there will come emissaries in your place. Do not
+believe that I would so send you to death needlessly. There will be no
+emissaries after you. Your Confederates shall know that Maximilian's
+court martial executed you, and is it that your compatriotes will then
+desire to help Maximilian? Believe--only believe, monsieur--that it is a
+cruel duty not permitting that I shall listen to my heart. If you but
+knew, if you but knew--and you shall know. Monsieur Driscoll--oh, mon
+chevalier, it is that I love you. There, know then, dear heart cheri,
+the enormity of my sacrifice. Know the necessity of it. Know that I envy
+you, for you are going, and I must stay, all alone, without you. Mon
+bien aime, _without you_, through all my long life!"
+
+She had signed it simply, "Jacqueline."
+
+Again Driscoll was on his feet. He paced up and down the room. "There's
+one thing," he muttered, "and that is, there's nothing between her and
+Maximilian, not when she's keeping help from him." And on he paced, his
+fists opening and clenching. Suddenly he came to a dead halt.
+
+"By God," he cried, "I'm not going to be shot, no sir, not now, not
+after--not after this letter!"
+
+Here was neither boy nor warrior. It was very much in the way of a
+lover.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+BERTHE
+
+
+  "Il y a deux etres en nous: l'acteur et le spectateur."
+                                             --_Sienkiewicz._
+
+
+The same evening, though two hours later, a public hack entered an
+outlying quarter of the City of Mexico called San Cosme, and drew up
+before a white mansion with beautiful gardens. A young girl with soft
+brown hair and gentle eyes got out, ran to the door, and brought down
+the ponderous knocker so terrifically that it abashed her, for all her
+present agitation. To the flunkey, who noted the public hack and was
+reproachful, she said, "I must see His Excellency. Here, I have written
+my name on Mademoiselle d'Aumerle's card. I am her maid. Say to Monsieur
+le Marechal that he will regret it, if I do not see him at once. Quick
+now, you!"
+
+If possessed of guile, Berthe could not have done better. With
+Jacqueline's card, used only because it had a blank side, her admittance
+was certain and immediate.
+
+She passed the lackey into a luxurious apartment, Marshal Bazaine's
+private cabinet. At one end there was a Japanese screen with a lamp
+behind, and at intervals came the sound of someone turning the leaves of
+a book. But Berthe thought solely of her errand. The marshal, thick
+necked, heavy cheeked and stocky, was standing, waiting for her.
+
+"So," he exclaimed, "milady is arrived, eh, and you bring me her
+commands?"
+
+"No, Your Excellency, my mistress does not know that I am here. When she
+learns, she will dismiss me. I----"
+
+The marshal of France grew cold. "It was a decoy then, the card you
+used?" he interrupted. "And was that one also, young woman, when you
+threatened that I should regret----"
+
+"You will indeed regret, monsieur, if you do not let me speak. There's a
+mistake to correct if--if it's not too late."
+
+The chief of the Army of Occupation shrugged his shoulders until the
+back of his neck folded over itself. He had been correcting mistakes
+ever since Maximilian's landing. But he was a child of the people
+himself, and the distress in her eyes made him patient. "Well, what is
+it?" he asked.
+
+"It is an American. They will shoot him, monsieur!"
+
+"Ah, one who interests the young person now before me, eh?"
+
+"And I want you to stop them, monsieur! I want----"
+
+"Child, child, whom am I to stop?"
+
+"Colonel Lopez, monsieur. The American escaped once, but mademoiselle
+gave him up again. He'd saved mademoiselle's life, too. And mine."
+
+The veteran soldier rubbed his finger tips on his bald, bullet-like
+head. "He saves her, and she gives him to Lopez. He must be an important
+species of American!"
+
+"Yes, yes, monsieur."
+
+"There, don't worry. His Majesty will pardon your friend to-morrow--if,"
+he added to himself, "only from habit."
+
+"But Lopez will shoot him before the Emperor knows."
+
+The marshal had shrewd eyes, and now they opened wide. "Getting more
+important, our American!" he grumbled uneasily. "Berthe, did your
+mistress know that Lopez would shoot him before he could be pardoned?"
+
+"Oh yes, monsieur."
+
+[Illustration: "BERTHE"
+"... Brought down the ponderous knocker so terrifically that
+it abashed her, for all her present agitation"]
+
+"Name of a name, what does she want him killed for? Why is this drole
+of a Lopez in such a hurry?--See here, child, you know something more.
+What did you mean by my regretting----"
+
+"Because, because everybody seemed to think that the poor brave American
+had come with an offer of aid for Maximilian, and as you need more
+troops, I thought----"
+
+"Who, in all mercy, is this American?"
+
+"A Confederate officer, monsieur."
+
+Not one man, but two, paced the floor because of Jacqueline that
+evening. The second was the marshal of France, and he went at it now, on
+hearing of the first man. "A Confederate officer?" There were twin
+creases over his straight nose, furrows of vexed and intense thinking.
+The lone Southerner was linked intimately in his reflections with the
+parliament of a great nation. The people of France had never warmed to
+the Mexican dream, and the Chambers already were clamoring for the
+return of the troops. And now, for every Confederate enlisted, a
+pantalon rouge could be sent back home. But why--name of a name--should
+Jacqueline try to prevent?
+
+"Did she," he asked, but not very hopefully, "did she have any cause to
+dislike this American?"
+
+"Oh, monsieur!" The cry was pained surprise. That her mistress could or
+would pay a grudge! "On the contrary," she protested vehemently, "I have
+never seen her so moved, never, and if _you_ had seen her,
+monsieur, as we left Tuxtla! I thought she must surely lose her mind.
+One cannot imagine her terror. She cried to the driver, to the
+outriders, to lash the mules, harder, faster, till it's a miracle we did
+not crash over a cliff. And all the time she would look back, and at
+every sound she would clap her hands over her ears and cry out to know
+if that was shooting. And then she would pound at the window to them to
+go faster. She wanted to get out of hearing, monsieur. It was only when
+we were really here in the City that she quieted, but that was worse.
+She lay and moaned. I cried, I could not help it, hearing her. She would
+mutter things, too. 'France, France!' she said once, and it made me
+shudder. One almost thought she had a dagger in her hand----"
+
+"Never mind, what else did she say?"
+
+"She said, 'Oh, I hate thee, my country!' but she wasn't in her mind, oh
+no, monsieur. Then she grew very still, and that frightened me more yet.
+Once I even thought she was dead, and I put my arm about her. But her
+heart was beating, and her eyes were open, wide open and dry. I could
+see, for we were passing between the Paseo lights. I laid her head on my
+breast, and after a while I heard her lips move. 'God bless him!
+God--Oh, I hope there _is_ a God, just for this, to bless him, and
+keep him!'"
+
+"H'm'm," said the marshal, and went back and forth again, more perplexed
+than ever.
+
+Berthe watched him anxiously, jealous of each moment lost. Once she
+started to speak, but his gesture for silence was such that she did not
+dare a second time. There was no other sound in the room except the
+tramp, tramp on the soft carpet. Even the occasional turning of a leaf
+behind the screen had ceased. Bazaine was groping cautiously in the
+mystery. A state reason, and no personal one, had compelled Jacqueline;
+that much was certain. Direct from the Tuileries, she was weighted under
+some grievous responsibility, and this night, back there at Tuxtla, she
+had been true to it. And whatever it was, it exacted imperatively that
+no Confederate aid should reach Maximilian. Such was Napoleon's wish,
+however contradictory to official instructions. But the marshal was
+sufficiently a disciple of the little Napoleonic statecraft to beware of
+meddling. He fretted under methods whereby the whisper of the Sphinx
+reached him through private and unofficial agents, but it was a great
+deal to catch the Sphinx's whisper at all. Besides, he owed his
+elevation to this enigma of Europe, and he meant to be loyal.
+
+"Berthe," he said at last, "there's just one man who can interfere where
+Mademoiselle d'Aumerle disposes, but he is rather far away. I mean the
+Emperor of France."
+
+The little Bretonne looked, comprehended, and burst into tears. "My dear
+mistress!" she sobbed.
+
+There was the sound of a book dropped on a table, and the screen was
+brushed aside.
+
+"Perhaps," came a softly ironical voice, "a woman might so much as veto
+our mighty Jacqueline. At any rate, suppose we try it, Don Pancho."
+
+Bazaine had forgotten his wife, his bride, who, to be near him, often
+retired behind the screen when he was busy with others. Hers was the
+loving ambition of a Lady Macbeth, in that a husband's secret was never
+one for her.
+
+"Step into this little room," she said to Berthe, opening a door. "It
+will not take long," she added, an assured light in her dark Spanish
+eyes.
+
+"You will save him, madame? You----"
+
+"Against all the marshals of France, child. Go, wait in there."
+
+The marshal of France present smiled on his bride indulgently,
+admiringly, as she closed the door and faced him.
+
+She was less than half his age, the girl wife of a gray-haired veteran,
+and as his wife she was second lady of the land. A Mexican aristocrat,
+small and slender, of a subtle, winsome beauty, with the prettiest mouth
+and the most pyramidal of crinolines, she had reminded Bazaine of his
+first wife, and he had courted her. At the wedding Maximilian had stood
+padrino for the groom, and Charlotte madrina for the bride. The imperial
+gift to groom and bride was Buena Vista, as the white mansion and
+gardens in San Cosme were called. Naturally, then, Madame la Marechale
+approved of Napoleon's _official_ instructions, which directed that
+Monsieur le Marechal was to establish the Mexican empire solidly and for
+all time.
+
+Now her manner of calling the marshal Pancho was considerable of an
+argument, especially when, archly formal, she made it Don Pancho. What
+if this Confederate aid were to go to the Mexican rebels, as it surely
+would if the emissary at Tuxtla were shot? And, without either French or
+Confederates, the Empire would fall, the rebels would win; and then, she
+wanted to know, what would become of their beautiful home, of their high
+position? Moreover, the United States was threatening to drive the
+French from Mexico, and Madame la Marechale believed it a very good
+thing for the French to have at their side some of the very men who had
+held those Yankees back for four long years.
+
+Bazaine wavered. Then he smiled. This Mexican bride of his was Mexican
+all the time; and French, sometimes not at all. She had not the big
+trust in the pantalons rouges when it came to those Yankees.
+
+"But, Pancho mio," she went on softly, "now for the real reason, the one
+that holds you back. It is your Emperor Napoleon, verdad? You think that
+he does not want this offer to reach Maximilian. Bien, have you had any
+intimation of what he wants? Any orders? Of course you haven't. Then
+save this American. Look at me--Don Pancho, I say-if----"
+
+"Sapristi, call the girl in! No, first I must have----"
+
+When madame could free herself from what he must have, she opened the
+door and triumphantly called to Jacqueline's maid.
+
+A half-hour later, in one of the marshal's own carriages, Berthe
+returned to the castle of Chapultepec. At once she hastened to her
+mistress's apartments, and confessed what she had done. Still in the
+blue flowered calico, with the dust of their frantic ride still on her,
+Jacqueline was seated before a little desk. Her head was buried in her
+arms, and her loosened hair fell like a shower of copper over her
+shoulders. She did not move as Berthe entered, nor give any sign. But
+when in a word the story was told, she got to her feet and stared
+blankly at the girl. Berthe expected dismissal, but the next instant two
+arms were about her, and lips were pressed to hers, and hot tears, not
+her own, wetted her cheek.
+
+"Berthe, you little addle-pated goose! You--oh you little ninny, you,
+you----" Her phrases were broken by laughter, then by an uncontrollable
+peal that was near a shriek, "Little, little fool, dost thou know, thou
+hast this night lost to France fifteen thousand leagues of empire?
+Thou--thou----" Yet kisses were again the portion of the thief of
+fifteen thousand leagues.
+
+"But do you think they will be in time, Berthe? Yes, yes, you've
+answered that once. And Michel leads them, you say?"
+
+"Oui, madame, Monsieur Ney was most eager to go, above all when His
+Excellency gave him Frenchmen to command. They are the cuirassiers. They
+will surely save the American monsieur."
+
+"But will they be in time? Yes, yes, I think I've asked that already."
+
+Her hysteric glee, changing to anxiety, now changed as quickly to
+something else. Her face went deathly white, the pretty jaws set hard,
+and there was the glint of resolution in the gray eyes. She seized a
+cloak and threw it about her.
+
+"Come," she said to the maid.
+
+"Madame is going----"
+
+"Yes, to _undo_ your mischief. Bazaine must send to overtake Ney,
+must command him _not_ to interfere with the execution. Bazaine
+will do this, when I see him."
+
+"But you will not find His Excellency to-night. Madame la Marechale
+ordered the carriage for them both, as I was leaving there."
+
+"Indeed? Then she knew you were coming here to me? Then she did not
+mention where they were going?"
+
+"No, madame."
+
+"Of course not. Oh, she is cunning, your Madame la Marechale!"
+
+Alas for Jacqueline! She might conquer herself, but add to herself a
+second woman against her, and she was beaten. She confessed defeat by
+throwing off the cloak.
+
+"Tuxtla is far, you think they will--will----"
+
+"Oh I think they will, madame!"
+
+"Say you _know_ they will! Say it, Berthe, say it!"
+
+"Oh, I hope so, madame. Monsieur the American is lucky."
+
+The American? Somehow the blood swept hotly into Jacqueline's cheeks.
+"Say they will _not_ save him, Berthe. Say no, no, no!" she
+commanded, and imperiously stamped her foot, but stamp as she would, her
+furious shame was there still, flaunting its glorious color. She was
+thinking of her letter, of her avowal to a doomed man. After that,
+_any_ man was under obligations to get himself shot. Only, this one
+was of a contrary fibre.
+
+In such an April mood, Jacqueline was capable of yet another caprice.
+"Berthe," she cried, even as the whim came, "one is tired after playing
+the goose, n'est-ce pas? Do you, then, rest--yes, yes, while I comb your
+hair."
+
+"Madame!" Berthe protested with what breath astonishment left her.
+
+"Do ye call me chief?" demanded the mistress. "Then, de grace, sit
+still! And why shouldn't I, parbleu? If it took our big French
+Revolution to throw me up an ancestor out of the common kettle, there
+has just now been another revolution here"--she pressed a hand against
+her breast--"to stir me back among the people again. Do you know, dear,
+that your hair is beautiful!"
+
+And so they were two girls, girl-like, passing the evening together.
+
+Of a sudden Jacqueline stopped, the braiding arrested by a most
+startling thought.
+
+"Grands dieux," she told herself slowly, for it had to be believed,
+however improbable, "until this very moment I've never once stopped to
+think of all the emotions I have been having this day. I've never once
+examined them, and such emotions--Oh, la, la, they're a collection, a
+veritable museum of creeps! And here I've hurried through that museum,
+till I've even forgotten my umbrella at the check stand!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+MIKE
+
+
+  "Quand on est aime d'une belle femme, on se tire toujours d'affaire."
+                                            --_Zoroaster, vide Voltaire_
+
+
+The Storm Centre chafed under a mad desire to verify his name, which was
+not unusual. But it was the first time he had ever craved active danger
+as an antidote for his thoughts. The sound of bars lifting came as a
+relief, and he shook off the dark mood and was himself. Before the door
+opened, he thrust her letter into the candle flame. He had kept it till
+the last minute, but now he burned it, as she knew he would.
+
+Instead of executioners, he beheld a tray, gripped by chocolate hands.
+Involuntarily he looked up to the face above the tray.
+
+"Johnny the Baptist!" he exclaimed. "Well, well, how goes it itself to
+Your Mercy this evening?"
+
+"Pues bien, senor," returned the Baptist, grinning sheepishly. "Would,
+would Y'r Mercy like another bath?" The grimace was not unamiable. It
+betokened that this time he, and not the prisoner, might have a game to
+play.
+
+"A thousand thanks," replied Driscoll, "but I'll try to make that other
+bath answer."
+
+"But senor, you wasted it."
+
+"Well, perhaps so. You see, Johnny, it was this way. I had only one bath
+coming, and on the other hand there were two things to save. Do you
+know, Johnny, I've been mortified ever since, to think how I squandered
+my one bath in saving just my life, and how I left my soul to bustle
+along for itself."
+
+The Baptist drew nearer. "But suppose, senor," he whispered, "suppose
+the need of absolution was again postponed, even now?"
+
+Driscoll's fork stopped half way to his mouth. There was no superstition
+in the affair this time. The once gullible Dragoon, moreover, was
+playing all the leads. "Of course," Driscoll agreed heartily, "I'd
+certainly like it right well," and he went on eating. But his wits were
+in a receptive state, alert for the meaning when it should come. The
+opening innuendoes exasperated him, for the guard was a clumsy agent.
+The man must needs feign a great dread of discovery, and tremble lest
+his colonel, Don Miguel Lopez, should find him out. As though supper,
+instead of a shooting squad, did not belie it all?
+
+"Still your move, Johnny," Driscoll had to remind him.
+
+In the end it was to be gathered that Don Benito Juarez, the fugitive
+Senor Presidente of the fugitive Republic, might welcome an offer of
+Confederate aid, and 'twas a pity that the condemned senor should have
+no chance to escape. But if he did escape, he might find his way to the
+Senor Presidente far off in the state of Chihuahua.
+
+So, the cards were dealt at last. Driscoll looked over his hand. He
+recognized a crooked game, a game of treachery and dark dealing; but
+even so he perceived that a trump or two had fallen to him, perhaps
+unwittingly, and he decided to "sit in for a spell."
+
+He began, with coy hesitancy, to beat his scruples around the bush,
+which was not a bad lead. Supposing he turned his offer from Maximilian
+to President Juarez, wouldn't it, well, look as though he did so to save
+his hide? Brown Johnny opened his eyes as at something unfamiliar.
+Driscoll went on. If he were shot, how was he to go to Juarez? But if
+he, uh, happened to get loose, he might just possibly be influenced to
+think of the Juarez proposal. But actually buying his way out would look
+dishonorable. "Now," he concluded abruptly, "run along, and put it that
+way to whoever sent you."
+
+The man protested, and in some genuine alarm, that he had no employers.
+
+"Oh all right," said Driscoll easily, "then you're bound to help me.
+Because if you don't, I'll sure tell Lopez what you've just been trying
+to hatch up here."
+
+The trap worked beautifully, for the guard tried hard to quake. But his
+fright was not spontaneous enough. Driscoll smiled. Now he knew the real
+player in the game.
+
+"Cheer up, Johnny," he spoke soothingly, "I'd not tell on you. But
+hadn't you better go and think it over by yourself a little?"
+
+The Baptist would hasten straight to Lopez, and Lopez, Driscoll foresaw,
+would interpret his scruples into a disguised acceptance. The
+crookedness of the game left the American no other trump, and he played
+it--against immediate death. Lopez, of course, would send him under
+guard to Juarez, but Driscoll thought he could trust that staunch old
+Roman, when once informed, to call for a new deck and an honest deal.
+
+Juan Bautista "thought it over" outside, and directly returned with an
+answer. But when he again left Driscoll, he did not bar the door behind
+him. Within ten minutes thereafter Driscoll was creeping past a sleeping
+sentinel, on between rows of maguey, toward the road. Around him hovered
+five or six shadows. They were to be his escort and take him to Juarez.
+They would join him openly a safe distance away, at a place where their
+horses waited. But as he emerged upon the road, for the moment alone, a
+voice in French challenged sharply. "Halte-la!"
+
+The shadows hesitated an instant, then showed themselves with energy.
+They sprang out and closed on their "escaped" prisoner. They handled him
+more roughly than did the Contra Guerrillas, who had first cried "Halt,"
+and who were now appearing as by magic. The blended anger and
+gratification of the shadows over the escape and recapture was
+vociferously sincere.
+
+"Take them all, mes enfants," a huge tone of command filled the
+darkness. It was Colonel Dupin. He had that moment arrived. Jacqueline's
+message had reached him in the City not an hour before. The American had
+escaped, it said; he was at Tuxtla. The Tiger, knowing nothing of Lopez
+lying in wait for the same American at the same place, had dismounted
+his men, surrounded town and farms, and was closing in, when Driscoll
+himself fell among them.
+
+The interview between Dupin and Lopez brewed stormy at first. The latter
+turned gray under his ruddy skin when Dupin walked in upon him in the
+front room of the farmhouse. But seeing that his own men were holding
+Driscoll, he nervously congratulated them upon the capture.
+
+"How did he escape this second time?" demanded the Frenchman. "It seems
+to me, mon colonel, that the question would occur to you too."
+
+Lopez was sufficiently alive to his peril. He quickly sent two Dragoons
+to the temporary guard house to investigate. Dupin curtly ordered two
+Cossacks to accompany them. Soon they brought back the sentinel who had
+been conveniently asleep when Driscoll slipped past. The sentinel rubbed
+his eyes as he faced Lopez. So far everything had passed according to
+arrangement, and he looked for a severe mock examination. But the Tiger
+had been left out of the calculations, and the Tiger forthwith
+shouldered himself into the inquisition.
+
+"Do you understand, Colonel Lopez, that your guard here was asleep? Si,
+senor, asleep! What now, mon colonel, is the little custom as to guards
+who sleep?"
+
+Lopez glared at the sentinel. It was a fine simulation of outraged
+discipline, and so life-like that when he spoke of a court martial, the
+culprit weakened. He opened his mouth. At that Lopez's stern anger
+became real. He feared the sentinel would tell all he knew.
+
+"Si senor," cried Lopez, "we don't have to be taught, we Mexicans. We
+shoot them. Here, six of you, out with him! Quick, before he can whine!"
+
+"Go with them," added Dupin quietly to six of his Cossacks.
+
+The sentinel was dragged out. His cries, whether for mercy or not, were
+smothered first by a sabre belt, and then for all time by musketry. The
+Cossacks returned and assured their chief that the execution was bona
+fide. This allayed Dupin's suspicions.
+
+"Permit me to suggest, Colonel Lopez," he said courteously, "that you
+likewise honor our friend the American. I came from the City to do it
+myself, but it is a pleasure to give way before your superior
+vigilance."
+
+It had already occurred to Lopez that Driscoll also might talk. "You are
+very amiable, Senor Dupin," he replied. "My court martial found him
+guilty, and as a matter of fact, he would have paid the penalty by now
+had Your Mercy not arrived. Between us, Colonel Dupin, he will hardly
+escape a third time."
+
+At his command six of the crack Dragoons stood forth. They were brown,
+and Mexicans. Lopez bowed to Dupin, who called forth as many Contras.
+The Contras were of variously hued races, but they were all the Tiger's
+whelps. The file of Dragoons was jaunty crimson, the other corroded red.
+Driscoll fell in meekly between them.
+
+"Sacred name of a dog, you are honored, senor!" Dupin exclaimed
+reprovingly. It angered him when a victim quailed. The present one ought
+to appreciate, too, that he was answering for two besides himself, for
+Murguia and Rodrigo, whose escape had wrenched the old warrior's bowels.
+
+The Storm Centre glanced at the picked hussars, at the famously infamous
+Cossacks, and assented modestly. So plain in gray, he did indeed look
+colorless among them. The Contra at his elbow was an American, whose
+brutish, swaggering scowl meant the world to know what a bad man he was.
+The type gives the decent citizen a mad desire to be bad himself just
+once, only long enough to prove the tough a contemptible sham.
+Driscoll's neighbor leered ferociously, that the prisoner flanked by
+sabres and muskets might respect him and be cowed. Driscoll kept him in
+mind, and in the tail of his eye.
+
+There was one anxiety for the Storm Centre. If they should bind him! But
+they had not, he was so docile. And as they marched out the door, he
+exulted, and could hardly wait. Wouldn't it be a lovely row, though!
+Just one good, last good time! He did not feel hard toward them, not
+when they had left off the ropes. He felt that he was to have value
+received, and all the while he figured out his desperate campaign.
+
+As they passed outside beyond the window's sphere of light, docility
+changed to whirlwind. A blow with his left, a jerk with his right, and
+he had the tough's carbine. He swung it between the two files, a grazing
+circle. He got blows in return, but not a man fired. That was because of
+the darkness, and a first shot would inspire a wild, general fusillade,
+endangering them all. As it was, the blows were impartial, except one,
+which came down with pointed favoritism on the tough's cranium. After
+that Driscoll helped one side or another, and when they were nicely
+mixed, he ran. He got as far as the road, but to find a troop of cavalry
+charging down upon him. Changing ends with the carbine, he fired from
+the waist at the leader of the new arrivals. This leader dropped his
+sabre, plunged heavily, and was dragged by the stirrup. Driscoll had not
+the time to change back to club musket, he used the barrel as such. But
+being for the instant alone, he was marked out, and Cossacks and
+Dragoons threw themselves upon him and brought him down.
+
+"It _was_ lovely," he muttered under the heap.
+
+They brought him back to the house, swathed in a mesh of lariats. Lopez
+awaited them, frothing oaths. Dupin was there too, and he looked an
+epicure's satisfaction as they stood his victim against the wall. He did
+not regret the incident, since it had turned porridge into so choice a
+morsel.
+
+"'Tis you, monsieur," he confessed with rugged grace, "who have honored
+us."
+
+"Oh, your grandmother!" said Driscoll.
+
+"Well, be patient. It will be all over in a minute more."
+
+The Tiger was, in fact, ordering the shooting squad, when through the
+open door glittering helmets and excited French and clanking sabres
+flooded the room. It was still another wondrous uniform for Driscoll,
+this of the cuirassiers, with so much of brass, and a queue of horse's
+hair, and loose pantaloons that merged into gigantic black boots. In
+they strode, an agitated host of bristling moustaches, while outside was
+the restless sound of many hard breathed horses. The cuirassiers bore
+their wounded leader, and laid him on the iron bed in the room. But the
+man struggled to his feet. He called loudly for "Monsieur le Colonel,"
+and only by force, though gentle, could they hold him quiet.
+
+"What is it?" responded both Dupin and Lopez.
+
+"I, I mean the American Colonel. He--he----"
+
+"Hello, Mike!" cried Driscoll.
+
+He could not see for the others, nor move, but he recognized the voice
+of Michel Ney. He knew, too, that Michel must be the cavalry leader he
+had just shot. "Darn it, Mike!" he exclaimed, "I'm sorry! But weren't
+there enough of 'em without you?"
+
+"Monsieur Ney," the Tiger interrupted, "let your men tend you here, and
+we will be back at once to see what can be done for your hurt. But just
+now----"
+
+He signed to Lopez, and Cossacks and Dragoons caught up the prisoner and
+started for the door.
+
+"Wait!" Ney moaned feebly.
+
+"Tonnerre, mon prince, your wound must be paid for, first. Hurry there,
+Messieurs les Imbeciles!"
+
+"Wait!" Ney gasped. He half raised himself, but sank back with closing
+eyes. He made a gesture to his breast. All halted as in the presence of
+death.
+
+"Help him, you there!" cried Driscoll. "Open his coat!"
+
+The cuirassiers, eager, awkward nurses, fluttered round the bed, and
+tore away the sky-blue jacket, thinking to find the wound beneath.
+Instead, they drew out a paper. One of them read the address on it.
+
+"Al Senor Coronel Don Miguel Lopez."
+
+Lopez broke the seal, frowned, and put the message in his pocket.
+"Nothing--oh, nothing important," he volunteered. "Now, once for all,
+let us finish our work."
+
+"Wait!" a faint whisper came from the bed.
+
+"He says to wait," doggedly repeated a cuirassier.
+
+"Yes, wait," Driscoll pleaded suddenly. "Just a minute, before I go,
+before we both go, perhaps,"--he thought in a flash that it might be a
+last word from Jacqueline--"perhaps, gentlemen, he, he has something to
+tell me."
+
+But Ney's head, moving weakly on the pillow, was a negative.
+
+The prisoner's voice grew firm again.
+
+"Then hurry up!" he ordered in the old querulous drawl. "Don't you know
+I'm in a hurry?"
+
+Ney opened his eyes as he heard the shuffling of feet. Men were carrying
+out the prisoner. With feeble anger he brushed aside the hand of a
+cuirassier who was trying to staunch the blood at his groin.
+
+"I--I----" His lips barely moved.
+
+The cuirassier sprang to his feet. He looked to his fellows, spoke to
+them. Puzzled, mystified, they rushed to the door and barred the way.
+
+"We don't know why we came," stammered one, "and he can't speak. But his
+signs are enough for us. It's, it's----"
+
+"It's something to do with the American," declared a second cuirassier.
+
+Dupin pounded back his half unsheathed blade. Brusquely he wheeled and
+faced the colonel of Dragoons. "Lopez," he roared, "what was that
+message?"
+
+"N-nothing, mi coronel, absolutely."
+
+"If it was from Maximilian, I'd know it to be a pardon, and not blame
+you. But I recognized the marshal's seal, and that's different."
+
+Lopez blanched, yet insisted again that the message was nothing.
+"Besides, senor," he added, "I do not take orders from His Excellency,
+the marshal."
+
+"But _I_ do," thundered Dupin. "And I see them obeyed too. Oh, you
+can protest to your Emperor afterwards, my royal guardsman, if you want
+to, but a marshal of France is the law when I am near."
+
+Grunting contemptuously, Dupin turned to the bedside. The cuirassiers
+had gathered cobwebs from the rafters, and were dressing the wound.
+Michel tossed and groaned in the beginning of delirium. Dupin muttered
+with vexation, but he took hold of the lad's wrist, and firmly closed
+his hand over it.
+
+"Listen," he said, very distinctly, putting into his tones every timbre
+of quiet, compelling will. "Listen, hear me!"
+
+Slowly the feverish man grew still.
+
+"Hear me," said Dupin. "There are two questions--two, only two. You are
+to answer them.--You will shake your head, 'Yes,' or 'No'--do you hear
+me?"
+
+The Chasseur's eyes opened wide, and they were calm.
+
+"Good, that's the brave gentleman! Now then, steady. The first question:
+Shall we shoot this American?"
+
+Slowly, painfully, the head rocked on the pillow, from one side to the
+other.
+
+"It's 'No'!" cried a score of men.
+
+"Silence!" roared the Tiger. "Now, the second question: Does this order
+come from Marshal Bazaine?"
+
+Michel's chin sank to his breast. He groaned, he could not lift it
+again.
+
+"Yes, thank----" Ney himself, his voice!
+
+Dupin swung round. "Colonel Lopez," he ordered savagely, "you will turn
+your prisoner over to Sergeant Ney, at once, sir! Open your mouth, you
+dog, and every Dragooning dandy of a Mexican among you----"
+
+The Tiger's pistols were drawn. His whelps looked hopeful. The
+cuirassiers bristled in sympathy.
+
+Cracking his finger nails, fawning to the marrow, Lopez agreed.
+
+"Unbind the prisoner," ordered Dupin.
+
+"Thank God!" came faintly from the bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+THE WHISPER OF THE SPHINX
+
+
+  "La politique, premiere des sciences inexactes."
+                                  --_Emile Augier._
+
+
+Jacqueline had divined in Bazaine another obstacle to her mission. And
+yet it seemed preposterous that he should not be her staunchest ally,
+since Napoleon had found a marshal's baton for him in his knapsack, just
+as he had transformed his own policeman's club into a sceptre.
+Nevertheless Jacqueline had her doubts, and they were homage to her sex.
+In other words, she returned to Mexico to find that His Excellency had
+married again.
+
+The very day after her arrival she called to see her dear friend, now
+Madame la Marechale. The two women were hardly more than girls, but who
+shall fathom the depth of their guile? They kissed each other
+affectionately on the cheek, and while the marshal was in the other
+room, reading the packet Jacqueline had brought him from Napoleon, they
+expressed earnestly their joy at meeting again.
+
+When Bazaine returned, madame rose to leave them to their "stupid state
+affairs." The marshal smiled, knowing how ravenous was his bride for the
+same stupid affairs of state, but Jacqueline agreed that indeed they
+were wearisome. Of course she might tell His Excellency much about
+Paris, but as to politics--and her little shrug bespoke a Sahara of
+ignorance.
+
+In the packet delivered by Jacqueline, the Sphinx had by no means turned
+oracle, and Bazaine wished to know what his crafty master would have
+said between the lines. But the first topic of their conference was
+Driscoll.
+
+"Your prisoner is incommunicado then?" said she.
+
+"Have no fears, he is comfortable, here in this very house?"
+
+"He has sent no word to Maximilian of his arrival?"
+
+"Not as yet, mademoiselle."
+
+"And why not, pray?"
+
+"Because I anticipated the honor of seeing you before permitting him so
+much. I must know the campaign better. A plain soldier is dense at
+guessing, mademoiselle, while you--you have talked with Napoleon.
+If----"
+
+"Oh, don't be tedious. You alone hold the knight that means royalty
+triumphant or checkmated, and you know that you do."
+
+"But you who are inspired, tell me how I shall play."
+
+"You forget that I left this man to be shot?"
+
+"Then I am to destroy him?"
+
+Jacqueline shuddered. "That was my only way, but you, monsieur, you can
+lift him off the board entirely."
+
+Bazaine rose from his chair and stood before her. "I am no poet," he
+said, "and these flowers of speech hide the trenches. My American means
+that I may have thousands more like him, and he is a good one to be
+multiplied even tenfold. Mademoiselle, _what_ am I to understand?"
+
+"Does Napoleon's letter satisfy none of your doubts?"
+
+Without a word he handed her the packet. It was from Napoleon's minister
+of finance, and it exuded woe. The French loans were exhausted by
+Maximilian's luxury and mismanagement, and therefore Bazaine was
+instructed not to advance a cent further. He was, moreover, to take
+charge of the Mexican ports, and administer the customs. Here, then, was
+the annihilation of Maximilian's sway. Here was the whispering of the
+Sphinx. France herself would take over the Empire.
+
+"Hardly," returned the marshal, "but we will frighten His Majesty into
+bettering his finances," and he handed her a confidential missive that
+had accompanied the other. Bazaine was therein authorized, when the
+security of the Mexican Empire absolutely demanded it, to advance ten
+millions of francs.
+
+Jacqueline sank back disheartened. Not even Napoleon would help her. The
+Sphinx had not the courage of his own designs, and she contemptuously
+flung him out of her way. She would strive alone, and against him,
+Napoleon, among the rest. First of all, there was his captain general,
+the man before her.
+
+"Monsieur le Marechal," she began, as impersonally as though quoting a
+dry paragraph of history, "there is a party among the Mexicans who fear
+the republicans and what the Republic would do. Yet their hope for the
+Empire is gone, and they want no more of it. These, monsieur, are the
+moderate liberals, and strange to say, they are the clericals too; in a
+word, the great landowners. They are for what is good in Mexico. They
+demand order. But they would not take it from the United States. They
+look to France--to France, which is Catholic, and liberal."
+
+"I know," said the marshal. "They have already hinted at annexation."
+
+"Annexation to France, of course. Now then, monsieur, if we stay at all,
+we shall have to fight the United States. But do you imagine that we
+would undertake such a fight for Maximilian? Parbleu, the French people
+would mob Napoleon over night. But, supposing we were to do it for
+ourselves, and not for an impecunious archduke----"
+
+His Excellency's eyes blazed. "Ah, it would be a fight superb!"
+
+"And you commanding, Monsieur le Marechal. And behind you, with our own
+pantalons rouges, those Confederates against their old enemies.
+_Then_ would be the moment to set your knight on the chess board.
+And," she added insidiously, "France would need a viceroy over here."
+
+The plain soldier started as though shot.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he gasped, "you--_you_ are Napoleon! The
+_great_ Napoleon, I salute you, mademoiselle!"
+
+"Helas, monsieur, that I am not in a position to credit Napoleon III.
+with what I have said!"
+
+"Yet you wish me to believe that you are only inspired by him? Pardon
+me, mademoiselle, but _he_ is the inspired one, and--mon Dieu, I do
+not blame him!"
+
+"But it's very simple," said Jacqueline, "and honorable too.
+Maximilian's bad faith nullifies our treaty with him. Tres bien, we are
+free, free to withdraw our troops. At least we may threaten as much.
+Then he will, he must abdicate, unless--well, unless he first sees Your
+Excellency's prisoner."
+
+She arose, feeling that she was leaving a good Frenchman behind her. But
+Madame la Marechale appeared to bid her adieu, and Madame la Marechale
+looked sharply from one to another, noting especially Bazaine's flush of
+enthusiasm. The good Frenchman straightway became uneasy. And
+Jacqueline, riding back to Chapultepec in her carriage with its coronet
+and arms and footmen, did not know that Driscoll had not been
+incommunicado against Madame la Marechale. Who could be? And Madame la
+Marechale betimes had paid her respects to a third woman, who also was
+but little more than a girl. She and the Empress Charlotte had discussed
+both the prisoner and Jacqueline.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE AMBASSADOR
+
+
+  "Receive then this young hero with all becoming state;
+  'Twere ill advis'd to merit so fierce a champion's hate."
+                                          --_Nibelungenlied._
+
+
+In his bedroom at Buena Vista, the marshal's residence, Driscoll the
+next day received a personage, and offered him a cigar. Declined, with
+bow from shoulder. Hoped he would have a nip of peach brandy? Declined,
+with sweep from hips. He _was_ a personage. Driscoll noted regalia,
+medals, cordon; and apologized for the temerity of Missouri hospitality.
+
+"Especially," he said, "as you're a Grand Divinity."
+
+"Dignity, senor," the hidalgo corrected him, "Grand Dignity."
+
+"You'll have to pardon me again," said Driscoll, "but I really didn't
+intend any short measure at all."
+
+It was the Imperial Grand Chamberlain himself. There were no
+incomunicado doors before _him_; he came from the Emperor. The
+Empress had spoken to His Majesty, having just had her discussion
+aforementioned with Madame la Marechale, so that Monsieur le Marechal
+had had to lift from his prisoner the ban of the incomunicado. But
+monsieur had been extremely reluctant about it.
+
+The Chamberlain's name went well with his exalted fourth degree of
+proximity to the throne. It was Velasquez de Leon, a very bristling of
+Castilian pride. He looked over the battered American in homespun gray,
+and wondered where the mistake was. For, as arbiter of precedence,
+appraiser of inequality between men, and supervisor over court functions
+generally, he had been sent in the way of business. Driscoll felt sorry
+for him.
+
+"Just tell them to let me out of here," said the prisoner, "then I'll
+call in on the Emperor whenever it's convenient for him."
+
+"But, senor," the don objected testily, "with what status, pray? Has
+your country a representative here? You must obtain a letter from your
+ambassador, or have him present you."
+
+Driscoll shook his head. "Can't," he said, "haven't any country."
+
+The minion of etiquette despaired.
+
+"But," Driscoll added, "I've got as good as credentials from what used
+to be my country."
+
+Velasquez de Leon grasped at the straw. "Then," he cried, "we can
+register you as an ambassador."
+
+"Bringing my country with me," Driscoll suggested.
+
+So it was all straightened out pleasantly, and quite in the orthodox
+manner, too. The American's status was defined. His reception would fall
+under the rubric: "Private Audience." There remained only one grave
+drawback. The protocol allowed no hints as to the un-protocol aspect of
+an ambassador's wardrobe. The hidalgo could only finger nervously the
+Imperial Crown in his Grand Uniform, and with stiff dignity take his
+leave.
+
+The ambassador who was his own country rode in the marshal's landau to
+court, with a retinue of Lancers that was also his guard. Soon they
+entered the Paseo, which Maximilian was making beautiful at inordinate
+cost as a link between the City and his summer palace, the alcazar of
+Chapultepec. Turning into the wide, stately boulevard, Driscoll was that
+moment plunged into an eddying splendor of Europe transplanted, and he
+blinked his eyes, half humorously. There were mettlesome steeds, and
+coaches with a high polish, and silver weighted harness, and the
+insolence of livery, and armorial bearings, and the gilt of coronets on
+carriage panels. There were silk hats and peaked sombreros, lace
+mantillas and Parisian bonnets. A lavish use of French money was doing
+these things, and the Mexicans, believing in their aristocracy since the
+revival of titles never heard of in Gotha, believed also that such
+brilliancy of display made their capital the peer of Vienna, or of the
+Quartier St. Germain. The Mexicans were very happy and arrogant over it.
+
+"I wonder how they can fight and yet keep their clothes so pretty,"
+thought the Missourian.
+
+The gallant carpet-knighthood of uniforms was bothering him again. They
+were dashing, militant, these paladins, a bal masque of luxurious oddity
+and color. They twisted waxed moustaches, and their coursers cantered to
+and fro in the gay parade, and among them only the charro cavaliers with
+a glitter of spangle let one guess that this could be Mexico. There was
+the Austrian dragoon with his Tyrolean feather, and the Polish uhlan,
+fur fringed, and the Hungarian hussar, whose pelisse dangled
+romantically, and there were some fellows in low boots and tights and
+high busbies, who were cross-braided on the chest and scroll-embroidered
+on the front of the leg, and looked exactly like Tzigane bandmasters or
+lion tamers. The Slav, the Magyar, the Czech, and yet others of the
+Emperor's score of native races, all were here out of the nearer Orient,
+with curved swords and ferocious bearing. There were the countrymen of
+the Empress, too; the Belgians, who were as bedecked of sleeve as a drum
+corps. And as to the French, there they were in green and silver, in sky
+blue, in cuirassier helmets, in the zouave fez, or in any of the other
+ways in which they bore _their_ chips on the shoulder.
+
+Shelby's ragged Missourians had tossed on straw for the lack of quinine,
+and yet were presuming to save this gorgeous empire of golden spurred
+gentlemen. The thought of his mission gave Driscoll an ironic twinge.
+
+But there was the pantalon rouge, the little soldier boy of France who
+did the work, and the sight of him put the American into a friendly
+humor. He was everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the
+walks, dotting the cafes with red, and every wee piou-piou under the
+great big epaulettes of a great big comic opera generalissimo. His huge
+military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the crimson pompon cocked on his
+little fighting kepi was more often awry, and he could not by any effort
+achieve a strut. He was only bon enfant, this unconquered soldier lad;
+so he gave over trying to be martial, and left to his officers the role
+of the Gallic rooster, taking it all as a droll joke on himself, while
+his vivacious eyes danced with fun.
+
+The ambassador's coach passed under the cypresses and wound round the
+Aztec hill of the Grasshopper, and came at last to the castle on the
+summit. And as Guatemotzin had once ventured to this place to plead with
+Moctezuma to save his empire, and to show him how to do it, so Driscoll
+now entered the portals of Chapultepec on a very similar errand.
+
+The superb Indian lord was never so hedged in with barbaric ceremony as
+was his Teuton successor of three centuries later. But Driscoll was
+patient. He advanced as the red tape gave way, humming under his breath
+"Green Grows the Grass," a schottische which the American invaders of
+'48 had sung in taking this same fortress, which also had given all
+Americans the name of "Gringo."
+
+Guardias Palatinas saluted the Missourian at the entrance. Two
+Secretaries of Ceremony, Grand Uniform, with cordon and the Imperial
+eagle, bowed before him in the Gran Patio. One stepped to his right, the
+other to his left, with all the ceremony of which they were secretaries,
+and the three walked abreast the length of the Galeria de Iturbide,
+where they were joined by the Lesser Service of Honor. Thus, swelling by
+cumulative degrees of impressiveness, Trooper Driscoll came at last into
+the Sala de Audiencias, and gazed with admiration at its beautiful
+Gobelin suite.
+
+The Emperor was there, tall, white browed, refined. He bowed. Driscoll
+bowed, and started toward him, for they were scarcely in speaking
+distance. But His Imperial Highness bowed again. He was absent-minded,
+evidently, but Driscoll bowed also, and pretended not to notice. Then
+yet a third time the monarch bowed. And with true courtesy the American
+overlooked what was growing ridiculous, and did likewise. Thus the
+ritualistic three obeisances were accomplished.
+
+Maximilian dismissed the Lesser Service, and he and his guest were
+alone. Now Driscoll supposed, considering the discommoding interest his
+mission had awakened in everybody except in the Emperor, that the
+Emperor himself would this time be concerned enough to "get down to
+business." But not so. There were yet the formalities.
+
+"I understand, Senor Embajador," Maximilian began in the language of his
+court, "that Your Excellency----"
+
+"Thank you, sir, but my name is Driscoll."
+
+"That Your Excellency comes accredited from a government that no longer
+exists. But We will waive that, since the said power existed at the
+moment of Your Excellency's departure."
+
+This was to harmonize the absurdity with the Ritual. Maximilian liked to
+play at receiving an American representative. It grieved him sorely that
+the United States had never recognized his dignity, but that it had
+consistently rated him as merely "the Prince Maximilian."
+
+Driscoll's first words cut short the make-believe.
+
+"You'd hardly call them credentials," he said. "Our president, it is
+true, helped me on my way, but I have nothing from him to you. And yet I
+bring more than Mr. Jefferson Davis could send. Here," and he produced
+the memorandum from the Confederate generals of the Trans-Mississippi
+department, which in his belt Jacqueline had had restored to him with
+his other effects.
+
+Maximilian took the note handed him, but stared at the emissary.
+Charlotte had induced the monarch to grant the audience. She had hinted
+at its importance, but not until now did Maximilian recognize his guest.
+Driscoll was attired in the full uniform of a lieutenant colonel of
+cavalry, which, by the way, was what he had carried so jealously in the
+bundle behind his saddle. From the dignified young officer in gray back
+to the desperado young giant in homespun proved considerable of a reach
+for the Hapsburg; but at last, by virtue of much caressing of his silky
+beard with delicate finger tips, he arrived.
+
+"So, it was you the marshal saved!" he exclaimed. "Yes, yes, I should
+have remembered sooner. Colonel Lopez told me. A capable, faithful
+officer, is Lopez! I could not but approve the finding of his court
+martial. And yet, against his urgent advice, I have decided to pardon
+you."
+
+"To apologize, you mean?"
+
+The Emperor looked hurt. As a foil for his royal clemency, there should
+be humble gratitude. Maximilian often mistook fawning for such.
+
+"Isn't it a bit odd," Driscoll queried whimsically, "that an ambassador
+should be arrested?"
+
+"Jove, that's a fact! I hadn't thought."
+
+"Certainly. But if it don't occur again, we'll just let the apology go."
+
+"No, no," protested the monarch. "You must have your apology. You will
+receive it from the Grand Chamberlain to-morrow, and it will appear in
+the Journal Officiel."
+
+"Oh, all right," said Driscoll, "anything to clear the way." Whereupon
+he plunged and stated his business.
+
+With debonair Prince Max it was not a question of even who talked best.
+It was who talked last. And Driscoll, being for the moment an exhorter
+of both descriptions, drove home conviction as a sabre point. He spoke
+bluntly, earnestly; and, at the scent of opposition, he spoke fiercely.
+The South was defeated, he said, and the North would now make good its
+threat to drive out the French. And the French would go, too. Suppose
+they were even willing to undertake a great war for Maximilian, yet they
+would go just the same. And why? Because they had fought the Russians.
+They had fought the Austrians. And they were keeping the Italians out of
+Rome to help the Pope. So they had not a friend left, not one, to help
+them against the enemy they must soon fight, which was Prussia.
+Consequently they would draw every bayonet out of Mexico, and Maximilian
+would be left alone to face his rebels. But Maximilian could not face
+the rebels alone. They had been dominant before the French came. To
+replace thirty thousand French, Driscoll offered fifty thousand
+Southerners, fifty thousand well-equipped, splendid veterans.
+Twenty-five thousand were already on the frontier, he meaning those
+under General Slaughter at Brownsville, and Shelby and the others were
+not far behind.
+
+"But," said Maximilian, smiling bitterly, "you forget that the United
+States would still object to my poor Empire."
+
+"Not when the French leave, they wouldn't. We would become citizens. We
+would not be a foreign intervention. You would be backed up by Mexicans
+against Mexicans, and the North could not interfere. But, suppose that
+the French remain, wouldn't they have to fight? And they would need our
+aid to do it, too. Don't you see, sir, that in any case you should make
+us very welcome?"
+
+"There is assuredly no other way to look at it!" admitted the prince
+uneasily.
+
+Dreaming himself a monarch of chivalry days, Maximilian was subtly
+enthralled by the idea of a band of heroes flocking to his standard,
+their swords on high. Stouter than those warriors who had helped
+Siegfried to his bride, they would hold for him a treasure greater than
+that under the Rhine. Themselves and their children forever, they would
+be the real mainstay of the dynasty founded by Maximilian the Great.
+They were Anglo-Saxons, Germanic, his own kindred, and to him they came
+for new homes and a new country. They would be his landed gentry, his
+barons, his hidalgos. It was a prospect for an emperor; above all, for a
+poet emperor. As he looked now on the young Confederate officer, on him
+who had seemed a desperado, Maximilian thought that here stood one who
+was the instrument of Destiny.
+
+"Can--can they really come?" he demanded breathlessly.
+
+Driscoll smiled. "Of course, there's no time to lose," he replied. "For
+instance, if I'd had your answer there at Murguia's ranch, I'd have
+gotten back in time to head off whole regiments who've probably given up
+their arms since then. But you can still count on an army west of the
+Mississippi that hasn't surrendered yet. At least _my_ general
+hasn't, not Old Joe, and he won't either. But you must say 'yes' pretty
+quick. We're restless, and might conclude to run the French out of here.
+We haven't forgotten how Napoleon forgot to help us."
+
+It was a cunning stroke. Maximilian would have asked nothing better than
+independence from his "dear imperial brother," and just this was the
+bribe so temptingly held out by the instrument of Destiny. But the
+Hapsburg of the heavy, trembling underlip credited wavering as
+statesmanlike prudence.
+
+"To-morrow," he said, "no, the day after, you shall have my decision."
+
+Jacqueline witnessed the ambassador's departure. Hidden among the roses
+of the fortress rock, where she sat with a book, she peeped out as he
+came down the steps to the marshal's landau. The glacial Secretaries of
+Ceremony flanked him on either side, and the statuesque Palatine Guards
+saluted. She could not be mistaken, the corners of his mouth were
+twitching. It was such an inimitable commentary on the Ritual that she
+had much to do not to dart out and laugh with him in gleeful mischief.
+
+Then, she noted his uniform. After the ornate regimentals of all Europe,
+what a relief was the simple gray! There was the long coat, the belt,
+the dragoon sabre, the unobtrusive insignia on the collar, and she
+murmured her verdict advisedly. It was beautiful! Next she noted the
+man--as though she had not in the first place. His easy frame still had
+that charm of gaucherie, and the rollicking daredeviltry lurked
+quiescent in the brown eyes, but enough to recall the rider of fury, her
+chevalier de Missour-_i_, plunging through a wall and cloud of dust
+on a big-boned yellow charger. And though now he was in this beautiful
+simplicity of gray, she looked in vain for some hint of martial stride
+or pompous chest.
+
+She wondered for a moment why he had worn the uniform. It signified
+nothing, since the Confederacy had fallen. Then she understood.
+_He_ had not surrendered. Nor had those he represented. The gray,
+for him, still had its reason, and was a power yet; the power to decide
+an empire's fate. It was the grave dignity of a lost cause; striving,
+before being doffed forever, to leave behind a new cause. Or, if
+failing, to accept the lot of surrender. In either case, her chevalier
+de Missour-_i_ was wearing the dear uniform for the last time. With
+her keenness for intuition and sympathy, Jacqueline _knew_. She
+knew what it must mean. And he looked so strong, so splendid! Her eyes
+unexpectedly dimmed in tenderness for him.
+
+Driscoll, being now a free man, established himself at a hotel near the
+diligencia office in the busy Plateros street. He drilled through the
+following day with tedious waiting for the day after, when he was to
+have the promised reply. Used to men who knew their own minds, he hoped
+for strength in this emperor fellow. Then, his mission successful, he
+would be in the saddle by the next night, perhaps by noon, and hastening
+toward the border with tidings of homes and more fighting for his
+comrades of the Old Brigade. But the next morning, even as he was
+mounting Demijohn to go to Chapultepec, a thin man in riding breeches
+entered the hotel patio and accosted him.
+
+"I am Monsieur Eloin," the stranger announced in English that could be
+understood, "of Her Majesty's household. Also aide and secretary in
+private to the Emperor. I see, you go to horse. It is well, sir. Mine is
+outside."
+
+"What's the answer?" asked Driscoll. "I'm not up on conundrums."
+
+"It is that we go to Cuernavaca."
+
+"You don't say! Now where's that, and what for?"
+
+"Cuernavaca is His Majesty's country sit-down, about a douzaine of
+leagues from here. You have not read of this morning the Journal
+Officiel? Here it is. The court went there yesterday. His Majesty has to
+need rest."
+
+"But he was to see me to-day! What's the matter with him?"
+
+M. Eloin's brow contracted narrowly, and he shrugged his shoulders. "His
+Imperial Highness is much worked. He is worse of good health. Her
+Majesty sought at having him stay, to give you that same-self answer he
+had promised already. And the Marshal Bazaine, sensible this once, did
+talk yesterday night before last, after you were there, and beseeched
+him to accept your offer. And they all beseeched, Her Majesty and Madame
+la Marechale, and I.--But, what would you?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know. What the devil----"
+
+"No, not him! But her, sir, her!"
+
+"Her, who?"
+
+"Why, her. We all talk, argue, beseech; and she, in one little whisper,
+she only tell His Majesty he has to need that rest--and, poof! off they
+all go to Cuernavaca, and I know nothing. Her Majesty leave me a note. I
+bring you it here."
+
+"But who is the 'she?' You don't mean----"
+
+"Yes, we others call her Jacqueline. She did it, against everybody who
+beseech. But we--how you say?--we fool her, you and me. Come, we are
+there to-night, at Cuernavaca."
+
+"Just that little girl----" Driscoll murmured wonderingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+CARLOTA
+
+
+  "Der sicherste Weg nicht sehr ungluecklich zu sein ist das Glueck nicht
+  erwarten."--_Schopenhauer._
+
+
+Everybody he met seemed to twist Driscoll's business into a vital
+personal issue, and it did not take him long to place M. Eloin. The
+supercilious Belgian of the rancid brow, as Driscoll mentally described
+him, wanted the perpetuation of the empire, and he wanted it for the
+very simple reason that the favorite of a realmless prince does not
+amount to much. Hence he intrigued for the acceptance of Driscoll's
+offer and for the confusion of Jacqueline.
+
+A small escort of Belgians joined him and Driscoll at the garita, or
+little customs house, on the edge of the City. Accompanying them was a
+burly priest with a head shaped like a pear. The padre had very small
+eyes for so large a man, but they were exceedingly bright and roved
+adventurously. They would settle with crafty calculation on Eloin time
+and again, though his manner toward the favorite was always a thing of
+humble deference.
+
+"His Dutch Holiness from Murgie's!" Driscoll observed to himself.
+
+But there might be an ecclesiastical college along, for all the
+Missourian cared. His own thoughts were battalions. "When it's over, one
+way or another," he kept deciding, "I'll speak to her, yes I will!
+What's there to be afraid of? W'y, she's--only a girl." It might be an
+unfair advantage, his not dying after the confession in her farewell
+letter to him, but he would have her, he would have her! The Lord be
+good to him, he _had_ to have her!
+
+Late in the afternoon they arrived at the quaint old Aztec village of
+Cuernavaca, which had been the country seat of Cortez, and was now that
+of a second fair god and a second Hernando. After dismounting at the
+hotel near the conquistador's palace, Eloin hurried Driscoll across the
+plaza into the beautiful Italian gardens where Maximilian made his home.
+At the villa, Charlotte's own residence in the gardens, Eloin had
+himself announced to Her Majesty. The American reflected that women
+seemed to have a great deal to do with the reigning business. In the
+drawing room, the Empress received them.
+
+She was a slender young woman whose lips were thin and proud, whose eyes
+were dark and lustrous. Her hair was black and very heavy, coiled in the
+old fashioned style away from a high forehead that was beautifully
+white. She could not be older than twenty-five, and there was even a
+girlishness in her bearing. But she had a steadiness of gaze--one eye
+seemed the least heavy lidded--and there was a firmness to the slightly
+large mouth, which gave an impression of strong lines to what was really
+a soft, oval face. Yet the temperament could not be mistaken. She was a
+woman of acute nerves. She was tensely strung, inordinately sensitive.
+
+Driscoll believed now what he had heard, that the Empire fared better
+when Charlotte was regent and her lord on a journey. Maximilian dreamed,
+while she realized. The Hapsburg cadet, gazing over the Adriatic from
+the marble steps of Miramar, had brooded fondly on what Destiny must
+hold for him. He would be king of a Poland born again among the nations.
+Then Louis Napoleon whispered of another throne in the building.
+Whereupon _she_ began the study of Spanish; _she_ decided her
+half hesitating spouse to accept, however loftily they both scorned the
+adventurer who helped them to it.
+
+Carlota, for so the natives called her, amiably greeted the Missourian.
+She was a woman of tact, and though one Din Driscoll was for her as
+impersonal a thing as some opportune event, yet events must be neatly
+turned to account.
+
+"His Majesty and I have discussed your presence in our country, sir,"
+she began in English, "and feeling that he desires to see you again, I
+requested M. Eloin to bring you to Cuernavaca."
+
+"Why, thank you, ma'am," said Driscoll.
+
+She all but reproved the form of address. But, for her at least, common
+sense was beginning to prevail. The rigid court punctilio, largely of
+her own enthusiastic designing, had gone hard with her. Her husband had
+proved no more than consistent to the medieval revival. He was but true
+to that old chivalry which distinguished between the divinely fair
+damsel to be won and the mere woman won already. He was the monarch, she
+his consort. Classifying others, the Empress found herself classified.
+He was her liege, and she might not even enter his presence unannounced.
+But how much happier was she in the blithe sailor prince who came
+a-wooing, who wooed for love, in accordance with that same ancient
+chivalry!
+
+A princess of the Blood, of the House of Orleans, Charlotte had had that
+nicest poise of good breeding, the kind that is unconscious. But here
+among the Mexicans, she had to proclaim a superiority not taken for
+granted, and the nice poise was gone. In her the generations--Henry IV.,
+the Grand Monarch, and all of that stately line--in her they stooped.
+And an element of sheerest vulgarity, as plebeian as a Jew's diamond,
+crept in perforce. Poor tarnished escutcheon of Orleans! Poor princess
+of the Blood, become menial with scouring it! She was weary. Over this
+New World there floated too much of obscuring democratic dust. So she
+allowed "ma'am," like a homely fleck, to settle unreproved on the
+ancestral doorplate.
+
+Driven to expediency for her very Empire's sake, she herself trampled on
+the Ritual. Waiving all formalities, they would go and seek out His
+Majesty. He must be somewhere in the gardens, perhaps beside the pond
+with its fringe of deep shadows from the trees. There they expected to
+find him, breathing the air of orange blossoms, gazing enraptured into
+the water, and on the gold fish and the swans and the fountains. He
+would be teasing Nature for a sonnet's inspiration.
+
+Driscoll went ahead, since Carlota and Eloin talked earnestly in French,
+intent on their plot for the persuasion of the Emperor. But as the
+American parted a clump of oleanders and laden rosebushes that hid the
+little lake, he stopped, his eyes wide on something just beyond. In the
+instant he fell back, and confronted the other two with such a look on
+his face that both started in vague alarm. They saw the sickened look of
+one who turns from a revolting sight. A wretch stricken suddenly blind
+may know at once the fact of a terrible grief, yet he cannot quite at
+first gather to himself the fullness of the horror. He is only aware
+that, afterward, the meaning will slowly take shape, like a gradually
+darkening despair.
+
+Driscoll gazed uncertainly at the Empress, as though she had somehow
+arrested his thoughts. Then, as a strong man rushing from danger, he
+comprehended that here was a frail woman near the same peril.
+
+"You will not go, ma'am," he ordered in a kind of terror for her.
+
+Eloin had already hastened on to the screen of roses. Being a fellow of
+the arras and closets, he scented a royal secret. The Empress lifted her
+shoulders and would have followed, but Driscoll did not hesitate. He
+took her by the elbow and gently turned her the other way.
+
+"You must not!" he said again, with that same scared manner on him.
+
+She bridled indignantly, but when she saw how white he was, and how
+earnest, something there awed her. In a flash she understood. Her lip
+curled, baring teeth of the purest pearl, and a sneer quivered on the
+highbred nostrils. But suddenly, in piteous tumult, her breast heaved
+once, and betrayed the wound. It gave him to know the knighthood which
+covets blows in a woman's behalf. But she, with a will that held him in
+admiration and reverence for her, spoke to him, and her tone was even,
+was unbroken.
+
+"I dare say you are right," she said, and turned to retrace her steps.
+But, as if to drink deeper of the bitter cup, she paused, and forced
+herself to a last word.
+
+"I suppose I should thank you," she went on, and her eyes, still dry of
+tears, were lustrous as they lifted to his, "but a gentleman--and I have
+never known one more than you, sir, this minute past--will understand
+that I cannot--There, I am going now. And after--after this that you
+have just beheld, I shall never see you again, sir. Alas, it's the more
+pity. Such as you are rare, even in--in my world."
+
+Driscoll watched her blankly as she left him, her head poised high, her
+step as slow as dignity itself. His own face was cruelly drawn, with the
+first sickened ghastliness still on him. He stumbled to a bench, and sat
+down. But there was nothing to think about, nothing he could think
+about, just then. Yet his brain was full to throbbing, and he had no
+consciousness of where he was, nor of the passage of time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+THE WOMAN WHO DID NOT HESITATE
+
+
+  "The soul of man is infinite in what it covets."--_Ben Jonson._
+
+
+Stealthily Eloin drew aside the bushes, and peered through. The tiny
+pond with its crystal surface sunk deep in foliage, its flowering island
+in the centre, looked not unlike a mirror on a dining table luxuriantly
+wreathed by garlands. The Belgian stared greedily. He did not see quite
+what Driscoll had seen, yet he saw enough to draw his brow to a
+narrowing fold of keenest interest. Jacqueline was seated on the raised
+edge of the basin, pensively dipping a hand into the water. Her plump
+wrist showed rosy, like coral, and glancing sideways now and again at a
+poor agitated prince striding up and down, she looked as she did that
+day in the small boat, while tempting a shark. As she leaned over, the
+line of her waist and neck was stately and beautiful; and there were the
+maddening baby tendrils of soft, glowing copper. Maximilian had
+evidently found her there, in a reverie perhaps, and was at sight of her
+lured to some act bold and desirous; for just as evidently, if his
+flushed face and the way he bit his lip were tokens, he had that moment
+been repelled. Eloin watched them avidly, the tall archduke pacing up
+and down, the demure lady seated on the basin's edge.
+
+"It was but the lowly homage of a prince," Maximilian cried out
+peevishly. Such was his apology.
+
+"Homage of a play-king," she corrected him with exasperating sweetness.
+
+He turned on her angrily. "Why do you say that--a play-king?"
+
+"Whose embassies," she proceeded calmly, "cringe for recognition. Like
+beggars they prowl about that White House at Washington, yet never cross
+the threshold."
+
+Maximilian was too amazed for denial. "How do you know?" he exclaimed.
+
+"While at the same time," she went on, "the same neighbor receives the
+minister of the Mexican republic, and sends one in turn. But no matter.
+The marionettes of empire can dance, so long as Napoleon holds the
+strings. Was the princely homage a make-believe, too?"
+
+"But--but, if I should convince you, mademoiselle, that the majesty
+which only asks to kneel is genuine?"
+
+Her eyelids narrowed, and she looked at him with the oddest smile.
+
+"You know--sire--that I only ask to be convinced. Where will Your
+Imperial Highness begin?"
+
+"Know then that the American peasant named Lincoln, who would not
+recognize a Hapsburg, is dead. He has been assassinated. He will no
+longer encourage our rebels in Mexico."
+
+"That poor gentleman whom you call a peasant," she returned with galling
+frankness, "was greater than any Hapsburg. He was fifty million people,
+and one million are still under arms. Your rebels know it. They still
+cry, 'Viva la Intervencion del Norte!' But go on, _sire_."
+
+He chafed under her mockery in the title. But sitting there, goading an
+imaginary shark, she was no less inciting than when he had ventured his
+caress.
+
+"They are of no consequence," he burst forth, "neither the Americans,
+nor the dissidents. Your own countrymen, mademoiselle, will, and must,
+assure my empire."
+
+"H'm'n," she ejaculated, with a quick shrug. "Even the marshal, greatly
+against his will, has had to inform Your Majesty that we will shortly
+withdraw."
+
+"Then I shall depend on my subjects alone!"
+
+She contented herself with repeating, "Viva la Intervencion del Norte!"
+That too, was ample comment as to the loyalty of his subjects. The
+Emperor paused in his walk. "Alas," he sighed wearily, "a Hapsburg
+sacrifices himself to regenerate a people, and--they do not appreciate
+it."
+
+Jacqueline bent her head to hide a smile. She dreamily made rings in the
+water, and seemed to fall into his mood of poetic melancholy. "A
+comedietta of an empire," she mused sympathetically, "a harlequinade,
+nothing more. Grands dieux, I do not wonder that Your Highness finds it
+unworthy!"
+
+There is no such incense to a man as when he imagines himself understood
+by a pretty woman.
+
+Yet the temptress now found herself the harder to master. It was the
+thought of what she must yet do. But she gave her head an impatient
+toss, and the tears that had come were gone. The lines of her mouth
+tightened, and the dangerous glint shone in her eyes. "So," she added,
+almost in a whisper, "you did not mean it, sire, when you offered only a
+play-empire--to me."
+
+She knew that he started violently, and was looking down at her. But she
+kept her gaze averted, that he might not see the hard expression there
+that was merciless for them both. He did see, though, the long lashes,
+and the warm pink of her forearm, so tantalizing for shark or man.
+
+"These imperial gardens, they are beautiful," she went on softly, "but,
+helas, they are not the Schoenbrunn. Nor is Chapultepec more than a
+feeble miniature of the Hofburg. Oh, the wretched farce! The wretched
+farce, sire, in your pretension to--to honor me! A wooer from the
+throne, indeed? A straw throne--no, no, I do not like it!"
+
+Then she let him see her eyes. Half raised, half veiled; they held the
+daring suggestion hidden in her words.
+
+"And if," he cried, "and if we _were_ in the Schoenbrunn----"
+
+"Yes, yes," and she clapped her hands with delight, "yes, where the
+heroic figures on the crest of the hill are silhouetted against the sky,
+where----"
+
+"Never mind the heroic figures! But where I shall be really an emperor,
+_the_ Emperor over Austria, over Hungary. Then, what then?
+Jeanne--Jacqueline, tell me!"
+
+She had brought him to it. Yet her face clouded pitifully, as that day
+in the small boat, when she told Ney that a woman might only give. Such
+a woman too, would be lost for the reason that she would _not_
+hesitate. Here was the errand of the Sphinx, and achievement at her
+hand. Dainty flower of France, yes! But in truth, what was she?
+
+"And then?" she repeated, and the maddening promise in her voice
+thrilled him. "Why, sire, I suppose that I could not help but listen to
+you. Yet first," she hastened to add with subtle emphasis, "first, you
+would have to give up your play kingdom here."
+
+His blue eyes flashed. "I will!" he cried. "It shall be mine, the Roman
+empire of Charles V. They are tired of my brother Franz. Already they
+cry out for me. Our mother made an uncle abdicate for him, I will do as
+much for myself. I will, Jeanne, I will!"
+
+Eloin behind his screen moved uneasily.
+
+"The devil go with her!" the eavesdropper muttered. "She'll have him
+abdicating himself in another minute. She must be stopped, she must!"
+
+He tiptoed back, and once out of hearing, he ran. He found Driscoll on a
+bench, slowly passing his fingers through his hair, and staring fixedly
+at the ground.
+
+"Coom," said Eloin, "coom quick! He is alone. You find your chance. He
+is that happy, he say yes to anything."
+
+Driscoll got heavily to his feet. There was his mission. For the sake of
+that, for the sake of comrades depending on him, he would go and once
+more offer succor to this libertine princelet.
+
+"No, not that way," the Belgian directed. "The path here, it leads the
+more direct at the pond, so. Quick!" He knew that foliage would hide the
+couple until Driscoll should turn the corner of the hedge and burst on
+them squarely. The American hastened down the walk. "A nice surprise,
+mutual." Eloin chuckled to himself.
+
+Jacqueline did not falter before her victory. She knew that Maximilian
+rated the Mexican throne as a stepping-stone to another in Europe. She
+knew of a certain family pact among the Hapsburgs and how it rankled in
+Maximilian's breast. Therein he had, on accepting the Mexican throne,
+solemnly renounced all right of inheritance to that of Austro-Hungary.
+But she knew also that he considered his oath as void, since Franz Josef
+had forced it on him. Craftily she pictured the Mexican enterprise, how
+instead of enhancing his prestige at home, it but turned him into a
+sorry and ridiculous figure. And so she won the child of Destiny. Yet,
+when in a sudden fervent outburst he came and sat beside her, and would
+have taken her hand, she still did not falter. Napoleon would have the
+glory, and she a shame unexplained, but for all that her country would
+have Mexico. Her country would have Mexico! Would have a vast expanse of
+empire, greater and more enduring than any won for her by Bonaparte
+himself.
+
+Nevertheless, she brushed away the gallant's arm with more vigor than
+her coy role demanded. "No, no," she moaned faintly, "not yet!"
+
+"But, _cruelle_----"
+
+"Not yet, not until I know that you will try to win in Austria, not
+until--you abdicate here!"
+
+"But, I shall sail this very month, I----"
+
+"And never return, never to Mexico?"
+
+"Never!"
+
+Frankly, then, she placed her hands in his.
+
+That moment Driscoll turned the corner of the hedge, and was before
+them. He fell back, and reddened as though himself caught in wrongdoing.
+It was strange how he noted, at such a time, that she was clothed in
+light blue, in the very dress he had given her. But no, he perceived at
+once that it was of some delicate silk from Japan. Yet the pattern was
+so nearly the same. She must have selected it--she had selected
+it!--with him in mind. And now, against a girl's love so quaintly, shyly
+revealed, to behold this contrast, her hands there, wantonly
+surrendered!
+
+Instantly she tore herself free and confronted him.
+
+"Oh, why, _why_," she cried fiercely, "did you not let them kill
+you?"
+
+Suddenly her hands flew up to her hot face. "Then," she moaned, "then
+you would not have lived to see!"
+
+The Emperor stepped between them. Tall, severe, he was cold in anger.
+
+"It's the intrusion of a rowdy, mademoiselle." To Driscoll he said,
+"Now, go!"
+
+Utterly confused, the trooper turned to obey. But at the first step he
+swung round, looking as he had never looked in the bloodiest of cavalry
+charges.
+
+"I am here for your answer, sir," he said.
+
+"Answer? What answer, fellow?"
+
+Driscoll breathed once, he breathed twice, and yet again. It may be he
+counted them. Then he spoke.
+
+"You understand, of course, that I might call you a puppy? Or break you
+over my knee? But I've got something harder on hand. It's to make you
+honor your promise. I've ridden forty miles for what you were to give me
+six hours ago at Chapultepec. Now then, shall I bring the men to save
+your empire? Think well. You need not take the question from me. Take it
+from them, from an army of fifty thousand men. Now, answer! And
+remember, you can save your empire."
+
+"Save my empire?" Maximilian repeated the words.
+
+There was a reluctant note in the query. Jacqueline heard. And the
+bravest act of her life was when she raised her head and faced her
+shame, with _him_ to see. She must begin her fight all over again.
+
+"Yes, your play empire, sire," she said, wielding two weapons, the
+mockery in her voice, the seduction of her eyes.
+
+Driscoll saw his cause forlorn against eyes like those.
+
+"It's unfair!" he protested involuntarily.
+
+She turned on him in defiance. "It is _not_ unfair! And you,
+monsieur, of all men, know that it is not. You, and you alone, know what
+I, what I would give--what I tried to give--that I might win in this!"
+
+He could not help a thrill of admiration. She was battling against all
+men and women to change the destinies of two continents.
+
+"W'y, I take it back then," he said.
+
+She stared at him in wonder, and drew farther away. It was his tone,
+altered as she could never have thought possible, nor had she known that
+aught on earth might hurt her so. She heard a decent man addressing some
+unavoidable word to a strumpet. All vestige of respect was gone, gone
+unconsciously, except that respect for himself which would not allow
+that the word be coarse or an insult. She looked in vain, too, for a
+trace of anger. Once she had sought to kill him, but that had not
+changed his big heart. While now! How much--oh, how much easier--was
+that other sacrifice of hers than this!
+
+"Perhaps, sir," she found the strength to say, "perhaps I have even, in
+my humble opinion, favored the acceptance of your offer. But His Majesty
+knows far better than I under what conditions he might accept."
+
+Driscoll turned to Maximilian direct. "Name them."
+
+"There is but one. We cannot give refuge to the enemies of the United
+States----"
+
+"The conditions?"
+
+"Therefore, to avoid complications, your men must lay down their arms on
+entering Mexico. Then we would deliver the arms to the United States on
+their recognizing Our Empire----"
+
+"Trade us off, you mean?"
+
+"Or, in case the United States still held aloof, then, as citizens of
+Mexico, you could take up your arms again."
+
+Driscoll looked at Jacqueline. She, the inspiration of such a condition,
+knew quite well beforehand that he would not submit.
+
+"This is final, is it?" he demanded.
+
+"It is, because We cannot provoke war with the United States, but,"
+Maximilian urged querulously, "you have only to surrender your swords."
+
+"After refusing them to the Federals, to the men who _fought_ for
+them? And now we are to give them up to a pack of----" Driscoll stopped
+short and took another breath. "By God, sir, no sir!" he cried.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+A SPONSOR FOR THE FAT PADRE
+
+
+  "Every man is as heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse."
+                                                        --_Cervantes._
+
+
+When Driscoll had gone, Jacqueline would not linger. Maximilian sought
+to detain her, but something had happened that he could not fathom. She
+was no more the same person.
+
+"Not even a token to bid me be brave so far away in Austria?" he
+pleaded.
+
+"There have been tokens enough," she returned shortly. "I ask Your
+Majesty's leave. Good-night."
+
+She gained her room, and worked till late on a cipher dispatch to
+Napoleon. Its purport was, that now, if ever, Maximilian must be
+discouraged absolutely. Following on what she herself had done, such
+would bring his abdication. She implored, above all things, that Bazaine
+be kept from meddling, from extending false hopes. Poor girl, after what
+it had cost, she was passionately bent on success. A courier took her
+packet to the City the next day, whence the message was to be sped to
+Paris.
+
+"That foolish Prince Max," she thought, "if he does give it up and go, I
+am really saving him from terrible sorrow. But, who will save me from
+mine, I wonder? Mine, that is come already! God in Heaven cannot."
+
+Maximilian had watched her as she left him, till her stately girlish
+figure was lost in the dusk under the trees. Then with a sigh he turned
+away. At the villa he found his wife. She was seated apart from her
+maids, and Eloin was talking to her, in tones low and swift. Charlotte
+only half listened. Her agitation was nearly hysterical. Her eyes
+gleamed wildly, and sometimes they would close, as though they ached for
+the soothing that tears might bring.
+
+"Who," demanded Maximilian, "has had the presumption to introduce a spy
+on these grounds?"
+
+Eloin glanced quickly at the Empress. "A spy, sire?" he said uneasily.
+
+"I mean that American, sir. But shall I ask the sentinels at the gate?"
+
+"That, Ferdinand," Charlotte interposed icily, "is not necessary.
+Monsieur Eloin, at my command, brought the American here. You should
+know why."
+
+"To save my play-empire, I suppose?"
+
+"An empire," she cried, catching up the word the more hotly because she
+knew it to be Jacqueline's own gage of battle, "an empire, August Sire,
+to be gained by fighting, as your forefathers, as mine, won theirs. And
+that is nobler, _I_ suppose, than puny inheritance. I do not know
+what the Hapsburg may be fallen to, but a daughter of Orleans still has
+the right to expect a crown from her husband. If not, she is unworthily
+mated."
+
+Maximilian thought of that other empire, which that other temptress
+exacted of him. It seemed that he had many realms to conquer. But the
+grimmest humor of all was that he blithely imagined himself capable of
+satisfying the whims, not of one woman, but of two. Deluded Prince Max!
+
+But the Emperor was not there to discuss empire building, much less to
+face the tigerish light in his lady's eyes.
+
+"Monsieur Eloin," he said, "this is my first personal complaint against
+you, but there have been others, long, insistent ones, from French and
+Mexicans alike. You lose me my friends, sir, however I assure them that
+you have not the slightest influence over my policy. So, after the
+awkward intrusion of to-day, I am resolved that you had best leave us."
+
+"Your Majesty desires----"
+
+"That you leave the country at once, Monsieur Eloin."
+
+"But," protested Charlotte, "that is open disgrace. At least cover it
+with the pretext of some mission."
+
+The downcast courtier took heart. Watching his master with narrowed
+sycophant eyes, he said, "But it need not be a pretext, sire. Since I
+must leave Your Highness, permit me, then, to find my mission, and one
+in which I can still serve my sovereign, though in spite of himself."
+
+Imperceptibly Maximilian fell under the spell of the old fawning.
+
+"And what mission could that be, my good friend?"
+
+"To feel the Austrian pulse, sire. To know when the time is ripe, to
+hasten the time----"
+
+"The time for what?"
+
+"For Your Majesty's return. Even now the unpopularity of His Imperial
+Highness, Franz----"
+
+"Eloin!" Maximilian stopped him sharply. But he could not hide the flash
+of his own blue eyes.
+
+"What would Your Majesty? In Vienna, in Budapest, in your own Venetia,
+sire, they long for you; at least as regent till the crown prince shall
+come of age. Would you rebuke them also, as you do me?"
+
+Charlotte stared at the Belgian in amazement and distrust. He had only
+just warned her how Jacqueline had kindled Maximilian's Austrian hopes
+in order to get him out of Mexico, and here he was borrowing that
+woman's guile. And here was Maximilian, too, softening under the
+enervating blandishment, softening behind his frowns for the officious
+meddler.
+
+"There, there, Eloin," he said, "you know that I must be inexorable. But
+in the Journal Officiel it will appear that you are gone on a secret
+mission, though you have no mission at all. None at all, do you
+understand, sir?"
+
+Eloin protested that he understood.
+
+"None," repeated the Emperor, "except to win back my confidence. When
+you have taken leave of Her Majesty, you may come to my cabinet to bid
+me farewell."
+
+As Maximilian left them, Charlotte turned on the favorite. "Indeed,
+Monsieur Eloin?" she said in utter scorn.
+
+"But, Your Majesty----"
+
+"Is Napoleon, then, so liberal a paymaster?"
+
+"Your Majesty!" and in genuine distress the courtier hurried on. "If you
+would listen, Madame! 'Tis true that Jeanne d'Aumerle has found the
+surest lever to pry His Highness out of Mexico----"
+
+"So good a lever, that you would use it too, to topple over my throne."
+
+"Not so, Madame. It's a cunning lever, yes; but _I_ shall use
+another fulcrum."
+
+"Really, monsieur, if I were in the mood for riddles and such pretty
+trifles, I'd ask you to favor Us with a chansonnette."
+
+"But this is as plain as day. First, our little intrigante knows that if
+His Majesty tries for the Austrian throne, he must leave Mexico.
+_That_ is her lever to move him. But suppose we shift it to my
+fulcrum. Then, whatever encourages his hopes for Austria, will make him
+but the more determined to cling to Mexico. For to succeed in Austria,
+he must triumph first in Mexico. He must prove to Europe that he can
+reign brilliantly. But if he abandons Mexico, as Jacqueline would
+persuade him, what of his prestige then? What of his glory to dazzle the
+Austrians? If Your Majesty would suggest to him this phase----"
+
+"And you, meanwhile in Europe?"
+
+"Oh, I shall find his chances good over there, but conditional on his
+success here."
+
+"Monsieur Eloin, I find that I must congratulate you. More, I even
+regret that you are going, for I dread that some other will replace you
+in favor with the Emperor who----"
+
+"Who may not be in accord with our views, Your Majesty would say? But if
+you will permit, Madame, I believe I know quite a different man.
+Moreover, he has already made an impression on His Highness, during our
+brief stay at an hacienda in the Huasteca. Now he is here. I brought him
+to commend as a future loyal follower."
+
+"Pray, who is the paragon?"
+
+"A priest, Madame, a German priest, who perhaps would not refuse the
+Bishopric of Durango. The hope of that rich see would insure his
+devotion. His name is Fischer. He is a clerical, he is an imperialist,
+he is resourceful. Our Jacqueline will have much to do to outwit him.
+This corpulent padre, Madame, would wheedle the sulky pope himself into
+a good humor with us. If I might venture so far as to present him
+before----"
+
+"Oh, I suppose so," said Charlotte wearily.
+
+
+
+
+PART SECOND
+
+
+THE ROSE THAT WAS A THORN IN THE LAND OF ROSES
+
+  "The rugged battle of fate, where strength is born."
+                                             --Emerson.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+MEAGRE SHANKS
+
+
+  "... and should a man full of talk be justified?"--_Book of Job_.
+
+
+At the hotel in the City of Mexico where Driscoll stopped, the entrance
+was big enough for a stage coach to drive through. But as to height, it
+did not seem any too great for the attenuation of Mr. Daniel Boone, who
+therein had propped himself at his ease, delightfully suggesting a
+tropical gentleman lounging on a veranda under the live oaks. One
+shoulder was impinged on the casing of the archway, from which contact
+his spare frame drifted out and downward, to the supporting base of one
+boot sole. The other boot crossed it over, and the edge of the toe
+rested on the pavement of the Calle de los Plateros, familiarly
+so-called.
+
+Mr. Boone hailed from Boonville, but in Missouri, with Kentucky for
+ancestral State, such was not a strained coincidence by any means. An
+individual there of the name of Boone, and a bit of geography likewise
+distinguished, are bound to fall together occasionally. For instance, a
+flea's hop over the map, and Mr. Boone and Boonville both might have
+claimed the county of Boone. Under the circumstances, Daniel's Christian
+name was the most obviously Christian thing his parents could do, and
+followed (to precede thereafter) as a matter of course.
+
+Now, Missouri, in the beginning of the Civil War, was a very Flanders
+for battles, and this sort of thing had ended by disturbing Mr. Boone
+considerably in the manipulation of an old hand-press, dubbed his
+Gutenberg, which worked with a lever and required some dozen processes
+for each impression of the _Boonville Semi-Weekly Javelin_.
+Finally, when Joe Shelby and his pack of fire-eaters were raiding
+Missouri for the second time, Daniel plaintively laid down his stick in
+the middle of an editorial on Black Republicans, and what should be done
+to them. The shooting outside had gotten on his nerves at last. That
+blazing away of Missourians back home made him homesick. He was like the
+repressed boy called out by the gang to go coasting. And he went. An
+editorial by example, he went to do unto the Black Republicans somewhat
+personally. The Javelinier was a young man yet.
+
+"There's been rumors hitherto about the pen and the sword," he mused,
+"but type, now--that's _hot_!" Wherewith he emptied his cases into
+a sack, took down a squirrel rifle, chased off his devil, locked in the
+Gutenberg, and joined the raiders. Flinging his burden of metal at
+General Shelby's feet, he said, "There sir, is _The Javelin_ in
+embryo for months to come. Now it's pi, which we'll sho'ly feed out by
+the bullet weight, sir."
+
+From then on the newspaper man followed his proclivities and turned
+scout, and it was a vigilant foe that could scoop him on the least of
+their movements, whether in the field or in their very stronghold, St.
+Louis itself.
+
+At the present moment Mr. Boone was retrieving a lost familiarity with
+good cigars. There was a black one of the Valle Nacional in his mouth,
+and also in his mouth there was a wisp of straw. The steel-blue smoke
+floated out lazily, which his steel-blue eyes regarded with
+appreciation. It was an Elysium of indolence. The cigar, the not having
+to kill anybody for a few minutes, and a place to lean against, these
+were content. Troubadour phrases droned soothingly in his brain. Of
+course he had to apostrophize the snow-clads:
+
+"Popo, out there, grand, towering, whose frosty nose sniffs the vault of
+heaven, whose mantle of fleecy cloud wraps him as the hoary locks of a
+giant, whose--Sho', if I had some copy paper now, I'd get you fixed
+_right_, you slippery old codger!"
+
+The wisp of straw hardly tallied with poesy of soul, nor did the lank
+figure and lean face, nor the cavalry uniform, badly worn, though lately
+new, nor yet the sagging belt with dragoon pistols. But the eyes did.
+Those eyes held the eloquence of the youth of a race. They were gentle,
+or they flashed, according to what passed within. It did not matter
+necessarily what might be going on without. They would as likely dart
+sparks during prayer meeting, or soften as a lover's mid the charge on a
+battery. Shaggy moustached Daniel, not yet thirty, was a scholar too, of
+the true old school, where dead languages lived to consort familiarly
+with men, and neither had to be buried out of the world because of the
+comradeship. Once, in Pompeii, Daniel blundered suddenly on that mosaic
+doormat which bears the warning, "Cave canem"; and before he thought, he
+glanced anxiously around, half expecting a dog that could have barked at
+Saint Peter himself. From which it appears that the editor had traveled,
+and it would not be long in also appearing that he had gathered enough
+of polite and variegated learning to fill a warehouse, in which
+junk-shop he was constantly rummaging, and bringing forth queer
+specimens of speech wherewith to flower his inspirations.
+
+Streaming back and forth before the shops in lively Plateros street were
+elegance and fashion and display, the languishing beauty of Spain, the
+brilliancy of the Second Empire, the Teuton's martial strutting, the
+Mexican's elation that Europe had come to him and with the money to pay
+for it. The toughened Boone gazed on the bright morning parade of
+ravishing shoppers and ogling cavaliers with the unterrified innocence
+of a child, or of an American. He had the air of doing nothing, such as
+only a newspaper man can have when really at work. He did not look as
+though he were waiting for some one. But only a half-hour before he had
+gotten from the saddle. He had just ridden four hundred and fifty miles
+for the express purpose of waiting for someone now.
+
+Finally the keen, lazy eyes singled out an immense yellow horse and
+rider from among the luxurious turnouts. "Jack!" he exclaimed gladly.
+"The Storm Centre," he improvised, as the new comer approached,
+"straight as Tecumseh, a great bronzed Ajax, mighty thewed, as strong of
+hand as of digestion--w'y, bless my soul, the boy looks pow'ful
+dejected, knocked plum' galley-west! I never saw him look like that
+before."
+
+Man and horse had come all night from Cuernavaca. But Din Driscoll never
+tired, wherefore Boone knew that _something_ was the matter. At the
+doorway Driscoll flung himself from the saddle, gave the bridle to a
+porter of the hotel, and was following, his face the picture of gloom,
+when he heard the words, "How' yuh, Jack?" His brow cleared in the
+instant. "Shanks!" he cried, gripping the other's hand.
+
+Mr. Boone untwined his boots and for the first time during a half-hour
+stood in them. As he shook Driscoll's hand, he shook his own head, and
+at last observed, in the way of continuing a conversation, "It was the
+almightiest soaking rain, Din, for the land's sake!" And he shook his
+head again, quite mournfully.
+
+Driscoll had not seen Mr. Boone since leaving Shelby's camp back in
+Arkansas. He naturally wished to know what was being talked about. But
+his woeful friend only kept on, "It wet all Texas, heavier'n a sponge,
+and," he added, "they ain't coming."
+
+"Shanks! You don't mean----"
+
+"Don't I? But I do. They're a surrendered army. The whole
+Trans-Mississippi Department of 'em, pretty near. But not quite, bear
+that in----"
+
+"But the rain? What in----"
+
+"What did you come down here for, I'd like to know? To say how the
+Trans-Mississippi wouldn't surrender, didn't you? Well?"
+
+"Oh, go on!"
+
+"Well, it rained, I tell you. Didn't it rain before Waterloo? Didn't it
+now?"
+
+Mr. Boone believed in trouble as an antidote for trouble. When he had
+stirred Driscoll out of his dejection enough to make him want to fight,
+he deigned to clear the atmosphere of that befogging downpour in Texas.
+
+"You rec'lect, Din, that there war god we put up in Kirby Smith's place,
+who so dashingly would lead us on to Mexico?"
+
+"Buckner, yes."
+
+"Him, Simon Bolivar B., whose gold lace glittered as though washed by
+the dew and wiped with the sunshine----"
+
+"Now, Shanks, drop it!" Driscoll was referring to the editorial pen
+which Mr. Boone would clutch and get firmly in hand with the least rise
+of emotion. Against his other conversation, the clutching always became
+at once apparent.
+
+"Anyhow," said Daniel meekly, "he wilted, did our Simon of B. B.
+calibre, and he gave back the command to Smith. And Smith's first order,
+his very first order, sir, was that the Department, the whole fifty
+thousand, should march into Shrevepoht and--and _surrender_, by
+thunder!"
+
+"Dan, you're not going to tell me----"
+
+"That _we_ surrendered, we, the Missourians, the flower of 'em all?
+Now s'pose you just wait till Joe Shelby gets back to us in Arkansas,
+after that conference with the other generals? Then you'll see what
+_he_ does. He proclaims things, on wall paper. The Missouri Cavalry
+Division will march to Shrevepoht, will depose Smith for good, will head
+off the surrender, will lead the other divisions on to Mexico. And we
+started to do it too. And then, and then--it rained. Rained, sir, till
+our trains and guns were mired, and we couldn't budge! And all the time
+we knew that regiment after regiment was stacking arms off there at
+Shrevepoht. Did Little Joe rave? Opened Job his mouth? He did. His
+fluency gave the rain pointers. I sho'ly absorbed some myself, me, that
+have language tanks of my own. Well, I reckon all our hearts pretty near
+broke. But we had our Missouri general and our Missouri governor, and
+the Old Brigade just decided to come along anyhow. And we're a coming,
+Din, we're a coming!"
+
+Driscoll's face went blank. He thought of the scant welcome his homeless
+comrades would get. But Mr. Boone did not notice. He had only stretched
+his canvas, a big one, and there was a picture to paint. His long body
+began to straighten out, and his eyes glowed. From Xenophon to Irving's
+Astoria, from Hannibal crossing the Alps to Marching Through Georgia, he
+ransacked both romance and the classics for adequate tints, but in vain.
+The colors would have to be of his own mixing.
+
+"Din Driscoll," he began solemnly, "_you_ know that devil breed? Of
+coh'se, you're one of 'em. You're a chunk of brimstone, yourself. And
+you'll maybe rec'lect they did some fighting off and on. There was that
+raw company, f'r instance--boys, hardly a one broke in his yoke of oxen
+yet--and they hadn't even gotten their firearms, but they took a battery
+with their naked hands, and got themselves all tangled up in the fiery
+woof of death. But you'll not be rec'lecting that that there Brigade
+ever _lost_ a gun. And those raids, Din, back into Missouri, a
+handful back into the Federal country, when men dozed and dropped from
+their saddles and still did not wake up, and some went clean daft for
+want of sleep, and fighting steady all around the clock too, fair and
+square over into Kansas! And there was the night they buried eight
+hundred!"
+
+In all this Daniel might have said "We," but reportorial modesty
+forbade.
+
+"And," he went on, gaining momentum, "I don't reckon you'll be
+forgetting Arkansas, and the ague and rattlesnakes? And how the
+small-pox swooped down on that camp of cane shacks? And how the quinine
+gave out, and--and the _tobacco_? Lawd!--And how those boys forgot
+how to sew patches, their rags being so far gone! And how they made
+bridles out of bark, and coffee out of corn! And how they kneaded dough
+in old rubber blankets and cooked it on rocks! Well, Jack, there they
+were, in Arkansas like that, and the War was over at last, and Missouri
+was just a waiting for 'em. And then, to think that they had to face
+square around another way entirely! Din, you'll just try to imagine that
+there devil breed facing any other way except to'ds home!"
+
+"Don't, Shanks, you----"
+
+"Devils? They were the wildest things that are. It's a mighty good thing
+they didn't go back. Think of their neighbors across the Kansas line,
+getting ready for 'em with every sort of legal persecution under the
+sun, and carpet-bag judges to help! Outlaw decrees? Well, I reckon those
+decrees will make a few outlaws, all right, and there'll be
+unsurrendered Johnny Rebs ten years from now. Shelby's boys had the look
+of it. Your own Jackson county regiment would have flared into
+desperadoes at sight of a United States marshal. They were all in just
+that sort o' mood, as they turned their backs on Missouri. And after
+four years, too! But there, it's a stiff wind that has no turning, so
+cheer up! _They_ did, as soon as that deluge got done with and they
+were headed for Mexico, one thousand of 'em. Soldiers mus'n't repine,
+you know. For them, Fate arrays herself in April's capricious sunshine."
+
+Driscoll had to smile. "Careful, there, Dan, don't stampede."
+
+"I ain't, but if now 'I hold my tongue I shall give up the ghost,' and I
+want to tell you first that Texas is a handsome state. We--they--were
+considerable interested all the way through it."
+
+"But, Meagre Shanks, where'd you leave 'em?"
+
+"Back in Monterey, drinking champagne with Fat Jenny. Alas, 'who can
+stay the bottles of heaven?'"
+
+"Fat--who's she?"
+
+"Now you wait. They've got heaps to do in Texas yet, before they get to
+Fat Jenny. First, they helped themselves out of their own commissary
+departments, horses, provisions trains, cannon, everything. Decently
+uniformed for the first time, and the War over! You should of seen 'em,
+a forest of Sharpe's carbines, a regular circulating library of Beecher
+Bibles. There were four Colts and a dragoon sabre and thousands of
+rounds of ammunition to each man. They had fighting tools to spare, and
+they cached a lot of the stuff up in the state of Coahuila. And they
+fed, and got sleek. This ain't editorial, my boy. It's God's own truth.
+Adventures every step of the way only did 'em good. They saved whole
+towns from renegade looters by just mentioning Shelby's name. They
+fought all day and danced all night. San Antone was the best. There they
+gathered in generals, governors, senators, and even Kirby Smith, all
+yearning to join Old Joe--our Old Joe, who ain't thirty-four yet."
+
+The speaker paused, and when he began again, there was a light ominous
+of inspiration in his eyes.
+
+"At the Rio Grande," he said, solemnly, "they crossed out of the
+Confederacy forever, so it was meet and right that there, in midstream,
+they should consign their old battle-flag to the past. They had not
+surrendered it, but as a standard it existed for those gallant hearts no
+more. Woman's loyal hand had bestowed it. Coy victory had caressed its
+folds mid the powder pall and horror of ten score desperate fields. And
+now it floated over the last of its followers, ere the waves should
+close over it forevermore. With bowed heads, they gathered sadly
+about----"
+
+"Lay it down, Shanks, lay it down," Driscoll pleaded. He was referring
+again to the pen in hand.
+
+"All right, Din," Boone answered hastily. "Yes, I know, we all got kind
+of weepy too. No wonder Colonel Slayback wrote some verses. Reckon you
+can stand just one? This one?
+
+  'And that group of Missouri's valiant throng,
+  Who had fought for the weak against the strong--
+    Who had charged and bled
+    Where Shelby led,
+  Were the last who held above the wave
+  The glorious flag of the vanquished brave,
+  No more to rise from its watery grave!'
+
+"And," he added savagely, "just let any parlor critic smile at the
+sacred feet of those same lines!"
+
+"Let him once!" said Driscoll. His eyes were moist.
+
+Mr. Boone faithfully traversed the rest of the way with the "Iron
+Brigade," and no company of errant knights, perhaps, ever had such a
+junketing as those same lusty troopers. No sooner did they set foot in
+the enchanted land of roses than a damsel in distress, the Republica
+Mexicana herself, came to them for succor. Or more literally, a
+dissident governor, backed by the authority of President Juarez, offered
+Shelby military control of the three northern states and grants in the
+fabulously rich Sonora mines, if he would hang high his shield and
+recruit his countrymen in the republican cause. There is little doubt
+that General Shelby could have raised an army and become henceforth a
+power in Mexico, for Washington would have smiled on the undertaking and
+all Texas would have afforded a base of supplies. But the Missourian's
+Round Table voted it down. They awaited Maximilian's reply which
+Driscoll was to bring. Perhaps, too, they would have a chance to wage
+war against the United States again, and that was better than being
+smiled on.
+
+Henceforth they fought the forlorn damsel herself, fought every foot of
+the way through desert mesquite thick enough to daunt a tarantula. There
+were guerrillas, robbers, spies, deserters, and Indian tribes. It was
+one eternal ambush, incessantly a skirmish, often a pitched battle. They
+saved a French garrison. They rescued a real maiden by a night attack on
+an hacienda stronghold, and did it with strictly de rigueur dash and
+chivalry. Once or twice they were even stung, by some "langourous
+dusky-eyed scorpion of a saynorita" to fight among themselves,
+cavalryman's code. Daniel was never one to spoil a romance by mentioning
+that a tropical maid was faced like a waffle-iron, though more than
+likely she was. Finally, as a last stroke, Fat Jenny promised to shoot
+Shelby and hang the rest.
+
+"You've been derogatory about this lady before," Driscoll interposed,
+"and I want to know who she is."
+
+"She is the English for Jeanningros, the French general at Monterey,
+who'd heard about those negotiations with the Republica. But Shelby
+formed in battle line, to storm his old city, and at the same time sent
+word explaining that he hadn't accepted any offer from the Republica.
+So, instead of shooting and hanging, Jenny asked us around for supper.
+That's where I left 'em."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"W'y," said Boone in surprise, "to see if you'd gotten here, and to take
+back Maximilian's answer."
+
+"But what's the use? The Trans-Mississippi went and surrendered."
+
+"Gra-cious, but you're in a vicious humor! Now, here's the use. Instead
+of fifty thousand, we're only one thousand, I know. But there are
+hundreds and hundreds of Americans down here like us, and all of 'em
+wanting service. There's that colony just starting at Cordova near Vera
+Cruz. But they'd fight, if there was an American to lead them, and more
+yet 'ud come from the States. Quicker'n that, Old Joe will have a
+division."
+
+Driscoll ruefully shook his head. "Maximilian wants us," he said, "if
+we'll give up our arms first."
+
+"If we----"
+
+"If we will surrender, Dan."
+
+Mr. Boone's jaw fell. The phrase that would measure the depth of the
+proposed ignominy would not come. Finally, he dug from his pocket a
+bright new gold coin, twenty pesos, and contemplated reflectively the
+side that bore Maximilian's effigy.
+
+"I've got the cub repohter's superstition," he said at last. "You get
+your cards printed," here he tapped the coin significantly, "and you're
+sure to lose your job--still we might of helped him."
+
+There was nothing, though, for Daniel but to turn back and meet the
+Brigade. Learning Maximilian's decision, the Missourians would probably
+join the Cordova colony. Boone reckoned that _he_ would. He
+discovered that he was tired of fighting. Perhaps the new citizens at
+Cordova would want an organ, a weekly at least; and already his nostrils
+were sniffing the pungent, fascinating aroma of printer's ink. Then he
+asked Driscoll what he thought of doing, now that he was free.
+
+"Don't know," came the reply lonesomely. "Stir around, I guess. There's
+a flying column leaving this week to capture Juarez. Maybe that'll do
+me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE BLACK DECREE
+
+
+  "So may heaven's grace clear whatso'er of foam
+  Floats turbid on the conscience."--_Dante._
+
+
+That unleashed hawk which was the flying column failed to clutch its
+prey. From the City of Mexico across the far northwestern desert the
+Chasseurs and cuirassiers rode their swift Arabian steeds, and into the
+town of Chihuahua at last. But the old Indian for whom they came was not
+there. Benito Juarez had fled. He must have known. Yet how, no one might
+conjecture. It was as though some watchful Republican fairy had marked
+the sturdy, squat patriot as the one hope of the Empire's overthrow, and
+did not propose to have him taken. Scouts, spies, the entire French
+secret service, delved, gestured, and sweated. But they laid bare next
+to nothing. At the Palacio Municipal a number of functionaries told of a
+peon in breech clout, a wretch coated with alkali dust till the muscles
+of his legs looked like grayish ropes, who had emerged from the cacti
+plain ten days before and come running into Chihuahua. The peon had made
+direct for the Palacio, where, in some way, he had contrived a secret
+word with Don Benito; and that very day Don Benito with his one
+minister, Lerdo, had set out toward the north.
+
+Afterward the functionaries had questioned the messenger, but he knew
+next to nothing. A senor chaparro had sent him, was all he said. It was
+a ridiculous anti-climax. A senor chaparro, "El Chaparrito," "Shorty,"
+such a one to be the omniscient guardian of the Republic! But for all
+that "El Chaparrito" was to be heard of again and many times, and always
+as an enigma to both sides alike, until the absurd word became freighted
+on the lips of men with superstitious awe. There was an inscrutable,
+long-fingered providence at work in the blood-strife of the nation. The
+warning to Juarez at Chihuahua was its first manifestation.
+
+Their quarry had escaped, but Driscoll was not sorry. More than once he
+had felt a vague shame for the unsportsmanlike chase after one lone,
+indomitable old man. Driscoll held a commission, which Michel Ney,
+happily recovering, had procured for him from the marshal. But as the
+American's healthy spirits, like cleansing by vigorous blood, swept the
+gloom from his mind, he began to wonder at the craving for bustle and
+forgetfulness which had made him snatch at such an offer. The corners of
+his mouth twisted in whimsical self-scorn. He, one of your drooping,
+unrequited lovers! "Shucks!" that is what he thought. And he persuaded
+himself that it was all over. Quite, quite persuaded himself. But as a
+matter of fact, he hoped that he might never have to see her again.
+
+It was not until October of the same year that Driscoll saw actual
+battle in his new service. With the Fifth Lancers under Colonel Mendez,
+the best of the few native regiments in the field, he had been assisting
+at a manner of pacification. That is, they marched from town to town,
+and received allegiance. Guerrillas of course punished the towns later,
+but Maximilian would not be induced to organize a native army, and
+thirty thousand French could not garrison fifteen thousand leagues. They
+could only promenade, through sand storms, through cacti. Then the
+battle took place. It was the last vestige of Liberal resistance to the
+Empire. A few hundred men near Uruapan in Michoacan flaunted their
+defiance. Driscoll noticed an expectant and wolfish look in his
+colonel's eyes. Mendez was a strikingly handsome and gallant Indian, but
+his expectancy now was not for battle. It was for the battle's sequel.
+Michel Ney and a squad of Chasseurs had just brought him an Imperial
+packet from the City, and the packet contained general orders very much
+to his Indian taste.
+
+The fight was a rousing one, and Driscoll enjoyed himself for the first
+time in many days. His Mexicans behaved as he could have wished, better
+than he had hoped. At the start in the familiar uproarious hell, he
+missed the hard set, exultant faces of his old Jackson county troop, and
+seeing only tawny visages through the smoke and hearing only foreign
+yells, he felt a queer twinge of homesickness. But he was at once
+ashamed, for the humble little chocolate centaurs whom he had been set
+to train were dying about him with lethargic cynicism, just as they were
+bidden. Wearing a charm, either the Virgin's picture in a tin frame, or
+the cross, they might have worn the crescent. They were as effective as
+Moslems. They were ruthless fatalists.
+
+Michel Ney also spent a diverting half-hour. He had lingered for the
+fray. Waving a broken sabre snapped off at the hilt, he charged with
+Gallic verve and got himself knocked under his kicking and wounded
+horse, and pummeled by Liberal muskets on every side. Driscoll saw, and
+straightened out matters. Handing the Frenchman a whole sabre, he
+reproved him soberly, as a carpenter might an apprentice caught using a
+plane for a ripsaw.
+
+After it was over, the living of the enemy were prisoners. The victors
+marched them to Uruapan near by, because it was charged that at this
+place two of the captured Liberals, Generals Arteaga and Salazar, had
+lately shot two Imperialists. Here, in their turn, they were promptly
+executed.
+
+Driscoll heard the volleys, ran to the spot, and saw the last horrid
+spasms.
+
+"What--what----"
+
+Ney turned on him a sickened look.
+
+"Don't you know, it's the new decree."
+
+"What new decree? These dead men were prisoners of war. If murderers,
+they weren't tried."
+
+"It's the decree I brought from Maximilian, the decree of general
+amnesty."
+
+Driscoll glared fiercely at such a jest, but to his utter amazement Ney
+was quite in earnest.
+
+He who had commanded the shooting squad stooped over the corpses, a
+smoking pistol in his hand. Now he glanced up at Driscoll. "Pues, si
+senores," he said, "of amnesty, yes," and chuckling, he indicated the
+bodies with his pistol. "But wait----" He thought he saw a form quiver,
+one he had overlooked. Remedying this with a belated coup de grace
+through the brain, he shoved back his white gold-bordered sombrero and
+mopped his forehead as a laborer whose labor is done.
+
+"Under which general amnesty, caballeros," he went on merrily, "you have
+just witnessed the first act. My loyalty to the Emperor grows. His
+Majesty has a sense of humor."
+
+It was Don Tiburcio. He had deserted the Contras to waylay the rich
+bullion convoy of which Rodrigo Galan had told him. But the convoy never
+came. Rodrigo, the "sin vergueenza," had not levied toll at all. He had
+swallowed it whole, a luscious morsel of several millions in silver and
+gold. The coup was of a humor the less appreciated by Don Tiburcio
+because he had figured on doing the very same thing himself. At present
+he was chief of scouts under Mendez, and commanded the Exploradores,
+audacious barbarians who were invaluable for their knowledge of the
+country.
+
+From Tiburcio and Ney Driscoll finally gathered the meaning of the
+decree. It was the keynote to the Imperialist hopes. Its cause was the
+flight of Juarez across the border. Maximilian was surcharged anew with
+enthusiasm. Even the United States must now recognize his empire, he
+believed. And confounding flurry with activity, as usual, he fervently
+proclaimed the courage and constancy of Don Benito Juarez, but added
+that the Republican hegira finally and definitely stamped all further
+resistance to the Empire as useless. Then, august and Caesar-like, he
+allowed amnesty for those who submitted immediately; he prescribed death
+for all others. Rebels taken in battle were not even to have trial.
+Maximilian believed that ink, thus sagaciously besmeared by a
+statesman's fingers, would blot out further revolution. But it was so
+fatuous, so stupidly unnecessary! The court martials, or French gardens
+of acclimatization, as the dissidents called them, were already doing
+the work of the decree. The poet prince merely lifted the odium of it to
+his own shoulders. His amnesty became infamy, and was called the Bando
+Negro, a nefast Decree to blacken his gentleness and well-meaning for
+all time.
+
+Driscoll left his informants, and walked up and down, up and down,
+alone. It did not occur to him to fill the cob pipe between his teeth. A
+scowl settled between his eyes, and it deepened and grew ugly. The
+desperado was forming in the man--desperado, as contrast to polite
+conventions. Desperado, as primitive man, who hews straight, cutting
+whom or what he might, cutting first of all through the veneered bark of
+civilization. For this reason, in this sense, he might be termed outlaw.
+And walking up and down, up and down, he hewed till he had laid bare the
+core of the matter. And he saw it naked, without the polish. Thereupon
+he knew what he was going to do.
+
+He saddled Demijohn, and Demijohn followed at his shoulder to the
+jefetura. Here, at the entrance, under the brick-red portales, Driscoll
+left the horse, untied, and opened the door and passed within.
+
+The jefetura, or prefecture, was at present the headquarters of the
+command, and in the long front room were assembled a number of officers,
+including Ney and Tiburcio, besides the jefe of the place and several
+town magistrates, all chatting with Colonel Mendez about the recent
+victory. They greeted the American cordially, and poured out tequila for
+him. He had done as much as any to win the fight. Michel laid a hand on
+his shoulder.
+
+"Monsieur," he said with mock formality, "to-day, when you permitted
+yourself to save my skin, you called me a fool. But I would have you
+observe, monsieur, that only my patron divinity, the god of fools, is
+permitted to know so much."
+
+Driscoll loosed himself from the affectionate grip, and turned to
+Mendez.
+
+"Colonel," he said, "I'm going to get out of this."
+
+"_What?_ Oh come, mi capitan, find a better one!"
+
+"It's not a joke, sir. Profiting by a commission that does not bind me,
+I am here to tell you good-bye."
+
+"Jean, mon ami!" Ney cried in protest.
+
+Don Tiburcio waited with keen appreciation, as he always did when the
+unexpectedness of this Gringo was unfolding. The others stared agape at
+the man between them and the door. Mendez saw too that he was in
+earnest, and he began to argue, almost to entreat. The Mexican leader
+had lost the quality of mercy in civil wars that had touched him
+cruelly, that had exacted many near to him, but there was sincerity in
+the man, and men were won by the stirring sound of his voice.
+
+"You would retire now," he exclaimed, "now, when every soul here may
+look for promotion, and none of them more than you, Senor Dreescol?"
+
+But he did not stop there. He conjured up a tempting vista of long and
+honored life under an empire that was now supreme. Even the scum of
+rebellion yet left on the calm surface was that day swept away, and
+naught remained but to enjoy the favors of his grateful Majesty.
+
+"Which only makes it," said Driscoll, "a good time to quit. I should
+mention, too, that I intend to join the Republic, that is," he added,
+"if there's any of the Republic left."
+
+Don Tiburcio was not disappointed.
+
+Mendez sprang to his feet and his voice was stentorian, as when he
+rallied his men by the magnet of fury and hatred.
+
+"It's desertion!" he roared.
+
+"Or simple honesty," Driscoll corrected him. "But it doesn't matter. The
+penalty is no worse for a deserter, if you catch him."
+
+Mendez curbed his rage. He did not wish to lose this man. That is, he
+would regret deeply having to kill him.
+
+"_Why_ do you mean to change?" he demanded.
+
+"Because I can't feel _right_! It's like--somehow it's like being
+an accomplice of murderers."
+
+"Dios mio, I suppose Your Mercy and his tender heart refers to the
+Decree?"
+
+"Partly. That thing is a blanket warrant of death. Just because your
+enemy can't fight any longer----"
+
+"But you forget, senor, the mines that exploded in the highways. You
+forget the poisoned springs, the ambuscades, the massacres. Would they
+not shoot prisoners too, your new friends?"
+
+"Si senor, as you and others may some day experience personally."
+
+"Then, mighty judge, condemn them also."
+
+"Don't I? But I can't blame them. They are punishing crime."
+
+"But not of murder, as we did to-day."
+
+"That too, for that was murder to-day. But I was thinking of a worse
+crime. I was thinking of theft, sir."
+
+"Theft? How can that be worse?"
+
+"Theft of their country, I mean, and as your accomplice I owe
+restitution. Leaving after a victory ain't so bad, but if I'd known that
+I was fighting for that Black Decree, I'd of dropped out before the
+fight. But look at it anyway you please. _How_ it looks be damned!"
+
+"Senor, lay down your pistols and sabre, there, on that table, because,
+by Heaven, I shall stop you! But if you are armed, I--I shall have to
+shoot you, too."
+
+"Hang it, Mendez, you're a good fellow! But--I can't help it."
+
+"Lay them down, you renegade!"
+
+Driscoll removed his sabre and gravely placed it on the table.
+
+"The guns are my own," he said. "Dupin had them returned to me.
+_He_ took them. Suppose _you_ take them, Colonel Mendez!"
+
+He was in the doorway, and from there he faced them. The day was hot,
+and Mendez had taken off his belt with his weapons. But the others were
+armed. Yet they hesitated. They were brave enough for death, but before
+the certainty of death for at least one among them and the uncertainty
+of which one, they paused. Driscoll had not touched the black
+six-shooters under his ribs. That would have snapped the psychological
+fetter. As he expected, Mendez sprang first. This put an unarmed man
+between himself and the others. In the instant he wheeled, was in the
+saddle, and clattering down the street.
+
+Back in the room Mendez saw his blunder and made way. Ney passed him
+first, reached the door, aimed and fired. But someone behind him touched
+his arm, and the ball sped high. Ney turned, and saw Tiburcio filling
+the door against the others, and regarding him with evil challenge in
+his eye.
+
+"Oh, don't think that I hold it against you," Ney cried gratefully.
+
+Tiburcio half laughed.
+
+"A man who don't want prisoners shot is better with the enemy than
+dead," he said.
+
+Tiburcio's chuckle was prophetic. The enemy invariably executed
+Exploradores, and would certainly do as much for Don Tiburcio if they
+caught him.
+
+Ney heard the hoof beats, already far away.
+
+"May the god of fools look after him too," he murmured heavily.
+
+The fugitive swept round the first corner of the street and on through
+the town. None thought to stop him. Soldiers and townsmen supposed him
+on the Empire's urgent business, and when they knew better, there was no
+longer hope for their ponies against the great Missouri buckskin, now a
+diminishing dusty speck mid cacti and maguey.
+
+"The devil of it is," Driscoll muttered ruefully, "I don't know where
+there's anybody to desert _to_!"
+
+However, he was feeling much better.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+AS BETWEEN WOMEN
+
+
+  "A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market."--_Lamb._
+
+
+Jacqueline had wrought close to success during that May twilight on the
+edge of the Cuernavaca pond. She had won a promise of abdication. Yet in
+the end it was not the Emperor that left Mexico, but the Empress. And
+Jacqueline was to accompany her, to leave despite herself the scene of
+her labors. Such was the case precisely, and it all came to pass in this
+wise.
+
+Maddened by the distance which his temptress kept, also goaded to it by
+the sorry state of his empire, Maximilian thought only of abdication.
+Napoleon responded to Jacqueline's cipher dispatch with orders to
+Bazaine. But Bazaine, urged thereto by Empress and marechale, ignored
+the orders, and advanced Maximilian more money. And Maximilian, having
+no longer his excuse to quit, stayed on to spend the money. Jacqueline
+sighed, and--began all over again. Consequently Bazaine, hearing once
+more from Napoleon, found himself a defaulter, and virtually recalled.
+Consequently, Napoleon set dates for evacuation. Consequently the
+rebellion sprang into new life, and the Empire lost armies and cities,
+and thousands of men by desertion. But the darkest cloud was formed by
+one hundred thousand Yankees massed along the Rio Grande. Napoleon took
+heed. He ordered that the French troops should leave at once, unless
+half the Mexican customs were turned over to the French administrator.
+This was during the summer of 1866, only six months after the bright
+hopes embodied in the Black Decree of general amnesty. Utterly appalled,
+Maximilian took up his pen again to sign his abdication.
+
+But there was Charlotte. Even yet she pettishly clung to her crown. The
+Mexican agents in Paris had availed nothing with Napoleon. Bien, she
+would herself go to Paris. She would get the ultimatum recalled, and
+Bazaine as well, because Bazaine no longer advanced money. The imperial
+favorites, among them the sleek-jowled padre recommended by Eloin,
+seconded her intention. And as they all talked so well, Maximilian
+quaffed of hope. With a spite hardly noble though entirely royal, he
+predicted that soon the marshal would find himself in a sadder fix than
+himself, the Emperor.
+
+Suddenly, secretly, a little after midnight, Charlotte left the capital.
+Maximilian bade her good-bye with a solemn promise to rejoin her in
+Europe if she failed. Three days later Dupin and his Contra Guerrillas
+met her in the Tierra Caliente, and offered to join her French cavalry
+escort. The Empress took his presence as an affront. Of late small
+things excited her to a feverish agitation which she was unable to
+control. The Tiger bowed over his saddle, and kept his gray hair bared
+to a torrential downpour while her carriage passed on. It was the
+tropical rainy season. The clouds hung low around the mountain base and
+truncated the more distant peaks, while the valley below was a bright
+contrast in wet, tender green. The wheels sank deep, and mired in the
+black, soggy earth. Men tugged constantly at the spokes, and the
+steaming mules reared and plunged under the angry crack of whips.
+
+The Tiger of the Tropics waited as carriage after carriage toiled past
+him and creaked and was forced on its way. Behind the dripping
+windowpane of the very last he saw a face he knew, a beautiful, saddened
+face, puckered just now by some immediate ill-humor. She frowned on
+recognizing the French barbarian, but unlike Charlotte, she did not jerk
+down the shutter. Instead, she lowered the glass by the length of her
+pretty nose.
+
+"Is it dotage already, monsieur? Then put on your hat!"
+
+"Name of a name, yet another petulant grande dame!" But the Frenchman
+turned his horse and rode beside her coach.
+
+"Did Her Majesty pout, then?" inquired the lady within.
+
+"Almost as superbly as Mademoiselle la Marquise."
+
+"Thank you well, but I have a superb reason for it."
+
+"Because you return to Paris, surely not? Yet, if that is the reason,
+you need not quite despair."
+
+"Why, what--what do you mean?"
+
+"Only brigands, mademoiselle. When everyone is looking for abdication, a
+cortege mysteriously leaving the City must be the Emperor who goes back
+to Austria. The news travels like wildfire. The Indito runners go as
+fast as when they brought Moctezuma fresh fish from the Gulf. I rather
+think they have carried the news to an old friend of ours. It's my
+chance to catch him."
+
+"Not my Fra Diavolo--Rodrigo Galan?"
+
+"None other. But Rodrigo is stirred by more than patriotism these days.
+Upon it he has grafted a deep wrong, and he swears lofty vengeance by a
+little ivory cross such as these Mexican girls wear. The conceited
+cut-throat imagines there is a blood feud between himself and His
+Majesty. So if he hears that Prince Max comes this way----"
+
+"He will find Charlotte instead? But he must not detain her."
+
+"Tonnerre!" exclaimed the Cossack chief. "Why not? She goes to Europe to
+sustain the Empire, while we French----"
+
+"All the same, let her go. She will gain nothing there. Listen to me,
+monsieur. She leaves that he may _not_ abdicate, while if I stay,
+she fears that----"
+
+"He _will_ abdicate?"
+
+"Your wits, mon colonel, are entirely satisfactory. And so she invited
+me to go with her, and as first lady of her household, I could not
+refuse. I wonder, now, if Fra Diavolo would deign to capture just me,
+alone!"
+
+The sharp look which Dupin gave her from behind the streams tumbling off
+his sombrero was the sixth of a half-dozen. But it was this last one
+that seemed to satisfy him.
+
+"Put up the window, mademoiselle," he said, "you're getting wet."
+
+Ten minutes later Jacqueline felt the coach lurch heavily and sink to
+the hub on one side.
+
+"Go on with your nap, Berthe," she said to her one companion. "They'll
+pull us out, as usual."
+
+The customary yelling and straining began, and men grunted as they
+heaved against an axle. After a long seance of such effort there came a
+sharp exclamation, like an oath, and the confusion fell to a murmur of
+dismay. Someone jerked open the door, and Dupin's grizzled head
+appeared.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I regret to have to announce that a wheel is dished in."
+
+Jacqueline's gray eyes regarded him quizzically. The sardonic old face
+spread to a grin, but deftly readjusted itself to the requisite despair.
+
+Not a carriage except the wrecked one was in sight. Only the Tiger's
+whelps, by the hundred, surrounded her.
+
+"And the others? Her Majesty?"
+
+"The others did the sensible thing. They know that you will catch up
+with them when they themselves are mired. Her Majesty, being ahead, is
+probably still in ignorance of your accident."
+
+"But the wheel?"
+
+"If mademoiselle wishes it mended?"
+
+"Is it so bad?"
+
+Dupin caught her expression. "It will take six hours," he said
+mercilessly.
+
+"Oh dear!" said Jacqueline.
+
+"There's a settler's cabin a mile from here. If you will accept my
+horse, and Mademoiselle Berthe can mount behind----"
+
+"Poor Berthe," sighed Jacqueline. But she nodded eagerly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE LACKING COINCIDENCE
+
+
+  "Achilles absent was Achilles still."--_The Iliad._
+
+
+Colonel Dupin helped first one and then the other of his charges upon
+the same horse and wrapped them about in the same gaudy serape till only
+two pair of pretty eyes peeped forth at the rain. The Vera Cruz highway
+clung to the mountain side, but the Contra Guerrillas took a venturesome
+little bridle path which dropped abruptly down into the rich valley of a
+thousand or more feet below. Emerging from the dense tropical growth of
+the highland, they beheld a vast emerald checkerboard of cultivation,
+field after field of sugar cane, and set in each bright square a little
+house of bamboo with a roof of red piping. After the dreary black gorges
+behind them, the light of the sun seemed boxed in here under a leaden
+cover of cloud. Coming suddenly out of the chill and mist, the two girls
+felt the very rain gratefully warm and the fragrant smells of the wet
+earth a thing of comfort. As the beauty and the cheer of it subtly
+gladdened her mood, Jacqueline thought that here at any rate was an
+adequate mise-en-scene for whatever tremors might befall.
+
+There was one circumstance that already seemed a portent, and got on a
+person's nerves like the stillness of nature just before a Kansas
+cyclone. This was the curious absence of all human life. Except for the
+grimly expectant troop around her, and the clanking of metal as the
+Contras rode, she had no token of a fellow creature. The first of the
+plantations was deserted, and likewise the next. But the house doors
+were open. Nothing showed preparation for departure. The riddle was
+uncanny. At the third Jacqueline stated that she would go no farther.
+She hated to tramp down a man's field when the man himself was not about
+to express an opinion, and the ruthless swath made by her escort through
+the cane gave her shame. Besides, it was too much like wading, the way
+her skirts brushed the long leaves and knocked off glistening drops by
+myriads.
+
+The third cabin was abandoned too, but there were inducements within for
+any houseless creature. A hammock was hanging from corner to corner in
+the front room, probably to thwart the fauna of tropical stingers, and
+there was that comfort unfamiliar to French women, a rocking chair,
+before a most inviting fireplace, itself a luxury rare in Mexico. The
+two girls removed their cloaks, and settled themselves to dry their
+shoes before a roaring fire which the men lighted for them. Then the
+Cossacks, including their colonel, left on some stealthy business
+without, and Jacqueline and Berthe were alone.
+
+Jacqueline tried the rocker, found it good, and smoothed her skirts over
+her knees to the warmth of the blaze. "We've only to yawn at the flies,
+eh, ma cherie?" said she.
+
+"Not a thing else, madame," came a cheery voice from the hammock.
+
+Jacqueline was at once suspicious. "You absurd little mouse," she cried,
+"don't I understand that gaiety of yours! And all the while you are
+really trembling in fear of terrible bandits. For months now you grieve
+because you imagine that I--well, that I am sad. But you'll not make me
+hilarious, you won't, Berthe, as long as it's 'madame.' Child, child,
+will you not let me have my friend in you, I who have none, nor a mother
+or sister! There now, if I'm not to be--ah--pensive--remember there's no
+'madame' between thee and me, dear!"
+
+The Bretonne's gentle eyes filled suddenly. Jacqueline had before sought
+to change their relations, ever since Berthe's part in Driscoll's rescue
+from execution, but she had always tried to bring it about by playful
+bantering. Now, however, Berthe was given to see the utter loneliness of
+an orphaned girl in one who for all the rest of the world was the
+disdainfully independent little aristocrat, who had met the proffered
+intimacy of the French empress with a sneer, who was the cold princess
+when among princesses of the Blood. The loyal child of simple Breton
+folk sprang impulsively to the arm of the rocker, and was herself
+clasped no less impulsively.
+
+"But there," said Jacqueline, laughing rather brokenly, "we're
+forgetting the flies."
+
+A belt over the fireplace caught her eye, and she unexpectedly
+discovered that her breath had quickened. She stared fascinated at the
+letters on the buckle. "C. S. A.," she murmured. Then her startled gaze
+roved hurriedly over the walls. It became even frightened before a faded
+gray cape-coat of the Confederate cavalry and a battered white gauntlet
+sticking from the pocket. Involuntarily, trembling foolishly, she looked
+to see if there might not be an old cob pipe also. There was not, but
+the other familiar objects made her imagination leap fearfully to what
+might be. Both hope and dread will always override common sense, and
+convoy imagination perforce. If _he_ did live here--if they should
+meet! Could such a coincidence happen, could it, outside the neat
+ordering of a book or play?
+
+She sprang to her feet and began investigating. She went awesomely as
+one would tiptoe over a haunted house. In the next room she came upon
+what was an odd treasure trove for an isolated bamboo cabin tucked far
+away under the Tropic of Cancer. It was a printer's shop, after a
+fashion. The case was a block of stone, in whose surface the little
+compartments had been chiseled. They were sparsely accoutred with type
+and plentifully with cigar ashes. As for a press, there was none. But a
+form had been made up on a slab of marble, and near by were a tiny
+hillock of ink, a roller and a mallet. The mysterious printer could at
+least take proofs. There was one now on a file. Jacqueline pulled it
+off, and contemplated a miniature American newspaper, of one sheet,
+printed on one side only, and no larger than a magazine cover. At the
+top she read the legend, in German caps: "_The Cordova
+Colonist_--_Weekly Independent_."
+
+"Is that a pun?" she wondered.
+
+But now at least she could identify the ghostly company of the valley,
+though not its scribe. That word "Cordova" gave the clue. A year ago one
+thousand hardy men had ridden into the capital from the north. Their
+leader was a fiery, black-whiskered little man with a plume in his hat
+and the buff sash of a brigadier general around his waist. They were the
+Missourians, defamed as "Shelby's horse thieves and judges of whiskey,"
+honored as "The Old Brigade," and so feared and respected under any name
+that the City fairly buzzed and stared goggle-eyed. But Maximilian again
+refused their offers to enlist under his standard, and they could only
+disband. Some took ship to hunt for Kidd's treasure in the Pacific,
+others went to Japan and the Sandwich Islands, and a number joined a
+congenial regiment of veterans, the Zouaves. But the majority, she
+remembered now, had been settlers, persuaded thereto by their
+countryman, Commodore Maury, who was Imperial Commissioner of
+Immigration. Maury had secured a grant of land near the town of Cordova,
+within a hundred miles of Vera Cruz. There were one-half million acres
+of rich land, suitable for the three Big C's of southern countries,
+cotton, cane and coffee. But until now the strip had not been
+cultivated. The Church had held it fallow. Then the Republic had
+nationalized it; and the Empire was selling it to the Americans at $1.25
+an acre. The hopeful settlement bore the name of Carlota.
+
+So the cape-coat and those other things were explained. She was denied
+her coincidence. But as there was so much of a plot forward anyway, she
+ought to have been satisfied--as an artist, she ought. She craved an
+ecstasy of peril or of terror, not as the former dilettante of emotions,
+but as the lotus eater who exacts forgetfulness.
+
+Meantime she read editorials, and got interested. The _Colonist_
+never advanced beyond the proof-sheet stage, but as such it circulated
+with avidity over the valley. Eloquence flowed serene under mashed type
+and variegated fonts. The editor persisted in viewing the Empire and
+Republic as political parties, and the horrors of civil warfare as
+incidents of an electoral campaign. He had congenial scope for his
+unpartisan and independent pen, advising with owl-like sagacity or
+abusing with peppery virulence, and either, for either side, with blithe
+impartiality. At times, though, the strained analogy between ballots and
+bullets evidently cracked, and rather floored the editor. For instance,
+in a pot-pourri of long primer and pica with a dash of Old English
+lower-case was the following:
+
+  As we wen[t] to press last week we paused to entertain a torchlight
+  procession of the Young Imperialists' Flambeau [C]lub, which was
+  collecting a campaign contribution in the semblance of our alfalfa
+  stack. The spectacle of citizens taking an active [p]art in the issues
+  before their country ne'er fails to rouse in us a spirit of
+  collaboration, so [w]hat could we do but join heartily in the
+  celebration, so that a most excellent time was had. Later our
+  editorial staff, a score who in our canefields teach the tender
+  sprouts [h]ow to shoot, knowing t[h]e same so well themselves, gently
+  laid to rest a score and one Cossacks, past members of the [F]lambeau
+  Club, wh[o] had lingered behind for the reason that they _were_ past.
+  But, we ask, _ad quod damnum_?--i.e., isn't it as futile as
+  cauterizing a wooden leg? How much longer, O Jove, must we let our
+  public-opinion moulds cool off while we chase enthusiastic young
+  patriots away from our alfal[f]a!!!... In conclusion, with a cool
+  brow, we are constrained to say that if the party in power cannot
+  discourage the depredations above ci[t]ed, we shall have to fortify
+  ourselves to the contemplation of a c[h]ange of administration.
+
+[Transcriber's note: characters in brackets were originally printed
+as bold Old English lower-case as explained above.]
+
+"Why," cried Jacqueline, "what an _animal disputans_ it is!" She
+perceived an ink bottle, and exclaimed, "Ah, more milk from the black
+cow!" Taking up a wad of copy paper, on which a future editorial was
+already begun, she read, and quickly her amusement changed to a livelier
+interest.
+
+"Rumor goes," she read under the caption, _Ardentia Verba_, "that
+Father Augustine, political manager for the administration, vice Eloin,
+is soon to leave for Europe. He goes to have a pourparler with the Pope.
+He will concede everything, since the Empire no longer hopes to win over
+the moderate Mexicans. But the obstinate though Holy Father will
+negotiate a concordat on one basis only, and that is the return to the
+Mexican church of all nationalized church lands.
+
+"Men of the colony, attention now! We each own something like three
+hundred acres apiece of these lands. And we are paying for them, we are
+cultivating them, and we have to defend them against both guerrillas and
+contra-guerrillas. And now they are to be confiscated! Our new homes are
+to be taken from us!! Alas, we who are peaceful settlers, to think that
+we were Trojans on a time!!! Fellow citizens, with us it's a severe case
+of _e pluribus unum_. Oh, for a leader! But our incomparable chief
+of yore will not stir. Yet there _was_ one, gallant cavalier of the
+South, peerless captain, just the dauntless heart for any forlorn hope
+under the starry vault of heaven, if he were only here! If he, John D.
+Driscoll, were only----"
+
+The matter stopped abruptly. More than that, by force of habit the
+scribe had ringed the figures "30" underneath. They meant "finis." The
+editor had known, then, that he would not return to end his harangue.
+
+"A flea bite," mused Jacqueline, "would interrupt the penning of an
+Alexandrian line. Now, I wonder who or what the flea could have been,
+and what----"
+
+But there, she would ask herself no question concerning the editorially
+mentioned "John D. Driscoll."
+
+It was mid afternoon when Colonel Dupin, like a shaggy, dripping bear,
+returned to the house and begged leave to dry himself. Standing before
+the fire, he reloaded his holster pistols. They were tremendous, elegant
+utensils of French make, with a nine-chambered cylinder, and a second
+barrel underneath that carried a rifle ball. Where no prisoners were
+taken on either side, the owner of such a weapon usually reserved the
+murderous slug for himself, and the loading of that lower barrel became
+a sort of ghastly rite. Jacqueline shuddered as she watched him fix on
+the cap.
+
+"How do you explain your desertion of Her Majesty?" she asked. "Our Fra
+Diavolo should thank me for drawing you off."
+
+The Tiger adjusted the double hammer so that it would play on the
+cylinder first. A rumbling chuckle came from the depths of his throat.
+
+"I should be honored with mademoiselle's approval," he said, "for at
+court mademoiselle is a guileful warrior. The casualties there may not
+be so sanguinary, but the strategic principle is the same. Know, then,
+that Rodrigo Galan employs a spy whom I own, body and soul. By now
+Rodrigo has learned from this spy that the Imperial coach broke down,
+and that to-night Her Majesty rests--here. So you see that she is not
+likely to be attacked----"
+
+"But I see that _we_ are, parbleu!"
+
+"Of course," and the Tiger unctuously rubbed his hands in the blaze.
+"It's my chance to trap him. He has only three hundred men."
+
+"And you, monsieur?"
+
+"Our mutual spy has told him that I have less than two hundred men. The
+brigand knows that I was forced to leave a garrison at Tampico."
+
+"But how many have you, really?"
+
+Dupin motioned her to the window. But she saw not a man, not a musket.
+She saw only the wet fields of cane, and the black mist-shrouded
+mountains beyond.
+
+"Just the same," the Frenchman assured her pleasantly, "they are there,
+full five hundred of my little tribe. Does mademoiselle approve?"
+
+"It looks like the curtain on 'Fra Diavolo,'" she replied, shuddering.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE MISSOURIANS
+
+
+  "Men sententious of speech and quick of pistol practice."
+                                  --_Major John N. Edwards._
+
+
+An hour before nightfall the guerrillas attacked. Jacqueline was
+standing at the window, when she heard a jubilant din and saw a tawny
+troop charging through the fields toward the house. They yelled as they
+came, waving machetes and carbines. It was the usual theatrical dash of
+Mexicans. Like savages, they thought first to frighten their
+adversaries.
+
+"Won't you come and see, Berthe? It's like a hippodrome."
+
+She felt sorry for them. The dulcet cane grew thorns. Under the leaves
+the black soil was become clay red with leather jackets. The Cossacks
+had fixed sword-bayonets to their muskets, and were waiting on their
+knees.
+
+Stung by the hidden barbs, the first horses reared in air, pawing and
+screeching frantically. Many sank down again, and they were limp as the
+life ebbed. Others crashed backward, their riders underneath, and those
+behind plunged over them, unable to stop. Soon it was a fearful jumble;
+men and beasts, hoofs and steel, curses and shrill neighing. Then the
+firing began, a woof of fine red threads through the warp of pale-green
+reeds. The guerrillas yet fought. The myth of their own heavier numbers
+kept them from panic. Ragged fellows with feet bare in the stirrups
+leaned over to slash at heads between the tasselled stalks. They
+squirmed like snakes from under kicking horses, and fainting, got a
+carbine to the shoulder at aim, and someway, pulled the trigger. Then
+they were taken in the rear. One-half of the Contra forces, mounted, had
+waited under the sapling growth of the nearest foothill. Now they sprang
+from cover, bloodthirsty whelps trailing the Tiger. The guerrillas could
+not turn back. To retreat they must cleave the way in front, and they
+did, by sheer desperation. Falling in the mesh at every step, they at
+last gained the large open space around the cabin.
+
+Then it was that Jacqueline got a near view of Don Rodrigo. He was
+superbly mounted, and his long body made a heroic figure on the
+curveting charger. He frowned, and his mustachios bristled fiercely, and
+his shouts of command were heavily ominous. The wind turned the folds of
+his black cloak. It was faced with scarlet silk; and the charro elegance
+beneath was black and resplendent. All told, he was a very outburst of
+glitter; breeches, jacket, sombrero, saddle, stirrups, and bridle; not
+of silver, but of gold. Good carbines for his vagabond Inditos,
+magnificence for himself, these had come from that fabulous theft of the
+bullion convoy. And he had arrayed himself this rainy day to dazzle a
+princess of the Blood. So now he wielded his sword with a conscious
+flourish, glancing toward the window to see if he were seen.
+
+"The poseur, never out of his role," murmured his audience there. "How
+will he enjoy running, I wonder?"
+
+But to her astonishment he did not run, though Dupin was cutting closer
+and closer through tangled bodies, eager to grapple with his old-time
+slippery foe. Don Rodrigo raised in his saddle, and looked anxiously in
+all directions. Suddenly his dark face lighted, and wheeling round, he
+called to his men, and in his turn strove as furiously to reach the
+Tiger as the Tiger had striven to reach him. Jacqueline could not now
+tell which side to feel sorry for. But she exulted in the thrill of it,
+even as she wrung her hands at sight of the red agony.
+
+Then something happened, which even the Tiger, who knew his warfare so
+well, had never known; which got into even his dried and toughened
+marrow. It was the Rebel yell. It rose over a sudden thunderous rush of
+hoof beats. And next, as a puff of air, a herd of horsemen, a wild
+mud-spattering streak, surged past the house. On across the open, and
+straight upon the fray, they merged everywhere, and made bigger and
+livelier the blotch of mad swarming. Some wore slouch hats, others straw
+sombreros, and all were ruddily burned. They fought with revolvers, and
+often one would pause between shots to spit tobacco. They brought to the
+battle one thing above all else, and that was vim, vim unbounded, vim
+that simply had to have vent.
+
+Jacqueline caught her breath. What race of men were these? Exalted,
+quivering, she watched them doing as workmen what fell to their hands,
+yet ever with that whirlwind of vim.
+
+"The Missourians--of course!" she cried.
+
+Through powder smoke and misty rain the figure of one horseman slowly
+grew familiar. She caught fleeting glimpses of him, as he darted into a
+melee, as he spurred round to find a hotter field. Suddenly her eyes
+widened, and she pressed a hand hard against her breast.
+
+"The coincidence!" she gasped, trembling from head to foot. "It is the
+coincidence!"
+
+Her nose flattened against the wet pane. She remembered how that general
+of the Missourians had told Charlotte about this man, for the Empress
+had asked. And the general had related how the troop had dubbed him the
+Storm Centre.
+
+"And no wonder!" she breathed. "Mon Dieu, how he _enjoys_ it!--But,
+oh--he will be killed--oh!"
+
+Yet nothing of the kind happened. When she uncovered her eyes, his
+assailants were in flight. Every Cossack survivor was in flight. The
+Storm Centre wheeled and confronted Don Rodrigo, who raised his sombrero
+effusively.
+
+"Rebellion makes strange comrades," thought Jacqueline. "But no,
+my--the--chevalier--does not take his hand."
+
+Indeed Driscoll was looking the guerrilla over with little favor. "So,"
+he exclaimed, "it was you I was to help here!"
+
+"And what better patriot, senor----"
+
+"Never mind that. Why didn't you wait till dark to attack? Weren't those
+the orders, or--that is, the suggestion?"
+
+"But whose suggestion? Perhaps, senor, _you_ know who El Chaparrito
+is?"
+
+"Haven't the least idea, nor anyone else. But it's certain, Rod, that
+this is your first experience of Shorty. Another time, and you'll have
+sense enough to take his hints. Now then, where's the emperor we were to
+catch?"
+
+Fra Diavolo's smile was Satanic. "Your Chaparrito was either mistaken
+about the Emperor, or," and he glanced toward the window, "or he
+deceived you into helping me capture a beautiful young woman."
+
+"How? What----"
+
+"I mean that His Cautious Majesty did not come, however much El
+Chaparrito seems to want him. But--" and Rodrigo's tone lowered heavily,
+"but his August Spouse came instead. She is in that cabin now. It is
+well, senor, for vengeance in kind is just. It is righteous, it is
+biblical. Since fate has thrown----"
+
+"E-a-s-y! Eas-y, boy. Of course, if we've gone and netted an empress,
+we'll ask 'em to please take her back. This ain't a woman's game."
+
+"Give up a queen's ransom?"
+
+Driscoll nodded cheerfully.
+
+"I believe, caballero," said the brigand with awful dignity, "that I
+command here."
+
+Driscoll looked at his Missourians returning from the chase. "Well," he
+laughed, "you might try it on, and see how they take it."
+
+Behind Jacqueline the door opened. She almost jumped. Of the hundreds
+likely to enter there, her startled fancy pictured only one. But the new
+comer was a stranger.
+
+"Oh-ho, come a-visiting, eh?"
+
+The voice was cordial, robust, Western.
+
+"Missour-_i_!" she exclaimed involuntarily.
+
+"Yes'm, Cooper county."
+
+She turned, won to friendliness, and beheld a man who, to use her mental
+ejaculation, was "of a leanness!"
+
+"Monsieur----" and she paused.
+
+"Boone, ma'am. Daniel, your most obedient servant. If I'd known--Sho',
+we might of had things spruced up a bit. Are you the queen, maybe?"
+
+The lady's laugh rang as clear as a bell. Taken aback, Boone sought to
+correct his mistake. He saw that Berthe was seated in the hammock. She,
+then, must be the Empress.
+
+"I'm downright sorry we went and captured Your Majesty," he began.
+
+"Her Imperial Highness does not understand English," Jacqueline
+explained.
+
+Then to her surprise the man proceeded in French. He was evidently
+greatly disturbed because Missouri hospitality did not harmonize with
+war. "It was a blunder," he apologized earnestly, "come of our deciding
+just this morning to make you Europeans vacate our continent. But don't
+let that worry Your Majesty. Here, under my roof, the decision doesn't
+hold, _at_ all!"
+
+Berthe lifted her head quickly. It was her second promotion in the
+social scale that day. She had trembled when the door opened, for she
+knew that Rodrigo's side had triumphed. But this tall stranger brought
+relief to one's nerves, and somehow she had watched him trustingly. He
+was of the same race as Monsieur Driscoll, to whom also she had once
+turned instinctively for help. But when the tremendous young fellow
+addressed her with reverence due a queen, she felt only the respectful
+admiration due a pretty young woman. It unexpectedly awakened in her the
+knowledge that she was a pretty young woman; and with a winsomeness that
+amazed and delighted Jacqueline, to say nothing of its effect on Daniel,
+she gently put him right as to her identity.
+
+"It doesn't matter," Boone protested stoutly, "you ought to be one!"
+
+The door opened again. It struck the wall with an insolent bang, and in
+strode Don Rodrigo. Jacqueline noted who it was and indifferently seated
+herself in the rocking chair, with her back toward him. The Mexican
+advanced to the centre of the room. The brief twilight had fallen, and
+the place was in half light except for the blazing logs. He stopped
+rigid and flung his scarlet-lined cloak back over his shoulder.
+
+"Where," he demanded in the huge tones of a victorious general, "is the
+tyrant's empress?"
+
+No one volunteered as to where the tyrant's empress might be. The toe of
+Jacqueline's boot was indolently busy with the embers on the hearth. The
+heads of both girls were in shadow.
+
+Rodrigo's furrowed brow creased more deeply. "Which of you is she?" The
+heavy syllables dropped one by one. He stepped tentatively toward
+Berthe. So did Boone.
+
+"Stand aside, senor!"
+
+"Can't, dear brigand," said Daniel.
+
+Then Berthe spoke. "Please, messieurs," she began, "Her Majesty is
+not----"
+
+"It's only a maidservant," Rodrigo exclaimed in chagrin.
+
+"Don't make any difference," said Boone, "she's come a-visiting."
+
+"If, Seigneur Brigand," spoke a clear voice, "you had not interrupted
+Mademoiselle Berthe, you would stand informed by now that Her Majesty is
+not here. Will you deign to close the door?"
+
+Rodrigo knew well those bell-like tones. Forgetting the question of an
+empress, he drew nearer to the lady of the rocker. She gave him no heed,
+but her profile against the red glow was very soft and beautiful. His
+chagrin vanished. Here was a more ravishing triumph.
+
+"A vengeance in kind," he muttered, wetting his lips. "Ha, he took
+nobody's wife, as to that; and his wife may go. But in the matter of
+sweethearts--ah!"
+
+Bending, he laid a hand caressingly on her neck, against the tendrils.
+
+At the touch she sprang to her feet, and Boone leaped forward with fist
+drawn back. But both stopped. Her face changed from fury to pallor.
+Boone's expressed approval.
+
+The room had filled through the open door with men and torches, but the
+first man among them had come as far as Rodrigo's shoulder even as the
+insult occurred. From behind, the man's arm had straightened under
+Rodrigo's chin, and twisting to a lever, was gradually forcing back his
+head. Rodrigo groped for a knife, but half way to his waist the fingers
+clutched vainly in a sharp spasm, and all involuntarily flew up and
+gripped at the vise under his chin. Yet another ounce of pressure, and
+it seemed his neck must snap like a dry twig. Suddenly his spine bent
+limp. Muscles relaxed. The whole body capitulated. Then the man behind
+stooped a little, and Rodrigo began to rise. Slowly at first, and next,
+as from a catapult, the brigand shot backward over the man's shoulder
+and struck his length on the floor.
+
+"No, not that, boys," said the man. "Don't kick him. Laugh at him, it
+hurts more."
+
+He spoke more particularly to one "Tall Mose" Bledsoe of Pike county who
+was purple with indignation that a "saddle-colored Greaser should dare
+lay hands on a white woman."
+
+But there were also "Rube" Marmaduke of Platte, "Mac" Crittenden of
+Nodaway, the "Doc" of Benton, "Cal" Grinders from the Ozarks, Clay of
+Carroll, and Carroll of Clay, besides a ruddy sprinkling from the county
+of Jackson. Among the latter was "Old Brothers and Sisters," a plump
+little young man with cherubic eyes behind round brass spectacles. Clem
+Douglas had been ordained in the M. E. Church (South), and became
+thereupon the Rev. Mr. Douglas. "Old Brothers and Sisters" was a
+theological degree of later acquirement, lovingly bestowed by the Iron
+Brigade. But in his more recent gospel of pistol practice, Clem Douglas
+was not a backslider. He was simply all things Southern to all men. Like
+the others in the cabin, his hat was off, his muddy boots scraped; and
+like the others, he was not unaware of the two girls.
+
+"Rather showery out," he observed genially, wiping the mist off his
+glasses, and imagining weather a livelier topic than battle.
+
+Jacqueline did not hear. Her eyes were still on the man who had
+disdained to strike Rodrigo from behind, who had flung him away instead,
+as one would a dog. She stood motionless, and her face was very white.
+She saw that he wore loose leather "chaps," a woolen shirt, and an old
+coat, with only stained shoulder straps, green braid on dark blue, to
+indicate a uniform. His wet black hair was curly. His brown eyes flashed
+whimsical contempt on the resplendent guerrilla at his feet. He was the
+Coincidence; he was the Storm Centre. He turned, expecting to see the
+Empress, and he met her eyes. His own darkened with a new anger, and
+involuntarily, he swung round, himself to kick the Mexican who had
+insulted her. But a flood of memory swept over him, the memory of what
+he had seen at Cuernavaca. Not for her could he touch a fallen man.
+
+"Take him into the back room, two of you."
+
+Red, red to the neck, he was turning to follow, when he saw Berthe.
+
+"Miss Burt!" he exclaimed.
+
+Heartily he shook hands with her. "It's my first chance, you know, to
+mention what you did for me over a year ago. But I sure appreciate
+having my life saved, you know that. There now, you're not to worry over
+this present mess. We'll have it straightened out, just in no time."
+
+He stammered as he spoke, and when he turned and left the room, his
+bearing was constrained. Jacqueline's eyes followed him until the inner
+door closed behind him. Then, with a half shrug, she sat down and
+pensively resumed the building of fiery mounds on the hearth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IF A KISS WERE ALL
+
+
+  "A man, a woman, a passion--what else matters?"--_Sardou._
+
+
+"Tall Mose" Bledsoe and the Rev. Mr. Douglas conveyed Don Rodrigo to the
+back room, and here Driscoll and Boone joined them. They did not disarm
+the Mexican. It did not occur to them that any man would risk drawing a
+weapon in such company. And as to Fra Diavolo they surmised correctly.
+He sulked a little at first, for there were sore tendons that ached. But
+in the end he grew reasonable, and his white teeth gleamed acquiescence
+to all that the senores were pleased to say. He agreed to bivouac his
+men apart from the Missourians and go his own way at daybreak. The
+Contras were routed. The Tiger had barely escaped. There was no further
+need of combined forces. Indeed, Don Rodrigo feared a night attack so
+little that he meant to reward his men with many copitas of aguardiente.
+Might he send a barrel over to his esteemed allies?
+
+Mose Bledsoe turned a pleading look on the parson, and to his surprise
+the Rev. Mr. Douglas beamed tolerant benevolence. "Why yes, my friend,"
+he himself said to Don Rodrigo, "good liquor is always acceptable,
+especially when soldiers must sleep on the wet ground."
+
+The brigand was then allowed to depart, and Old Brothers and Sisters
+explained. It was best to let Rodrigo send the brandy, for then one knew
+what to expect. Otherwise the Christian brother and rascal would hatch
+up some other plot, and any other plot might take them off their guard.
+
+When an hour later, Rodrigo did in fact attack the presumably somnolent
+Americans, more happened than either he or they expected. A third was
+also waiting to strike for the sake of a woman. He was Dupin, who wanted
+nothing better than the allies at each other's throat. Crouching warily
+near, the Tiger sprang at both of them. In the rain and the black night,
+the three-cornered fight raged like firecrackers under a tin bucket. The
+guerrillas, repulsed by the Americans, fled upon the Contras, whereat
+the Americans swept them both back indiscriminately. Instead of a lady,
+the Tiger carried off Don Rodrigo, and was quite glad to carry himself
+off. But Boone, scouting near, reported that Rodrigo was held a prisoner
+instead of being executed at once. This meant something. It meant beyond
+any doubt that the Mexican and the Frenchman would combine, Rodrigo for
+his life, Dupin to rescue Jacqueline.
+
+The Missourians held council in Daniel's sanctum. To restore the
+captives to Dupin had been Driscoll's intention from the first. But now
+it was a question of trading them against Rodrigo. Dupin must know the
+American offer before he and Rodrigo should attack. Driscoll proposed
+for himself alone the errand to the Tiger's camp. Rising to his feet, he
+left his protesting friends without a word further. But he had to pass
+through the front room first, to get the cape coat hanging there. It
+was, in fact, his own. The two girls were seated before the fire,
+Jacqueline still in revery, Berthe nervously agitated from the late
+racket of battle. Daniel Boone had laid before them a ranchman's supper
+with tropical garnishing, but it was untouched. Driscoll nodded, crossed
+the room, took the coat from its nail, and started for the outer door as
+he drew it on.
+
+"Snubbing--an acquaintance," spoke an impersonal little voice, "is
+cheap."
+
+He stopped, waited.
+
+"Of a gentleman, I reckon you'd say," he interrupted uneasily. "Maybe
+not, but a ruffian's got his instincts too. When he's afraid of hurting
+someone, he hides himself."
+
+"I was mistaken," she said gravely, with that quaintest inflection of
+the English he had ever heard, "yes, mistaken. He mais--but it is just
+that the complaint. You hurt more by _not_ speaking."
+
+"But there's nothing to say," he faltered. "I'm just going to Old
+Tige's--to Dupin's camp, and get him to come here for you."
+
+"Monsieur, monsieur, you fight for your captives only--only to give them
+up?"
+
+"That's not the question. You can overtake the Empress yet. Dupin
+will----"
+
+"But it is not that I want to overtake empresses at all. I--Berthe,
+would you mind carrying back these supper things?--I," she continued,
+when they were alone, "have no wish to go back to Paris. I shall return
+to the City."
+
+Again the liaison with Maximilian, he thought bitterly. And Charlotte
+away! It was infamous. However, he had no right to be concerned.
+
+"Very well," he said, "then Dupin can take you to the City, or wherever
+you wish."
+
+"Ma foi, what trouble to be rid of your prisoners, monsieur, and after
+two battles too!"
+
+"That's got nothing to do with it."
+
+She meant, though, to have him confess that she had had a great deal to
+do with it. She was taken with the self-cruel fancy to lay bare and
+contemplate his love for her, that she might feel more poignantly the
+happiness she had lost. But he abruptly turned again to leave, and all
+else was forgotten in terror.
+
+"You go to that Tiger!" she cried. "Do you not know that----" She darted
+between him and the door--"that he recognizes no rules of war? He will
+shoot you, he will, he will!"
+
+Driscoll laughed.
+
+"Oh, I'll be safe enough all right, thank you. Dupin holds Rodrigo, we
+hold you. So it's simply an exchange of prisoners. And he'll not do
+anything to me, for fear of what might happen to you here. You're not a
+hostage, sure not, but as long as he thinks so, I'll profit by it."
+
+"You are right," she admitted, yet not heeding his anxiety to pass.
+"Dupin will not even detain you. He will judge you Missou-riens by
+himself. So, voila, he frees Diavolo. He comes for me. And--and you,
+monsieur?"
+
+"Me? W'y, I'll wait for the boys at Dupin's camp, after he takes charge
+here. Then we'll march."
+
+"And--you do not come back?"
+
+"No need to. Now will you please get away from that door?"
+
+"Not coming back!" she repeated. Could the Coincidence be for naught
+after all? Could not real life be for once as complacent as art? He was
+going, and when, where, in the wide world, in all time, might they ever
+meet again? And he was going, like that! Except for her, he would not
+even have spoken.
+
+But--if he were the man to hold her, despite herself? If he were primal
+man of primal nature, the demigod raptor who seizes his mate? Yes, she
+would forgive him--if only he were that man. If, as such, he would but
+hold her from her duty, from her sacrifice, despite herself,
+if--if--if----And so her daring fancy raced, raced as desire and hope to
+outrun sorrow. And why not? She could look him in the eye with that
+honesty which pertains to woman, for she knew that the shame he thought
+of her was only in the evidence of what he had seen, of what he had
+heard the world say, and not--no, not in fact. And for the kindness of
+that fact she thanked Providence. Then, daring to the end, her insane
+hope for happiness gave her to remember that there was a clergyman among
+these Americans, and to see in that the ordering of fate.
+
+But Reality was still there, grim and greater than either Providence or
+Art. The man was waiting for her to step aside, and when she did, he
+would pass through the door and out of her life. She gazed, as for the
+last time, on his stalwart shoulders, on his splendid head, the head of
+a young Greek, on his flushed face, his mouth, and those obstinate
+little waves of his hair. How good he was to look upon--for her, that
+is! No, no, she could not let him go.
+
+And she tempted him. With all her woman's beauty she tempted him. If
+beauty were aught, it must win her now what she held dear. Afterward,
+when she should tell him why, he would forgive her the unmaidenly
+strategy. She had noted with a passionate joy that the lines of his face
+were tightly drawn, were even haggard, that his breath came short; in a
+word, that he suffered. It told her that his gruff manner was not
+indifference, but the rugged front of self-control. What a will the man
+had! Knowing that strength, she must have been an odd young woman indeed
+not to try to break it.
+
+"I suppose," she said, lowering her head and shaking it in demure
+resignation, "no, I suppose a captive has not the littlest thing to say
+of her disposal? But if the poor child has curiosity, monsieur? If, for
+the instant, she wonders why a monsieur fights for her, and then why he
+hazards his life to be rid of her?" With which she raised her eyes
+inquiringly. It was disconcerting.
+
+"We'll not talk of that any more," he grumbled. "Are you going to let me
+pass?"
+
+Frail creature between him and the door, how easy to remove her! But he
+feared the warmth of her hand, should he but touch it, or the faint odor
+from her hair, should a stray lock no more than brush his cheek.
+
+"Even a captive will wonder why she is so little prized," observed the
+perverse maid.
+
+She considered with glee that the window was too small, and with yet
+keener delight that his wits for strategy had left him. He did not once
+think of exit by the inner door.
+
+"Why do you keep me?" he demanded.
+
+His tone was harsh command, and for the moment it frightened her. She
+all but gave way, when she perceived that the menacing growl was really
+a plea. The poor fellow was at bay. She very nearly laughed. Then, too,
+he would not meet her eye again.
+
+"Oh, am _I_ keeping you?" she exclaimed in innocent dismay.
+
+It provoked him to what she wanted. He came toward her angrily, while
+she stepped back against the door and spread her arms across it. Her
+pose was a dare; and the trouble was, he had to look. He had to see the
+girlish, the wonderful line of head and shoulder, the color flooding
+cheek and neck, and most dangerous of all, the challenging gray eyes.
+His teeth snapped to, and his hand closed over her wrist. He pulled, she
+yielded. He felt her other hand laid on his. The touch seemed to sear
+his flesh.
+
+"You must not go," she whispered, "must not!"
+
+He drew her farther from the door, toward himself.
+
+"Must not!" she repeated. He could feel the breath of her whisper.
+
+"Don't--Jack-leen!"
+
+She barely heard the words, but she knew the agony there. And he, as he
+gripped her wrist, sensed the throbbing that passed through her whole
+body. For pity, he was powerless to thrust aside a lass who pitied him.
+
+"It is that common, yes. It is not the instinct of----"
+
+Yet, all the while, like another Brunhilde, she was praying in her heart
+that she had not taunted him in vain. A very eerie Valkyrie, she had
+taunted him to be the stronger, stronger than his will, stronger than
+herself, to strive with her, to master her. And now she saw a fury of
+love and hate aroused in him, a fury against herself for making him love
+her more than his great will could bear. In her lust for seeing this
+anger of his, she forgot her mission absolutely, forgot why she had come
+to Mexico, forgot all but the prayer in her heart.
+
+Nothing was left her but to learn the answer, and this she did, by
+tugging firmly, coyly, to free her wrist. The answer was rapture; his
+grip had tightened. She pulled harder, and felt herself being drawn
+toward him. Yes, yes, her triumph was a fact. Slowly an arm of iron, a
+tremulous, masterful vandal, circled her waist.
+
+She pushed at him with her fists, and panting, tried to fight him off,
+however the blood stung in her veins and coursed hot as in his. The
+matter had gone far enough. It was time for explanations, for an
+adjustment. But he did not seem to think so. He was relentless.
+Barbarian Siegfried with the warrior virgin was not more so. The tendons
+in that arm of his suddenly went rigid, and crushed her body against
+him. It was then that a sudden horror took her, and she struggled like a
+tigress. She gasped out a cry for help, but the scream had no volume.
+Before she could try again, his hand covered her mouth.
+
+And then, and then--oh, the words he was whispering! Even as he
+smothered her shriek, she heard them.
+
+"Well--we'll just have in Clem Douglas. You've seen Clem, little girl?
+He's our parson."
+
+His life long, Driscoll had never dreamed of heaven as he saw it then in
+her eyes. Never, his whole life long, as she raised those eyes to his.
+And the sweet relaxing of herself, the trustful pillowing of her head on
+his breast, the soulful content as she softly breathed there, instead of
+that wild panting of a moment before! Blinded to the world, he fervently
+thanked God that he had been made.
+
+He touched her white brow lovingly, and gently tilted back her chin.
+Again her eyes lifted, confidingly. His head bent. She waited. His lips
+drew nearer to hers, very slowly. He was held in a deep reverence, in an
+awe of something sacred. It was a rite of adoration before a shrine. And
+she, seeing that look in his eyes, wanted him to know that the shrine
+was truly as pure as in his oblivion to the world he for the moment
+believed. For later memory would come to him, and that she could not
+bear. He must know now, before their lips met. Yet a good woman may not
+brazenly avow that rumor and evidence speak what is false. But for all
+that he still must know, in some way. With a playful gesture she
+intercepted his lips against the soft palm of her hand, her eyes the
+while holding his in their communion of soul. And thus she spoke,
+prettily, saucily, and blushing the while,
+
+"And are you so sure, sir, that you are the first?"
+
+She had looked for protestation, and she would have answered. And he
+would have believed. He must have believed. But instead the spell of
+faith broke sharply. Poisoned memory rushed in before it could be
+belied. She could see the tragedy of it in his changed look, in his
+ashen face, cold and gray. He thought her question a gloating over his
+weakness, and it revolted him. He was, then, but a caprice for her. He
+remembered that after all he had only happened by, and that she was
+returning to Maximilian. But still she was hardly less tempting. He had
+a moment of cruel conflict with himself, which left him with a sullen
+rage against the princelet in Mexico, against the order of princelets,
+that thus fell a deathly pall between an honest man and a true love
+kiss. Yet, she was there in his arms, dear and fearfully clinging
+and--no less tempting.
+
+"Take this woman to my mother?" the question rose.
+
+As one might close the eyes of his dead wife, he loosed the arms about
+his neck, and let them fall at her side. Once free, he leaped to the
+door, flung it open, and was gone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A CROP OF COLONELS
+
+
+  "And thus they led a quiet life
+  During their princely raine."
+          --_Ballad of King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid._
+
+
+Some years after the events recorded here, there appeared in the
+Boonville Javelin (post-bellum and revived) a serial of reminiscences,
+which, behind an opalescent gossamer of romance, pictured the
+Missourians and the chivalrous role they played around that forlornly
+chastened and be-chased damsel, la Republica Mexicana.
+
+Quite aside from the prodigious deeds set forth therein, the
+journalistic epic is of itself naively prodigious, as anyone knowing Mr.
+Boone with pen in hand will at once suspect. All the little Trojan
+band--call them Gascons if you will, but own that if they boasted they
+were ever keen to substantiate the bluff--all of them, then, strove and
+blazed away invariably as heroes and were just as peerless as could be.
+You wouldn't look for anything else from Mr. Boone. He must, however, be
+credited with one peculiarity, that he never hinted at himself as one of
+the glorious company. Daniel knew his newspaper ethics. He knew that the
+newspaper man is _not_ the story, however they may regard it in
+France, for instance, where the reporter is ever the bright particular
+cynosure of any interview that bears his signature.
+
+A few strokes of the Meagre Shanks brush in the way of excerpts from his
+narrative, with plenty of extenuating dots in between, should make an
+impression, even though impressionistic, and serve perhaps as a sketch
+of what befell after Din Driscoll had bearded the Tiger, freed Don
+Rodrigo, and surrendered his own two captives. To begin:
+
+A retreat was had [Daniel always got under way slowly, as though
+fore-resolved not to stampede.] Echo demands, "Retreat?--The Iron
+Brigade in retreat?" 'Twas true. Rallied once again, but under another
+flag than the Bars, the Missourians rode all that dank, wet night lest
+they meet and have to fight their new friends, the guerrillas under
+Rodrigo Galan. It was a weird predicament. Two days before, they were
+peaceful settlers in the land--_omne solum forti patria_--their
+blood-flecked swords as ploughshares fleshed in earth's warm bosom....
+But tyrannical confiscation of the soil they tilled loomed
+foreboding.... Pestered nigh unto forceful phrases with shooing robbers
+of both sides out of their melon patches, and fired at last by the
+sentiment that it behooved them to sally forth and regulate things
+themselves.... They only lacked a Cincinnatus. Their old general would
+not lead them. Wearing his bright chaplet of renown, Joe Shelby now
+drove mules, a captain over long wagon trains....
+
+Then gallant Din Driscoll appeared among them, the dry-humored, reckless
+Jack Driscoll of other days, attired now in the brave, dashing
+regimentals of the Republic[!] From out the wilds of distant Michoacan
+he came with the long gallop that never would tire, and pausing at cabin
+after cabin in the Colony's broad acres, summoned his old comrades to
+arms ... to arms against the invader.... Who, now, will argue bucolic
+content? Those lusty young planters smelled the battle from afar. What
+now were waving tassels to the glory of deeds?--_a cuspide
+corona_--to a wreath of powder-burned laurel? That very day the Iron
+Brigade rallied again, gathered once again at the oft remembered bugle's
+full, resonant blare.
+
+Fighting came sooner than the Missourians hoped. Even as they started
+for Michoacan, a ragged Indito, whose village had been razed by the
+Cossacks, met the command and asked for the Senor Coronel Gringo.
+Driscoll heard what he had to tell, and was greatly concerned, though
+the others laughed at first and scoffed. For it seemed that the Indito
+did not know who sent him, except that it was a senor chaparrito, a
+short little senor. "Then you must be a Shorter Yet?" said Driscoll.
+"Well, what do you bring?" The Indito produced from his ragged shirt a
+bit of parchment, whereon Colonel Driscoll was urged to join with his
+new recruits in an attack on Maximilian's escort, for Maximilian was on
+his way to Vera Cruz. The parchment was signed, "El Chaparrito."
+
+"Shorty! That word means 'Shorty'," the troopers guffawed. But Driscoll
+showed them another handwriting at the bottom. The parchment had been
+countersigned in blank, thus: "Benito Juarez, Libertad y Reforma." The
+Missourians were respectful after that. Many thought that the mysterious
+guardian angel of the Republic's battles must be the Presidente himself,
+though the Presidente was thousands of miles away.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the victory won against Dupin's Contra Guerrillas [so the
+chronicle goes on], the Missourians found their ally to be none other
+than that picturesque buccaneer of the Sierras, Don Rodrigo, wild as a
+prairie wolf, handsome as Lucifer; and their captives to be not the
+Emperor and suite but two beautiful women....
+
+When the prisoners had been exchanged--i. e., the two fair girls
+restored to Dupin, and Rodrigo freed--and Rodrigo had hurried away to
+gather his scattered vagabonds from among the foothills, the Missourians
+realized their predicament. That day they had fought the Empire. Then
+they had turned and fought the Republic in the person of the guerrilla
+chief, Rodrigo Galan. They had rebelled against the rebels, so were
+doubly rebel, doubly outlawed. Ye gods, it _was_ bizarre! And as
+morning dawned on them trailing along a dreary inferno gorge of the
+Sierra Gorda, they blinked at each other ruefully. Poor waifs, they had
+lost their native country. And now, one rainy morning, they found they
+had lost an adopted one. But each man looked into a face likewise so
+rueful that his own broke into a grin.
+
+"We'll just start a _new_ country," cried Driscoll abruptly.
+
+His voice sounded strange and very unlike him, but the inspiration was
+characteristic of the man, and true to the old irrepressible Storm
+Centre they had known. Hunted outlaws, they too were in the mood for any
+desperate venture. Spontaneous as wildfire, they seconded this one ere
+they had asked a question. They never did ask "How?"
+
+"A new country," roared Tall Mose, "but where?"
+
+"And when?" Old Brothers and Sisters inquired gently.
+
+"We'll start right after breakfast," their intrepid leader replied. "And
+right here in Mexico. It's anybody's country yet, and we might as well
+slice off a little private republic for ourselves."
+
+"And won't we fight, by Jiminy!" drawled Cal Grinders, with Ozarkian
+deliberation.
+
+"And it don't matter whom we fight," Marmaduke added. "Let 'em show
+themselves, Slim Max or Don Benito. We'll meet all comers."
+
+That was the mood they were in, and they were in it to the chin. Submit
+a wholesale fighting order, and they bid for it like neither bulls nor
+bears, but like wolves.
+
+"About taxation?" asked Clay of Carroll dubiously.
+
+But as a good general, or as another Romulus, Driscoll had figured it
+all out. His answer brought comfort.
+
+"We'll not have any. We will levy on commerce, as republics have the
+right to do."
+
+"Then," said Carroll of Clay, "we'll need a seaport?"
+
+"Of course. Ain't Tampico simply waiting for us? The French aren't there
+now. They are concentrating in Mexico City for evacuation. There's no
+more of a garrison than what Old Tige left, a few hundred Cossacks. If
+we get there before the Liberals----" ...
+
+... And why not? They were nearly five hundred and greater than Romulus.
+They were Missourians, sir. They were from that State which gave the
+best fighters to both sides; which, population considered, gave more to
+the North than any other Northern state, more to the South than any
+other Southern state, and yet as a state would be a Republic unto
+herself. What, then, might not be possible to these her sons on a
+foreign shore? Intrepid youngsters, they were of royal State lineage,
+Missourians from Kentucky, Kentuckians from Virginia, which was in the
+beginning. Dauntless cavaliers of the Blood, if they chose to carve
+themselves a kingdom, why not?
+
+But they themselves answered the questions, questions that had men's
+lives in them thicker than hard words in the Blue-back speller. The
+business was as already done, and Mose Bledsoe could go back to his
+chant with an easy mind. And once more Missouri's revered saga echoed
+among the crags:
+
+  "I come from old Missouri,
+    Yes, all the way from Pike.
+  I'll tell you why I left there,
+    And why I came to roam
+  And leave my poor old mammy,
+    So far away from home."
+
+Then, the bard leading in a fashion vociferous, the whole command helped
+out:
+
+  "Says she to me, 'Joe Bowers,
+    You are the man to win;
+  Here's a kiss to bind the bargain,'
+    And she hove a dozen in...."
+
+... Bivouacked under the black-lipped howitzers of Tampico's sullen
+heights.... Dismal fens ... where fever exhaled its dread gray breath
+thick over swamp and lagoon ... above, the vast aegis of the firmament,
+wrought in a diamond dust of stars ... a sickly, jaundiced, moon tilted
+drunkenly.... Through ooze and fetid slime the Americans crept
+stealthily out of the reeds; and on, over cypress roots, silently in the
+silent night; on, up the hill under the low walls of Fort Iturbide.
+Gently and fleeting as a dark beauty's sigh in old Castile, they were
+come in canister range.
+
+"Steady, men," their leader whispered.
+
+"Unto death," came the low-breathed response.
+
+[No such words were uttered, as Daniel knew perfectly well, but he knew
+that they should be--in the telling.].... A sharp cry ... fearful
+alarums from the crest of the hill ... next a belching fury of grape....
+But Tall Mose was happier for it. The seal was off his lips at last, and
+out thundered his stentorian war-song:
+
+  "O Sally! dearest Sally!
+  O Sally! for your sake...."
+
+... still upward, until the cannon fumes broke as a dun-colored wave
+over pennant and plume ... and grimy troops fell as spring blossoms in a
+balmy south breeze.... Dying as they loved to die, game to the last ...
+they stumbled back to the river, which swept over the gallant stranger
+slain....
+
+  "... It's enough to make me swear!--
+  That Sally had a baby,
+  And the baby had red hair...."
+
+... Then piercing and wildly plaintive, the clarions rang out, clamoring
+for victory and _vae victis_ ... and Din Driscoll's hoarse voice....
+"We are the last of the race, let us be the best as well."... "Back at
+'em, fellows!" Bledsoe bellows.... And the parson murmurs, "He prays
+best who fights best, both great and small" ... his soft voice tremulous
+enough for Glory, his superb trigger finger disturbing enough for
+Chaos.... At last, the supreme command "like volley'd lightning"--"Give
+'em the revolver. _Charge!_"...
+
+Not until the story is told shall ... for over the battered masonry, in
+through the splintered doors, felling shadowy foes on every hand....
+When well within-side ... the prowess of each unto himself ... tempest
+of pistol cracking ... bleeding deathfully ... ah, the killing is fast
+and desperate ... and not a candle over the pitiless fray.... Huddled
+together for a brief last stand, the Cossacks ... panic, flight....
+_The fort is taken!_
+
+When the incarnadine embers of sunrise glowed in the east, the
+Missourians stood on the battlements and surveyed their domain. "You are
+the man to win, Joe Bowers," Mose hummed with an I-told-you-so air, but
+softly, for many of his comrades were wounded, though he was not, as
+usual, for all his seven feet of perpendicular target. But "the Doc," of
+Benton, was, of course. Getting wounded was the greatest trouble with
+Doc. If he attacked a hornet's nest, he would contrive some way to get a
+leg shot off. But with him such things had become to be a matter of
+course, so now he crated himself together enough to move around and
+attend to the others. Driscoll was most innumerably barked, with a
+perforated humerus as climax. [The modest Boone might have catalogued
+similarly his own casualties.] Old Brothers and Sisters, that cool
+Christian, had lost a lens out of his spectacles, and was now replacing
+it from a supply he always carried. What, though, were fractured arms
+and busted specs to becoming a republic over night?
+
+But eternal vigilance is ever ... and menace was not long in coming.
+Three French gunboats, like sluggish water beetles, crossed the bar and
+steamed up the river.... Promptly the howitzers on the ramparts were
+trained.... But there was no need ... a white flag ... a naval
+lieutenant at the fortress gate.... The gunboats had not come to fight.
+Bazaine had sent them to carry off the endangered garrison, it being
+expected that a Liberal army under a General Pavon would shortly besiege
+the place. The Frenchman was astounded to find that the Liberals, as he
+imagined the Missourians, had already arrived. Driscoll allowed him to
+embark the dislodged garrison, as well as the defenders of the other
+fort, Casa Mata; that is, all except those who might want to change
+sides. And nearly every Mexican among the Cossacks did change. It was a
+sign of the panic that had spread throughout the Empire. Driscoll also
+insisted on the burial of certain guerrilla corpses which Dupin had left
+hanging to the town's lamp posts. After which the gunboats took
+themselves out of republican waters.
+
+Yet they left behind expectancy. So, a Liberal army two thousand strong
+was approaching? The Missourians provisioned themselves from the town
+and rested on their arms. The Liberal host appeared, variegated of
+costume, piratical of aspect.... Again a flag of truce.... "If the
+senores Imperialistas desired to surrender?"... "We are not
+Imperialists," came the reply from the fort, "and we're blessedly d-n-d
+if we desire to surrender."... "Then, the saints bless us, _who_
+are you?"... "The Republic of Tampico, de facto and determined."
+
+The dumfounded Liberals scratched their heads. They were Republicans,
+and here was a republic, and naturally it bothered them. But when they
+had gotten it tangled unmistakably enough, they decided that they wanted
+surrender anyhow, if the senores Tampicoistas would have the kindness
+... and on refusal from the fort, they withdrew to load their siege
+guns.
+
+They had sent a shot or two and received a dozen, when an Indito,
+emaciated and loathsome from scales of dirt, dashed from nowhere through
+the cross-fire and pounded at the fortress door. Driscoll ordered him
+admitted. The first President of the Tampico Republic seemed
+extraordinarily anxious about this ragged vagabond, especially as he had
+perceived a second one, likewise from nowhere, dash into the Liberal
+camp. Ten minutes later the enemy ceased firing. "Now come, all of you,"
+Driscoll then said to his little army, "and hear what he's got to tell.
+I reckon he's a Shorter Yet."... "From Shorty, then!" exclaimed his men.
+And so it proved, for the Indito produced the usual bit of parchment,
+signed El Chaparrito and countersigned Benito Juarez, Libertad y
+Reforma. The message thereon demanded why the Coronel Driscoll and his
+new recruits for the cause had turned against it.... "'Cause we don't
+hanker after hanging," Cal Grinders interposed.... Was it, Driscoll
+continued to read, because they thought they had lost favor by fighting
+Rodrigo Galan? If so, there was naught against them, nothing, because
+President Juarez had outlawed Galan for robbing a bullion convoy. It was
+true that the writer of the parchment had used the said Rodrigo, in the
+hope of capturing Maximilian, but the bandit was not for that reason a
+Republican officer.... "In other words," lisped Crittenden of Nodaway,
+"we're in-lawed because the good patriot Don Rodrigo is away
+outlawed."... "Therefore," the parchment went on, "His Excellency the
+Presidente through the writer has herewith sent a message to General
+Pavon of the besieging camp to comply with whatever Their Mercies the
+Americans may deem fit to require. Further, knowing the temper of Their
+Mercies, General Pavon is ordered to at once cease operations and leave
+Their Mercies in possession."
+
+The Missourians looked at one another and were reluctant. They hated to
+forego a battle. But it takes two sides to make one. Not outlawed, not
+even threatened, they had no excuse to hold against the Liberals.
+
+"But," said Crittenden, "as an ally of this sister Republic, we'll still
+have our fighting."
+
+"Well," demanded Driscoll, "what will you ask for?"
+
+"Our Cordova lands back, after we've won them from the Empire."
+
+"And," put in Grinders, "equality. We want republican equality."
+
+"Then we'll all be privates?"
+
+"No sir-ee, by cracken! Equality high up, that's what! We'll be
+colonels, breveted colonels, every last one of us--Colonel Driscoll,
+Colonel Grinders, Colonel Brothers and Sisters, Colonel----"
+
+"That's easy," said Driscoll smiling. "Now I'll go and fix it up with
+General Pavon, before he gets away."
+
+... To conclude this chapter on the Missourians' Republic, there is yet
+a word, which perhaps is also explanation of the saddened change that
+had come over Din Driscoll since that night after the battle with Don
+Rodrigo. It must be remembered that the peerless lad had just won his
+old comrades to the Mexican Republican cause. While yet rejoicing that
+here he more than made good the three hundred Liberals he had helped to
+capture when a captain under the Empire, he found that he had only cast
+his recruits out of the pale of law, first against the Empire, and then
+against the Republic.... Then he proposed their own republic, and for
+themselves they took Tampico from the French. But why? What was the real
+object in Driscoll's innermost thought? The suspicion arises: Was it to
+win a peace-offering wherewith to make friends again with the Liberals?
+Such an explanation of his otherwise wild scheme is but a theory, but
+the theory fits, for John D. Driscoll, though as reckless as any and
+quick for any forlorn hope, was, when a leader, scrupulously practical.
+
+The above suggestion, moreover, is apropos in these later days, when the
+Tampico Republic has become to be folklore throughout Missouri, and when
+our cousins, the Kentuckians, even those proud colonels by acclamation,
+cannot rank beside these five hundred colonels scattered over the sister
+state; so that, when a stranger questions, a Missourian answers: "He a
+colonel? W'y yes, of course, sir. And, by God sir, a Tampico colonel,
+too! Yes, one of the five hundred!" and the stranger's eyes bulge as he
+takes off his hat.
+
+[The deposition of Meagre Shanks ends here.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ROYAL RESOLUTION
+
+
+  "... O restless fate of pride,
+  That strives to learn what Heaven resolves to hide."--_The Iliad._
+
+
+On returning to the capital, Jacqueline did not once set foot in any
+Imperial palace, but she established her own salon of a grande dame, and
+there installed herself mid a simple elegance. What was left of the
+mortgaged chateau in the Bourbonnais went to pay for it. Jacqueline
+would accept not a louis out of Napoleon's Black Chest. A French
+gentlewoman, she impoverished herself to work for France. And when, a
+little later, Napoleon dishonored his own name and that of France in his
+dealings with Maximilian, she thanked the instinct that had kept her
+free. Puddles muddied one's skirt so! The valiant maid broke her sword.
+She would serve no longer. At least, she was quite certain that she
+would not.
+
+Napoleon's shame lay in this. Maximilian had accepted his harsh
+ultimatum regarding the Mexican customs, and in return for such
+humiliation he depended on the presence of the French troops for yet
+another year. But the United States threatened war, and Napoleon
+cringed. He would withdraw the troops immediately. He would abandon
+Maximilian, treaty or no treaty. Thus the quiet forces in the American
+Legation at Paris battled against the proud House of Orleans. The
+princess of that House failed. She could not save her husband's throne,
+and her own. Her mind gave way. She became a raving maniac. So much for
+Charlotte's mission.
+
+With the news Maximilian was a broken man. He seemed to remember his
+promise to rejoin her in Europe, for he set out coastward and left the
+marshal a letter that was virtually his abdication. Yet in the Hot
+Country he stopped for his health. An Austrian frigate waited for him.
+But behind him was his capital. Would he return? History will never
+know, perhaps, the soul-despairing network of intrigue and
+counter-intrigue that wound and tightened about the young sapling roots
+that would strike deep in an unnourishing soil and become a dynastic
+oak. The rabid clericals, who were Maximilian's ministers at the time,
+thought their puppet gone, and in terror of an avenging Republic they
+resigned. But Bazaine, urged to it by Padre Fischer, prevailed upon them
+to remain, and Fischer gave his word that the puppet would not escape.
+So France lost another chance to take back the Mexican Empire, and
+thereby pave a way out of her shame. For while Maximilian recuperated,
+he reconsidered. Clerical generals assured him of armies, the ministers
+talked eloquently of treasure from the Church coffers. The fat padre
+manipulated generals and ministers and Emperor, He was supreme. None
+might come near the royal ear except at his pleasure.
+
+It was at this time, about the first of the year, some six months after
+Charlotte had sailed to Europe, and only a few weeks before the French
+would do the same, that one evening Jacqueline's footman brought her a
+plainly sealed envelope, without crest, without writing. She tore it
+open, and started as she looked at a simple autograph on the card
+inside.
+
+"His--this gentleman, Tobie, you admitted him?"
+
+The well-trained servant stood impassive. "What would madame have?" he
+replied. "The man walked in like a lord, keeping his face hid in a
+cloak. But if madame----"
+
+"Was there a carriage?"
+
+"No, madame, but I noticed a saddle horse at a little distance, held by
+a mounted soldier with a carbine. But if madame----"
+
+"He is in the drawing-room, then?"
+
+"Oui, madame, and without removing his Mexican sombrero. But if madame
+desires that this citizen find himself--h'm--pressed to go----"
+
+"Tobie! No, on the contrary, you will permit him to wait undisturbed,
+until I come."
+
+A few minutes later Jacqueline beheld a tall figure in elegant charro
+garb striding the length of her salon. As she entered, her guest threw
+off sombrero and Spanish cloak, and revealed the drawn and troubled
+features of the Emperor of Mexico.
+
+"Your Majesty has returned to His capital!" she exclaimed. "Then it is
+true----"
+
+"That I shall cling to my play-empire? But I do not know yet,
+mademoiselle, I do not know yet. If I did, I should not be here, here in
+your house for the first time, and against your wishes----"
+
+"Will Your Highness be seated?"
+
+Maximilian flung himself wearily into an armchair. The fire of the
+enthusiast had died out of his eyes, and the fire of fever had left them
+faded. They reminded one of the blue of old-fashioned china.
+
+"But why----" she began.
+
+"Why come to you, you mean? I don't know; instinct, I suppose."
+
+"Isn't that rather vague? Your Imperial Highness returns to the City, to
+his palace----"
+
+"Not to his palace, mademoiselle, not while it would seem a mockery of
+my poor imperial state, but to an hacienda in the suburbs. If I enter my
+Mexican palace again, it will be because I have decided to remain an
+emperor."
+
+"And for the reason that you have _not_ so decided, you do me the
+honor----"
+
+"I do myself the service, mademoiselle. I can bear this torment of
+indecision no longer, and you can help me, for you, dear lady, see
+clearly where the vision of others is distorted. The enthusiasm of the
+others is unsafe. Yes," he sighed, with a little superior air of
+resignation to all human foibles, "those on whose loyalty I can depend
+are indeed few, but I am thankful that among them are my ministers, and
+my faithful secretary, Father Augustin Fischer----"
+
+"Then why, in heaven's name, does Your Highness come to me?"
+
+"Instinct, or--perhaps it's mania. Something has forced me to learn what
+_you_ would say."
+
+Jacqueline's foot--a small digression, at most--was slippered in blue,
+and this she pillowed on a cushion of red. And on another cushion she
+settled her elbow; and the sleeve of the chemisette, or blouse, or
+whatever the high-necked filmy white garment was, fell away, revealing a
+rounded forearm clasped in a band of gold. And resting her chin on her
+thumb, she regarded the young prince thoughtfully. In her look there may
+have been a sedate twinkle of amusement, but all was gently, pityingly
+sympathetic.
+
+"Let me know," she said, "more of the doubts that trouble Your
+Highness."
+
+Unerringly she touched the right chord. Doubts, yes, doubts of a broken
+dreamer. Illusions shattered as bubbles. A dweller in an ideal shadow,
+believing that subjects needed only lofty phrases, Maximilian was
+finding himself tragically maladjusted to the modern day in which he
+lived. But as the words tumbled from his lips in the passionate relief
+of unburdening, it quickly appeared that his misgivings arose only
+because he had fallen short of Dark Age standards. He recalled bitterly
+how, unlike the illustrious among his ancestors, he had not stirred
+until others had won his crown for him. But destiny was kind. He had the
+chance for redemption. To hold his empire now depended on him alone. He
+would mount his horse, give to the light a true Hapsburg blade, and
+valiantly ride forth to conquer or perish, and in any hazard be worthy
+of his House.
+
+Then, without abrupt change, he talked of Austria's late woes. Had he
+but commanded his country's ships at Lissa! Could he but have risked his
+life at Sadowa! And moreover, he was still needed over there. But in
+some quick recollection a moisture dimmed the blue eyes. He drew from
+his vaquero jacket a dispatch. It was from Franz Josef. If Maximilian
+returned to Austria, the message ran, then he must leave behind the
+title of Emperor--leave behind even the title!
+
+"And will that hurt so much?" asked Jacqueline.
+
+The Ritual again! For it a man withheld asylum from his brother.
+
+"Is there no mother," cried the exasperated girl, "to spank both your
+Majesties?"
+
+"'Tis of Her Serene Highness----" Maximilian began with dignity.
+
+"Highness? Yes, I forgot, but not high enough to chide majesty, though
+she be a mother."
+
+"Yet she has only just warned me of her deep displeasure if--No, her
+message shall wait. I wish to hear first what you think. Tell me, shall
+I go, or shall I stay? Tell me, tell me, and why!"
+
+Feverishly the man craved one frank word. There was in his look the
+prayer of a desperate gambler who watches a card poised between the
+dealer's fingers. Jacqueline had one answer only. But exactly how to
+express it, lest she be wrongly taken, made her pause.
+
+"In the first place," she began slowly, "there is only a single
+consideration involved, and in that lies the solution of Your Majesty's
+doubts. I mean the consideration of honor. Now if Your Highness
+is--_whipped_ off his throne--_that_ is ignominy--But wait,
+wait, I am not through. I----"
+
+"Almost my mother's words!" he cried triumphantly. And with a hand that
+trembled, he got out the letter from that Archduchess Sophia who had
+given one son a crown and loved this other as her darling.
+
+"'Rather than suffer humiliation by a French policy'" he read from her
+letter, "'stay, stay, though you be buried under the walls of Mexico!'"
+
+"But----" Jacqueline interposed. She had been taken amiss after all.
+
+"You too bid me stay," he insisted. "But I might have known. I might
+have known. One who never errs said that this would be your counsel. The
+Padre is wonderful--wonderful!"
+
+Father Fischer, of course! What else? How consummate was the snake in
+his cunning! He counted on honesty and nobility in another, though
+having none himself. He knew Jacqueline. He thought that, both good and
+frank, she must advise the Emperor as his mother had done. Accordingly,
+when Maximilian became afflicted with doubts, the priest allowed him to
+go to Jacqueline. She would be an accomplice despite herself. Only his
+judgment did not go quite far enough. Jacqueline had not spoken
+_all_ her mind.
+
+Imperiously she compelled Maximilian's attention. "I said ignominy,
+yes," she persisted, "but I would have added that honor--the modern and
+the decent--and the only courage, lies in facing this same ignominy.
+Listen. If the least of impure ambition enters in your decision to
+remain, then for each death in the civil war that must result, Your
+Highness may hold himself to account, and so be held by history. Now,"
+she went on, unmoved by the fact that he had winced, "the question
+remains with Your Highness--does aught besides honor hold you to stay?"
+
+To himself he answered as she spoke, and guilt confessed mounted his
+brow.
+
+"But there," she said, "Father Fischer will interpret the will of the
+Almighty. Before Your Imperial Highness retires to-night, my words will
+be forgotten."
+
+The lash fell on flesh already raw and smarting. To predict that he
+would change yet again, when to change he branded himself a wilful
+murderer--no! That was more than he could endure. She must not think
+that of him. He held out his hand. "Jeanne!" he murmured imploringly.
+
+"Don't!" she cried, "Don't call me that!"
+
+Then she bit her lip, and her fury turned against herself. "Jeanne" was
+feminine and French for "John," which was masculine and--American. This
+important discovery she had made months ago when riding beside a man
+whose horse was "Demijohn." As a girl in love, she had found a cozy joy
+in their names being the same. But for that very reason any recollection
+of it, since then, was the less to be borne.
+
+Blushing indignantly, she saw that Maximilian was regarding her with a
+puzzled expression. Manlike, he referred it to himself, and suddenly, he
+too started. Only once before had he addressed her thus familiarly,
+which was during that memorable afternoon beside the artificial lake at
+Cuernavaca. Here, therefore, must lie the association that caused her
+agitation. Yet, since that afternoon, she had permitted no reference to
+their interview, unless to raise her brows quizzically at his continued
+presence in Mexico. But now, what of the self-betrayal into which he had
+just surprised her? It could not but be connected with that other time
+when he had murmured her name. There was, however, no conscious vanity
+in the remarkable explanation. It was remorse. He thought of Charlotte,
+his wife. And this other woman, had he wronged her also? For during the
+past weeks of trouble he had forgotten that he had loved her, and she
+had not forgotten. In two such facts, falling together, was the wrong,
+and one that a woman scarcely ever forgives, as he had had reason to
+know.
+
+"I could not help supposing, mademoiselle," he ventured diffidently,
+"that what you said at Cuernavaca was inspired by--by no feeling toward
+myself. I could suppose nothing else in the light of your utter
+indifference since then, and--and your aversion for my very presence."
+
+Jacqueline laughed pleasantly. "In that Your Highness deceives himself.
+I did then, as I do now, feel for Your Highness enough to wish him
+safely out of Mexico."
+
+"Charity, then?"
+
+She did not protest.
+
+"As I thought," he said. "There was no feeling in--in----"
+
+Jacqueline raised her eyes and met his frankly.
+
+"When a woman feels in the sense you mean, sire," she said, "then she
+does not make an empire, even the Austrian Empire, a condition. If the
+man in question has no more than his horse, his pistols, even his pipe,
+then the woman----" But she stopped abruptly.
+
+"With you," he granted honestly, "it was not a matter of personal
+ambition either. But if neither of these, then what--_Now_ I see!"
+he cried. "A state reason! A decoy, to tempt me out of Mexico! Yes, yes,
+now I see!"
+
+"It is good to know," said Jacqueline, not ungratefully, "that Your
+Majesty at least, if no other, can see a high motive in my self
+abasement."
+
+"Now what can she mean by that?" he demanded of himself. "What other, in
+particular, thinks hard of her that she should care?"
+
+Eloin was the only other man who could have seen them, there at
+Cuernavaca. No, little it mattered to her what Eloin thought. But--yes,
+there was another. There was the American who had intruded and wanted to
+save his empire. Maximilian recalled now her change to bitterness after
+the American had left them, and a moment ago he had seen the identical
+pain of self-contempt tug at her lips. And yet, once she had left the
+American to die. But Maximilian answered even that objection. Leaving
+him to die was a necessity for her country. And the sacrifice had gone
+farther. It had not faltered before the self-degradation of which she
+had just spoken.
+
+The admiration in his eyes grew. The chivalry in his race awoke within
+him, and exalted him. He felt himself become the true knight, in the
+purity of devotion to a woman--a gentleman, as real chivalry would have
+the term. Poor man and poet, he felt even the impulse to bend the knee
+and crave as a boon some risk of life in her service, without thought of
+boon thereafter--a knightly impulse nearly obsolete in chivalry, if ever
+customary. But he knew now that the impulse was really possible, and the
+proof was this: that the constraint between them had vanished, that soon
+he was talking with her easily and naturally.
+
+For Jacqueline also the air had become blessedly pure, and deeply,
+gratefully, she breathed of it. Because now she talked with one whose
+respect was a fact, who _knew_ her for what she was, and during a
+moment's space she was happy, with the happiness of delusion. It seemed
+that other men, that one other man, might one day know her too, and give
+her his esteem. But the phantasy passed. The knowledge must forever be
+restricted to the man before her, and for him she did not care.
+
+Maximilian, very strangely, was thinking of the very self-same thing.
+Here was a service in her behalf already offering. If he could cause
+that other man to know? But it was out of the question. Men may convince
+one another of a woman's guilt, and only too easily. But of her
+innocence? No, it was absurdly out of the question. Besides, next day
+the true knight would be starting back for Europe. Had he not just
+decided?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+INTERPRETER TO THE ALMIGHTY
+
+
+  "... and could make the worse appear
+  The better reason."--_Paradise Lost._
+
+
+After half an hour's sharp canter, Maximilian dismounted at La Teja, his
+suburban hacienda. He had come quickly from Jacqueline's, for his heart
+was light. The stress and storm of wavering were ended at last. Soon now
+he would be at Miramar, at beautiful Miramar, overlooking the sea, where
+Charlotte awaited him, but knew it not. And by love and tender care he
+would coax her back to sanity. Ah, no, the pure joy of living was not
+done for them yet!
+
+"Desire Father Augustin to attend me in my private cabinet," he said to
+the first lackey.
+
+The huge priest came on the instant. He bore a candle in one fat,
+freckled hand, and above its light the dull flesh of his face shone
+yellow. His head was as ever pear-shaped with its heavy, flabby jowls,
+and in the apex the two little beads of eyes leaped adventurously at
+sight of the prince.
+
+"I am here, sire," he said purringly. "Your Majesty, then, wishes me to
+prepare for his return to the imperial palace to-morrow?"
+
+"No, father," His Majesty answered stoutly, though not without an uneasy
+glance. "To-morrow I set out for the coast. The _Dandolo_ is still
+there at anchor. You will give the necessary orders to my Hungarians,
+who will be my escort."
+
+Fischer opened his lips, to close them. The involuntary creasing of his
+brow smoothed at once. Maximilian, who had dreaded argument from this
+man, breathed easier. But of course any man would give way when a
+Hapsburg had irrevocably made up his mind. The padre laid down the
+candle, and interlaced his bloated fingers over his paunch in an
+attitude of sleek calmness. He was smiling and fawned meek anxiety to
+second his patron's least wish.
+
+"Your Imperial Majesty's wisdom, I see, is not a thing to be turned by
+the fraeulein?"
+
+"On the contrary, Mademoiselle la Marquise d'Aumerle counseled my
+departure, not my remaining."
+
+The fingers tightened slightly over the bulge of the sutane. "She then
+presumed to differ from Her Serene Highness, Your Majesty's mother?"
+
+"My mother would counsel the same, were she in Mexico. I thank you,
+padre, that I went to see the only one who could so take my mother's
+place, because now, at last, I know what I must do."
+
+The priest took a long breath, and drew back, mentally, to some vantage
+point whence he could survey the field and plan his campaign anew. He
+nodded humble acquiescence, but the small bright eyes seemed to gorge
+themselves on the prince. Maximilian stirred restively. One has seen a
+lion watch the trainer's whip, as though he wondered that a creature
+with only a whip should yet, in some way, compel him to do this or that.
+Before an obscure adventurer the monarch hastened to justify his
+abdication. But it did not make him easier because the padre listened so
+obsequiously, with never a quiver before the horror and misery pictured.
+He only listened, this man of God, noting it all deferentially, item by
+item, with a smiling gesture that he heard and understood, and was quite
+ready for the next. Maximilian became aware at last of his own low
+stooping. And that moment he stopped abruptly.
+
+"The Lord reward Your Majesty's tender heart," now spoke the priest,
+"and may the reward be such as a ruler should expect from his God!"
+
+"What do you mean?" demanded Maximilian in impatient anger. "Have all
+the barbarities of civil war no power to move you? Do I not know that
+the savagery has already begun?"
+
+The curate crossed himself. In humility he would bear the charge of
+hardness of heart. "Power to stir me?" he repeated. "If Your Majesty
+would think on his power to bring this same savagery to an end! That is
+his reward offered by Heaven, the reward of bringing holy peace to a
+stricken land."
+
+"Did I not come for that? You only remind me how I have failed."
+
+"And why, sire? Because your instruments were not blessed. The French
+oppressed the Church as well as the people. But now the French are
+leaving. It is the hand of Providence."
+
+"She _said_ he would interpret the will of Heaven!" Maximilian
+exclaimed.
+
+The priest heard, stammered, and went to wreck miserably, as a hypocrite
+unmasked knows that his next word must sound like hypocrisy. How slyly
+she had checkmated him! Forseeing his thrust, she had countered his
+every shift of cunning through this feeble fencer before him. And the
+mistake he had made, in sending Maximilian to her! For a moment the
+expression of the apostate Lutheran was very ugly in its baffled rage.
+But he was too wise a trainer to lose patience utterly. He realized
+instead that the struggle was harder than any he had yet had with his
+royal dupe, since now his real antagonist was the young Frenchwoman.
+
+"I? I interpret the word of God?" He said it very humbly, with bowed
+head. "Alas, Your Majesty knows I am the last to presume to that. But
+there are those who can. There is the Holy Father in Rome, who is
+infallible. I only know that _he_ told Your Majesty's servant,
+myself, that a ruler blessed by the Church is an instrument of God. But
+if the ruler turns his back ere his work is done----"
+
+Maximilian's nostrils were dilating strangely, and the consummate
+tempter hurried on. He exalted the grandeur of the Emperor's task, yet
+craftily made success appear simple and easy. The forces of "the
+arch-rebel Benito Juarez" were concentrated in "a horde of impious
+thieves calling themselves the Army of the North." But Miramon, His
+Majesty's own general, was hastening to meet them. One decisive battle,
+and there would be no more rebels. The nation must then recognize that
+the Empire had sustained itself without French aid.
+
+"Of course a few lives will be lost," he quietly sneered, "and we who do
+not understand may grieve for them, but the ways of Heaven, for its own
+ends, are inscrutable. Your Majesty knows that others before him, his
+ancestors, have had to wade through the blood of God's enemies. But Your
+Majesty's glorious ancestors were fulfilling their destiny. And why
+should not you, also, sire, you who are the child of destiny?"
+
+It was a magic word. Fischer knew his man devilishly well.
+
+"But how can I tell," Maximilian demanded petulantly, "that my destiny
+really lies in Mexico?"
+
+"Then your destiny, sire, must lie in Europe, in Austria," was the
+priest's astounding concession. "After all, a prince's intuitions, being
+given him by divine revelation, can alone be his guide."
+
+Maximilian's eyes flashed.
+
+"Then I abdicate--herewith!"
+
+Fischer meekly assented.
+
+"There are rumors, nay, more than rumors," he mused aloud, "that a
+strong hand is needed in Austria. I repeat only what all Europe says
+boldly, that Franz Josef cannot long hold his throne. Yes, yes, sire,
+but do not stare so!--Yet the crown prince is a child. Who then shall be
+regent? Who but----"
+
+"Enough, enough, I say! Now look to my orders. We start to-morrow."
+
+The secretary beamed unctious joy that his master had so decided, and
+was bowing himself out, when abruptly he paused, "Oh, I forgot, a packet
+for Your Majesty."
+
+Maximilian took the missive. It was not heavy. It did not seem as heavy
+as Fate, not as heavy as a coffin.
+
+"This is an old date," he said in a puzzled way. "See, the postmark,
+'Brussels, Sept. 17.'"
+
+"It just came by courier from Vera Cruz, being sent via New York no
+doubt accounts for the delay."
+
+Maximilian sighed. Even the post no longer considered royalty. Packets
+had taken on leisurely habits since the Empire's crumbling--or since the
+secretary's ascendancy. He broke the seal with tremulous fingers. The
+thing must tell him of Charlotte.
+
+"From Monsieur Eloin," he said.
+
+"But he--he does not send bad news, nothing, sire, of Her Imperial
+Highness?"
+
+Well enough did that soul of mud know the letter's contents. Well enough
+he knew that Eloin and himself could waste no time on an insane woman.
+Their chances of future position were in too critical a state. And the
+packet was designed for just such a crisis as the present.
+
+Maximilian frowned, read excitedly. He was swept along as by a torrent.
+Fixed on him were the small bead eyes of the priest, darting a light,
+like a flame on oil. And when the Emperor gasped quickly and sprang to
+his feet with hands clenched in the manner of a strong man, the priest
+was ready.
+
+"Good news, then?" he cried. "What fortune! Now Your Majesty will hurry
+the faster to Vienna?"
+
+Maximilian gave him a glance, as though he were dense to think so.
+
+"Here, read, read it!"
+
+M. Eloin, sycophant, courtier, had never sung for his royal patron a
+roundelay more pleasing than his prose of the moment. It caused to
+vibrate the very heart chords of the susceptible prince. There were
+subtle appeals to spite ungratified, to wounded pride, to ambition, to
+honor. The letter ran:
+
+  ... Nevertheless, I am convinced that to abandon the throne now,
+  before the return of the French army, would be interpreted as an
+  act of weakness.... If this appeal (to the Mexican people) is not
+  heard, then Your Majesty, having accomplished his noble mission to
+  the end, will return to Europe with all the prestige that
+  accompanied his departure; and mid important events that are
+  certain to happen, he will be able to play the role that belongs
+  to him in every way....
+
+And then the supreme refrain:
+
+  In passing through Austria, I was able to bear witness to the
+  general discontent that reigns there. Yet nothing is done yet. The
+  Emperor is discouraged; the people fret and publicly demand his
+  abdication; the sympathies for Your Majesty are spreading visibly
+  throughout the entire Empire; in Venetia a whole population wishes
+  to acclaim its former governor....
+
+Thus it was that Eloin pilfered Jacqueline's lever, and thus he used
+another fulcrum, as he had promised Charlotte he would. By pandering to
+Maximilian's Austrian ambitions, he showed the weak prince how they
+could yet never be realized if prestige were lost in Mexico. To keep
+this prestige, to increase it, Maximilian must prove to Austria that he
+could hold the empire he already had, and that without foreign bayonets.
+He had only to stay a short time after the French should evacuate. And
+then, within a few months, a few weeks, he might lay down the sceptre
+voluntarily, to take up the one awaiting him across the ocean.
+
+"We will leave here in the morning," cried Maximilian--"no, to-night, at
+once!"
+
+"For Vera Cruz, sire?" queried the padre.
+
+"No, for my capital, for my palace! And father, allow no one to mention
+abdication to me again. My decision to stay is irrevocable."
+
+The padre promised faithfully that he should not be disturbed, and this
+was one promise that the good padre kept.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+ALONE AMONG HIS LOVING SUBJECTS
+
+
+  "And Jove himself shall guard a monarch's right."
+                                          --_The Iliad_.
+
+
+Early one morning a month later, a solemn little group of uniformed men
+climbed to the roof of Buena Vista, the imperial wedding gift to Marshal
+Bazaine, and nerving themselves, pulled down the Tricolor. France, a
+Napoleon, were again leaving the New World. It was Evacuation.
+
+The Army of the Expedition came tramping down the Paseo. There were
+heavy Dragoons and Cuirassiers, on majestic chargers. There were light
+Chasseurs and Lancers, on fleet Arabians that had often proved
+themselves against the Mexican pony. There was the clanking of steel,
+and the flash of helmets through the dust. The imperial eagles, gilded
+anew, were poised for flight back to their native aeries. Lower in the
+earthly cloud bobbed the tasseled fez of the bronzed Zouave, and the
+perky red pompon on the fighting cap of the little piou-piou. With the
+steady beat of the march, the pantalons rouges crossed, spread, crossed,
+spread, like regiments of bright, bloody shears. The bands played. And
+yet it was not a martial scene. Feet, not hearts, lifted to the fife's
+thrilling note. Nor was the multitude that thronged the wide avenue a
+fiesta populace. It looked on stolidly, without a huzza, yet without a
+hiss. Enthusiasm in either sense would have been relief, but the
+Mexicans assisting at the bag and baggage of an invader were as unmoved
+as those other spectators, the colossal figures in the glorietas; as the
+two Aztec giants, leaning on their war clubs; as Guatemotzin, with high
+feathered crest and spear aloft, foreboding as in life to the European
+conqueror; as Columbus, who, having himself suffered, gave now no sign
+of remorse for the blows which this new hemisphere gave the old; as
+Charles IV. on his iron horse, who had bargained with a former Napoleon
+to be called Emperor of America, and who, unlike Maximilian, had wisely
+surrendered such a crown.
+
+Cavalry, infantry, cannon, wagons, on they came through the city and
+past the Zocalo, under the Cathedral towers, under the lifeless,
+shuttered windows of the Palacio. Here in the Zocalo, in the central
+plaza, the sometime first lady of Her Imperial Majesty's household sat
+in her barouche, and opposite her a pretty girl, and she was talking
+with an officer of Chasseurs d'Afrique whose horse was restive, and all
+the while there was the rumbling of wheels, the tread of feet, and the
+ring of hoofs.
+
+The sometime first lady was saying good-bye to the officer, as she had
+already to many another gallant chevalier pausing beside her carriage.
+But for her it was farewell to all her countrymen there, to the little
+piou-pious most of all, and her gray eyes were frankly moist.
+
+"And now they are going," she mused aloud, "really going, because,
+parbleau, a monsieur in Washington says they must."
+
+"I wish to heaven," swore the young officer gloomily, "some monsieur
+would say as much to you! See here, we'd give you and Mademoiselle
+Berthe enough room on the ship for a barracks, if you'd only come.
+There's a many less welcome," and he jerked his head toward a stream of
+vehicles straggling among the troops. They were filled with Mexican
+aristocrats whose doubtful titles had been revived by the Empire, all
+eagerly accepting French transport out of their native land.
+
+Jacqueline laughed. "They're so afraid of the Liberals, they will forget
+their escutcheons. So of course they've forgotten the bouquets. You
+should have seen the garlands, Michel, that heralded our grand entry
+here. Oh, la-la! We paid for them ourselves. Thus arrived the Drapeau
+Civilizateur de la France. And now behold the departure. Not the cost of
+a violet to spare from Napoleon's strong chest! He mais, hear that tune!
+It's 'Leaving for Syria,' the thing decreed into our national hymn. For
+once I'm glad, glad it's not the 'Marseillaise.'"
+
+"Mademoiselle--dear friend," spoke the slow-thinking Michel, "you do not
+wish to answer my question. Why do you stay behind, alone? Why? Nothing
+good ever happens to anyone in this country, and who can tell what might
+happen to you when the army is gone? Come now," he went on, forcing some
+bluff cheer into his words, "Jeanne d'Aumerle, your friends want you out
+of it. Fall in with us, here, now. Let me give the order, 'Cocher, a
+Paris!--Voila, what more's to be done?"
+
+Indeed, what more simple? Or more to be desired? Yet there was nothing
+she desired less. She thought of what she had found in Mexico, and must
+leave behind. It was a dead thing, true, and already buried. But--the
+grave was too fresh as yet. However, the real reason for her staying
+involved something else.
+
+She made no reply, for at the moment a strange voice, with a jagged
+Mexican accent and a thin insidious inflection, broke in upon them, and
+startled them all three.
+
+"Nay, Monsieur le Duc," it began, rolling the title as a morsel on the
+tongue. "Your Grace would deprive us of too much honor. Why, indeed,
+should mademoiselle not remain among us?"
+
+Turning quickly, Jacqueline beheld the stranger's black eyes upon
+herself. He, too, wished to know why she stayed in Mexico, but in his
+sharp, shifting look there was a penetration quite different from that
+of the guileless Michel. He bestrode a magnificent horse that seemed
+made for armor, whereas he himself would surely have been crushed under
+so much as a Crusader's buckler. Being so very small, and perched so
+very high, he cut a ludicrously martial figure with his plumed hat and
+epaulettes and gold buttons and braid and medals and exquisitely mounted
+sabre. It was not a French uniform that he wore, but Mexican Imperial,
+and stupendously ornate. And within the brave array, he was such a
+little, little man!--insignificance glorified into caricature.
+
+But the pigmy was not altogether on parade. He had that morning been
+receiving arsenals and fortresses from the French; in short, the keys of
+the Empire. For he was Commander in Chief of the Imperial armies, was
+this species of manikin. And ugly? He was a man of lifted upper lip
+under a bristling moustache, a man of fangs, a wee, snarling, strutting,
+odious creature of a man. A deep livid scar split his cheek and would
+not heal. Instead of arousing sympathy, it proclaimed him rather for the
+scratches he gave to others. For he was that Mexican of infamous name,
+the Leopard. Once he had looted the British Legation. Another time he
+massacred young medical students attending the wounded of both sides.
+There were stories of children speared and tossed in ditches. Yet
+certain priests blessed his ardor as defender of the Church. Maximilian
+had sent him on a mission to Palestine, since he was abhorrent to the
+moderates. But now he was back again, to lead the clerical armies. The
+valley of Mexico shrank from his brutal proclamation demanding
+submission. "Mexicans, you know me!" so ended the snarl. He gathered
+forced loans. He drafted peons, though they were exempt. He emptied the
+prisons, and convicts he sent in chains as recruits for the Imperial
+garrisons. In such a fashion Leonardo Marquez began his duties as
+generalisimo of the Empire.
+
+"Your Excellency is most kind," said Jacqueline, for no other reason
+than to annoy him by changing from French into his own language.
+
+"On the contrary," returned Marquez, "I am flattered that you will be
+here to observe how we, alone, shall crush the rebels. Your countrymen,
+senorita, happily leave plenty of them. But I cannot believe that this
+is why you remain."
+
+"Make her tell you, then," interposed the helpless Ney. He was utterly
+at sea. There was a trial of strength on between these two, but how or
+for what was quite beyond him.
+
+Jacqueline pushed back the Persian shawl she wore--this fifth day of
+February was the Mexican springtime--and settled herself to the contest
+in earnest. "I fear," she began slowly, "that my motive in staying can
+hardly be intelligible, unless, perhaps, Your Excellency knows why I
+came to Mexico in the first place. No senor, that blank smile of yours
+will not serve. Your Excellency cannot feign ignorance of public
+gossip."
+
+"Of course, I have heard that----"
+
+"To be sure you have," she returned dryly, "and you might add that I
+failed, since Maximilian has not yet abdicated. But Your Excellency is
+not one to imagine that the end can be long delayed."
+
+She, too, was searching for a motive, his motive in the interview.
+
+"The Mexicans alone will sustain our patriotic ruler," stoutly declared
+the generalisimo. "But let us suppose, merely for pastime, that His
+Majesty does abdicate. What then? What profit to France, since at this
+moment, before our eyes, her army is leaving?"
+
+Jacqueline smoothed the ruffled pleats on her full gray skirt. They
+looked like an exaggerated railroad on a map, and doubtless needed
+smoothing.
+
+"And remotely supposing," she said, "that our army _might_ come
+back again?"
+
+Then, in a flash, she raised her eyes, and surprised the start he gave.
+But she laughed at once, and at him, for taking her nonsense as serious.
+
+"No," she exclaimed, "Your Excellency can more easily recall Santa Anna
+from his island exile."
+
+This, too, was nonsense, or so he was forced to consider it. But knowing
+that the Empire could not endure, he was believed even then to be
+negotiating with the rich former dictator. In his scowl Jacqueline
+discovered what she sought. He wanted, in brief, to negotiate with
+Napoleon also, and he wanted to negotiate through her. Napoleon could
+bid higher than Santa Anna. She saw, moreover, what was worrying the
+traitor. If Napoleon did not mean to bid, why then was she staying in
+Mexico?
+
+Marquez glanced fretfully at Ney and Berthe. If he might be honored in
+the privilege of calling to pay his respects?----
+
+But Jacqueline regretted that she was to be too much occupied in
+preparations for her own early departure. And that very evening she sent
+a note to Maximilian, frankly warning him against the Leopard. But she
+warned His Majesty farther, that if he did not heed, that when it should
+be too late to save him in any case, and Marquez still had something to
+sell, that then she would advise her own emperor, should her own emperor
+wish to buy. Hoping, though, for the best, she sent by Ney a message to
+Bazaine at the head of the column, suggesting that he delay embarkation
+as long as possible. She had in mind Maximilian awakened to the
+faithlessness of his chief support and wishing to overtake the French
+troops.
+
+For which it appears that Jacqueline still wielded a free lance,
+belonging to her own country alone and owning no master other than her
+own conscience.
+
+As Bazaine at the army's head rode through the Zocalo, he looked up to
+find the palatial shutters closed. The Mexican Empire was sulking like a
+spiteful child. The marshal wearily shrugged his shoulders, and thought
+on the ingratitude of princes. But the silence of the Palace was only a
+pose, mean and despicable. Maximilian himself was peeping through the
+shutters down upon the gallant, moving sea of color. It was a stream of
+gleaming bayonets, of champing horses, of lumbering artillery. His eyes
+would single out and cling to this or that figure till it was lost in
+the street beyond, and then he would try to realize that it was lost to
+him forever. For the street beyond lay toward the coast, where many
+ships awaited. The archducal petulance gave way to vague melancholy.
+
+Finally he looked upon the last swinging foot, then at the dust
+settling. Below, in the Zocalo, what had been a fringe of mourning
+around the troops, became a scurrying of human creatures. They were his
+subjects. Not a French uniform remained, but the prince sighed heavily
+as he turned from his ignoble peep-hole. Courtiers and counselors
+glanced at each other significantly. By tacit consent one among them
+spoke.
+
+"Free at last, sire, free at last! Ah, see them, there below. They know
+their shackles are broken, they know that the foreign invader who
+chilled their allegiance is gone. Nay more, their loyalty has already
+borne fruit. In the north, sire----"
+
+"How, father? You do not mean----"
+
+"Yes, sire, yes, the mother of God be praised! I mean victory, and death
+to many traitors. The news has just come. Miramon has won a decisive
+battle and taken Zacatecas."
+
+"Zacatecas! But Juarez was there?"
+
+"Yes, sire, and Miramon entered so suddenly the arch rebel surely could
+not have escaped."
+
+"Juarez taken, that man taken!"
+
+"Even so, sire, And"--Fischer's interlaced fingers tightened until the
+veins grew large--"and, it only remains for Your Majesty to dispose of
+him, according to the law."
+
+Maximilian trembled with joy. He was master of the situation. His people
+had made him master. Here was divine right vindicated. It was--Destiny!
+He had but to follow whither the heavenly finger pointed. And in
+rapture, he seized his pen.
+
+  Palace of Mexico, Feb. 5th, 1867.
+
+  My dear General Miramon:
+
+  I charge you particularly, in case you do capture Don Benito
+  Juarez, Don Sebastian Lerdo de Tejado, and others of his suite,
+  to have them tried and condemned by a council of war ... but
+  the sentence is not to be executed before receiving Our
+  approbation....
+                                    Your affectionate
+                                                    Maximiliano.
+
+Bazaine and the French camped the first night, the next day, and yet
+another night outside the City, waiting. They did not reach Puebla until
+the tenth. The rear guard fell farther and farther behind, keeping the
+road open. At last there was news. Juarez had escaped Miramon at
+Zacatecas, warned in time through some mysterious agency. And farther,
+Miramon had encountered another Republican army, by whom he was not only
+defeated, but routed completely. In panic he was fleeing to Queretero.
+
+"Maximilian must surely abdicate now," thought Bazaine, and he sent back
+a message. "I can," he wrote, "yet extend a hand to His Majesty to help
+him retire."
+
+In Vera Cruz the marshal waited for an answer. Day after day passed, and
+then the answer came. Too late, was its refrain. Maximilian had left his
+capital with what troops he could spare. He had left for Queretero, to
+join Miramon there.
+
+Bazaine, the last to quit the shore, climbed aboard his ship, and taking
+one final look for a chance horseman with word to wait yet longer, and
+seeing none, gave the order to weigh anchor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FATALITY AND THE MISSOURIAN
+
+
+  "Si debbe ai colpi della sua fortuna
+  Voltar il viso di lagrime asciutto."
+                            --_Machiavelli._
+
+
+The mountain villages were arming. Bronzed men, savagely joyful, poured
+from under roofs of thatch, strapping on great black lead-weighted
+belts. In the corrals others lassoed horses. It looked like a sudden
+changing from peaceful highland domesticity, as the clans of Scotland or
+the cantons of Helvetia might gather. But these men were not rising to
+defend their homes. The hamlets clustered among the crags were their
+barracks, nothing more. The wildest canyons of the Sierra Madre del Sur,
+far away in the rocky southwestern corner of the continent, were only
+their camping grounds, their refuge. To be armed was their natural
+state. They were fighters by occupation. They were an army. Unceasing
+hardship and constant peril had seasoned them, and their discipline was
+perfect, unconscious, because it came from the herding instinct of
+wolves. During years they had waged war against a ruthless foe, and
+they, too, were relentless. The penalty of defeat was massacre.
+
+The foe of this army was a greater army, and between the two it was a
+duel of chieftains, of General Regules in the Sierra, of General Mendez
+on the plain. Deadlier antagonists might not be imagined. Mendez, he who
+had shot two Republican generals under the Black Decree, was above all
+men the likeliest to hold stubborn Michoacan for the Empire. But even he
+failed, because the man against him was not less a man than he, because
+also the spark of resistance to sceptre and crosier never dies out in
+Michoacan.
+
+The man as good as he was Regules. A Spaniard, Regules had fought with
+the Catholic Don Carlos. And now, he was suffering for Mexican Liberals
+the most that any general can suffer, defeat after defeat, and sometimes
+annihilation. But he was a Marion, a Fabius. He knew the mountain
+recesses as no one else, even better than Mendez, who was born among
+them, and here he would gather fugitives, draft every straggler, until
+in time he sallied forth again to badger his arch enemy. He hoped only
+to exist till that day when the French should leave Empire and Republic
+face to face, on equal terms. It had taken tenacious faith and gloomy
+years, but the day came at last. The news sifted through defile and
+gorge. The invader had embarked for Toulon. Nearer at hand Mendez had
+evacuated Morelia, and was marching to Queretero. And at Queretero was
+Miramon, driven there from the north by Escobedo. At Queretero was the
+Emperor--was the Empire, desperate, ferocious, an animal at bay. Out
+boldly upon the plain, then! But no longer as a slinking guerrilla
+horde! As an army rather, with thrilling bugles and the Mexican eagle
+aloft, and regiment numbers in gold on pennons of brightest red! For the
+Empire was the hunted mad-dog now, and the dignified host was the
+Republic. The barracks of the Sierra were arming.
+
+In one of the corrals an officer of cavalry was quelling insubordination
+with soft words. But the mutineers, not knowing their man, did not
+fathom the dangerous sweetness of his tone. They were deserters from
+Mendez, come that morning, and as they had horses, were foisted on the
+officer's splendid troop. But like the native infantry, they insisted
+that their women, the soldaderas, should go with them on what was to be
+a swift march to Queretero. Having brought useful information concerning
+Mendez, they were insolent in their demands.
+
+"Now, muchachos," said the officer of cavalry, "you see how absurd it
+is, so quiet down. The women can follow later."
+
+"A Gringo to dictate to us, bless me the saints! Us, free Mexicans, and
+Republicans!" And the ringleader drew his machete and rushed on the
+officer.
+
+The Gringo smiled, in a way that a man rarely smiles. His eyes opened in
+mild surprise, and as the mutineers looked to see his head roll from his
+shoulders, he was still smiling in that poisonously sweet way. Perhaps
+there passed across his face just the shadow of pity or of revulsion,
+but none might say for certain, because of a pistol's flash that came so
+quickly after. With the report the assailant plunged headlong, and on
+the ground seemed to shrivel in his rags. Behind the smoke the officer
+was carelessly holding a large black revolver, no higher than his hip.
+
+"Because," he added, "it's not a woman's game."
+
+Then he thrust the weapon back under his ribs and sauntered away. The
+mutineers gaped in trembling at his back. When they picked up the
+ringleader, they saw that his fingers had been neatly clipped at the
+hilt of the machete.
+
+The cavalry officer was Driscoll--but changed! He was changed as bland
+Mephisto would change a man, if the material were adaptable and Mephisto
+an artist. Such exquisite gentleness in peril and in slaying could be no
+other than the devil's own, and in the most devilishly artistic mood of
+that suave dilettante.
+
+It was natural that any man should color somewhat into a desperado,
+considering such an existence among those Sierras, but Driscoll was a
+desperado refined by cynicism. And yet there was still naught of
+self-consciousness in it all. The change had not been abrupt, but
+gradual, as a growing into maturity. The roughened native instincts of a
+gentleman had sobered from Quixotic impulses into a diabolic calm. His
+bravery was turned to cool and almost supernatural self possession,
+mocked withal by gentleness. And yet he was not a villain. To the
+mutineers, to those who beheld his smile, he seemed a fiend. But his
+horse knew no change in him, which was significant. Something had gone
+wrong, that was all. The young man who had looked out on the world, half
+challenging, half expectant, must have seen too suddenly that part of
+life which is unlovely. However, the thing may not be thus easily
+explained. The soul of a man, when bent or distorted under stress, is a
+weird and fearful growth. One may contemplate it in awe; but understand
+it, never.
+
+More than a year before, when Driscoll changed sides, he was embarrassed
+to find a side to change to, so thoroughly had the Empire swept away all
+vestiges of the Liberal strength. But on achieving that farewell of his
+to Mendez, he rode happily southward, with some vague notion of tracking
+the Republic into Michoacan. The first night he slept under the stars
+mid tunas and Spanish daggers, and when he awoke it was to find a
+strange Indito squatting patiently at his feet. He sat up and rubbed his
+eyes at what might have been a Hindoo image, except that it doffed a
+straw sombrero.
+
+"Y'r Mercy is awake?" queried the idol.
+
+"N-o, but it will probably not be long now. Who in thunder are you?"
+
+The Indito explained, and Driscoll covered his knees with his hands, and
+stared and grew more astounded. The ragged fellow said that he had
+escaped from Mendez's camp by squirming on his belly through the cacti,
+and he had followed the American senor, on foot. He was, he added, a
+Republican spy.
+
+Driscoll mechanically drew his pistol, but recalled that now he also was
+Republican.
+
+"But why follow me?" he demanded.
+
+"I was sent to watch only Y'r Mercy, Y'r Mercy's thousand pardons."
+
+"The devil!"
+
+"And with Y'r Mercy's permission, I was to kill Y'r Mercy at the first
+chance. But since Y'r Mercy has changed sides----"
+
+"Now look here, who--who put you up to this business, I want to know?"
+
+The man shrugged his shoulders. He only knew that a senor chaparro had
+sent him.
+
+"A short senor?" Driscoll repeated. "Then we might call you a Shorter
+Yet, and maybe you know where this Republica is hiding out?"
+
+The Indito brightened. "That's why I'm here, senor. I'll take Y'r Mercy
+to the Citizen General Regules."
+
+At the name Driscoll frowned involuntarily, but laughed as he again
+remembered that he no longer shared the Imperialist hates.
+
+"Regules?" he repeated. "But we all thought he was dead, since the last
+time we scoured his mountains."
+
+"That the Virgin would have let me kill Y'r Mercy before then!" said the
+Indito regretfully. "But no matter, Y'r Mercy will discover that the
+citizen general is still alive."
+
+And so he was. They found him in the wildest of the wild region of the
+Sierra Madre del Sur, far away beyond the Rio de las Balsas, beyond
+Michoacan, in the impassable tierra caliente of the Pacific slope. The
+Indians here were the Pintos, who knew naught of the world outside, and
+owned allegiance to none but a grizzly old dictator, royally described
+as the Panther of the South. One thing was certain, the Empire could
+never follow Regules to the fever and ambush of the Panther's marshy
+realm, and Regules was hard pressed indeed when he sought such
+protection. But he was there now, in that last refuge of Liberalism,
+alone, wounded, fever stricken, emaciated, but undaunted. Driscoll found
+him so, and became his first recruit.
+
+For the moment Regules had no army, but armies were only weapons
+brandished by the real principals in the duel. Over battle and rout and
+slaughter the two chiefs would glare each at the other, blade in hand
+and panting, but either ever ready for the stroke that should thrust
+through the army to the heart of its general. Such a struggle needed
+only antiquity and a bard to be Homeric. No Greek could equal either
+champion in cunning, nor Trojan in prowess, nor both in grim persistence
+and rugged hate. It was truly a fight to have a hand in, and with big,
+lusty zest, the Storm Centre bounded into the lists. He leaped backward
+into the age of colossal, naked emotions, which strove as great veined
+giants with a rude splendor that was barbaric. It was the grandeur of
+primeval man, of majesty resting on him who fought best. After a
+thousand years of roof and tableware a man may be no longer primeval,
+but he is no longer quite a man either if his primeval state does not
+sometimes appeal to him. As for the young Missourian, he was enthralled.
+
+During that winter, the Spaniard and the American were a recruiting
+squad of two, picking up the seeds of rebellion among the fertile rocks.
+The vago, or poor Indito, was drafted wherever caught. Guerrilla
+fugitives rejoined their leader. The little band grew slowly, but in
+appearance merited Mendez's contemptuous epithet of brigand thieves.
+Fluttering yellow rags revealed only leathery-hided bones. Sandals
+sloughed away. There were a few machetes, and one or two venerable
+musketoons. But the commoner weapon was a heavy wooden staff, used for
+trudging up the steep paths. Imagine a Mexican abandoning his horse! But
+pursuers often tracked "the brigand thieves" by their mounts dying here
+and there--a pitiful blazed trail. And their exhausted riders often lay
+down as well, and would not rise, though Regules lashed them, though the
+terrible Mendez followed close behind. If at this time the Republic
+compared its conditions with the tapestried court in Mexico, then hope
+of success must have seemed lugubrious irony. Yet there was the
+watchword still, "Viva la Intervencion del Norte!" Regules looked to the
+United States to drive away the French. Driscoll's face would twist to a
+grimace. It was a peculiar position for an ex-Confederate.
+
+The Republicans in Michoacan were cut off from all outside help, while
+those along the Rio Grande drew from the friendly Americans in Texas
+much aid and comfort. Driscoll pondered on this, until in June he got
+leave to go to the Cordova colony and there enlist, if possible, his old
+comrades of Shelby's brigade. The result is known. After the affair at
+Tampico, he came back with a troop of colonels. They were the nucleus of
+a cavalry which he loved more than Demijohn, more than his ugly pistols,
+more than his pipe.
+
+It was a grim affection that Driscoll bore his regiment of horse. He was
+no longer the same man as when he left. He returned from Cordova with a
+mood on him, which settled more and more heavily as he nursed his troops
+into a splendid fighting machine. There was a dangerously quiet
+exultation in the patience with which he built the regiment up to full
+strength and trained it into the power of a brigade. He did wonders
+through the idea, pleasantly instilled, that much of the fun of fighting
+lies in the winning, and he demolished, as an absurd fetich, the idea
+that the hunted men of Regules were doomed never to win.
+
+Thus he labored with the Inditos, his terrible little fatalists in
+combat. There were enough to choose from, since by now the tide of
+desertion was changing toward the Republic. The problem of mounts in
+time solved itself. The French began selling their horses rather than
+transport them back to Europe, and these being declared contraband of
+war by the Liberal government, were complacently taken away from their
+owners without even Juarez script in payment. The question of arms
+proved more troublesome, but the answer at last was even more
+satisfactory. For the besieged at Queretero, Driscoll's troop later
+became some unfamiliar dragon hissing an incessant flame of poisonous
+breath. This was due to a strange and mystical weapon which not only
+carried a ball farther than any rifle known before, but sixteen of them,
+one after the other. The strange and mystical weapon multiplied a lone
+man into a very genii of death, until the Missourian's twelve hundred
+were more to be dreaded than many battalions.
+
+The repeating rifles, it may be explained, formed a part of the cache
+which General Shelby had made on crossing into Mexico. He had taken
+them, among other things, from the Confederate depositories in Texas.
+Driscoll knew of the cache through Boone, and by infinite patience had
+it brought into Michoacan. A solitary Indito journeyed eight hundred
+miles unnoticed with some seeming fragments of scrap iron. Other vagos
+were in front of him. Others followed. And these passed yet others,
+empty handed, trudging in the opposite direction. So an arsenal came to
+the Sierra Madre del Sur all the way from the Rio Grande, and each and
+every cavalier, whether miserable ranchero or veteran Missourian, became
+an engine of destruction, good for a fusillade of forty shots without
+the biting of a cartridge, for sixteen from his rifle, for six from each
+of his revolvers, and after these, good for terrific in-fighting with
+his dragoon sabre. It was no marvel that Driscoll loved such a troop,
+but the wonder lay in his smile, soft and purring and far-away, as he
+stroked his murderous darling.
+
+Colonel Daniel Boone, chief of scouts, was harassed nearly to insomnia
+over the change in his friend. At the bottom of the mystery there must
+be inspiration for a glowing line, and with pen ready poised over the
+violet fluid of romance, it was disheartening to have the solution elude
+him. He proposed clues as a poet tests rhymes. There was vendetta. There
+was blighted passion. But he ruefully discarded both. Either would be
+marked by violent growth, while this thing that touched the Storm Centre
+formed as slowly as the gravity of wisdom. But what baffled most was
+that Driscoll himself was completely oblivious. If _he_ knew
+nothing of the effect, how then could one ask him about the cause?
+
+Daniel, however, overlooked the fact that a malady may break out
+variously, according to temperament. As an instance Daniel's patient
+would lose himself in reverie, long and deep and mellowing. Now he was
+riding with a girl whose gray eyes were upon him in that pensive way she
+had; or rather, in the pensive way of a girl who finds herself in love,
+and wondering at it, seeks to learn the reason through a grave scrutiny
+of the object. It seemed very good to be riding with her again like
+that, for there was a soothing sense of companionship, of dear
+camaraderie that needed no words, but only that expression of her mouth
+and a pair of gray eyes. The day dream, while it lasted, had nothing of
+bitterness, but lulled his soul instead, and when it passed, he would be
+left with thankfulness for his moment of fleeting bliss and ineffable
+comfort. Or again, he awoke to reality with a longing that fiercely
+would not be denied. "Oh, I want--Jack'leen!" Often and often the
+imperious smothered cry all but passed his lips. And then he would shake
+himself, as out of physical slumber, and he would take up his life
+again. But he would be a shade deeper in the devil's own mood, of
+gentleness and a smile.
+
+After Cuernavaca Driscoll had brooded somewhat, yet rather as a boy
+whose melancholy is callow and easily fades. But during that evening in
+Boone's cabin, he had changed to a man, for it was then he came to know
+the meaning of possession, and in the same moment he learned the meaning
+of loss. A dull and indefinable resentment thereafter grew on him. But
+against whom? Against no one, perhaps. Yet he had had a vision of his
+life's dearest happiness, and it was gone, that vision, beyond recall.
+
+Ignorant as he was of Jacqueline's mission, Driscoll had but one
+explanation. A man had been born a prince, and a prince dazzles a woman.
+Yet the rankling in him was neither because of the prince, nor because
+of the woman. It was much more hopeless than that. It was because a man
+could be born a prince at all. Something was out of harmony in the
+world. The irony of it made him grim, and to his sense of humor that
+such things could be came the smile. A prince in the New World and in
+the Nineteenth Century!--Now here was as incongruous a juxtaposition as
+a bull in a crockery shop. And the result?--A people robbed of their
+dignity as men; a spike among the cogs, and the machinery everywhere
+grinding discordantly. For the pilfered people, however, the matter
+could be righted, and Driscoll felt his vague wrath as one with theirs.
+Together they would drive the bull from the shop. The Mexicans could
+later repair _their_ crockery. But as to his own precious little
+bit of bric-a-brac, that was shattered beyond hope. His only balm was to
+help the other sufferers. His only resentment was against fatality. But
+to pout at fatality is such a foolish business that he smiled, in a
+gentlemanly, sardonic way. Lucifer himself would be obsequious before
+fatality. And as for presuming to chastise it, that does indeed require
+the devil's own mood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE RENDEZVOUS OF THE REPUBLIC
+
+
+  "It may be short, it may be long,
+  'Tis reckoning-day!' sneers unpaid Wrong."
+                                      --_Lowell._
+
+
+It was a long column that undulated over the cacti plain with the
+turnings of the national highway. Men and horses bent like whitened
+spectres under a cloud of saltpetre dust. They burned with thirst, and
+had burned during fifteen days of forced marching over bad roads. They
+kept their ranks after the manner of soldiers, else they would have
+seemed a hurrying mob, for there was scant boast of uniforms. The
+officers wore shoulder straps of green or yellow, and some of the men
+had old military caps, high and black, with manta flaps protecting the
+neck.
+
+Except for an occasional pair of guaraches, or sandals, the infantry
+trudged barefoot, little leather-heeled Mercuries who cared nothing for
+thorns. Their olive faces, running with sweat, were for the most part
+typically humble, patient under fatigue, lethargic before peril. Here
+and there one held the hand of his soldadera, like him a stoic brown
+creature, who shared his hardships that she might be near to grind his
+ration of corn into tortillas. Veterans were there who had fought the
+French at Puebla, and on coarse frayed shirts displayed their heroes'
+medals. Some among them had meantime served the Empire, and had lately
+deserted back again--but no matter. In the cavalry there were those who
+on a time had ridden against the Americans in Santa Anna's famous guard.
+Now they rode with Driscoll, among the Missourians. And the Missourians
+sang:
+
+  "My name it is Joe Bowers,
+    And I've got a brother Ike;
+  I come from old Missouri,
+    Yes, all the way from Pike."
+
+Their mouths opened wide to the salty dust, and they roared with
+great-lunged humor, the stentor note of Tall Mose Bledsoe--Colonel
+Bledsoe of the State of Pike--far and away in the van of the chorus.
+Even the Mexicans, who comprised over half the regiment, chanted forth
+the tune. They had heard it often enough, and thought it a species of
+appropriate national hymn. Only the colonel of the troop rode in
+silence, but not gloomily. This playfulness of his pet before a snarl
+was music that he liked. The other Missouri colonels (brevet) were as
+boys ever, were still only Joe Shelby's "young men for war." There was
+Colonel Marmaduke of Platte. There was Colonel Crittenden of Nodaway.
+There was Colonel Grinders from the Ozarks. There was Colonel Clay of
+Carroll, and Colonel Carroll of Clay. These were captains. Colonel
+Bledsoe was a major, and so was Colonel Boone, also chief of scouts.
+Colonel Clayburn, otherwise the "Doc" of Benton, was ranking surgeon;
+while the chaplain, lovingly known as "Old Brothers and Sisters," and
+the choicest fighter among them, was lieutenant-colonel.
+
+Of course some of the four or five hundred colonels had to be privates.
+But they did not mind, they were colonels just the same. Which provoked
+complications, especially with a Kansan who had wandered among them some
+time since. The Kansan, whose name was Collins, was an ex-Federal, even
+one of their ancient and warmest enemies, of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry.
+And being a mettlesome young man into the bargain, he rose by unanimous
+consent to command a native company of the troop. But Captain Collins
+found it hard to address a Missouri private as colonel, and to be
+addressed by the Missouri private as an inferior in rank. A sporadic
+outburst of jayhawker warfare generally ensued. But according to the
+merger treaty between the Republic of Colonels and the Republica
+Mexicana, the Missourian was strictly in his rights. Besides, both
+needed the exercise, and after the business of fists, formality dropped
+of itself. Captain Collins thereupon became "Harry;" and the private
+"Ben" or "Jim," or whatever else.
+
+Driscoll's troop wanted for nothing. Regimentals, luckily, were not
+considered a want. But in replacing worn-out slouch hats and cape-coats,
+the Americans set an approximate standard, which was observed also by
+their fellow troopers among the Mexicans. They were able to procure
+sombreros, wide-brimmed and high-peaked, of mouse-colored beaver with a
+rope of silver. The officers and many of the men had long Spanish capas,
+or cloaks, which were black and faced in gray velvet. Their coats were
+short charro jackets. As armor against cacti, they either had "chaps" or
+trousers "foxed" over in leather, with sometimes a Wild Western fringe.
+They came to be known as the Gray Troop, or the Gringo Grays. The
+natives themselves were proudest of the latter title.
+
+The brigade marched as victors, but they remembered how they had
+formerly skulked as hunted guerrillas, and also, how Mendez had scourged
+the dissident villages. They found bodies hanging to trees. At Morelia a
+citizen who cried "Viva la Libertad!" had been brained with a sabre. It
+was the hour for reprisals. And Regules exacted suffering of the
+_mocho_, or clerical, towns that had sheltered the "traitors."
+Requisitions for arms, horses, and provisions marked his path. Deserters
+swelled his ranks. He had enough left-overs from the evacuation to
+organize what in irony he called his Foreign Legion. At Acambaro a
+second Republican army, under General Corona--"welcomer than a stack of
+blues," as Boone said--more than doubled their force, and together they
+hastened on to Queretero.
+
+But at Celaya, when men were thinking of rest in the cool monasteries
+there, they learned that they must not pause. The word came from El
+Chaparrito, who ever watched the Empire as a hawk poised in mid-air.
+General Escobedo of the Army of the North had pursued Miramon south into
+Queretero, but only to find him reinforced there by Mendez and the
+troops from the capital. This superior array meant to attack Escobedo,
+then turn and destroy Corona and Regules. The Republicans, therefore,
+must be united at once.
+
+The message was no sooner heard than the two weary brigades of Corona
+and Regules set forth again. They covered the remaining thirty miles
+that night, expecting a victorious Imperialist army at each bend in the
+road. But they met instead, toward morning, a lone Imperialist horseman
+galloping toward them. Regules's sharp eyes caught the glint of the
+stranger's white gold-bordered sombrero, and with a large Castilian oath
+he plucked out his revolver. Driscoll touched his arm soothingly.
+
+"But, Maria purisima," cried Regules, "he's an Explorador!"
+
+The Exploradores were Mendez's scouts, his bloodhounds for a Republican
+trail, and the most hated of all that breed.
+
+"Aye, Senor General," the stranger now spoke, "I was even the capitan of
+Exploradores, who kisses Your Mercy's hand."
+
+There was a familiar quality in the man's half chuckle, and Driscoll
+hastily struck a match. In its light a face grew before him, and a pair
+of malevolent eyes, one of them crossed and beaming recognition, met
+his.
+
+"Well, Tibby?" said Driscoll quietly.
+
+"First your pistols, then what you know," commanded Regules. "Here, in
+between us. Talk as we ride, or----"
+
+Don Tiburcio complied. Such had been his intention.
+
+"I am no more a loyal Imperialist," he announced, with a gruesome
+contortion of the mouth.
+
+"Nor a live deserter for long," said Regules. "Quick, what's the news at
+Queretero?"
+
+"Carrai, my news and more will jolt out if I open my mouth. Eh, mi
+coronel," he added to Driscoll, "you've taught this barbarous gait to
+the Republic too, I see?"
+
+"Better obey orders," Driscoll warned him gently.
+
+"But there's no need of hurry, senores. Not now, there isn't."
+
+"You mean the Imperialists have whipped Escobedo, that----"
+
+"Not so fast, mi general. If they had, wouldn't I want you to hurry, for
+then there'd be a conquering Empire waiting for you?"
+
+"Colonel Driscoll," said Regules, "fall back a step. I'm going to kill
+this fellow now."
+
+"As you wish, general. But he's got something to tell."
+
+"Then por Dios, why doesn't he?"
+
+"Yes, Tibby, why don't you?"
+
+Don Tiburcio cocked a puzzled head toward the American. He had not known
+such softness of voice in Mendez's former captain of Lancers. But he saw
+that Driscoll had drawn his pistol, which accorded so grimly with the
+mildness of his tone that the scout chuckled in delight and admiration.
+
+"You know that I'll tell--now," he said reproachfully. "In a word,
+there's been no battle at all, curse him, curse both----"
+
+"No battle! Escobedo kept away then?"
+
+"No, not even that. The Imperialists would not fight, and the Empire has
+lost its last chance. Curse them both, curse----"
+
+"Well, curse away, but who, what?"
+
+"I curse, senores mios," and the scout's words grated in rage and
+chagrin, "I curse His Excellency the general-of-division-in-chief of the
+army of operations, Don Leonardo Marquez. I curse, senores, the Reverend
+Senor Abbot, Padre Augustin Fischer----"
+
+"Good, that's finished. Now tell us why there was no battle."
+
+"I curse His Ex----"
+
+"You have already, but now----"
+
+Tiburcio flung up his hand in a gesture of assent, and his ugly features
+relaxed. Though going at a brisk trot, he rolled a cigarette and lighted
+it. Then he told his story. Queretero? Ha, Queretero was now the Court,
+the Army, the Empire! Pious townsmen shouted "Viva el Senor Emperador!"
+all day long. The cafes were alive with uniforms and oaths and high
+play. Padres and friars shrived with ardor. There was the theatre.
+Fashion promenaded under the beautiful Alameda trees, and whispered the
+latest rumors of the Empress Carlota. Maximilian decorated the brave,
+and bestowed gold fringed standards. Then came Escobedo and his Legion
+del Norte, but they kept behind the hills. Bueno, the Empire would go
+forth and smite them, and the pious townspeople climbed to the housetops
+to see it done. And yesterday morning the Empire, with banners flying
+and clarion blasts, did march out and form in glittering battle array.
+
+"And then, hombre?"
+
+"And then the Empire marched back again, senores."
+
+Regules and Driscoll were stupefied. What gross idiocy--or
+treachery--had thrown away the Empire's one magnificent chance?
+
+Tiburcio sucked in his breath. "I curse----"
+
+"Marquez?" cried Regules.
+
+"Si senor, Marquez! Marquez cried out against the attack, and His
+Majesty ordered the troops back into town again."
+
+"But Miramon, hombre? Miramon, the best among you, where was he?"
+
+"General Miramon fairly begged to fight, but he has been defeated once,
+and now Marquez warns the Emperor against Miramon's 'imprudence.'
+Marquez is chief of staff, and crows over Miramon, who was once his
+president. He personally ordered Miramon off the field, yet it was
+Miramon who first made the insolent little whelp into a general."
+
+"This," said Driscoll, "does not explain why you desert to us?"
+
+For an instant the old malignant humor gleamed in the baleful crescent.
+"It's the fault of the fat padrecito," he replied. "Your Mercy perhaps
+does not know about the pretty servant he eloped with from the Bishop of
+Durango's to Murguia's hacienda? Well, but trouble started when I saw
+her, or rather, when she saw me, even me, senor, for then she perceived
+that the padrecito was not a handsome man. Presto, there was another
+eloping, and the holy Father Fischer felt bad, so very bad that when he
+got into favor with Maximilian, he had me condemned for certain
+toll-taking matters he knew of. But I vanished in time, and I've been
+serving under Mendez as a loyal and undiscouraged Imperialist until
+yesterday. But yesterday the padre recognized me at a review of the
+troops. Your Mercy figures to himself how long I waited after that? Your
+Mercy observed how fast I was riding?"
+
+The fellow's audacity saved him. The news he brought proved correct.
+Escobedo had not been attacked. Besides, Regules perhaps hoped to trap
+Mendez through the former Imperialist scout, though Driscoll derided the
+idea and even counseled the worthy deserter's execution.
+
+Don Tiburcio's lank jaw dropped. Driscoll's advice was too heavy a
+recoil on his own wits, for had he not once saved the Gringo's life,
+feeling that one day he might be a beneficiary of the Gringo's singular
+aversion to shooting people? And now here was the Gringo in quite
+another of his unexpected humors. But what bothered Don Tiburcio most
+was the acumen that tempered the American's mercy. The facts indeed
+stood as Driscoll casually laid them before General Regules. Tibby, for
+instance, had neglected to call himself a "loyal" Republican. Asked for
+a description of the new earthworks on the Cerro de las Campanas, he
+only told how peons and criminals were forced to carry adobes there
+though exposed to Escobedo's sharpshooters, which had in it for Tibby
+the subtle element of a jest. Or asked about the new powder mills, he
+described how Maximilian slept patriotically wrapped in a native serape,
+woven with the eagle and colors, or related how the Emperor won the
+hearts of soldiers and citizens by his princely and ever amiable
+bearing.
+
+"Now sing us the national hymn," said Driscoll, "and the betrayal of
+your former friends will be complete."
+
+But though Don Tiburcio had deserted for convenience and perhaps meant
+to be a spy in the dissident camp, yet Regules saved him, while Driscoll
+lifted his shoulders indifferently and at heart was not sorry.
+
+The Celaya road, crossing a flat country, first touches Queretero on its
+southwestern corner, and from here the two Republican brigades beheld
+the ancient romantic town in the dawn as they approached. Many beautiful
+Castilian towers, stately and tapering to needles of stone, rose from
+among flat roofs and verdure tufts, and pointed upward to a sky as soft
+and warm as over the Tuscan hills. Other spires were Gothic, and others
+truncated, but the temples that gave character to the whole were those
+of Byzantine domes. Lighted by the sun's level rays of early morning,
+their mosaic colors glittered as in some bright glare of Algeria, but
+were relieved by the town's cooling fringe of green and the palms of
+many plazas within. It might have been a Moorish city, in Happy Arabia
+called paradise, a city of fountains, and wooded glens, like haunts of
+mythical fauns. Queretero once boasted a coat of arms, granted by a
+condescending Spanish monarch, and for loyalty to the hoary order of
+king and church she in those old days described herself as Very Noble
+and Royal. Stern cuirassed conquistadores held her as a key to the
+nation's heart, as a buckler for the capital, and lately the French did
+also. And now the Hapsburg had come to a welcome of garlands, and called
+her his "querida."
+
+But however excellently Queretero served as a base of military
+operations, as a besieged place pocketed among hills her aspect altered
+woefully. She was like an egg clutched in the talons of an eagle. On
+north and east and south the hills swept perilously near, a low,
+convenient range, with only a grass plain a few miles wide separating
+them from the town below. On north and east the heights were already
+sprinkled with Escobedo's tents and cannon. They commanded the only two
+strongholds of the besieged, as well as the town itself, which lay
+between. One stronghold was the Cerro de las Campanas, a wedge-shaped
+hill on the northwestern edge of the town, which held nothing but
+trenches. On the northwestern edge was the other stronghold, the mound
+of Sangremal, which fell away as a steep bluff to the grassy plain
+below. From the bluff, across the plain, to the hills opposite,
+stretched a magnificent aqueduct. On the mound's commodious summit of
+tableland there was the Plaza de la Cruz, also the Church de la Cruz,
+and an old Franciscan hive, called the monastery de la Cruz. Here
+Maximilian established himself in a friar's lonely cell. On the north a
+small river skirted the town, on the south, where nothing intervened
+between the grassy plain and the wooded Alameda, the besiegers found the
+most vulnerable flank.
+
+On this side investment began with the arrival of Corona and Regules,
+and soon after, of General Riva Palacio. The Republicans numbered
+fifteen thousand already, and more were coming daily, but as yet there
+were ragged strands in the noose being woven around the beleaguered
+place. Curiously enough, the most feverish to see the cordon perfected
+was none other than Don Tiburcio.
+
+"Marquez will escape! Marquez will fly the net!" he kept bewailing. "Si
+senor, and the padrecito with him, curse them both!"
+
+Two weeks passed, filled with skirmishes and ominous tests of strength.
+At night fiery parabolas blazed their course against the sky, up from
+the outer hills, sweeping down on Las Campanas or La Cruz. Imperialist
+chiefs urged a general attack, but again Marquez foiled their hopes.
+Then, at two o'clock one morning, there came to pass what Tiburcio had
+feared. A body of horse stole out upon the plain, and gained the
+unguarded Sierra road to Mexico. Four thousand cavalry pursued over the
+hills, but in vain. The fugitives were Marquez and the Fifth Lancers,
+his escort. He was gone to the capital to raise funds, and to bring back
+with him, at once, the Imperialist garrison there of five thousand men.
+Doting Maximilian had even named him lieutenant of the Empire, and
+Mexico City would shortly have the Leopard for regent. Queretero,
+moreover, was seriously weakened by the loss of the Fifth Lancers, and
+there were those who remembered how, when Guadalajara was besieged by
+Liberals seven years before, Marquez had likewise set out for aid, and
+had returned--too late.
+
+To his wrathful disgust, Don Tiburcio learned that Father Fischer was
+also gone with Marquez. The priest had disguised himself in an officer's
+cloak, and for the moment none in the town knew of his flight. The fat
+padre, it appeared, no longer hoped for the luscious bishopric of
+Durango. His was the rat's instinct, as regards a sinking ship.
+
+The Leopard and the Rat got away only in time. The very next day ten
+thousand ragged Inditos, largely conscripts, arrived from the Valley of
+Mexico and filled the gap in the besiegers' line. Investment was now
+complete, against a paltry nine thousand within the town.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A BUCCANEER AND A BATTLE
+
+
+  "The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature
+  of man."
+                                                       --_Bacon._
+
+
+But the paltry nine thousand were the best army of Mexicans ever yet
+gathered together. For weeks they kept more than thirty thousand
+Republicans out of an unwalled, almost an unfortified town. But while
+the Republicans were largely _chinacos_, or raw soldiery, they
+inside were trained men. There were the Cazadores, a Mexican edition of
+the Chasseurs, organized by Bazaine under French drill masters. There
+was Mendez's seasoned brigade. There was Arellano's artillery, though
+numbering only fifty pieces. There were the crack Dragoons of the
+Empress, the Austro-Mexican Hussars, and a squadron of the Municipal
+Guards. There were veterans who had fought at Cerro Gordo, and steadily
+ever since in the civil wars. There was the ancient Battalion de Celaya,
+mainstay of the Spanish viceroys, and later of the Emperor Iturbide, its
+colonel. There were the Battalion del Emperador, the Tiradores de la
+Frontera, a company of engineers, and several well-disciplined regiments
+of the line.
+
+But the day came when they began to starve, and being hungry took the
+heart out of many things. It took the heart out of bombarding Escobedo
+in his hillside adobe; out of taunting "uncouth rebels." The rebels were
+in trenches often not a street's width distant, and for reply they
+pointed to certain dangling acorns who had been "traitors" caught
+slipping through the lines. Being hungry took the heart out of the
+quick-time diana, played after a brilliant sortie. Out of the embrace
+Maximilian gave Miramon. Out of Miramon's call for vivas for His Majesty
+the Emperor. Out of standard decorating and promotions and thrilling
+words of praise. Out of the anniversary of Maximilian's acceptance of
+the throne. Out of a medal presentation for military merit, which the
+generals bestowed on their Emperor in the name of the army. Out of being
+made a caballero of the Order of Guadalupe, especially as the monarch
+could give only a ribbon, since the cross must wait until his return to
+the capital. And being hungry certainly made pathetic his prediction
+that some among those present would one day wear the medal for
+twenty-five years of faithful service to the Empire. Being hungry took
+the poet-hero's glow out of his wan cheek as he declared again that he,
+a Hapsburg, would never desert, for even then he heard Imperialist
+platoons shooting recaptured deserters. Or he thought of the wounded
+left to die on the grassy plain and lying there unburied. No, all the
+heart was being taken out of these things, for Marquez still did not
+come with the help he had gone to bring, and the noose was tightening
+day by day. Attempts were made to send some one through to depose
+Marquez, but each one failed. Splendid sallies resulted in prisoners
+taken, which were only so many more mouths to feed. The Roman aqueduct
+had long since been cut off, and now the wells were giving out. Mules
+and horses drank at the river, while sharpshooters picked them off. The
+feebler animals were butchered and distributed as rations. And still the
+sorry Marquez gave no sign. Even hope failed the empty stomachs.
+
+But for those who waited outside as Vengeance enthroned, expectation
+began to take on a creepy quality. The besiegers were preparing against
+themselves a host, not of men, but of frightful spectres, of famished
+maniacs, of unearthly ghouls, who would clutch and tear with claws any
+man that stood between them and a morsel of food. And the fury of
+desperation sharpened with each succeeding irony of a dinner hour.
+
+The siege had endured six weeks. Marquez had been gone a month. But the
+Republicans held ready for whatever force he might bring. Their key to
+the situation was the Cimatario, the highest hill on the south. Between
+it and the wooded Alameda stretched the grassy plain. Republican
+trenches from base to shoulder of the peak opposed Imperialist trenches
+under the Alameda trees. Republican troops flanked the Cimatario on
+either side, lying in wait for Marquez. On one side Driscoll's Grays
+guarded the Celaya road.
+
+So here they were sleeping encamped on the morning of April 27, when the
+bugle of a patrol cracked their slumbers. They lay booted and spurred. A
+moment later they were horsed as well, blinking across the plain in the
+pearly mist of dawn. They had heard hoofbeats, sharp and dry on the high
+tableland. Now they saw a wild, shadowy troop, which was hotly pursuing
+a spectral coach of gossamer wheels, with six plunging mules frantically
+lashed by outriders. At once, almost, the coach was lost among the dim
+strangers, who snatched at flying ends of harness, and with their prize
+raced on again.
+
+The Grays stared. It was like some pictured hold-up, not real. But they
+knew better when from among themselves a colossal yellow horse and rider
+dashed toward the road. Then they awoke for certain, and tore after
+their colonel to solve this ashen mystery so early in the morning. Was
+it Marquez, perhaps? But the coach white with dust, and white curtains
+flapping, what was that?
+
+Striking their flank at an angle, Driscoll drove hard into the fleeing
+horde. The Grays saw his hand raise as a signal, whereat they did not
+close in, but swerved and galloped parallel, some fifty paces distant.
+Driscoll struggled alone against the heaving sea about him. But no
+cut-throat of that pirate mass so much as drew a knife. By force of
+brawn, he wedged his way toward the coach, reached it, leaned forward,
+and caught up the curtain. And what he saw was a poke bonnet. The bonnet
+was a bower of lace and roses, held by a filmy saucy knot under a lady's
+chin. He saw a face framed within, of a skin creamy white, of lips
+blood-red, of hair like copper, and he saw a pair of eyes. They were
+gray eyes, and as they opened suddenly and wider upon him whom she
+thought must be her captor, the lady started violently, her cheeks
+aflame. But at once the eyes snapped as in mockery, and her lips moved.
+
+"Monsieur permits himself----" she began, but no one heard except her
+terrified companion within the coach. Driscoll had already dropped the
+curtain as a thing that burned, and was raging on again with the
+turbulent stream. He got to the leader of the band, and jerked the
+fellow's bridle. He raised his voice, and louder than the pounding of
+hoofs he cursed in wrathful disgust.
+
+"Dam' you Rod, this here's getting monotonous!"
+
+The man swung in his saddle. His eyes were black-browed and savage. He
+was Rodrigo Galan, the terrible Don Rodrigo. But shabby, how very shabby
+he looked for the thief of million dollar convoys! Yet that bonanza coup
+of the bullion train had happened two years ago. Since then the outlaw
+had visited the capital. Boldly, audaciously, he had gone as a rich
+hacendado, and after the manner of rich hacendados he had "seen the
+City." Mozos with gorged canvas bags on their shoulders had followed his
+stately stride into the gambling casinos. He had played with regal
+nerve, and on the last occasion, had flung the emptied sacks away as
+nonchalantly as on the first. Only, the last time, he had felt remorse
+that the "bank" had profited instead of Tiburcio. In that matter of the
+bullion convoy he had not treated Don Tiburcio as one caballero should
+another.
+
+Their horses--Rodrigo's and Driscoll's--were racing by bounds shoulder
+to shoulder. This endured for possibly the space of a second. Then
+Demijohn felt his rein tighten, and he took more time. Next his bit
+suddenly pinched, and down the old fellow came upon his front feet
+together, firmly planted, and sank to his haunches. Driscoll still held
+Rodrigo's bridle, and Rodrigo and horse, being in air, lunged backward.
+
+"We stop here," Driscoll announced.
+
+Don Rodrigo plumped down heavily in his saddle. His bristling moustache
+lifted over his cruel white teeth. Two hundred swarthy little demons
+reining in around them looked expectantly for a signal. But their chief
+frowned at the twelve hundred Gringo Grays hovering on his flank. They
+too wanted only a sign, and they outnumbered the Brigand's six to one.
+But Rodrigo believed he held the advantage. First he obediently halted
+himself and his minions.
+
+"Now then senor," said he in pompous and heavy syllables, "I am at your
+disposition. Will your people commence the battle, or shall we?"
+
+Driscoll appreciated the dilemma. The carriage would be in the line of
+fire. He had had an intuition of its occupants, and for that reason had
+kept back his men.
+
+"Where was she going?" he demanded.
+
+Rodrigo feigned surprise. "And where," he asked, "or rather, to whom,
+should Your Mercy imagine?"
+
+To Queretero! To Maximilian, of course! This, too, Driscoll had divined
+already.
+
+"No matter," he retorted shortly, "but how did you run across her this
+time?"
+
+The outlaw filled his chest, "You Americans, senor, do not understand
+the feelings of a man bowed under a heavy wrong. You----"
+
+"We'll let it go at that," said Driscoll, with a little wave of the
+hand, "but--how in----"
+
+"You scoff already, senor? But will you, at these stains of blood? Then
+let me say to you, senor mio, they make me remember one shameless deed
+for which the tyrant Maximilian must pay."
+
+The stains Rodrigo meant were on a little ivory cross which he had taken
+from his jacket. The emblem served him to lash his emotions, to goad his
+precious sense of wrong. He studied the cross intently; then, by a vast
+and excruciating effort, thrust it into Driscoll's hand.
+
+"Yes, yes," he cried, "you must take it! He said so."
+
+"He?"
+
+"Si, senor, he who shares my wrong, Don Anastasio Murguia."
+
+"Murgie!" exclaimed the bewildered American. "But--why, hombre, I
+haven't seen the old skinflint since--since he and I both were
+court-martialled by Lopez!"
+
+"Still I promised him to send the cross to you, because you will have a
+chance to give it to him. He said so."
+
+"Oh, he did?" But Driscoll put the trinket in his pocket, not unwilling
+to see more of this foolish drama in Latin-American sentiment. "Now
+then, Rod," he went on impatiently, "you haven't explained yet how you
+happen to find her again."
+
+"That," replied the outlaw, "was _his_ part of the bargain."
+
+"Whose?"
+
+"Anastasio Murguia's."
+
+"Rod, you talk like a----"
+
+"But no, senor, it's because you Americans cannot understand. Murguia
+also believes in vengeance. I haven't seen him either, not since he sold
+his hacienda over a year ago. But I do know that he or some spy of his
+is in the capital, for a messenger from him came to me in the mountains.
+The messenger said that the Marquesa d'Aumerle was leaving for
+Queretero. If I captured her, it would be vengeance in kind. But Murguia
+wanted pay for his information. He wanted that cross--it was his
+daughter's--and I was to send it to him through you. Dios mio, but I had
+to hurry! A little more, and the Marquesa would have been inside your
+lines."
+
+"She is already," Driscoll corrected him, "and so are you. Will you
+fight it out, or surrender?"
+
+He pointed to the Grays as he spoke. They had dismounted, and each man
+had a rifle at aim across his saddle. It was a reminiscence out of
+Driscoll's boyhood of Indians and the Santa Fe trail. But Don Rodrigo
+only smiled.
+
+"You want the coach first?" he said.
+
+"No!" Driscoll retorted. "You're the one that's wanted, and you can
+either wait for your trial, or be shot now, fighting. The coach will
+have to take its chances. But see here, if the firing once starts, not a
+thief among you will be left standing----"
+
+It was a perilous "bluff," and none might say if it would have broken
+the deadlock. But the outlaw interrupted.
+
+"Listen! What's that?"
+
+"Oh, nothing. We're only throwing a few bombs into Queretero."
+
+"Only!" The brigand's eyes flashed, and his voice was filled with envy.
+Throwing bombs among the traitors?--and magnificence like that had grown
+common! Yet he, whose patriotism was a passion that fed and thrived upon
+itself, must be barred from such exquisite satiety.
+
+Driscoll understood, and thought it droll. First there was that loyal
+Imperialist, Don Tiburcio, frothing chagrin because he had had to
+desert. And now here was this rabid Republican, heart broken over being
+outlawed from the ranks of his country's avengers.
+
+Again Rodrigo interrupted, more excitedly yet. "Senor, senor, you don't
+shoot them that way every day? What does it mean?"
+
+Both gazed across the plain to the city of domes under the green hills.
+Driscoll's chin raised, and he listened intently. What had commenced
+like indolent target practice against a beleaguered town had suddenly
+burst into a terrific cannonading chorus. More, there was musketry,
+vicious and sustained. There were troops deploying over the plain.
+Something critical was happening. If it were the supreme rally of the
+famishing Empire!
+
+Driscoll stirred uneasily. He glanced at his outlaw. He thought of the
+coach. To leave her with these ruffians? To miss a fight? Here was a
+quandary!
+
+"You are not going?" Rodrigo cried at him furiously. "Now, now," he
+raged, "is the hour of triumph for the incarnation of popular
+sovereignty. Go, I say, go, the Republic needs you!"
+
+Until those words Rodrigo had held the situation. With them he lost it,
+and Driscoll was master. And Driscoll grew serene, and very sweet of
+manner. He began filling a cob pipe. A nod of his head indicated the
+coach as a condition of his going.
+
+"Look, look!" Rodrigo shouted. "Oh, que viva--they're running! We've
+smoked them out! We've smoked them out!"
+
+Driscoll swept the country with his glasses. Thousands of men were
+running like frightened rabbits down the Cimatario slope, and spreading
+as a fan over the grassy plain. Mountain pieces boomed farewell behind
+them, until in abject panic they cast away carbines and scrambled the
+faster. But other troops were pushing up the slope opposite the town,
+and these were ordered ranks of infantry. Up and up they climbed, to
+trench after trench, and the howitzers one by one stopped short their
+roar. When Driscoll laid down the glasses, his face was white. Rodrigo's
+glee turned to uncertainty.
+
+"What--what----"
+
+"Smoked out, you fool? We're the ones smoked out!"
+
+"But those runaways?"
+
+"Are our own men, ten thousand of 'em, raw conscripts to support our
+batteries on the Cimatario."
+
+"But the Cimitario?" Rodrigo knew by instinct the crucial importance of
+the black cone.
+
+"The Cimitario is taken by the Imperialists!"
+
+Driscoll did not forget, however, the nearer contest, and as the Mexican
+grew frantic, he was the more coolly indifferent.
+
+"Max has everything his own way now," he added soothingly. "He can
+either evacuate, or go around on the north side and thrash Escobedo."
+
+But the Grays were clamoring for action. "By cracken, Din, hurry up
+there!" yelled Cal Grinders.
+
+Driscoll raised his palm, waving the fingers for patience. He scanned
+the plain again. The Imperialist ranks were breaking. Hungry men rushed
+on the besiegers' camps, snatching untouched breakfasts. The townsmen
+poured out among the uniforms, and darted greedily in every direction.
+The llano was alive with scurrying human beings. Driscoll could well
+wait for the psychology of Republican defeat on Don Rodrigo, since at
+the same time he awaited the effects of victory on a starving army. The
+Grays fretted, but they knew their colonel was never more to be depended
+upon than when his blood grew cold like this.
+
+"If," Driscoll observed pleasantly to the Mexican, "Escobedo isn't
+already making tracks for San Luis----"
+
+It was the last straw. The patriot brigand jerked off his sombrero and
+flung it to the ground. He gestured wildly over the plain, and he
+gestured in the American's face. He choked on words that boiled up too
+fast.
+
+"You--you--traitor!" he spluttered. There was actually froth on his
+lips.
+
+"We haven't," Driscoll reminded him with exceeding gentleness, "settled
+this other yet," and again he nodded to the coach.
+
+"That--that is why you wait?" Rodrigo had forgotten his prize entirely.
+"Take her, then, take her! Only go, go, kill all the traitors!"
+
+"After you, caballero," Driscoll returned with Mexican politeness. He
+wanted to be sure of the outlaw's departure, since holding him prisoner
+was now out of the question. But Rodrigo chafed only to be gone. With a
+reed whistle he signaled his little demon centaurs, then at a touch of
+the spurs his horse leaped forward and all the band clattered close on
+his heels.
+
+"Sure anxious to escape," thought Driscoll. But he stared after them in
+wonder. Instead of turning to the safety of the mountains, they charged
+straight ahead on the town, straight against the Empire, and in any
+case, straight into the maw of justice. Behind, the coach and mules
+stood high and dry in the road. Driscoll was at once all action.
+
+"Shanks," he called.
+
+Mr. Boone hurried to him from the Grays.
+
+"Shanks, will you stay here with six men----"
+
+"Jack Driscoll!"
+
+"To watch that coach, Dan. There's two girls in it."
+
+"Jack! Miss that there fight!"
+
+"But Dan, _these_ girls are friends of yours, you met them once."
+
+Mr. Boone started violently.
+
+"Never mind, I'll ask Rube Marmaduke or the Parson."
+
+A pitiful struggle racked Mr. Boone.
+
+"You, you're not fooling me, Din?" he pleaded.
+
+"Sure not. It's your empress all right. It's Miss Burt all right."
+
+"Then, Lawd help me, I'll stay!--But you'd best be hustling and get to
+work."
+
+"Just a minute, Shanks, there's the other one in the coach. She wants to
+go to Queretero. If she gives her word of honor--never mind, she knows
+honor from a man's standpoint--if she gives her word that she brings
+nothing that will help 'em inside, then you can escort the coach into
+the town after things quiet down some. All right? Good. Then we're off!"
+
+Demijohn's hoofs pelted dust balls with each impact. The Grays were
+ready. They surged behind. The sound of them was a swishing roar. In the
+apex of the blinding tempest, Driscoll sat his saddle as unmoved as an
+engineer in his cab. He looked ahead placidly. Empire and a prince had
+just triumphed. So he was going to readjust fatality. The smile touched
+his lips as it never had before, and hovered there in the midst of
+battle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+BLOOD AND NOISE--WHAT ELSE?
+
+
+  "On stubborn foes he vengeance wreak'd,
+  And laid about him like a Tartar,
+  But if for mercy once they squeak'd,
+  He was the first to grant them quarter."
+                            --Orlando Furioso.
+
+
+Only for the moment of a cooling breath is Nature gray in Mexico. The
+sun's barbed shafts had already ripped away the cloak of dawn when
+Driscoll and his cavaliers swept over the glaring road. But there was no
+longer any battle. The plain swarmed confusion only. Panic cringed
+before hunger. The defeated besiegers panted, stumbled, ran on again, or
+lay still in trembling. The victorious besieged were gorging from
+fingers crammed full. It was the hour for trophies. A prosperous
+townsman bore a stack of tortillas, and gloated leeringly as he hurried
+to put his treasure safely away. A dashing Hungarian with fur pelisse
+shouted gallant oaths at a yoke of oxen and prodded them with his curved
+sword, as though a creaking cart filled with corn were the precious loot
+of an Attila. Pueblo and soldiery tore ravenously at fortifications that
+had so long kept them from one savory broth. With nails alone they would
+demolish walls and trenches. Some lurched over fugitives in the grass,
+and then pinned them there with bayonets, the lust for food turning
+fiendishly to a lust for blood.
+
+But what most inflamed the Grays were the captured cannon. They counted
+as many as twenty being dragged into the Imperialist lines. The
+Missourians were aggrieved. Never, never had Joe Shelby's brigade ever
+lost a gun. And as they galloped, they looked anxiously about for
+chances of more battle. Just then Rodrigo's outlaw band caught their
+eye. These had swerved from the road out upon the field, hot to engage
+anything, everything. A long provision train offered first. Many carts
+had been loaded with Republican stores, and were being convoyed to the
+town by a squadron of Imperialist cavalry. It was the clash between this
+escort and the brigands that attracted the Grays coming on behind. But
+the escort wheeled and fled and the brigands pursued, slashing with
+machetes, and so charged full tilt into the Dragoons of the Empress who
+were sent to retake the abandoned prize. Red tunics mixed with ragged
+yellow shirts, and war-chargers and mustangs swirled together as a
+maelstrom. Then the Grays pounded among them, in each hand of each man a
+six-shooter. The red spots began to fall out of the peppered caldron.
+The red tunics that were left broke, retreated, ran. It became a rout.
+Only a few of the Empire's best survived those ten minutes of
+blood-letting. Fatality? Driscoll's lip curled. Fatality? The Dragoons,
+now no more, had twice held him for their bullets.
+
+Grays and brigands chased them back toward Queretero. The fleeing
+remnant began yelling for help. Driscoll rose in his stirrups, and saw
+just ahead a large force of the enemy. It was gathered around the Casa
+Blanca, a little house on the plain. The large Imperialist force there
+was an army, nothing less, though still disordered from the late action
+and victory. Surrounded by a brilliant staff was a tall, golden bearded
+chieftain, sumptuously arrayed as a general of division, regally mounted
+on a cream-coated horse of Spain. He was Maximilian, viewing from there
+the winning of his empire. The army behind him filled his ears--"Viva Su
+Majestad!"
+
+But he who had given the cue for that thrilling music now saw the
+convoy's fate. He rode up and down anxiously, striving for order in the
+confused ranks. He wore the green sash of a general. He had a moustache
+and imperial, searching black eyes, and an open brow. His fine features
+showed in the blend of French and Castilian blood. He was the real
+chieftain. He was Miramon. Impetuously he made ready to avenge the
+Dragoons.
+
+These things that he saw ahead brought Driscoll to his senses. With
+reluctance, but instantly, he made up his mind. He held high his sabre
+and halted his own men, turning at the same time to collide obliquely,
+and purposely, against Rodrigo.
+
+"Not that way, Rod, not that way!"
+
+"But it's the tyrant! It's the tyrant!"
+
+Driscoll got the brigand's bridle and swung him around fiercely. "Let
+the poor tyrant be!" he yelled. "We've got to take that there Cimatario
+hill."
+
+A moment later Grays and brigands wheeled to the right and were off.
+Back at the Casa Blanca Maximilian lowered his glasses. "They surely,
+they surely are not--yes," he cried, "they _are_ going to attack
+the Cimatario!"
+
+Miramon smiled. "Then they are lunatics," he said. "Why, Your Highness
+knows that we have five thousand of our best men on the Cimatario."
+
+"Yes," Maximilian agreed uneasily, "but I thought I recognized the man
+who leads those lunatics. Do you happen to know, general, how Tampico
+fell?"
+
+"Do not worry, sire," Miramon replied, willing to humor the prince, "I
+will take our infantry to the Alameda and strengthen our reserve there,
+should anything really happen."
+
+Across the grassy plain raced the twelve hundred cavalry and the two
+hundred outlaws. They raced to attack five thousand brave men who had
+that morning dislodged ten thousand. Five thousand in the trenches
+above, fourteen hundred in the open below, such were the odds of Empire
+against Republic.
+
+Grays and brigands drew rein under the Cimatario's west slope, and the
+bugle sounded to dismount.
+
+"But senor," Rodrigo protested, "don't we charge straight up?"
+
+"And not have a man left when we do get up? Here Clem," Driscoll added
+to Old Brothers and Sisters, the lieutenant colonel of the Grays, "you
+circle round and up the other side with eight companies. Take all the
+horses, but leave 'em back of the hill as you go. Don't that look like
+the best scheme?"
+
+The parson's cherubic features beamed. "Good-bye, Din," he said. "But
+pshaw, I reckon--I reckon we'll be meeting up above." He referred,
+however, to the top of the Cimatario.
+
+Four companies and Rodrigo's band remained. These Driscoll spread out in
+a skirmish line that made a long beaded chain around their side of the
+hill. It was evidently an unfamiliar method, for the Imperialist
+tiradores fired down on them contemptuously. But each time, while the
+enemy above were reloading, the Grays and outlaws below were climbing a
+few yards, each man of them individually, up from behind his own
+particular rock. The Imperialists, it now appeared, had blundered
+incomprehensibly, since they had actually taken away nearly all the
+cannon captured on the Cimatario. But six-pound affairs from batteries
+in the Alameda soon began to splinter and furrow around the climbing
+men. One loosened boulder rolled and struck Doc Clayburn on the tip of
+the shoulder, bringing him down like a bag of meal. He arose, feeling
+himself. "Now, by the Great and Unterrified Continental----" he began,
+as he always did at the monotony of being hit. Then his disgust changed
+to wonder. "W'y," he cried, "I'm not either, I only thought I was!"
+
+They mounted higher, and the business grew hotter. Each man had to look
+to himself more and more sharply, lest he forget that economy of the
+individual was now the hope of the regiment. But for all that, when a
+Missourian craved tobacco--it is a craving not to be denied, in no
+matter what danger, as most any fireman knows--he would leave cover to
+beg his nearest neighbor for a chew, and obtaining it, would feel the
+heart put back into him.
+
+As they drew close under the first of the trenches, they concentrated
+for a bit of sharp in-fighting, and so suffered more. But once they
+provoked the next volley, they meant to rush the works. The Imperialists
+though were loath to squander the one ball to a carbine when Indian-like
+fighters like these were so near. They had one mountain piece, a brass
+howitzer, and the gunner stood ready, the lanyard in his hand. But he
+hesitated, bewildered. His targets were not twenty paces below, yet
+nowhere crouching behind the rocks were the foe massed together. His
+pride forbade that he waste twelve pounds of death on a single man.
+
+But suddenly that happened which the gunner never in this life
+explained. Poised expectant in the lull of the fray, he was trembling
+under the tense silence, when he saw the impetuous Don Rodrigo dart up
+the slope, full against the muzzle. At the same instant he heard shouts
+of warning behind him, and he heard the tiradores there above firing at
+someone almost at his feet. But the figure that had scaled up the back
+of the hill, crawling around the trench, was already on him. He drew
+back his arm to drive the heavy shot through Don Rodrigo in front, but
+only to feel the cord in his hand part before a knife's keen edge. With
+a cry of dismay he sprang to grasp the rope's end, but as in a vision a
+head of curly black and an odd smile rose between, and a swinging fist
+of a great bared arm crashed back his chin, and he sank as a brained ox.
+
+"Lambaste 'em, Din Driscoll!"
+
+It was a rapturous shout, and Cal Grinders, passing Rodrigo, tumbled
+over the earth-heap and joined his colonel against five hundred. Behind
+swarmed others into the newly awakened hell, coatless men of Saxon necks
+tanned a dark ruby, and in the hot Imperialist fire they settled to
+their work.
+
+"By cracken, lambaste 'em! Why in all hell _don't_ ye lambaste
+'em?"
+
+This fury boiled through oaths, unable to spend itself in blows. The
+tigerish rage seized on them every one. Teeth grated vengefully as men
+struck.
+
+"Lambaste 'em, Din Driscoll!"
+
+"Lambaste 'em--_good_--Din Driscoll!"
+
+The yell swelled to a murderous chorus. These men did not know that they
+were raving. A war cry is just the natural vent. It is simply the whole
+pack in full cry.
+
+But never before--for now around him there was the contrast of hate and
+panting and passions in ferment--had Driscoll seemed so distant a thing
+from flesh and the human sphere. In grime, in dust, in smoke, among
+faces changing demoniac wrath for the sharp, self-wondering agony of
+mortality, his face was cool, serene, with just the hint of a smile
+tugging at his lips. His own men would try to look another way, try
+uneasily to break the fascination of this strange warrior who led them.
+
+The battle was short, but of the hottest. Its central point was the
+little brass howitzer. Driscoll, Grinders, Bledsoe, the Doc, all four
+pushed at the carriage or pulled at the trunnion rings, while around
+them, hindering them, swaying back and forth over rocks and in the
+ditches, the two forces battled for possession, hand to hand, with
+six-shooters and clubbed muskets. Grinders fell, cursing angrily.
+Bledsoe fell, toppling heavily his great length. The Doc fell. "By
+the----" he began, but got no further. He was not mistaken this time.
+But the gun was turned at last, and a vicious hand jerked the rope.
+Powder grains pierced the eyes of the nearest Imperialists. The shot
+tore through the mass of them. Yet Driscoll remembered most how wan, how
+_hungry_, they looked.
+
+"Death to the traitors! A muerte! A mu-erte!"
+
+It was a heavy nasal, hurled from the lungs with that force and venom
+peculiar to the Spanish tongue. It came from Don Rodrigo, who had pulled
+the lanyard, and who now pulled it again and again, crazed first with
+joy, then with rage because the emptied gun would not respond.
+
+While the combatants were so confused together, the tiradores in the
+upper trenches had to hold their fire, but when the defenders gave way
+at last, those above could wait no longer. Four thousand and more, they
+leaped their earthworks, and came charging down the slope on what was
+left of Driscoll's six hundred.
+
+Grays and brigands faced about, but most of all they looked beyond the
+enemy's right flank, to the line of the hill's crest there. For just
+beyond that jagged line and somewhere below Old Brothers and Sisters and
+the eight other companies must be toiling up. But they would have to
+appear in the interval of the Imperialists' downward rush. Driscoll
+turned to his bugler. "Blow, Hanks! Blow like the _very_ devil!"
+
+The blast sounded long and shrill, like a plaintive wail. The six
+hundred pumped lead up the hill mechanically, but their hearts were
+echoing the clarion's cry for help, and rather than on the foe sweeping
+down over the rocks to crush them, their eyes were strained on the
+sun-emblazoned line against the sky. But the parson was a man. At last,
+just over the slope's crest, a head appeared, a cherubic head with
+spectacles, and two arms waved for haste to others behind. And instantly
+more heads bobbed up, and more yet, until the jagged line was fairly
+encrusted with mouse-colored sombreros, like barnacles on a stranded
+keel.
+
+From where they were the new comers began their work, lying flat on
+their stomachs. Once over the ridge, down each man fell and joined the
+chorus of musketry. Their fusilade thickened to a blanket of flame,
+closely woven. The host rushing down the slope forgot the tales that
+were told of the marvelous sixteen-shot rifles. They thought instead
+that an army of Republicans, and not a man less, were upon their flank.
+For how else could volleys be so well sustained, how else so deadly? And
+how fast they themselves were dropping! The thing was not like bullets,
+but as the earth caving under them. The charge turned to panic. They
+plunged on downward, indeed, and even sheer into the cross fire of
+Driscoll's six-shooters and the one howitzer. But it was headlong
+flight. At the trench they did not stop to grapple, but fought their way
+through and fled on down the hill, on across the grassy plain, nor
+paused until they had crowded pell-mell into the main Imperialist army
+drawn up before the Alameda.
+
+Maximilian and his resplendent staff were there at the Alameda. The
+Emperor was perhaps less astounded than they.
+
+"Ai, general, if you _had_ known how Tampico fell!" he said to
+Miramon.
+
+Yet neither was actually dismayed. The Cimatario and five thousand men
+had succumbed to a thousand or fifteen hundred daredevils. It was hard
+enough to believe, in all conscience. But the daredevils could be
+dislodged, and they must be, at once. Miramon's orders rose sharply and
+quick, and the Empire sprang to obey. The Alameda batteries were trained
+on the hill, and a few moments later the guns on the roof of the La Cruz
+monastery were also. At the same time, the army, the entire Imperialist
+reserve, battalion after battalion in close, hurried ranks, set out
+across the grassy plain, straight toward the Cimatario's front slope.
+Foot, horse, artillery, the concentrated might of the Austrian's
+sceptre, was being hurled against a handful of jaded warriors.
+Maximilian flushed with something like shame at the thought.
+
+Back on the slope Driscoll cried, "No, no, keep to the trenches, you
+fellows! This ain't _our_ promenade."
+
+And soon, when screaming comets began to fill the air and burst around
+them, they were glad of the ditches. There they waited, smoking,
+spitting tobacco against the torrid rocks, but with sullen eyes on the
+army moving nearer and nearer. Where, all this morning, was Escobedo,
+who, with his thousands of Republicans on the north of the town had
+taken no thought of the Republican stress on the south? He had not fired
+a shot. Yet surely he must know by this time. But no matter. Over a
+hundred outlaws were left, and nearly a thousand Grays. Missourians,
+brigands, and guerrillas of Michoacan, they were a dangerous blend.
+
+"Got a match, Harry?" asked Driscoll of the Kansan, as he filled his cob
+pipe.
+
+They _had_ to wait, you see. Yet haste was all they would have
+begged of the advancing Imperialist host.
+
+The red jackets of the Dragoons--the few that were left--brightly dotted
+the van of the attacking thousands. On either side rode the Second and
+Fourth Lanciers. Behind tramped the battalions of Iturbide, of Celaya,
+and regiments of the line. They gained the foot of the hill and the
+cavalry were dismounting before they drew fire. The baptism had a
+sharpshooter deadliness, even at that distance, but the Imperialists
+waited tentatively. No, there was but one volley. When the second came,
+it was only after an interval long enough for reloading. Officers and
+men glanced at one another more hopefully. The terrified fugitives were
+of course mistaken, they thought. For the force above could not be
+large, nor yet possess the mysterious sixteen-shot rifles. The assurance
+gave the buoyancy of relief. To charge against carbines that made each
+man as sixteen were uncanny, too much like challenging the Unknown. But
+a thousand men who fired only every two or three minutes--an antagonist
+like that was quite well known to their philosophy. So breathing hard,
+they valiantly marched up the hill. They suffered cruelly under the
+scattered fusillades, yet were not materially resisted. At last they
+were near enough, and the bugles sounded for the final rush.
+
+Now what was odd, the Republicans stopped firing altogether. But they
+were waiting for shorter range, and a moment later, at a hundred paces,
+their reopening volley had all the clockwork dispatch of platoon drill.
+Yet the Imperialists took the dose as a thing expected, and sprang over
+their wounded to gain the trenches. They required only the lull of
+reloading. But instantly a second volley prolonged the first. The column
+staggered, and faces blanched. In a sudden despair they realized the
+enemy's tactics, for the enemy did have those terrible rifles, after
+all. From the trenches a low sheet of flame had spread, searing the
+breasts of rank after rank that pressed against its edge. Scarlet-coated
+Dragoons, the last of them, flecked the rocks, and over them fell green
+uniformed troopers, as grass will cover a bloody field, and the
+Municipal Guards, swaying up from behind, paid out a sprinkling of
+blue--a ghastly pousse-cafe, as one grim jester described it afterward.
+The long massed lines wavered.
+
+"They've stopped, they've stopped!" cried Rodrigo. "Now we'll close with
+them, eh, senor--por Dios, _now_!"
+
+"All you fellows," shouted Driscoll, "just fill your rifles while they
+wait. Stopped nothing, Rod! And anyhow, who'd hold the hill if we left
+it? Who?"
+
+The answer came at once, and in dramatic form. One of the pickets
+stationed on the flank ran among them.
+
+"There's another big slew of 'em a-coming!" he yelled excitedly.
+"Yonder, over yonder!"
+
+Driscoll rose and followed the man to the east slope. From there he
+beheld an overpowering force, advancing diagonally across the llano
+below. It came by the Carretas road, which skirted Queretaro on that
+side, and it was hurrying toward the Cimatario. The colonel of Grays
+watched them anxiously through his glasses.
+
+"Shucks," he said at last, "the fight's over. It's Escobedo. He's sent
+his reserve. Don't you see those black shakos, Jim, and those gray
+coats? They're the Cazadores de Galeana, and the best yet. Now we'll
+have someone to hold the hill!"
+
+But getting back to the trenches, Driscoll saw that the help might not
+come soon enough. For however the Imperialists squandered their lives,
+they would yet overcrowd death. Some had already gained the first
+trench, and were there engaged hand to hand, with sabre and pistol. In
+the trenches above the Grays steadily fed the molten flame. But Driscoll
+chose the in-fighting, and naturally became himself the centre of the
+hottest patch.
+
+"Help's here! in five minutes, just five minutes!" he spoke right and
+left to his men, as a carpenter will converse and hammer at the same
+time. For the outnumbered Grays it was the help arrived already.
+
+The Imperialist cannon had of necessity ceased firing, so what should be
+the consternation of the attacking column to have a shell fall among
+them from the rear! All eyes turned, and a murmur of panic rose. It was
+not that their own batteries had made a mistake, but that there had not
+been any mistake. The reserve sent by Escobedo, hearing the battle, had
+wheeled and rushed straight down the centre of the plain on the chance
+of giving quicker assistance. Once in sight of the trenches, though
+still considerably to the right of the hill, they had unlimbered a gun,
+while cavalry and infantry pushed on to the rescue. Not to be caught
+between trenches and plain, the Imperialists acted with soldiery
+decision. Their clarions sounded retreat.
+
+"Now it's _our_ turn!" shouted Driscoll, and with the parson and
+the Kansan and the outlaw chief, and guerrillas and Missourians pouring
+out of their ditches, he chased down hill the concentrated might of an
+Empire. So closely was that chasing performed that pistol flashes burned
+into standards and uniforms.
+
+Maximilian and Miramon and the high officers of the realm were still at
+their post of observation in front of the Alameda. For the third time
+that morning they faced Imperial cohorts hurled back upon them by a man
+named Driscoll. Miramon reproached himself bitterly. His plans to
+intercept Escobedo's reserve on the north had failed. The Emperor's
+pallid features were drawn with the tensity of a big loser. Yet in the
+soft blue eyes there flashed a chivalrous wonder at an enemy's valiant
+deed.
+
+On the llano fugitives and pursuers mingled as one in the human wave of
+confusion. Escobedo's cavalry had overtaken the melee, and blended with
+the rear of the fleeing column, until it seemed likely that both must
+enter the town together. But a charge of grape, fired obliquely from the
+Alameda, mowed a path between them--a Spartan business, for it reaped
+Imperialists among Republicans. However, a second and third blast were
+better gauged, and these carpeted the new alley-way with Republican
+bodies. Also, the Imperialists were re-forming, and under a withering
+fire the little band of victors had to draw back to the Cimatario.
+
+As Escobedo's reserve occupied the hill, Driscoll marched his own force
+behind the same to get his horses there. But the mustangs of the
+brigands had disappeared, and far to the southwest were the brigands
+themselves, moving swiftly over the plain toward the mountains. They
+hardly numbered two-score now, and at that distance seemed a few men
+herding a drove of empty saddles. The late indignant patriot, Don
+Rodrigo, had changed back to outlaw. As another Cid, he might have
+looked for pardon from a grateful country, but possibly he feared the
+Roman justice of Juarez too much to risk it. Besides, a man will not
+lightly give up his career. That same night Rodrigo lay again among the
+sierras, quite ready for the first bullion convoy or beautiful
+marchioness passing by.
+
+Shells and minie balls were yet dropping perfunctorily, and the llano
+between hill and town was still a dangerous place enough, but scattered
+here and there were a few of both sides looking for their wounded, and
+often themselves going down before the aim of sharpshooters. Stiffening
+bodies lay under the trampled grass in every varied horror of
+mutilation, and glassy eyes peered unseeing upward through the stalks,
+like the absurd and ghastly contrast of a horrible dream. But among them
+were the stricken living in as varied an agony, of raw wounds stung by
+gnats, of pain cutting deep to vitality, of thirst, of the broiling sun,
+of a buzzing fly, or of an intolerable loneliness there with death.
+Groans rose over the plain, and guided the searchers. Driscoll had
+already found many of his men in this way. Once he heard his own name.
+The voice was weak, but there was something vaguely familiar to it, and
+involuntarily he held his pistol against treachery as he parted the
+grass and revealed a wounded man at his feet. It was a piteously
+famished body that raised itself a little by one hand. It was a
+soul-tenanted death-head that crooked gruesomely down on the shoulder
+and lifted its eyes to Driscoll's in greeting. They were glowing coals,
+those eyes, glowing with the virile fire of twenty men, however wasted
+the face or tightly drawn the yellow parchment skin.
+
+"Murgie!"
+
+Driscoll's exclamation was a shudder rather than the surprise of
+recognition. What could it be that had grown so--so _terrible_ in
+the weazen, craven miser! And to find the abject little coward on a
+battlefield, and wounded! An occasional bomb even then screeched
+overhead. And he was clothed in uniform, a soldier's uniform, he, Don
+Anastasio!
+
+"Gra-_cious!_" Driscoll muttered.
+
+More and more stupefying, the uniform was not Republican, but
+Imperialist. There were the green pantaloons with red stripes, the red
+jacket, the white shoes, the white kepi, of the Batallon del
+Emperador--a ludicrous martial combination, but pathetic on an aged,
+withered man. The Batallon del Emperador? Driscoll remembered. They were
+the troop that had surrounded Maximilian during the recent battle in
+front of the Alameda, and Murguia had fallen on the very spot. The
+venomous Republican was then become one of the Emperor's bodyguard!
+
+As the Republican, so also was the coward gone. The gaunt little old
+Mexican seemed oblivious of peril, as fever blinds one to every nearest
+emotion. There was even a grimness in the shifting gaze. And a certain
+merciless capacity, born of unyielding resolve--born of an obsession,
+one might say--was there also. He could have been some great military
+leader, cruel and of iron, if those eyes were all. Little shriveled Don
+Anastasio, he had no sense of present danger, nor of the red blood
+trickling.
+
+"That's bad, that," said Driscoll, overcoming his repugnance. "Here,
+I'll get you taken right along to our surgeons."
+
+But Murguia shrank from the offer as though he feared the Republicans of
+all monsters.
+
+"No, no," he protested feebly, yet with an odd ring of command. "Some
+one on--on my side will find me."
+
+"But you called?" Driscoll insisted.
+
+"Yes, you--have heard from Rodrigo Galan? He was to have sent you a--to
+have sent you something for me."
+
+More and more of mystery! Rodrigo had said that Driscoll would see
+Murguia to give him the ivory cross, and so it had come to pass. But the
+battle, the old man's wound, surely these things were not prearranged
+only that a trinket might be delivered.
+
+"How was I to see you?" Driscoll asked abruptly.
+
+Murguia started, and there was the old slinking evasion.
+
+"There, there," said Driscoll hastily. "Don't move that way, you'll
+bleed to death! Here, take it, here it is."
+
+Murguia clutched the ivory thing in his bony fingers.
+
+"Maria, Maria de la Luz," he fell to murmuring, gazing upon the cross as
+though it were her poor crushed face. In the old days she had made him
+forget avarice or fear, and now, before this token of her, the hardness
+died out of his eyes and they swam in tears. Driscoll gazed down on him
+pityingly. The old man was palsied. He trembled. There passed over him
+the same spasm, so silent, so terrible, as on the night of her death,
+when he had sat at the court martial, his head buried in his arm.
+
+"Rod said you would want it," Driscoll spoke gently. Then he moved away.
+An Imperialist officer was approaching over the field who would bring
+the help which Murguia refused to accept of the Republicans.
+
+Driscoll looked back once. The Imperialist officer was carrying Murguia
+into the town. He was a large man, and had red hair. His regimentals
+were gorgeous. There seemed to be something familiar about him, too.
+Greatly puzzled, Driscoll unslung his glasses, and through them he
+recognized Colonel Miguel Lopez. Lopez, the former colonel of Dragoons,
+now commanded the Imperialist reserve, quartered in the monastery of La
+Cruz around the person of their sovereign. But Lopez had once condemned
+Murguia to death. A strange solicitude, thought Driscoll, in such a high
+and mighty person for a little, insignificant, useless warrior as poor
+Murgie. A strange, a very strange solicitude, and Driscoll could not get
+it out of his head.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+OF ALL NEWS THE MOST SPITEFUL
+
+
+  "O poor and wretched ones!
+  That, feeble in the mind's eye, lean your trust
+  Upon unstaid perverseness."--_Dante_.
+
+
+Her gestures, her every word, were an effervescence. There was something
+near hysteria in the bright flashes of her wit. However gay, joyous,
+cynical, Jacqueline may have seemed to herself, to Berthe, terrified
+though the girl was, Jacqueline's mood was a sham.
+
+"The _frisson_, oh, those few exquisite seconds of emotion, eh
+Berthe?" she exclaimed. "Pursued by robbers--the chase--the rescue--and
+the jolting, the jolting that took our breaths! Why, Berthe, what more
+would you have? Helas, to be over so quickly! And here we are, left
+alone in our coach, robbers gone, rescuers gone! Berthe, do you know, I
+believe they compared notes and decided we weren't worth it. But I
+_should_ have thought," she went on in mock bitterness, "I should
+indeed, that at least our Fra Diavolo would have been more gallant, even
+if----"
+
+"Even if?" prompted Berthe, then bit her lip.
+
+"Even--Oh Berthe, _fi donc_, to catch me so because I was
+wandering!--even if one could expect no such gallantry from the
+Chevalier de Missour-_i_. There now, do you tell Tobie to drive
+on----"
+
+"But mademoiselle----"
+
+"Say 'Jeanne'," the marchioness commanded, stamping her foot.
+
+"My lady," the girl persisted, but added with affectionate earnestness,
+"and my only friend, I was simply going to say that we are not deserted
+after all."
+
+"But didn't I see him riding away?"
+
+"_Him_, yes, but look out of the window. See, he's left six or
+eight--O--oh----"
+
+It was a joyful cry, which got smothered at once in confusion. Turning
+quickly, Jacqueline beheld a little Bretonne with eyes cast down and
+cheeks aflame. Yet even then Berthe gave a cosy sigh of relief. There
+was cannonading not far away. They had just been taken by brigands, and
+as suddenly left alone on the road. Thus Jacqueline's company ever cost
+her many a tremor. Yet somehow one of those chevaliers de
+Missour-_i_ needed only to appear, and she felt as secure as a
+kitten on the hearth rug. A chevalier de Missour-_i_ had but now
+ridden up to the coach door.
+
+"Berthe!" whispered Jacqueline severely, so that the girl thought her
+dress was awry. "Quick, tuck your heart away in your pocket. It's right
+there on your sleeve." Whereat Berthe employed the sleeve to hide her
+higher mantling color.
+
+Jacqueline turned on the chevalier at the window, and surveyed
+_his_ sleeve. It was covered with dust, but Jacqueline's big eyes
+could see through dust. She felt about her a subtle atmosphere that made
+her an outsider.
+
+"Ah, Monsieur le Troubadour?" came her bantering recognition.
+
+Mr. Boone's French crowded pleasantly to his tongue tip. "Mademoiselle,"
+he returned, "and," he added, with an odd glance toward Berthe, "Madame
+l'Imperatrice, uh--how goes it?"
+
+Jacqueline's lashes raised inquiringly, until she remembered how the
+lank gentleman before her, with the tender heart of a Quixote, had
+mistaken Berthe for the Empress, months before at the Cordova
+plantation. She liked him somehow better now for persisting in it.
+
+"Her Imperial Highness," she explained, very soberly, "may deign
+presently to observe that you are here, monsieur, though, as you see,
+her thoughts are far away. However, if you can possibly give your own to
+a humbler person, to myself, dear Troubadour, I should very much like to
+know what is to happen next. Use fine words, if you must; even put it
+into verse, only tell me----" With an impulsive shove she flung open the
+door and stepped into the road. She could still see Driscoll's troop, or
+rather the cloud of dust, speeding toward Queretaro, but her arm swept
+the horizon impersonally. "Only tell me," she demanded, "what's
+happening now, over yonder?"
+
+"Pressing business, ma'am--mademoiselle, and," Daniel lied promptly,
+"Colonel Driscoll wished me to make you his excuses."
+
+"The minstrels of old, sir," said Jacqueline, "usually accompanied their
+more gallant fibs with a harp."
+
+Her vivacity was rising fast, and for some reason, Berthe darted an
+angry look of warning on Mr. Boone. But the poor fellow was blind to
+Jacqueline's jealousy of a distant conflict, and he blundered further.
+
+"Jack Driscoll's just that way," he apologized for his friend
+cheerfully. "_Abundat dulcibus vitiis_--he's chuck full of pleasant
+faults. When there's a clash of arms around, let the most alluring Peri
+that ever wore sweet jessamine glide by, and--she can just glide. While
+with me----"
+
+"I see. _You_ have stayed. But I, too, like battles, monsieur.
+Tobie, get back up there with the driver. There's no admission charge, I
+imagine, to this battle?"
+
+Boone gladly offered to take them for a nearer view, but he saw
+Berthe--his eyes were never elsewhere--shrink involuntarily.
+
+"Stop, arretaz! Hey there!" he ordered, and the driver stopped.
+
+Jacqueline's pretty jaw fell in wonder. The natural order of things was
+prevailing over the artificial. Social status to the contrary
+notwithstanding, it was Berthe who commanded here, and not Mlle. la
+Marquise. But Jacqueline was happy in it, and perhaps a little envious
+too. Ah, those _Missouriens_! This one, who would rather stay than
+fight! And that other, who was now fighting for quite the opposite
+reason! They had a capacity for variety, those _Missouriens_!
+
+It was much later, after a lunch from Jacqueline's hampers under the
+nearest trees, and after the distant fusillades had quieted to an
+occasional angry spat, that the ladies' escort of Gringo Grays, bearing
+a flag of truce, set out with their charge toward the town. Daniel rode
+beside the coach window, and the flaps of the old hacienda conveyance
+were drawn aside. He wondered how it happened that the hours had passed
+so quickly. He would not believe that his comrades had been fighting,
+that many of them had died, so blissfully fleeting were those hours to
+himself.
+
+"It's all according," he mused profoundly.
+
+And he could not help singing. He hummed the forlorn chanson of Joe
+Bowers of the State of Pike, which Bledsoe, then lying cold and stiff
+under a mountain howitzer, had so often bellowed forth.
+
+  "It said that Sal was false to me,
+    Her love for me had fled,
+  She's got married to a butcher--
+    The butcher's hair was red."
+
+But he sung it as a plaint, yet not hopelessly, and Mademoiselle Berthe
+was the maid entreated of his melody.
+
+The sharpshooters on both sides paused as the coach drove into the
+little sweet-scented wood that was called the Alameda, and the
+Missourians, with sabres at salute, transferred their charge to the
+Imperialists crowding around. Among the latter were some of Jacqueline's
+own countrymen, and those, in starvation and defeat, were as debonair as
+the cadets of Gascogne.
+
+"A rose, mademoiselle," said one, bowing low. He had an arm bandaged,
+and his sword was broken. "An early merciful bullet plucked it for you,
+so that it fell unhurt, though the petals of all the others are
+scattered everywhere among the leaves, among the fallen branches, among
+the shattered statues of our classic grove here. See, like the rose I
+tender, you come among us poor broken soldiers of fortune. I think, dear
+lady, there will be those above to bless you for it."
+
+Jacqueline smiled behind her tears. "Always a Frenchman, eh, mon
+lieutenant?" she said.
+
+The fragrance of the place was smothered under gunpowder and sluggish
+fumes. The pleasant drives, the grass, the flowers, were trampled by
+gaunt soldiers bearing their wounded, but the young officer murmured on
+in the speech of the Alameda's one time fashionable promenade.
+
+"Who is that?" she interrupted.
+
+She pointed over the heads around her to a man bearing someone off the
+late bloody field, and that moment staggering across the trenches into
+the Alameda. It was an act that moved her, for the rescuer was a richly
+uniformed officer, and the other but a common soldier. With Berthe close
+behind, she alighted from the coach and hurried forward to help. The
+wounded soldier's face lay on the officer's breast, and she saw only his
+hair, matted and very white, from which a rusty brown wig had partly
+fallen. But more to the purpose she saw that he was bleeding, and the
+callous warriors there knew that the angels of the siege had come at
+last.
+
+"Lay him in my carriage--but carefully, you!" she said, and was obeyed,
+while Berthe deftly fixed cloaks and blankets around the withered form.
+Someone mounted with Toby and the driver, and the coach rolled slowly
+away to the hospital, leaving behind the two girls staring at the richly
+uniformed officer, and the officer staring tenfold harder at them. He
+was a large man, with big hands and feet, and for a Mexican he had a
+mongrel floridness of skin. His cap was in his hand, and his hair was
+red and thin. Amazement and a startled prying anxiety choked his
+utterance.
+
+"Now then, Colonel Lopez," Jacqueline addressed him calmly, "may I ask
+you the way? I have come to speak with Maximilian."
+
+"La Senorita d-d'Aumerle!" he stuttered.
+
+"Faith, no other, who is awaiting your pleasure, senor."
+
+"You come from, from--Mexico?"
+
+"But hardly to chat with you all the afternoon, caballero."
+
+"From Mexico! From the capital!" he kept repeating. The man's finger
+nails cracked disagreeably, and his features worked in an extreme of
+agitation. He tried to fix his shifting blue eyes upon first one and
+then the other of the two girls, as though to ferret out what they must
+know. "You do bring news from there?" he said huskily. "What of Marquez?
+Is he coming? Shall we have the aid he went for? When----"
+
+"Ah, the medal for military valor!" observed Jacqueline. "Indeed, mi
+coronel, all must acclaim your bravery, as well as--your loyalty. But
+take me to your beloved Prince Max, for I do assure you, senor, my news
+goes not without myself."
+
+"He visits the hospital every day," Lopez advised reluctantly. "Perhaps
+if I should take Your Mercy there first----"
+
+Passing on through the ravaged Alameda, they entered the streets of
+Queretaro.
+
+"Hear!" Jacqueline exclaimed. "Such a quantity of vivas and clarins and
+national hymns and triumphant dianas, one would imagine, for example,
+that there had been a great victory?"
+
+"Eh? Oh yes, or a hearty breakfast, senorita."
+
+Which was more essential. And why not? Hope's bright hue blotted out
+emaciation. They had broken through to food that day. Bueno, could they
+not do it again? Old croons had returned to their stalls and accustomed
+corners in the market place, and as in days of peace were already
+squatted before corn or beans heaped on the stone pavement in portions
+for a quartilla, a media, or a real, as though the pyramids were not so
+pitifully little, as though the wholesale purchase were not made just
+that morning in heavy terms of blood.
+
+Behind the ponderous Assyrian-like church of Santa Rosa, in the old,
+half ruined monastery and garden, was the hospital of the besieged. A
+stifling, fetid odor, far worse than of drugs merely, sickened the two
+girls as a foul breath when they passed with their guide between thick
+walls into the large, overcrowded rooms. Military medical service was
+not yet become an institution in Mexico, and this place was like some
+horrible antechamber of the grave. Every cot had its ghastly transient,
+and so had the benches, brought here from the different plazas. More and
+more wounded were arriving constantly, and those found to be still alive
+were laid on the flagstones wherever space for a blanket remained. But
+in spite of the morning's fight, in spite of almost daily skirmishes for
+weeks past, the sick outnumbered all others; and those who did come with
+wounds, and survived them, stayed on to swell the longer list. Men
+tossed in fever, craving what they might not have, a cooling draught, a
+proper food, and effective medicine, until, with waking, they craved an
+easier boon, and died. But the hospital fever, the calenturas, the
+gangrene, were not to be all. Out of the diseased air, mid the fumes of
+pious tapers, the spectre of epidemic was taking hideous shape over the
+many, many upturned faces. The spectre was the tifo, a plague more
+dreaded in high altitudes than black vomit in the low.
+
+Jacqueline found Maximilian bending over a stricken cavalry officer. The
+Emperor was far from a well man, and his fair skin more than ever
+contrasted as something foreign and lonely among the swarthy faces on
+every side. His ostentation was now simplicity, as befitted a monarch in
+camp. He wore neither sword nor star. His garb was plain charro, in
+which he often walked among citizens and soldiers, inquiring about
+rations, or requesting a light for his cigar, never minding if a shell
+burst and kicked dust over him, and always affable, always ready to
+smile and praise. It was a role that came naturally to his gentle soul.
+One would like to believe--if one could, alas!--that he had in mind no
+kingly precedent.
+
+Pausing unseen, Jacqueline noted tears in the blue eyes as he pinned
+some decoration on the officer's bloodstained shirt. A good heart, she
+thought, yet ever the prince. In his divine right was he even here,
+presuming to send a dying subject to the Sovereign in Heaven with a
+"character," with a recommendation for service faithfully done. His
+hands trembled from haste, for he would have the soldier appear before
+that dread Throne above as a Caballero of the Mexican Eagle. In pity for
+them both, Jacqueline asked herself what precedence awaited the new
+Caballero of the Mexican Eagle in a Court, not Imperial, but Divine.
+
+Jacqueline had not journeyed her perilous way out of simple friendship
+for a desolate prince, but could she have foreseen how his eyes lighted
+with gladness to behold one friend who remembered, in sweet charity she
+would almost have come for that alone.
+
+"When Your Highness has finished here," she said, glancing at the
+inquisitive Lopez near her, "or whenever I can speak with Your Highness
+in private----"
+
+There was beseeching in Maximilian's quick scrutiny of her face, as
+though the helpless messenger had aught of power over her tidings.
+"In--in a moment, mademoiselle," he said tremulously. "I always see
+the--new ones, before I go."
+
+The "new ones" were still being brought in, until any first aid from the
+distracted surgeons was of the most casual--the ripping of bandaged
+cloth, a knot tied, and so on to the next. Followed by Lopez, the two
+girls, and several officers of the hospital staff, Maximilian passed
+from ward to ward. But Jacqueline's hand seemed always to be threading a
+needle, or holding a ligature, or lightly touching a hot forehead, and
+in every case the surgeon would nod quickly, gratefully, as to a fellow
+craftsman. Berthe the while gazed in tender wonder on her calm mistress,
+and nerved herself someway to help also.
+
+And so they came to the withered form in brave red coat, and green
+pantaloon whom Lopez had carried off the field. One of the nurses had
+placed a handkerchief over his face, because of the stinging flies, but
+Jacqueline recognized the thin white hair and the twisted wig as of the
+old man whom she had sent ahead in her coach. At first he seemed to be
+dead, for he lay very still on the floor, though a surgeon was probing
+his wound, and his blood was fast filling the bowl held by the nurse.
+But now and again, the straining cords in his emaciated wrist twitched
+with the protest of life. Maximilian stooped to raise the handkerchief.
+Lopez made a movement to prevent, but restrained the impulse as useless.
+And then Maximilian revealed the gaunt, leaden features of Anastasio
+Murguia, the father of Maria de la Luz.
+
+Jacqueline fell back with bloodless lips. The father of that dead
+girl--and Maximilian! They were face to face, these two! But the
+Emperor's expression was of pity only. He sank to his knees, the better
+to make the wounded man understand the words of comfort on his lips. For
+Jacqueline, the horror of it chilled her. Surely, surely, she thought,
+the hidden tragedy must now unmask; because of its very awfulness, it
+must! That the prince should be thus oblivious of such a knowledge, and
+yet kneeling there, made the scene ghastly beyond words.
+
+"I remember him," said Maximilian softly, looking up to the others. "One
+of your orderlies, Colonel Lopez, I believe? Of course I remember him,
+for I see him often. He is always near me. Even to-day, on the llano,
+during the thickest of the battle, there he was at my stirrup, and there
+he must have fallen, in humble, unquestioning loyalty."
+
+Jacqueline drew back in relief, and she imagined that Lopez did also.
+Maximilian had forgotten the hacendado utterly.
+
+With a grunt of satisfaction the surgeon drew forth his forceps from the
+wound and dropped a bullet to the floor. Next he gently rolled the
+patient over on his back, and then it was that Jacqueline saw in
+Murguia's hand, in the hand that had been under him, a little ivory
+cross. Fainting, unconscious, he still clutched it, from Driscoll's
+leaving him on the battlefield until the present moment. By now the
+stains of his child's blood were washed away in his own. Jacqueline's
+quick eyes caught an inscription on the gold mounting, and leaning close
+she read the dead girl's name, "Maria de la Luz."
+
+With the gripping of the bullet and its extraction, or possibly at the
+sound of a voice--Maximilian's--the old man's eyes opened, and held the
+Emperor's in a deathly stare. Jacqueline watched the piercing beads grow
+smaller and smaller in their cavernous sockets, and all the while they
+seemed to concentrate their intense fire. The others, except Lopez,
+thought it delirium, but Jacqueline would have named it the very
+blackest hate. "This man will live!" she said to herself, and shuddered.
+
+Maximilian, seeing consciousness returned, spoke cheerily. "Ah, doctor,
+you will have him well and sound within a week, I know? Look to it, sir;
+a heroic veteran like this cannot be spared."
+
+A strange distortion wrapped the visage of suffering. "Could that be a
+smile?" Jacqueline wondered. But the Imperial party took its leave, and
+the tragedy lurking beneath was not revealed, as yet.
+
+Through the throng waiting outside the hospital to acclaim him again as
+a prince victorious, Maximilian led the two girls to their coach, and
+went with them to the convent of Santa Clara, where he asked that they
+be received as guests by the sisters. Here, in the comfortless
+_parloir_ of the retreat, he learned the reason of Jacqueline's
+daring journey from the capital.
+
+"I bring Your Highness," said she, "the most spiteful news my feeble sex
+can ever bring."
+
+Again the involuntary plea for fair tidings swept his face.
+
+"And, and that is, mademoiselle?"
+
+"'I told you so.'"
+
+Maximilan's cheeks paled to the marble whiteness of his brow. He had
+just heard the answer to the one question, to the one hope, of all
+Queretaro.
+
+"You, you mean Marquez?"
+
+"Yes." And then she told him, and seeing how stricken he was, her
+exasperation at his vain incapacity changed to pity for his breaking
+pride--which may be called his breaking heart.
+
+"But mademoiselle, I gave my empire into his keeping," he protested, as
+though such trust in a man of itself proved that man's constancy. But
+the messenger, but Truth, would not recant.
+
+"Then," moaned the Emperor suddenly, "Marquez is not coming back?"
+
+"Nor ever meant to, sire. Listen, Your Highness made him lieutenant of
+the Empire, and sent him to the capital for aid. Bien, he turned out the
+ministers. He broke into homes, and pillaged even the stanchest
+Imperialists. He heard that Puebla was besieged by a Liberal general,
+Porfirio Diaz, so instead of coming here, Marquez marches all his army
+down there. You will observe, sire, that he wanted the road kept open to
+Vera Cruz."
+
+"But why? Tell me!"
+
+"Ma foi, to sell the capital more easily. In any case to be able to save
+himself."
+
+"Sell the capital?"
+
+"Just a little patience, sire. Now what did Diaz do, but take Puebla by
+assault before Marquez could arrive? Then he turned on Marquez, and
+Marquez turned and ran. Oui, oui, sire, he _ran_, ran like the
+little ugly, skulking Leopard that he is. To cross a creek, he filled it
+with all the ammunition, and kept on running, leaving his army
+defenseless behind him. Groan if you must, sire; others have died in
+groans. But the Leopard had done this kind of thing before, it should
+have been remembered. He got back safely though, and squandered the army
+that might have relieved Queretaro to do it. Mon Dieu, what that panic
+must have been! One entire battalion surrendered to fifty guerrillas.
+Yet the Austrian cavalry, the Hungarians, and some others fought, fought
+with their sabres, and won victories too. Helas, they only proved what
+might have been. They only proved how Marquez, if he had not hesitated,
+might perhaps have saved Puebla and destroyed the Liberals. As it was,
+they could only retreat, and hardly two thousand of them, ragged and
+bleeding and filthy, straggled back into Mexico during the next few
+days. Now they are besieged there. Oui, oui, _besieged_, by Diaz,
+by the army of the East, by twelve thousand Republicans, formerly called
+brigands. And inside is the Leopard, snarling as ever with his regency
+of terror. Oh no, he will not come to Queretaro. Bonte divine, he
+cannot. Nor would he. He still holds the capital--for sale."
+
+"No, no, mademoiselle, there you wrong him, surely. Or tell me, then,
+who would buy?"
+
+"Probably no one. At least not Santa Anna. The buyer must have an army."
+
+"My friend, this is a cruel jest."
+
+"Earnest enough, parbleu, to make the Leopard forget Queretaro, once he
+was safely away."
+
+"Then why doesn't he sell out to Diaz?"
+
+Jacqueline's eyes snapped contemptuously. "Young Diaz," she replied, "is
+not a fighter to buy what he can take. It's only a question of a few
+weeks."
+
+"Then by all that's mysterious, _who_ would buy? I cannot."
+
+"Of course you cannot. That is why Marquez wants you out of the way,
+sire. So he left you here. The Liberals will attend to that for him."
+
+"Then who will buy? Who? Who?"
+
+The blood shot into the girl's cheeks, and one small hand clenched
+tightly.
+
+"France--possibly," she said.
+
+The Emperor started as from an acute shock. His thoughts raced backward,
+then forward, gathering the whole heinous truth about the perfidy of
+Marquez.
+
+"And I," Jacqueline added calmly, though she was still flushed, "I have
+forwarded his offer to Napoleon."
+
+"You, mademoiselle? You, an accessory?"
+
+"To Your Imperial Highness's downfall? Ah no, sire! Your Highness is no
+longer a factor. Your August Majesty will be eliminated absolutely
+before Napoleon can reply to my despatch. As I said, the Liberals around
+Queretaro will attend to that. Your Highness has merely delayed the
+profit my country might have had from his abdication. Meantime Your
+Highness himself has made his own ruin inevitable. But I, sire, I would
+not see Marquez, nor receive a word from him, until we were actually
+besieged in the capital, and he beyond the hope of coming to Your
+Highness here. Now then, if Marquez only holds out until the army of
+France returns----"
+
+A deep sigh interrupted her. "No longer a factor," murmured the Emperor.
+Thus quickly, then, could the world take up its affairs again after his
+elimination!
+
+"Mademoiselle," he cried suddenly, generously, "you are--superb! Dear
+little Frenchwoman, you are, you are!"
+
+"Poof!" said Jacqueline. "But don't you see, sire," she hurried on
+eagerly, "that we will have to fight the Americans? Yes, yes, then they
+can no longer say they _drove_ us out."
+
+"Indeed they cannot. And I, among the first, and the most heartily, do
+wish you a warlike answer from that firebrand of a Napoleon. But tell
+me, why do you come to Queretaro? How did you come?"
+
+"How? Easily. All the guerrilla bands--except one, which I escaped--are
+concentrated either here or with Diaz."
+
+"And Marquez let you come, you who are so important to him now?"
+
+"As though he could help it, parbleu! My message to Napoleon was in my
+own cipher, and after he had sent it by a scout to Vera Cruz, I informed
+him that in it I had directed Napoleon to send his answer to me at
+Queretaro. Otherwise Marquez would have kept me in prison rather than
+let me go. But as it was, he assisted me through the Republican lines by
+a secret way he has arranged for his own escape, if need be. So----"
+
+"But why did you wish to come at all?"
+
+"Ma foi, as if I knew! A matter of conscience, I suppose."
+
+"Matters of conscience are usually riddles."
+
+"Like this one? Bien, I am still trying to get Your Highness to leave
+the country. But this time, sire, it is to save you."
+
+"To save me?"
+
+"Of course, on account of France."
+
+"Oh, on account of France?"
+
+"Why else? If--if anything happens to Maximilian, France will be blamed.
+Oh why, why did you not escape this morning, while the road was open?"
+
+For the first time during the interview the fire of high resolve leaped
+into the prince's eyes. "But could I, in honor?" he demanded sternly.
+"Think of the townspeople, abandoned to the Liberal fury. Their Emperor,
+mademoiselle, means to face the end with them, here, in Queretaro."
+
+The dignity of his catastrophe was already beginning to appeal to him,
+to exalt him, even as the vision of a Hapsburg winning his empire had so
+often done before.
+
+"But," protested the girl, "if they capture Your Highness, if they--if
+they hold you for trial?"
+
+She stopped, for Maximilian was laughing, and laughing heartily. The
+idea of hands laid on him, an Archduke of Austria--ha, he was grateful
+to her. Its very absurdity had given him the first relaxation of a laugh
+in months.
+
+"Nevertheless," persisted Jacqueline, whose heritage of a revolution was
+an obstinate bundle of these same absurdities, "nevertheless, I had
+hoped to save Your Highness with my news, since it is news that leaves
+no hope. Why not, then, escape? Treat for terms, do anything, only save
+your followers and--yourself, sire?"
+
+But she found it impossible to sway him from this, his latest conceit.
+His new role, the more desperate it looked, only ensnared him as the
+more worthy. He contemplated the end serenely. As a military captain he
+was culling laurels against theatric odds. His heroic loyalty to a lost
+cause, with perhaps a little martyrdom (of personal inconvenience), how
+these would count and be not denied when he should return to his destiny
+in Europe!
+
+His was even a mood to consort with lofty traits in others, and in a
+kind of poetic ecstasy he thought of Jacqueline's steadfast devotion to
+her country's glory. And he was moved again by the vague, chivalrous
+longing to bend the knee, to do her some knightly service. But--yes, he
+seemed to remember, there _was_ such a service to be done, yet and
+yet--no, he had forgotten.
+
+Then quite curiously, yet still without remembering, he dwelt in reverie
+on that man named Driscoll who had so filled the morning with valiant
+deeds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+VENDETTA'S HALF SISTER, BETTER BORN
+
+
+  "When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will
+  be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen."
+                                                        --_Emerson_.
+
+
+Just outside Driscoll's tent, under the stars, a fragrant steak was
+broiling. The colonel's mozo had learned the magic of the forked stick,
+and he manipulated his wand with a conscious pride, so that the low
+sizzling of flesh and flame was as the mystic voice in some witch's
+brew. There were many other tents on the plain, a blurred city of
+whitish shadows against the night, and there were many other glowing
+coals to mark where the earth lay under the stars, and the witching
+murmur, the tantalizing charm of each was--supper. In this wise, and
+thinking themselves very patient, men were waiting for other men to
+starve to death. The besieged had tried, but they had not again cut
+through to food.
+
+In Driscoll's tent there was a galaxy of woolen-shirted warriors, a
+constellation of quiescent Berserkers. For they were Missouri colonels,
+except one, who being a Kansan, required no title. They were
+tobacco-chewing giants, famous for expectoration. Except Meagre Shanks,
+who tilted his inevitable black cigar now toward one eye, now toward the
+other. Except the Storm Centre, who fondly closed his palm over his cob
+meerschaum and felt its warmth and seemed far away, a dangerous poet.
+Except Old Brothers and Sisters, most austere of Wesleyans, who had
+neither pipe nor quid. He was cleaning his pistols. They were men hewn
+for mighty deeds, but--cringe must we all before the irony that neither
+life nor romance may dodge--it was not a mighty deed which that night
+was to exact of them, which yet they were brave enough to do, though
+sorry the figures they thought they made.
+
+Politics was their theme, since men, though busy with war and death,
+must yet relieve their statesmen, especially after supper, and neatly
+arrange the Tariff, Resumption, or whatever else. Like oracles the
+ex-Confederates held forth that the Yankees had only driven out the
+French to march in themselves, and so tutor the Mexicans in
+self-government. To which the Kansan ventured a minority opinion, though
+being thus a judge of the bench, as it were, he had no need of the oaths
+he took.
+
+"Why God help me and to thunder with you, the United States ain't aiming
+at any protectorate. You unreconstructed Rebs simply cain't and won't
+see good faith in the Federal government!"
+
+"Carpet bags?" Driscoll murmured sweetly. It was the majority opinion.
+
+"Yes sir'ee," and Daniel took the cue as a bit in the mouth, "there's
+blood on the face of the moon up there, _acerrima proximorum odia_,
+by God sir! Look at the troops at our elections! Look at the Drake Test
+Oath! Look at----" Mr. Boone was fast getting vitriolic, in heavy
+editorial fashion, when a famished face, a wolfish face, appeared
+between the flaps of the tent. "Look at--_that!_"
+
+Politics vanished, war and death resumed their own.
+
+The whole mess stared.
+
+"Sth-hunderation, it's an Imperialist!" lisped Crittenden of Nodaway. He
+pointed at the newcomer's uniform, which was of the Batallon del
+Emperador.
+
+"Well, bring him on in," said Driscoll to the pickets gripping the man
+by either arm.
+
+"He was trying to pass through our lines," one explained. "And when we
+stopped him, he begged hard to be brought to the Coronel Gringo, that
+is, to you, senor."
+
+The mess turned curiously on Driscoll. Why a half dead soldier of the
+Batallon del Emperador should have a preference as to his jailer was
+beyond them. But they were yet more puzzled to hear Driscoll address the
+prisoner by name.
+
+"See here, Murgie," he said, "is this the occasion Rodrigo meant when he
+talked about my meeting you soon? Is it? Come, crawl out of the grass.
+Show us what you're up to. No, wait, feed first. There's plenty left."
+
+But the old man had not once glanced toward the table. Whatever the
+pangs of hunger, another torment was uppermost.
+
+"What do you mean by this," Boone demanded, as though personally
+offended, "you've got the hospital color, dull lead on yellow? Here,
+take a drink. Yes, I know, it's mescal, out-and-out embalmed deviltry
+that no self-respecting drunkard would touch, but Lord A'mighty, man,
+you need _something!_"
+
+Murguia shook his head irritably. Offers of what his body craved were
+annoying hindrances before the craving of his soul. He twitched himself
+free of the sentinels, and limped painfully to where Driscoll sat. He
+wore no coat, but his green pantaloons with their crimson stripes were
+rolled to the knee, and the white calzoncillos beneath flapped against
+his skeleton ankles. His feet were bare, the better for an errand of
+stealth in the night. He was a pitiful spectacle, yet a repulsive, and
+the Americans despised themselves for the strange impulse they had to
+kick him out like a dog. They watched him wonderingly as he tried to
+speak. He panted from his late rough handling by the sentry, and his
+half-closed wound gave excruciating pain. The muscles of his face jerked
+horribly, but his will was tremendous, merciless, and at last the cords
+of the jaw knotted and hardened.
+
+"To-morrow morn--morning," he began, "the Emperor will fight. It is
+arranged for--for daybreak, senores. To to fight--to break
+through--to--to ESCAPE!"
+
+"W'y then," exclaimed Harry Collins, the Kansan, "_good_ for him!"
+
+The parson snatched off his brass-bowed spectacles, and his brow lowered
+fiercely over his cherubic eyes.
+
+"And so _you_ had to come and tell us?" he demanded.
+
+But the traitorous old man had not the smallest thought of his shame,
+nor could have.
+
+"You--you will let him _escape?_" he challenged them in frantic
+anger.
+
+The mess stole abashed glances at one another. They would, they knew
+well enough, have to act on this information. But they were men for a
+fair fight, and they had no stomach to rob the besieged of a last
+desperate chance. For a moment they were enraged against the informer.
+
+"We'll just keep him here," said one.
+
+"Yes, till morning. Then he'll tell no one else, and _we_ won't.
+Poor old Maxie!"
+
+"Sure," ejaculated Collins, "give Golden Whiskers a show!"
+
+The wolfish light in the sunken eyes quickened to a flash. Lust for
+Maximilian's capture turned to chagrin.
+
+"Senores, senores mios," he whined, "you do not know yet, you do not
+know, that if Maximilian is not taken----"
+
+"Ah, here now," growled Clay of Carroll, "you needn't worry so much.
+He'll be driven back into the town all right, I reckon."
+
+"And what then, senor? No, you do not know. Your general,
+senores--General Escobedo--has orders to--to raise the siege."
+
+"_What?_"
+
+"Si senor, to _raise_ the siege! The orders are from San Luis, from
+the Senor Presidente there. He--he thinks the siege has lasted long
+enough."
+
+"Great Scot!"
+
+"Precisamente. Yes, it would look like--defeat. It would, if--you don't
+capture Maximilian by daybreak."
+
+Meagre Shanks brought his boot soles wrathfully to the ground, kicking
+the stool back of him. His whole mien exuded a newspaper man's contempt
+for faking. "Now then, young fellow," and he shook a long finger at the
+ancient Mexican, "here you know all that Maximilian knows. And here
+again you know all that the Presidente knows. All right, s'pose you just
+tell us now more or less about how mighty little you _do_ know?"
+
+"It's--it's like a message from El Chaparrito," the parson demurred.
+
+"From Shorty?" Daniel almost roared. "Oh come, Clem, don't you go to
+mixing up the unseen and all-seeing guardian of the Republica with this
+dried-up, wild-eyed specimen of a dried-up--of, of an old rascal. No one
+ever hears from El Chaparrito 'less there's a crisis on, and is there
+one on now? You know there ain't. If there was, someone would be hearing
+from Shorty--Driscoll there, prob'bly. But there ain't. Shucks, this old
+codger is only plum' daft. Aren't you now"--he appealed querulously to
+Murguia, "aren't you just crazy--_say?_"
+
+But even as the Americans breathed easier, they stared aghast at the old
+man.
+
+"Crazy?" he repeated. "Crazy?" he fairly shrieked, clutching Boone by
+the sleeve. "No, I am not! Senor, say that I am not! No, no, no, I am
+not crazy, not yet--not--not before it is done, not--before----"
+
+"God!" Boone half whispered. "Look at his eyes now!"
+
+The old man checked himself in trembling. No help for him lay in human
+testimony. But there was his own will, which had driven his frail body.
+Now as a demon it gripped his mind and held it from the brink.
+
+"Go, out of here, all of you!" he burst on them. "Go, I have more to
+tell--more, more, more, do you understand?--but I'll tell it to no one,
+to no one, unless to Mister Dreescol."
+
+A raving maniac or not, canards or not, there might be in all this what
+was vital. The Americans stirred uneasily, in a kind of awe, and at a
+nod from Driscoll they left the tent.
+
+Murguia grew quieter at once. His faculties tightened on the effort
+before him. He was alone with the man who would understand, so he
+thought; who had the same reason to understand, so he thought.
+
+Driscoll had shared nothing of the late emotions. He had smoked
+impassively. His interest was of the coldest. Only his eyes, narrowed
+fixedly on the Mexican, betrayed the heed he gave. When the others were
+gone, he uncrossed his legs, and crossed them the other way, and thrust
+the corncob into his pocket.
+
+"Sit down!"
+
+Murguia dropped to the nearest camp stool.
+
+"Now then, you with your dirty little affairs, why do you come to me?"
+
+Murguia leaned forward over the table between them, his bony arms among
+candles and a litter of earthen plates. The odor of meat assailed his
+nostrils. But the hunger in his leer had no scent for food.
+
+"This _is_ the time I meant, senor, when Rodrigo told you that you
+would see me."
+
+"About the ivory cross? But I gave you that a month ago."
+
+"A month ago--a month, wasted! How much sooner I would have come, only
+another had to be--persuaded--first."
+
+"Oh, had he? Then it's not about the cross? And this other? Suppose I
+guess? He was--he was the red-haired puppy, my old friend the Dragoon,
+who carried you off wounded that day? Humph, the very first guess, too!"
+
+Murguia darted at him a look of uneasy admiration.
+
+"I would have told Your Mercy, anyway," he said, half cringing. "Yes, he
+is Colonel Lopez."
+
+"And you 'persuaded' him?"
+
+"Events did. Since the siege began I've tried, I've worked, to convince
+him that these same events would happen. Ugh, the dull fool, he had to
+wait for them."
+
+"I can almost guess again," said Driscoll, as though it were some
+curious game, "but if you'd just as soon explain----"
+
+"Listen! You remember two years ago at my hacienda, when Lopez sentenced
+you to death? But why did he sentence you to death, why, senor?"
+
+"That's an easy one. It was because he didn't want my offer of
+Confederate aid to reach Maximilian."
+
+"But why not? I will tell you. It was because he was trying even then to
+buy the Republic's good will, in case--in case anything should happen.
+But he was _afraid_ to change, the coward! He must first
+_know_ which side would win. I am his orderly--_he_ knows why
+I am--and I've tried to drive it into his thick wits that the Empire is
+damned and has been, but he still doubted, even when we were starving
+again, even when every crumb was gathered into the common store, even
+when it was useless to shoot men for not declaring hidden corn, even
+when forced loans were vain, since money could no longer buy. No senor,
+even with proofs like these, Miguel Lopez was stubborn."
+
+"I'd prob'bly guess he was a loyal scoundrel, after all."
+
+"More yet, he has fought bravely, making himself a marked man in the
+Republic's eyes."
+
+"Then why----"
+
+"Because so long as the Empire had a chance, or he thought it had, he
+hoped for more coddling. You see, senor, he thought Marquez was coming
+back with relief. There was that--that Frenchwoman you know of--who
+brought news from the capital. But Maximilian dared not make the news
+public. He forged a letter instead, a letter from Marquez, and he had
+its contents proclaimed. Marquez had been delayed, so all Queretaro
+read, but he had at last destroyed the Liberals in his path, and was
+then hurrying here with his victorious army. This false hope blinded
+Lopez with the others in there. But when Marquez did not come, when
+utter demoralization set in, when we were a starving town against
+thirty-five thousand outside, when there were scores of deserters every
+day, when any man who talked of surrender was executed, and still no
+Marquez, then Lopez began----"
+
+"I see, he began to be persuaded?"
+
+"Still, he wanted to be a general. But the other generals forced
+Maximilian not to promote him."
+
+"So he was disappointed?"
+
+"And persuaded, senor. The sally was already planned for this morning,
+but Lopez argued obstacles, and so got it postponed until to-morrow
+morning. He wanted to--to act on his--persuasion. And that is why,"
+Murguia got to his feet and limped around the table to Driscoll, "and
+that is why," he ended in a croaking whisper, "why I am here!"
+
+"And the red puppy, how near here did _he_ come with you?"
+
+Again Murguia darted at his questioner that uneasy glance of admiration.
+
+"Lopez is waiting between the lines," he replied. "As to our own lines,
+we passed them easily, since Lopez commands the reserve brigade and
+places the sentinels himself around La Cruz monastery."
+
+"Oh, does he?" Driscoll whistled softly. "But what's your plan?" He put
+the question sympathetically, which disturbed Don Anastasio vastly more
+than the American's peremptory tone in the beginning. "What's your
+plan?" he asked again, gently coaxing.
+
+Murguia hesitated. This polite drawing-room interest was the most
+ironical of encouragement for villainy. Driscoll frowned impatiently,
+but at once he was smiling again. He placidly filled his corncob, and a
+moment later, his gaze piercing the tobacco smoke, he said, "Then I'll
+tell you. You're here to make a dicker, you and your tool between the
+lines. The monastery of La Cruz on top of the bluff is the citadel of
+Queretaro. Maximilian has his quarters there. The troops there are the
+reserve brigade. This puppy, this mongrel, commands the reserve brigade.
+He places the sentinels. And you are his orderly.--Oh, I haven't
+forgotten how he let you off that time he condemned me!--So now you are
+his orderly, for your own reasons and his. And here you are, talking
+mysteriously about _capturing_ Maximilian. But you don't mean that,
+snake. You are here to _sell_ him! Howsoever," and smiling a little
+at the stilted phrasing, Driscoll paused and delicately rammed the
+tobacco tighter in the bowl, "howsoever, Murgie, you've come to the
+wrong market. No, there's no demand for Maximilians just now, not in
+this booth. But why in blazes didn't you go to Escobedo? With his
+Shylock beard, I reckon _he'd_ take a flyer in human flesh."
+
+"I was going to him, but I came to you first, to take us there, to take
+Lopez and myself, I--I thought you would manage it all, because
+you--Your Mercy is the strongest, the most resourceful----"
+
+"Resourceful enough, eh, to dodge the bullets you had fixed up for me
+once? Thanks, Murgie, but I liked your attentions then better than your
+slimy advances now. By the way, how are you going to get to Escobedo?"
+
+The tone was honey itself.
+
+Murguia gasped, yet not so much to find himself a prisoner, as to find
+himself mistaken in the American.
+
+"Now maybe," Driscoll suggested, "maybe you'll be wondering yourself why
+you bring your dirty little affairs to me? Lopez may be an open book,
+but you seem to've read _me_ wrong. Prob'bly the language is
+foreign."
+
+Murguia's jaw dropped, and he gaped as one who beholds the collapse of
+high towering walls. It was his system of life, of motives calculated,
+of humanity weighed. It was the whole fabric of hate and passions which
+quivered and crashed and flattened in a chaos of dust before his wildly
+staring eyes.
+
+"You mean, senor, you mean you do not want--as well, as _I!_--to
+bring to his end this libertine, this thief of girlhood, this prince who
+scatters death, who scatters shame, this--this----"
+
+"Man alive, you're screaming! Stop it!"
+
+With his nails the old man combed the froth from his lips.
+
+"But you too have cause," he cried, "cause not so heavy, but cause
+enough, as well as I! There was my daughter, my little girl! With you
+there is that French wo----"
+
+He stopped, for he thought he heard the sharp click of teeth. But
+Driscoll was only grave.
+
+"Well, go on," he said. "But--speak for your daughter only."
+
+"I can't go on. I won't go on," Murguia burst out desperately, and flung
+up his arms. "If you don't understand already, then I can't make you.
+It's useless. A book? You're a stone! But any other, who had a heart for
+suffering, in your place would----"
+
+"Oh shut up, Murgie!" cried Driscoll wearily, but in something akin to
+supplication.
+
+With the serpent's wisdom, the tempter struck no more on that side. His
+fangs were not for the blighted lover. What, though, of the soldier?
+
+"No one doubts, senor," he whined unctuously, "that Your Mercy is loyal
+to the Republic. So it cannot be that Y'r Mercy knows----"
+
+"See here, Murgie, I'm getting sleepy. But I'll find you a comfortable
+tent, with plenty to eat, and a polite guard----"
+
+"Senor," stormed the old man, "I tell you you don't know what this means
+to the Republic. Maximilian will escape, no matter the cost. At daybreak
+there is to be a concentrated attack on some point in your lines; but
+where, nobody knows except Miramon. Then Maximilian will cut through
+with the cavalry. The infantry will follow, if it can. And after them,
+the artillery. You Republicans may not even know it until too late,
+because meantime you will be fighting the townspeople, thinking you are
+fighting the whole army."
+
+Driscoll roused himself suddenly. "The townspeople?"
+
+"Si senor, they are to be a decoy. Some volunteered, the rest were
+drafted. They have been armed, but they are only to be killed, they are
+only to draw the Republican strength, while the Emperor and the army
+escape."
+
+Driscoll sprang from his seat, in an agitation that was Murguia's first
+hope.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me," he demanded, "that this Maximilian who makes
+speeches about not deserting intends now to sacrifice these poor
+helpless devils? Prove it!"
+
+Murguia had touched neither lover nor soldier. But what man was here, in
+boots and woolen shirt, puffing angrily at a corncob, yet sitting in
+judgment supreme on the proud Hapsburg himself? Blindly stumbling,
+Murguia had touched the inexplicable man who was of stone, and the
+baffled fiend that was in him leaped up with a cry of glee.
+
+"To prove it?" he cried, "Ai, then Lopez shall walk with you in our
+outer trenches. For in them you shall see the doomed townsmen
+themselves, a thousand townsmen, sleeping there until the dawn.
+Afterward, when Maximilian is safe, they who are still alive will be
+free to surrender."
+
+"And then----" But Driscoll knew the temper of the siege. What with the
+chief prize lost, there would be scant mercy for surrendered townsmen.
+
+"God in heaven," he muttered fervently, "if there's any to suffer, it
+might as well be the guilty one, and a thousand times better one than
+one thousand! A man's a man, or alleged to be!--Murgie, you wait here,
+I'm going to call the others."
+
+The others came, and heard. It was the court en banc, five Missourians
+and a Kansan. And the culprit was a Caesar. But they hewed forth their
+Justice as rugged and huge, and as true, as would the outlaw, Michel
+Angelo. Like him, they were their own law. Nor were they nice gentlemen,
+these Homeric men who spat tobacco. Finding their goddess pandered to by
+those who were nice gentlemen, and finding the gift of these a pretty
+scarf over her eye, they roughly tore it away. For them she was not that
+kind of a woman.
+
+"W'y, this prince is no Christian," Crittenden announced in querulous
+discovery.
+
+"One thousand loyally dying for their sovereign," Daniel mused, his
+romantic soul wavering. "Sho!" he cried the instant after, "that thing's
+out-dated!"
+
+"And the prince there----" began the Kansan angrily.
+
+"May just go--to--the--devil!"
+
+All swung round on one of their number. It was the parson himself who
+had pronounced sentence.
+
+Then they set out under the stars to attend to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+UNDER A SPANISH CLOAK
+
+
+  "What misadventure is so early up,
+  That calls our person from our morning's rest?"
+                                --_Romeo and Juliet_.
+
+
+Just within their own bivouac four Missourians waited with eight horses.
+Driscoll and Boone, and the small limping shadow of Murguia between
+them, went on outside the sentry line toward the Alameda. When they
+returned, a stranger accompanied them, a little distance apart.
+
+"It's true," Driscoll whispered to those who had staid. "The trenches
+are filled with townsmen. _He_ took me."
+
+The Americans glanced once the stranger's way, and grunted. He was a
+large man, hidden to the eyes in a Spanish cloak. For all the charity of
+darkness, he seemed ill at ease, and held himself from them, a marked
+figure, alone. A leprosy in himself tainted his every thought. He would
+not willingly come near any man. He understood English, unhappily now
+for him, and Boone's warning as they mounted seared like vitriol. "Look
+out, Harry, don't touch the filthy skut! It'll take the rotting of death
+to clean your fingers." After that, even Murguia drew involuntarily away
+from the stranger.
+
+They circled the town widely, having only Republican challenges to
+quiet, and they dismounted under the trees which shade the valley to the
+northeast, between the Sangremal, or mound of La Cruz, and the
+besiegers' range of hills. Here, under La Cruz's steep bluff, the
+Republican general-in-chief had his quarters, and here he kept a hawk's
+jealous watch on the walls above, where slept his country's invader.
+
+Open battle is clear honor, so reckoned; but it takes a brave man to
+dive for a pearl in slime. Driscoll was the one to conduct Murguia and
+his gloomy companion into the presence of General Escobedo. When he
+rejoined the other five outside the tent, he was alone.
+
+"Well, come on," he said as he mounted under the trees. "We needn't stay
+for the rest of it, thank God."
+
+For a while they rode in silence back toward their camp. They passed
+under the aqueduct and entered the open plain. Then the parson stretched
+out his hand to the pommel of Driscoll's saddle.
+
+"Well?" he ventured softly.
+
+"Well, Clem, it's done."
+
+The others crowded their horses nearer.
+
+"I want to tell you all," Driscoll abruptly began again. "I want to tell
+you that I've just seen the strangest thing of my whole life, right back
+there in that tent. I--well, it's simply flattened me out!"
+
+"You mean Lopez, Din?" one asked tentatively.
+
+"Lopez? No, no, there's nothing strange in him. Any low hound will sell
+out to save his hide. No, Dan, I mean the other. I mean the old man.
+He's the one who used to run the blockade off Mobile, and a
+whiter-livered, more contemptible old grandmother I never hope to see
+anywhere, no, never! Yet not a month ago, the day of that Cimatario
+scrimmage, I found him on the battlefield, and he had been wounded. But
+he didn't seem to know it. He didn't even seem to know that the shells
+were still banging all around him."
+
+"An _old_ coward, too!" someone muttered.
+
+"But wait. He used to be one thing worse, one thing more, than a coward.
+He was a miser, and such a miser that he _made_ himself face
+danger. You should have seen him running a blockade, with the Yankees
+chasing behind. He trembled--I tell you, he trembled like a withered
+cottonwood leaf on a broken stem. Yet he whined against stoking with
+turpentine, because it cost a little more. I'd 'a' thought, I did then,
+that the miser was in his bones until the last trumpet. But to-night,
+back in that tent just now----"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, he _refused_ money! He refused _gold_! He didn't seem
+to know what it was, any more than he did bullets a month ago. Escobedo
+asked him his price, and shoved a glittering heap across the table at
+him. You saw how he acted when we offered him something to eat? Well, he
+looked the same way at the gold. He acted impatient. He didn't want to
+see anything except Lopez. But you'd have called it a miser's eagerness,
+the way he watched that Lopez. Only a miser don't exult when it's
+someone else who pockets the money."
+
+"Maybe they'll divide?"
+
+"Not much, because Murgie could have had his share over and above. No,
+it wasn't that. It wasn't the gold. He was greedy--for a soul! He wanted
+to see Lopez _bought_, and no hitch. And when it was done, he wet
+those catfish lips of his with his tongue. I believe the devil in hell
+must look just that way when he gets some poor sinner. But to think of
+that old skinflint, to think of that old feeble cowardly shark not
+_knowing_ danger, not _knowing_ money----"
+
+"Come, Din," the parson's blessed, cheery voice interrupted, "let's
+hurry back and wash our hands. Then we'll _all_ feel better."
+
+While the six Americans rode gloomily away from what they had done, and
+from their own thoughts as they best could, a stealthy company was
+forming under the trees among the tents of the Republican general. After
+a time the seeming spectres began to move in unison, an undulating wave
+that spread as the grayish shadow of a low hanging cloud. The dim
+figures slowly swept the little space of valley, on toward the steep
+slope of La Cruz, and soon they were climbing, silently creeping, nearer
+and nearer the dark walls above.
+
+Two seemed the leaders, and the third limped close behind. But one of
+the first two held a pistol ever near the heart of his companion, who
+was wrapped to the eyes in a Spanish cloak.
+
+"Who goes----" cried an Imperialist sentry.
+
+"Your colonel, fool!" he of the cloak stopped him short. "I, Miguel
+Lopez. I am changing the guard. Return now to your barracks and get what
+sleep you can before morning. One of these men with me will take your
+place."
+
+In like manner each later challenge was satisfied, and so on to a
+cannon-battered crevice in the wall. The spectres passed through the gap
+there into a field of graves on the mound's level summit. The earth had
+an uncanny softness under their tread. The plots were mostly fresh, of
+slain Imperialists still keeping their rank according to battalion. But
+the living, the Reserve Brigade, were here as well, sleeping over the
+dead. They stirred and grumbled at being disturbed, but thought then no
+more of the intruders. The secret plans for the daybreak attack
+explained everything. Their colonel, whose voice they knew, was shifting
+forces in preparation. But when the dawn came, they awoke to find their
+weapons gone, and themselves defenseless prisoners.
+
+Many of the spectral troop fell away to hold the cemetery, but the rest
+kept on, and entered the monastery garden. Here there was a battery of
+one gun, whose muzzle pointed the way to the Republican camp. Without a
+sound the Imperialist gunners were replaced by Republicans. The cannon
+was one captured during the Cimatario fight. It was called "La
+Tempestad," and bore an inscription, "The Last Argument of Nations." Its
+new possessors turned the muzzle squarely on the monastery, not fifty
+yards away, where Maximilian lay then asleep.
+
+The shadowy host did not linger in the monastery itself. They swept
+through hastily, in at the garden entrance, along the corridor, and out
+by the great portico door upon La Cruz Plaza. They had passed the
+citadel. The town lay before them. But in the Plaza were more cannon,
+which had been taken from the trenches and massed for the supreme
+effort. They lay silent, under the silent bells of the church. They lay
+under the giant Cross of the Apparition, which was adorned by the
+Inditos with garlands in vague memory of pagan rites on that very spot.
+They lay under the splendid Arabian palms. They lay among defenders. To
+take them was like prowling with a torch among broken casks of
+gunpowder. Not a shot must be fired until the thing was done. Otherwise,
+a quick second shot was to find the heart of Lopez. So Lopez was
+exceedingly cautious. However, he commanded here. He was the Emperor's
+favorite. Squad after squad, the drowsy Imperialists moved off, letting
+the strangers relieve them. So the critical work was achieved, even as
+day appeared over the eastern hills. Then he who had kept so close to
+Lopez put his revolver away.
+
+"Your bargain is fulfilled, senor," he said. "Accordingly, here's the
+paper I was to give you. It is your safe conduct throughout the
+Republic. You are free. Go!"
+
+Lopez clutched the thing that meant his life, but as his fingers
+tightened over it, his first greed vanished. He stared about him
+uncertainly. The Plaza swarmed with men. They were the gray battalion he
+had led there. In the dawning light they were still gray. They were the
+Supremos Poderes de la Republica. De la Republica? Yes, of the enemy,
+and he had brought them. But it was as though he had just awakened, and
+found them there. The enemy? The enemy was in La Cruz! With a sharp cry,
+he turned and ran back into the monastery. He brushed aside the hateful
+gray uniforms. He ran panting up the stone steps. In the dark hall above
+he stopped at a cell door, and pounded, and tugged frantically at its
+latch.
+
+"Senor, awake! Hurry! We are betrayed! Hurry! Escape--escape----"
+
+Within came a startled sleepy voice, "What, what's--" which changed at
+once to reproving dignity. "Can it be?--Lopez!"
+
+"But senor--sire--the Chinacos, the Republicans, they are here already!"
+
+"Colonel Lopez!" In its shocked surprise the voice was edged with
+rebuke. "Man, man, where are your years of training near my person? One
+would think you some boorish night-watchman."
+
+Lopez outside the door dropped his hands, and fell abjectedly silent, as
+servilely abashed in his lapse of etiquette as though he stood the
+traitor unmasked.
+
+"Now then, Miguel," spoke the Emperor more kindly, "go to General Mejia
+and the others. Let them have the goodness to attend me here."
+
+Lopez turned on down the corridor, stopped at the doors of Generals
+Mejia and Castillo, and the Prince Salm-Salm. At each he tapped lightly,
+as one dazed, and announced that the enemy surrounded them. Then,
+remembering, he fled.
+
+Within the thick walls that narrowed his state into a friar's cell,
+Maximilian rose from his iron couch. "So," he sighed, almost in relief,
+"Destiny means it to end in this way." He was calm, and he attired
+himself carefully. He chose his general's uniform, with its rich dark
+blue, and scarlet cordon. Nor did he forget the star of some royal
+order, which to common men seemed a cotillion favor. When he should step
+forth that morning, it was to play a world role. The prince must be
+serene in the moment of trial. The nations must know that Destiny had
+him in hand. And musing thus, he parted his golden beard with dainty
+precision. Within a month Europe would acclaim him reverently. He noted
+that his high boots glistened. Mejia and the other two, hurrying to him,
+fell back in admiration to behold how placid he was.
+
+"Gentlemen," said he, "to leave here, or die! There's nothing else."
+
+He noticed a soft heap at the door, and picked it up.
+
+"Lopez's cloak, a disguise!" he exclaimed. "God bless the poor fellow,
+he left it for me."
+
+He wrapped the garment about him, took his pistols, and led the way. In
+the dark corridor down stairs a Republican sentry mistook the cool,
+commanding figure for one of his own generals, and presented arms.
+Maximilian gravely saluted, and with his three companions passed out.
+
+The Plaza was a blurred scene of confusion. Men were awakening to find
+their arms gone, and themselves covered by muskets. Shots had been
+fired. Curses abounded. Entire companies were being marched away as
+prisoners. Republican officers either thought that Maximilian was Lopez,
+from his cloak and height, or were too distracted to notice. It is
+possible, too, that the victors would have had him escape, that they
+might not have the trouble of his disposal, and that they preferred that
+he should not thrust it on them. At any rate, he and the three behind
+pushed their way undisturbed through cannon and brown stolid men in
+gray, and reached the spot where the Plaza narrows into a street that
+gently slopes down into the town. But here a guard was posted.
+
+"Pues, hombre, they're civilians, let them pass."
+
+Maximilian turned on him who spoke, and beheld the blackmailer, scout,
+deserter, Don Tiburcio. He wore now the uniform of a Republican
+explorador. His crossed eye gleamed so humorously up at the Emperor, it
+might have been insolence, but it was only the proffered sharing of a
+jest. His matter-of-fact tone prevailed, and the guard stood aside. The
+four passed on down the street. In comical melancholy Don Tiburcio
+looked after them, and then he perceived that a fifth had slipped by the
+guard and was following closely behind.
+
+"The saints help us--help _him_, it's Murguia!" Tiburcio muttered
+in horror. He recalled the night when Maria de la Luz was found dead.
+
+The old man, coatless, barefoot, in his pantaloons of Imperial green,
+limped desperately to keep pace with the great strides of the four
+ahead. The broad crimson stripe down each pant leg would break,
+straighten, break again, in bizarre accord, with every painful step. It
+was a lope, and he more like a starved wolf, a lean, persistent shadow,
+ever ready for the chance to spring.
+
+By hastening down into the town, Maximilian thought to rally what forces
+were there for a last stand; or, to be more exact, for a last tableau.
+The end of his empire must have eclat. He found the town panic-stricken,
+since all could see the Republic's standard over the towers of La Cruz.
+Dumfounded officers had gotten to housetops, and were using their
+glasses. They beheld the enemy as busy as scurrying ants on the
+surrounding hills. Clouds of men from every point were sweeping across
+the llano toward the town. The advance were already in the narrow
+streets. Killing, looting, had begun. Clanging bells, hoof beats, yells,
+musketry, and in the distance deep-voiced cannon! The Emperor and his
+three companions, with the malignant shadow hovering ever near,
+quickened their course through the town. They paused only to dispatch
+couriers. Miramon, when found, was to come at all speed with every
+possible man to the Cerro de las Campanas. They gained the adobe suburbs
+on the western edge, leaving behind the fearsome rising tide of human
+sound. An officer forced the Emperor to mount his horse. Many joined
+their flight. They crossed broken fields, and reached the summit of the
+wedge-shaped rock called las Campanas. Close behind, emerging from the
+town, were the first pursuers, who quickly grew to a thick black fringe
+around the hill. Shells were falling. The heavens seemed to flower
+vengefully, with the Campanas knoll as the one focus. The adobe stockade
+crowning the top was soon packed with fugitives, until those within,
+like shipwrecked creatures on a raft, barred out those still coming. The
+whisper spread that in the town Miramon had been taken shot through the
+cheek after shooting many others. The panic grew. Men knew themselves at
+bay. They recognized the deathtrap. On the outlying heights the cannon
+had their range. Grenades, bombs, grape, and canister, fell as hail.
+
+The Emperor turned to General Mejia.
+
+"Could we cut our way out?" he asked.
+
+Mejia put down his glasses. He paused, then shook his head.
+
+Straightway an orderly with a white flag was sent down the hill. But the
+firing did not cease for that. Maximilian, seeing that he could make no
+terms for those around him, seeing them fall by scores instead, himself
+followed the orderly; and following him, was the ever faithful shadow.
+
+From out the dark fringe a man on a white horse, a black bearded man
+with monstrous flapping ears, General Escobedo, rode forth to meet the
+Hapsburg. Then Maximilian forgot the eyes of the world, and thought of
+her who had suffered with him, who had suffered more than he, to hazard
+this, their dream.
+
+"It is our throne, Charlotte," he murmured, and gave up his sword.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+EL CHAPARRITO
+
+
+  "Meagre were his looks,
+  Sharp misery had worn him to the bones."
+                          --_Romeo and Juliet._
+
+
+A few days later Jacqueline and Berthe attended a performance at the
+Teatro de Iturbide. It was the first held there since the beginning of
+the siege, and to the place late foes were thronging eagerly in what
+seemed a most inordinate thirst for amusement. The playhouse was without
+a roof. Its metal covering had been widely sown in the shape of bullets,
+and only a canvas overhead kept out the sun. But the broiling pit was
+filled, as well as circling tier over tier of loges, and in the street a
+great crowd jostled and surged, like people who stare at the dead walls
+of a jail because a man is being hanged inside. If the curious cannot
+have both Time and Space to their liking, then the more ghoulish will
+gorge themselves on the coincidence of Time alone. "Now," they whisper
+awesomely, "his hands and feet are being strapped! What _must_ he
+be thinking this very instant, and we standing here?" So those outside
+the Teatro de Iturbide sweated patiently. In all evidence it was not an
+ordinary performance scheduled for that day.
+
+"Buzzards?" said Jacqueline, looking up and seeing their outspread wings
+shadowed on the canvas roof, "Fi donc, _that_ effect is long since
+shabby!" But it chilled her, nevertheless.
+
+The curtain was up. A drop, showing fields in green and a receding road
+in brown, filled the back. The actors seemed actors solely, and this
+idea persisted with the Frenchwoman, as with many another, throughout.
+Seven military characters arranged themselves in a kind of state on the
+unpainted, slanting stage. They might have been supernumeraries, like
+the "senators" in "Othello." At least their severe demeanor became them
+awkwardly. They wore uniforms, but not of appalling rank. He who
+presided was only a lieutenant colonel, the other six were captains.
+Before them, each on a square stool, sat two generals, one with a
+bandaged cheek. There were legal gentlemen in plain black, while guards
+at stiff attention here and there completed the grouping. Beyond any
+doubt, it was a trial scene. And to confirm the surmise, one of the
+legal gentlemen, a very peaceable appearing youth, arose and in the
+Republic's name demanded the lives of Miguel Miramon and Tomas
+Mejia--here he indicated the two generals--and with impressive cadence,
+also in the Republic's name, demanded likewise the life of Fernando
+Maximiliano de Hapsburgo. The lieutenant colonel and the captains
+knitted their seven tawny brows portentously, but they were not in the
+least astounded at such a very extraordinary request.
+
+There was no need of a theatrical production at all. Other Imperialists
+had not been so unnecessarily distinguished, as for instance, General
+Mendez, that ancient enemy of Regules and executioner of Republicans
+under the Black Decree. Caught the day Queretaro fell, he was shot in
+the back as a traitor. Yet he met a legal death. Taken in armed defiance
+of the Republic, identity established, the hollow square and shooting
+squad, such was the routine prescribed. But the lesser official relics
+of the Empire, six hundred in all, escaped generally with a few months
+of prison. The rank and file of the betrayed army had already melted
+away. But for the three arch-culprits a trial was deemed requisite, and
+President Juarez, in San Luis Potosi, so ordered. Hence the stage
+setting as above described.
+
+Maximilian was at first surprised. He had said to Escobedo, "I am ready
+to go whenever you can favor me with an escort to the coast, but first I
+require assurance that my loyal followers shall not suffer." But the
+Republican chief had smiled oddly, and locked him up. Later, however,
+Maximilian had seemed content. A trial for his life, that would add the
+last needed glamour to the prestige of his return to Europe. So he
+affably humored his captors, and was rewarded with humiliation--his
+judges could hardly be more obscure. So as he was genuinely sick abed,
+he got himself excused from playing his part in the Teatro Iturbide.
+
+The soi-disant Emperor had four conscientious defenders, chosen from
+Republican jurists, two of whom were then in San Luis to do what they
+might before Juarez. The other two spent eloquence and acumen on the
+court's seven tawny brows. Their first point came from Maximilian
+himself. It was complacent, this point. The naivete of it was superb.
+
+"I am no longer Emperor," so the defense ran, "nor was I during the
+siege; because, before leaving the capital, I drew up my abdication,
+which was then countersigned by my ministers. However, it was not to
+take effect until I should fall prisoner."
+
+When the Republic recovered her breath, she felt in her amusement a
+wounded pride. This prince must think her very simple. So, she was to
+recognize the usurper's abdication after she had fought and suffered to
+take the usurper? A captured thief draws from his pockets a quit-claim
+deed to the plunder he has stolen, and giving it to the court, would
+therefore go free! The tragedy changed for a spell to comic opera. And
+matters were not helped greatly when next were invoked "the immunities
+and privileges which pertain under any and all circumstances to an
+archduke of Austria."
+
+Though handicapped by their client's arrogance, counsel yet did their
+utmost. They argued law and humanity, with tremulo effects. They prayed
+that "the greatest of victories be crowned by the greatest of pardons."
+But it was of no use. The bloodthirsty stripling persisted in the
+Republic's name. This Maximiliano was a Mexican. In many beautiful
+speeches the said Maximiliano had said so. Hence he could not evade
+responsibility to the laws of his adopted country. And there was, for
+instance, the law of 1862 concerning treason.
+
+Well, in a word, the three accused were straightway sentenced to death;
+and Escobedo, approving, named Sunday, June 16th, for the execution. It
+might be mentioned of this Escobedo that on two former occasions, when
+the circumstances were exactly reversed, Mejia had each time saved his
+life. Since Queretaro, there have been comments on the vigor of
+Escobedo's memory.
+
+"Poor pliant Prince Max," sighed Jacqueline, "he is still being
+influenced to stay in Mexico! Come, Berthe, we must make all speed to
+San Luis and see the Presidente."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the long hall of the Palacio Municipal at San Luis Potosi, before the
+old-fashioned desk there, sat an Indian. He was low and squat and
+pock-marked, and there was an ugly scar, livid against yellow, across
+the upper lip. He had a large mouth, high cheek-bones, and swarthy skin
+with a copperish tinge. He was a pure-blooded Indian. At twelve he did
+not know a word of Spanish. His race, the Zapotecas of Oaxaca, had all
+but been extinguished by the Conquest. Except for the ungainly black he
+wore--excepting, too, his character--he might have been a peon, or still
+the servant he once had been. But the homely, heavy features of his
+round head did not, in any sense, repel. On the contrary, the
+countenance was frank, though yet inscrutable. The piercing black eyes
+were good eyes, and indomitable, like his muscled jaw. The flat, square
+forehead made one aware of intellect, and of force. So short and thick,
+he looked a sluggish man, but it was the phlegm of a rock, the calm of
+strength, and whatever the peril, almost inanimate. His country called
+him Benemerito de America, a title the noblest and rarest in its Spartan
+hint of civic virtue.
+
+The Indian's desk was littered with messages from the princes of the
+earth. Like his expiring race, he had fought their order, and they had
+made of him a wandering fugitive. But now they were imploring him for
+one of their number, whose surrendered sword that moment lay across
+their petitions. Two of the letters, but not from princes, he had read
+with deep consideration. One was from the President of the United
+States, the other from Victor Hugo. But these also he shoved from him,
+though regretfully, and now he was gazing out over the Plaza, the line
+of his jaw as inflexible as ever.
+
+But they were not many, the moments this man had to himself, and it was
+not long before a gendarme in coarse blue, serving as an orderly,
+disturbed him.
+
+"Well, show her in then," he said, frowning at the card laid on his
+desk, nor did he rise when an unusually beautiful but very grave young
+woman entered the room.
+
+"At your orders, Senorita de--d'Aumerle. You come, I suppose, to save
+him?--But," he added with the austerity of a parent, "it is not
+difficult to imagine why _you_ are interested."
+
+"No, Senor Presidente," he heard himself quietly contradicted, "Your
+Excellency can not imagine."
+
+He looked up, into a pair of honest gray eyes. But her tone had already
+told him enough. He rose to his feet in rugged courtesy. The Indian was
+a wise man, and he knew now that other men had whispered falsely about
+one exquisite Parisienne.
+
+"Pardon me, child," he said gently. "No, I cannot imagine."
+
+Impulsively Jacqueline leaned over the desk and gave him her hand.
+"Thank you," she said, in a voice that trembled unexpectedly. From that
+moment, too, she abandoned tactics. The wiles of courts would avail
+nothing against the primitive straightforwardness of the man before her.
+It seemed, moreover, good and homely, to cast them aside. She took a
+seat near the window, since he remained standing until she did, and
+waited. He should speak first, and afterward, she would accept. For
+there was nothing, she felt, that she could say. O rare tongue of woman,
+to so respect the leash of intuitions!
+
+As for Don Benito Juarez, he had not meant to speak at all. But knowing
+her now to be not what he had thought, he spoke as he had not to any
+plenipotentiary of any crowned head.
+
+"You are a Frenchwoman, senorita," he began. "Tell me, your coming must
+be explained by that?"
+
+"Now," said Jacqueline, smiling on him cordially, "Your Excellency's
+imagination is getting better."
+
+"And you wish to save Maximilian," the Presidente stated, rather than
+questioned, "because he is a victim of France."
+
+"Because he will be considered so."
+
+The old Roman smiled. "My dear young lady," he said, "an answer to
+France is the least of my obligations. Yet you expect it, and ask for
+clemency, though I deny all the great nations?"
+
+"Oh senor, what's the use? Let him go!"
+
+The keen black eyes regarded her quizzically. "Do you know," he said,
+"this is the second time I've heard that question to-day? One of our
+American officers had himself put in command of the escort for
+Maximilian's two lawyers here, and now I believe he did it simply
+because he too wanted to know, 'What's the use?' It was anti-climax, and
+a wet blanket over the fervid eloquence of the two lawyers. But
+nevertheless, he hit the one argument."
+
+"Yes, yes!"
+
+"In a word, why not brush aside our archduke? He's harmless, now, he's
+insignificant? Why not take from him the only dignity left, that of
+dying?"
+
+"Of course, Senor Juarez! Of course!"
+
+"And at the same time win bright renown for ourselves, instead of what
+will be called harsh cruelty?"
+
+"Surely!"
+
+The smile vanished. The large mouth closed tightly.
+
+"No," spoke the judge of iron. "He dies! That is the truest mercy, a
+mercy to those who might otherwise follow him here. And we, senorita, we
+have already suffered enough from Europe."
+
+"But the other two?" pleaded Jacqueline. "They are Mexicans."
+
+"They are that, por Dios, and they make me proud of my race. Miramon,
+Mejia, they are the leaven. They redeem Lopez, they redeem Marquez, they
+redeem the deserters who now so largely form my armies, who before had
+deserted me for the French invasion. By the signal example of these two
+men to die to-morrow, the world shall know that Mexicans are not all
+traitors. And as we grow, we Mexicans, we may grow beyond the empty
+loyalty of glowing Spanish words. Remembering such an example, we may
+come to be, in our very hearts, breathing things of honor. We have been
+shackled because of infamy during the last centuries. Can you wonder,
+then, that we use the treacherous weapon of the Conquistadores?--But
+that's apart. The loyalty of Miramon and Mejia has been loyalty to an
+invader, a wrong their country will not forgive. But our cultured
+gentleman of Europe, our vain fool who would regenerate the poor Indito,
+he will perhaps not feel so ashamed of us, not when he has two such
+companions in death, and not when he learns, though painfully, that the
+rod of Mexican justice respects neither immunity nor privilege of birth.
+There, senorita, I've had to talk more about this one individual than
+about the hundreds of others who have been punished for much less than
+he."
+
+"But it must be terrible to die, senor. And _he_ doesn't realize,
+while a delay of only a few days----"
+
+"Would suffice for his escape?"
+
+Jacqueline reddened guiltily. "No, to prepare for his end," she said.
+
+The Presidente smiled tolerantly. "Never fear," he answered first her
+confusion, "our justice stands committed, and to wink at escape now
+would be cowardly. Yet, whether you meant it or not, you are right, and
+the execution stands postponed until the nineteenth. A doomed man may
+learn much in three days to comfort him--on his way. But the criminal of
+all is lacking."
+
+"Marquez, you mean?"
+
+"U'm, him also. But I was thinking of Louis Napoleon, _and_ his
+wife."
+
+The order of postponement, being openly telegraphed to Escobedo at
+Queretaro, was known at once in San Luis, and caused a fury of
+excitement. For none doubted but that it meant eventual pardon. The
+tender hearted rejoiced. The rabid ones muttered. The wise shook dubious
+heads. And even as Jacqueline and Berthe were hurrying back to Queretaro
+in the canvas-covered coach, another caller was admitted roundly on the
+president's privacy, without so much as being announced. Juarez wondered
+if his orderly had gone crazy, for the newcomer thus obsequiously
+presented looked to be a species of ancient vagabond.
+
+"Well, what is it?" the President asked, frowning heavily. He was
+curiously irritated. "Stay," he interposed, "those dusty, muddy rags you
+have on, that green and red, that's not a Republican uniform?"
+
+"It's of the Batallon del Emperador," replied the stranger, unabashed.
+
+"Bless me the saints! Well, well, well, I suppose you, too, want to save
+your Maximilian. But how does it happen that you're not under guard
+yourself?"
+
+For answer the old man came nearer. He limped feebly, and the while he
+unbuttoned his coarse red jacket. Juarez watched him sluggishly, but
+with a hand upon a revolver under the papers on his desk. The stranger,
+however, drew forth nothing more sensational than five or six square
+bits of parchment. Yet these aroused the President more than a weapon
+could have done. They were blank, except at the bottom, and there the
+President read his own signature, "Benito Juarez, Libertad y Reforma."
+
+"Your--Your Excellency remembers?"
+
+"How well!" The admission came involuntarily. Juarez was laboring under
+an emotion that he could not at first control. He stared at his visitor
+in a new wonder. So gaunt, so hollow, so utterly insignificant! The
+President's wonder grew.
+
+"You--you gained entrance here by one of these slips?" he questioned
+sharply. The old man nodded. "And it was countersigned by----"
+
+"Si senor, by El Chaparrito. The slip said, 'Admit bearer at once.'"
+
+"Then I cannot blame my orderly! But who are you?"
+
+"Anastasio Murguia, to serve Your Mercy."
+
+"Bien, Senor Murguia, and now will you explain what no other messenger
+from our unknown friend has done? Who--who is El Chaparrito?"
+
+But, like the wretched messengers who had gone before, Anastasio Murguia
+only shrugged his shoulders blankly. "Your Excellency does not know El
+Chaparrito?" he asked. "And yet you trusted him, a stranger, with your
+signature?"
+
+There was a crafty stress on his words.
+
+"Ah, senor," Juarez placidly inquired, "what if a chief magistrate did
+not know when to trust? You are to be informed, then, that one year ago
+last October, at Chihuahua, I was saved from a French flying column by
+an Indito. The poor wretch had run across the desert with his warning.
+But he could prove nothing. He couldn't even tell who sent him, except
+that it was a short gentleman, a senor chaparro. Yet it was well for the
+Republic that I took his word and fled. Later, when I reached the Rio
+Grande, and he wanted my signature to some blank squares of parchment,
+which he was to take back to his senor chaparro--well, senor, I trusted
+again. That Indito in breech-clout obtained my autograph some twenty
+times over."
+
+The President, however, might have added that every Republican officer
+was advised first to test any warning on any bit of parchment signed
+"Benito Juarez." Yet, as a matter of fact, there came to be such magic
+in the name of El Chaparrito that the name of Juarez thereto was only
+needed as a guarantee that the lesser name was genuine.
+
+"Now, then, Senor Emissary," said the President, "what danger hangs over
+our Republic this time?"
+
+"None, senor. I return the parchment squares left over. El--El
+Chaparrito has no more thoughts for the Republic. He thinks," and
+Murguia ground his knuckles into the desk top, "he thinks of no one, of
+no one--except Maximilian! And he has never thought of aught else. The
+Republic? Bah, the Republic was only his tool, Senor Presidente. Only
+his tool, but the tool needed sharpening. They say that's the way with
+the guillotine, eh, Senor Presidente?"
+
+"But hombre--No, our unseen friend of the Republic, our Chaparrito,
+would not ask for Maximilian's pardon?"
+
+"_Pardon!_"--It was fairly a cry of rage--"Yet you, Senor
+Presidente, _you_ postpone the execution! _You_ mean to pardon
+him!"
+
+"Indeed?"
+
+"Yes, I--I think so. But you shall not, Senor Presidente. I come to,
+to----"
+
+"Now that's curious. Possibly I, too, am to be sharpened into a kind of
+guillotine, eh, senor?"
+
+"All the others were," Murguia returned stubbornly. "That is, all except
+one."
+
+"Ha, then El Chaparrito found one man who was incorruptible?"
+
+"Yes. But still Your Excellency is mistaken. El Chaparrito did not use
+money to win his agents. That, senor, is the unsafest way of all."
+
+"You would tell me, senor, that El Chaparrito had a safe way?"
+
+"Yes, and it was absolute. He awakened memory, the memory, Senor
+Presidente, of wrongs. For example, there was Your Excellency's savior
+in breech-clout. He once lived in a forest village down in the Huasteca.
+One night Dupin came and burned the huts, and the Indito's family
+perished with other women and children there. That village alone gave
+the Chaparrito many another messenger or spy, but memories left by the
+Empire were plentiful enough everywhere, and cheap. The Chaparrito
+simply drafted them, that was all. But once his system failed. Yet--well
+the man in that case was an American, and _they_ are liable to be
+exceptions to any rule, to any passion. But in the end he was safe
+enough too, though something else, that I can't understand, made him
+so."
+
+"And what did he do, this American?"
+
+"He took me to Escobedo."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I took Lopez. That same night Queretaro fell."
+
+"_You?_ Now--now to what particular wrong in _your_ case,
+senor, does the Republic stand thus indebted?"
+
+Juarez put the question lightly, even patronizingly. But his steadfast
+gaze had not once left his gaunt and battered visitor. By design, too,
+he had not asked a second time who the Chaparrito was, because he saw,
+or felt, that the old man knew, though former emissaries from that
+mysterious source had not known. And Juarez meant to possess the secret.
+But with his casual irony he never looked for any such kindling of
+memory as then flashed deep in the cavernous sockets opposite him. The
+eyes of the aged man glowed and darkened, glowed and darkened, and
+seemed the very breathing of some famished beast. It was a thing to
+startle even Benito Juarez, who during many, many years had learned the
+meaning of civil war. The President leaped to his feet, pointing a
+finger.
+
+"You are," he cried, "yes, _you_ are the Chaparrito!--No?--Yes! Ha,
+I've struck, I've struck!"
+
+He had indeed. The colossal guile and intellect and will, the giant whom
+men in awe called El Chaparrito, was only old, withered Anastasio
+Murguia. But the astute Juarez _knew_ that he was right. He knew it
+in that one look of consuming, conquering hate. He knew the giant in
+that hate. The feeble flesh, Anastasio Murguia, was an incident. Yet
+even so, only the President's tenacity held him to where his instinct
+had leapt. For under discovery Murguia was changed to a huddled, abject
+creature, stammering denial. Yet it must be true, it must. The
+strangest, the most weird of contrasts in the same soul and body--yet it
+must, it _was_ true!
+
+And Murguia? He might have asked for reward, and had it. But his was
+rankest despair. His work was not finished, his goal not attained. And
+now his most potent instrument of all, the Chaparrito, was miserably
+identified in his own self, was taken from him.
+
+Juarez rose and touched his shoulder, "Come," he said, "there's much too
+much tension here. Now then, sit down, so. Let me see, you said your
+name was--yes, Murguia. But--why, Dios mio, that's the Huasteca miser!
+Well, well, well, and so you are that rich old hacendado who never gave
+even a fanega of corn to Republic or French either, unless frightened
+into it? But hombre, we've had _big_ sums from the Chaparrito, and
+all unasked!"
+
+And yet must it still be true, yet must even this contrast accord. El
+Chaparrito had indeed given munificently. But in each case it was to
+bridge a crisis. As the shrewdest general he knew a vital campaign, and
+aided, if need be. But on a useless one the Republic's soldiers might
+starve, might freeze, might bleed and die, without ever the most
+niggardly solace ever reaching them from El Chaparrito. Economy was
+applied to vengeance, and made it unspeakably grim.
+
+"Once though," Juarez pursued, "you all but lost your Maximilian? I mean
+last fall when he started for the coast. He could have escaped to
+Europe."
+
+"I know," said Murguia quietly, "but I was near him. If he had not
+turned back, I would have done it myself."
+
+"It?"
+
+"The justice which Your Excellency has just postponed three days."
+
+"Dios mio, but our Chaparrito is a dangerous person! He'd have to be
+locked up if Maximilian were pardoned."
+
+"But--but Your Excellency will not pardon him!"
+
+"To be sure, I had forgotten. I am to be given a memory. Well?"
+
+"Your Excellency remembers, he remembers Zacatecas?"
+
+"Last February? Certainly I do. Miramon came, but a warning from El
+Chaparrito, from you, came first, and a last time I escaped. As it was,
+I was reported captured, and I sometimes wonder what Maximilian would
+have done had that report been true."
+
+"If I should tell you, senor?"
+
+"Ah, that is beyond even you, since Maximilian has never had the chance
+to decide my fate."
+
+"But he did decide, senor. He got word that you were taken at Zacatecas,
+and at once he sent orders to Miramon as to your treatment. But Miramon
+was already defeated, already fleeing to Queretaro."
+
+"And the orders, the orders from Maximilian?"
+
+"They never arrived. They were intercepted. They--yes, here they are,
+but before reading them, will Your Excellency promise to imagine himself
+in Miramon's power?"
+
+"I would, naturally. Come, senor, hand them over."
+
+It made curious reading, that weather-blotched dispatch. For Don Benito
+Juarez it was reading as curious as a man may ever expect to come by. In
+the handwriting of his prisoner, he read his own death sentence.
+
+"Your--Your Excellency sees?" Murguia stammered hungrily.
+
+"H'm, what, for example?"
+
+"Why, that--that Maximilian would not have pardoned?"
+
+"On the contrary, senor mio, that is precisely what the generous
+Maximilian did intend. Listen--Miramon was 'to delay execution until His
+Majesty should pass upon it.'"
+
+"No--no, Your Excellency, he would not have----"
+
+"O ho, so you think you've missed your last stroke! You think that there
+is no memory for me in this dispatch! But don't whine so, because, man,
+there is, there is! It may not be the memory of my intended death, but
+it is the memory of--intended insult. Oh, what a patriot he must have
+thought me, this good, regenerating prince! He had already offered to
+make me chief justice. But this time he would have saved me from his own
+Black Decree. And I would have been touched by his clemency? I would
+have accepted, the grateful tears streaming from my eyes? And thus I
+would be regenerated? It sounds beautiful. It sounds like the chivalrous
+Middle Ages, when there were Black Princes along with the Black Decrees.
+My liege lord _he_ would have been, but my liege Patria, what of
+her?--Well, well, well, he has three days in which to understand me
+better, and to think of his own regeneration a little."
+
+"Then," cried Murgia, limping gleefully toward him, "then there will be
+no pardon?"
+
+"I see," said Juarez, suddenly cold and very calm, "I am now corrupted.
+I am now safe, like the others. Take that chair, wait!"
+
+Saying which the Presidente left his desk, clapped his hands for the
+orderly, and seated himself near the window. To the orderly he said, "Go
+to the diligence office across the Plaza. Ask for Colonel Driscoll, the
+American officer who commands the escort of the two lawyers. Say that I
+wish to see him here at once."
+
+When Driscoll appeared, Juarez put to him this question, "Colonel--I'll
+say 'General' whenever you decide to be a citizen among us--Colonel, can
+you reach Queretaro early to-morrow morning by riding all night?"
+
+"Not with my own horse, sir. He's getting old, and deserves better."
+
+"Then it's all right, senor. You will take any horse you want. I have
+telegraphed to stop the execution, but there's been no reply. You must
+therefore see General Escobedo yourself. Look on my desk. Do you find a
+packet there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Sealed? Well, break it open. Now read the contents to my visitor here."
+
+Driscoll unfolded a long sheet of foolscap, and began to read. Murguia
+the while fidgeted in an agony, but listening further, his limbs grew
+tense, and a hideous joy overspread his face.
+
+"'But at sunrise of the nineteenth you will execute the sentence already
+approved.'"
+
+The prisoners were not to be deceived by false hopes. There would be no
+further appeal. The last, the final decision, had been made.
+
+"I have signed it, I believe, Colonel Driscoll?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then seal it again, and hurry! Good-bye, sir, good-bye."
+
+When Driscoll was gone, the Benemerito of America turned to the grinning
+hyena-like old man who was his visitor. His own dark features were
+passionless, impenetrable.
+
+"You observe, senor," he said, "that Justice does not require
+corrupting, nor even a memory. So let El Chaparrito add this to his
+philosophy, that he need not boast again of an infallible spur to civic
+loyalty, for he will never find it, nor I. And yet--there is
+patriotism."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+IN ARTICULO MORTIS
+
+
+  "The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty
+  of the soul.... Man cannot be happy and strong until he lives
+  in the present."--_Emerson._
+
+
+For Maximilian it was the eve of execution. The soul feels that there is
+much to decide at such a time, but under the nettling merciless load the
+soul will either flounder pitifully and decide nothing, else lie numb
+and in a half death vaingloriously believe that it has decided
+everything. So may the condemned be open-eyed or blind. Or, according to
+the police reporter, be either coward or stoic. But it really depends in
+large measure on whether realization be dulled, or no.
+
+Maximilian had too late come to understand that his anointed flesh was
+violable at all. He learned it only when the death watch was actually
+set on his each remaining breath. And now he was _en capilla_, in
+the chapel of the doomed; he, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of
+Austria, Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, Count of Hapsburg, Prince of
+Lorraine, Emperor of Mexico, even He!
+
+They had given him the tower room of Queretaro's old Capuchin church,
+and against the wall was an improvised altar. But the sacrament waited.
+The tapers on the snow-white cloth were as yet unlighted. Instead the
+Most Serene Archduke--Emperor no longer--read from a battered volume of
+Universal History, which, with a book's queer vagaries, had strayed into
+his cell. He read how Charles of England had died, then he paused,
+blinking at the two candles on the rough table. They were vague shapes,
+they were horrors, which he now began to see, as the visions of Truth so
+often are when hazily perceived.
+
+He bitterly envied that unhappy Stuart, who, before his palace window,
+among Cavaliers and Roundheads, had died in majesty, the bright central
+figure in a tragedy of august magnitude. But for the Hapsburg how
+sordid, how mean, it all would be! He could see already the gaping,
+yellow faces, sympathetic in their stupidity. _They_ would not
+really know that a prince was dying. The very guard with shouldered
+bayonet outside his door was a deserter, and it was this man, more than
+aught else, that gave him to chafe against his ignoble lot. The fellow
+never uttered a word, indeed; but he had a heavy, malignant eye, and
+each time he passed the large inner window that opened on the corridor
+he would look into the cell, as though to locate his prisoner. Then
+Maximilian could feel the insolent, mocking gleam upon himself, until
+for rage he clenched his fist.
+
+Thus the Most Serene Archduke's first perception of calamity was not
+that royal blood was to flow, but that it was to flow obscurely. Even
+the ancient raven curse, the curse of the Habicht which had given his
+House its very name, was now fulfilled by unclean buzzards. He saw them
+each day, perched on the neighboring roofs.
+
+He sighed and turned to his book. Universal History? Yes, but for
+hundreds and hundreds of years that history of millions and millions of
+people was no more than the record of his own little family group. Such
+a course of reading for such a man held a terrible grandeur, and it must
+have been a unique sensation of pride that touched the golden-bearded,
+ultra-refined viking prince. A spoilt child he was, and though so
+cruelly reproved by Life, he yet could learn no lesson in the passing
+footnote that _he_ would add to that family record. He could not
+see that the light which made the printed characters so dazzling, yet
+distorted them. He could not know that the commonest man of the millions
+and millions might read that Universal History by quite a different and
+a calmer light. But he was aware of the sentinel's tread back of him,
+and aware too of the fellow's coarse, familiar leer.
+
+One consolation he felt he might have had, and this was the dignity of
+martyrdom. But no one, alas, seemed to regard him as a martyr at all. He
+had begged that he alone should suffer. But the play at knightly
+generosity was too shallow. For at the time Maximilian believed that he
+would not suffer in any case. Later, though, when he knew that he must
+die, then with simple earnestness he had pleaded for Miramon and Mejia,
+and forgot himself altogether. But Juarez had hardly more than
+acknowledged the telegram, and now in the cell next him Miramon was
+confessing, and in the cell on his other side Mejia waited. Each of
+these two men would leave a wife and child.
+
+Someone knocked. "No, father, not yet," Maximilian answered gently,
+although his mood was impatience. The confessor sighed in protest
+against the waste of precious time, but he did not move away, as he had
+already twice before during the night. Instead he came and stood at the
+corridor window. His lip trembled pityingly. There was news, he said.
+
+Maximilian pushed back the book, and was on his feet. The priest meeting
+his eager look, shook his head sadly.
+
+"It comes from--from Miramar."
+
+Maximilian fell back. One hand groped out involuntarily, as in appeal
+before a blow. "News of Charlotte?" he asked faintly.
+
+Charlotte was dead, the priest told him.
+
+During a long time, after the priest had gone, his head lay on his arms,
+between the two candles. He heard no more the sentry challenges, nor
+sensed the menace in every slightest sound of the dark night outside.
+There was something else. "Death?" At first he did not consciously
+strive for an answer. But the question kept falling, and falling again,
+as a lash. The vulgar hands which plied the scourge, the stupid yellow
+faces, these no longer mattered. He felt the blows themselves, only the
+blows.
+
+She had died, the poor maniac! She had died, a thing for the lowliest
+pity. And this was true of the haughty child of Orleans because she had
+wanted a throne. Slowly her husband raised his head; and staring at the
+wall, his tear-dimmed eyes opened wider and wider. Because she had
+wanted a throne? Because she had wanted a dais above the meek and lowly,
+above those who now pitied her! His eyes fell on the Universal
+History--the family record, and there grew in his eyes a look of
+detestation. Groaning suddenly, he buried his head again in his arms.
+
+At dawn he too was to die, and because he too had craved a sceptre. Yet,
+and yet, he had meant to be an instrument of good. Born of kings,
+anointed by the Vicar of Christ, he had come as agent from the Almighty.
+But God had failed to sustain him, God had--again the blue eyes raised,
+but dry now, and stark in terror. "Yes, yes, yes," so his reeling soul
+cried to him, "there _is_ a God! There is, there is!" One sharp
+breath, and the mortal fear passed. In ghastly panic he crept back from
+the brink, either of the atheist's despair or of the madman's chaos. But
+the cost was heavy. Since God did exist, and God yet had failed him,
+then it was the man's Divine Right that must be false. He, only a man,
+had mistaken his Destiny. Nay, had he a Destiny? Or why, more than
+another man? Here, then, was the cost. To keep his hope of Heaven, he
+stepped down among the millions and millions. His Divine Right,
+crumbling under the grandeur of partition among the millions, became for
+himself the most infinitesimal of shares, neither greater nor less than
+that of any other human being. But glorified now by the holy alchemy of
+Charity, the tiny grain became divine indeed, and he beheld it as a
+glowing spark, his own inalienable share in the rights of man. So, for a
+moment, the poet prince knew again his old-time exultation. Even Truth,
+he now perceived, had her sublimities.
+
+But the pall of horror fell again. To-morrow he was to die. He was to
+die because his life long he had sought to rob others of the tiny grain,
+of their God-given dignity as men, and that too, even as they were
+awaking to its possession. The vanity, the presumptuous, inconsistent
+vanity of it all! Under the dark mediaeval cloak he had planned
+enlightenment, he, who had tried to rule without parliament, without
+constitution! He would have made a people believe in God's injustice, in
+God's choice of a man like them to be a demigod over them. Hence the
+blasphemous demigod had now to answer to human law. And it was meet and
+right. Purgatory was beginning on the eve of his death.
+
+He, the torch of Progress! Maximilian smiled scornfully on himself. He
+was only a clod of grit caught in the world's great wheels. The foreign
+substance had wrought a discordant screech for a moment, and then was
+mercilessly ground into powder and thrust out of the bearings. He
+pondered on the first days of the Family Group, when there was
+extenuation; more, when there was necessity, for a king. At any rate the
+monarch then earned, or could earn, his pomp and state by services
+actually rendered. And now? The Hapsburg decided that there was not a
+more contemptible parasite on the body politic. The crowned head was
+simply the first among paupers. He had his bowl of porridge, which was
+the civil list.
+
+The doomed prince sank to a depth of shame that may not be conceived. He
+was humanity's puny infant. He had dawdled among men centuries older
+than himself. His whole being was out of harmony with the universe. Fate
+had held his soul fast during those Dark Ages when he might have striven
+nobly, and now had cast it forth, an anachronism. It was a soul
+misplaced in eternity. The dire realization grew and grew, and with it
+the tragic agony, until with a sudden and the bitterest of cries he
+flung up his arms and fell heavily across the table.
+
+"My life!" he moaned in piteous begging for something he might not have.
+"My life, to live my life over again!"
+
+In the first light of morning Escobedo came. The Republican general
+unfolded a paper, and began to read. But instead of the death sentence,
+it was reprieve. President Juarez had postponed execution for three
+days.
+
+"Three days?" Maximilian repeated, wearily shaking his head. "If your
+Republic could give me as many centuries, but three days!--Three days,
+in which to _live_ my life!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+KNIGHTHOOD'S BELATED FLOWER
+
+
+  "Trusting to shew, in wordes few,
+  That men have an ill use
+  (To their own shame) women to blame,
+  And causeless them accuse."
+                  --_The Nut-Brown Maid._
+
+
+Later the same morning there sounded the ineffable swish of silken
+petticoats along the corridor and the clinking of high heels on the
+tiles. La Senorita Marquesa d'Aumerle had obtained permission to visit
+His Most Serene Highness. The sentinel of the evening before was again
+on duty, and his evil crossed eye seemed to lighten with vast humor as
+he presented arms for the lady to pass. She met his insolence with a
+searching, level gaze.
+
+Maximilian hastened to the door of his bare cell, and took both her
+hands in his. "I am beginning to recognize my friends," he said simply.
+"I know, I know," he added, "you come to tell me that you failed to get
+the pardon. But you do bring reprieve."
+
+He would have her believe that he valued that.
+
+Jacqueline regarded steadily the tall, slight figure in black, with the
+pinioned sheep of the Golden Fleece about his neck, and she sighed. She
+was disappointed in him. She had thought that pride of race, if nothing
+more, would give him character during these last moments. She allowed,
+too, for the grief, and the remorse, in the blow of Charlotte's death.
+But she was not prepared for the roving eyes, the disordered mind, the
+feverish unrest of the condemned prince. Had his soul, then, been a
+cringing one throughout the night just past? It was the first time she
+had seen him, except at a distance, since the day she arrived in
+Queretaro, for she had chosen, and perhaps maliciously, to disconcert
+the tongue of slander. Hence she could not picture the ravages of
+sickness and anxiety, until now when she beheld his haggard face. It was
+one to bring a pang. The cheeks were hollow, the lines sharply drawn,
+and the skin was white, so very white, with never a fleck of pink
+remaining. And staring from the wasted flesh were the eyes, large and
+round and faded blue, and in them an appealing, a haunted look. But they
+softened at sight of her, as though comforted already.
+
+"A reprieve is best," he said. "You cannot think that I want a pardon,
+now that, that _she_ is dead!"
+
+"But sire----"
+
+"'Sire'? Ah, my lady, you are a little late, by something like a few
+hundred years. You see our American was right after all; a letter no
+longer makes a king."
+
+It was a bon mot that Maximilian had always enjoyed, it being his own,
+but this time he was most zealously in earnest.
+
+"Monsieur, then," she said, in no mood for reforms of etiquette. "Only,
+let me talk! We have three days, three days which are to be used. Your
+Highness must escape!"
+
+But now she understood him less than before, for he only smiled wearily.
+It was, then, something else than fear that had broken him so.
+
+Escape? And that guard in the corridor? Passing, ever passing, the
+diabolical humorist seemed to chuckle inwardly, as though to stand
+death-watch were the most exquisite of jokes.
+
+"That man?" whispered Jacqueline. "Why, that's Don Tiburcio. He was
+driven out of the Imperialist ranks by Father Fischer. But from his
+lips, this very night, Your Highness will hear that the road is open to
+Vera Cruz. Ah sire--monsieur--we have been working, we others. There
+will be horses ready, there will be a long ride, and then, you will
+safely board an Austrian ship waiting for you."
+
+Maximilian slowly shook his head. "No," he said, "I am ready to die,
+as--as ready as I shall ever be."
+
+"But the remaining years of your natural life, Your Highness counts them
+as nothing! Yet you might live twice your present age!"
+
+"My life--over again," he murmured dreamily.
+
+"Of course, why not?"
+
+"One year to redeem each year that has gone."
+
+"Years of Destiny!" she cried, thinking to touch him there.
+
+"No!" he exclaimed, so harshly and quick that it startled her. "But for
+me they will be years of dearest mercy. Wait, tell me first, Miramon and
+Mejia----"
+
+"Yes, yes, we will save them too. Only, the risk is greater."
+
+"Bien!" He had almost accepted, but he smothered the word, and starting
+up, began to pace the room. At last he stopped. "The risk must be
+lessened, for them," he said. "_I_ will remain."
+
+"H'm'n," the girl ejaculated, "Hamlet declines? Then there will be no
+play at all, at all."
+
+Maximilian knew how stubborn she could be; and so, reluctantly, he
+joined the plot.
+
+"I have deserved Marquez and Fischer and Lopez," he sighed. "But why
+there should be friends, even now, that I cannot understand."
+
+Yet she told him bluntly why she wanted his safety. It was on France's
+account. Still, his gratitude was no less profound. She who would give
+life to others, what was her life to be henceforth? The mellowing
+sorrow, which her vivacity could not hide, smote him again, as it had
+that evening in Mexico when he came to her for counsel. He remembered.
+Out of a useless ambition for her country she had squandered her name,
+blighted her future. He remembered how, looking on her saddened face, he
+had been exalted to a pure devotion, and had burned with knightly fervor
+to do her some impossible service. But what was the service? There his
+memory failed, and he despised the chivalrous ardor which could be
+quenched with feeding on itself. After the fearful vigil of the night
+before, he had found a suit of armor beside him. In a word, he had
+forgotten self. Simple compassion was enough. That service? that
+service? If he could only remember. But he must. And in hot anger he
+strode back and forth, while Jacqueline sat and gazed in wonder. Once,
+turning from the corridor window, he paused. The guard had stopped a
+man, who now was evidently waiting until the prisoner should be
+unoccupied. Unseen himself, Maximilian recognized in the man the
+American named Driscoll. And then he remembered. He remembered
+Jacqueline's secret, betrayed to him that evening in Mexico. He
+remembered that her happiness was lost in the loss of this man's
+respect. Here, at last, lay the impossible service!
+
+Maximilian glanced toward her stealthily. No, from where she sat she
+could not see the corridor, could not see the waiting American. A moment
+later Maximilian stood behind her; and when he spoke, she thought it odd
+that he should change from French to halting English.
+
+"Miss d'Aumerle," he began, in distinct if nervous phrasing, "yes, it
+was for France, all, all of which you haf done. Therefore is it that you
+haf come to this country, and here to Queretaro, whatever is to the
+contrary said."
+
+"De grace," she laughed, rising abruptly, "there's enough to do to-day
+without discussing----"
+
+But he intercepted her even as she opened the door.
+
+"Will Your Highness kindly let me pass?"
+
+"And I know, I alone, that nefer haf you toward myself once felt, once
+shown, that which----"
+
+A sharp, indignant cry escaped her. Following her gaze he saw the
+American pass on down the corridor and out of hearing.
+
+"Now who," exclaimed the chagrined prince, "would ever have imagined
+such delicacy of breeding!"
+
+"And don't ever again," cried Jacqueline furiously, "imagine that
+_I_ stand in need of being righted!" Wherewith she too was gone,
+leaving her clumsy knight staring blankly after her.
+
+A few moments later Driscoll knocked.
+
+It was the first meeting of these two men since the memorable afternoon
+at Cuernavaca, when Driscoll had surprised Jacqueline listening to
+royalty's shameless suit. Now he beheld Fatality's retribution for that
+day's bitterness. Retribution, yes. But it was not restitution. The girl
+he loved had just passed him in the corridor with a slight casual nod,
+and he would not, could not, stretch forth a hand to stop her. Instead,
+the smile so ironical of Fate had touched his lips.
+
+"I was sent by Senor Juarez, sir," he addressed the archduke in the tone
+of military business. "The President is afraid your three days of
+reprieve will be misunderstood. He sent for me as I was leaving San Luis
+yesterday, and I--I was to tell you----"
+
+"You need not hesitate, colonel."
+
+"Well, that you must not hope for pardon, for the sentence will
+positively be carried out day after to-morrow. That--I believe that is
+all."
+
+"But--" Maximilian called, staying him. "Dios mio, such news merits a
+longer telling. It seems to me too, Senor Americano, that you should
+enjoy it the more, since it was partly you who brought me to this."
+
+"I don't know as I'd thought of that. How?"
+
+"You ask how? Do you forget how you took the traitor Lopez to Escobedo,
+the night I was betrayed?"
+
+Driscoll swung bluntly round on his questioner. "No I don't," he
+replied. "But you see, there was such a lot of bloodshed scheduled for
+the next day?"
+
+"Isn't that rather a curious reproof from a soldier? Loyal hearts would
+have bled, yes, and gladly. Noble fellows, they would have saved their
+Emperor!"
+
+Driscoll half snorted, and turned on his heel. But he stopped, his lips
+pressed to a clean, hard line. "What of those townsmen in the trenches?"
+he demanded. "It wasn't their fight."
+
+Maximilian's eyes opened very wide, and slowly his expression changed.
+The thick lower lip drooped and quivered. Suddenly he came nearer the
+American, a trembling hand outstretched.
+
+"I was saved that," he murmured earnestly.
+
+"They were," the grim trooper corrected him.
+
+"The townsmen, yes. But I--I was kept from murder. God in heaven, I
+would have murdered them! Ah, senor, if I could put to my account a
+night's work such as yours, that night, when you used the traitor! I
+could almost thank Lopez. I do thank you."
+
+Still Driscoll failed to notice the proffered hand. He might have, had
+he seen his suppliant's face, and the tense anguish there.
+
+"Those innocent non-combatants, then," Maximilian went on, "so they
+counted more than a prince with you?"
+
+"Of course, there were a thousand of 'em."
+
+The other's haggard look gave way to a smile, half sad, half amused, and
+taking the American by the shoulder in a grip almost affectionate, he
+said, "Colonel, did you ever happen to know of one Don Quixote of La
+Mancha? Well, lately I've begun to think that he was the truest of
+gentlemen, though now I believe I could name another who----"
+
+"And," interrupted Driscoll, "did you ever try to locate the most
+dignified animal that walks, bipeds not excepted? Well, sir, it's the
+donkey. Take him impartially, and you'll say so too."
+
+The strain was over. Maximilian laughed. "If Don Quixote had only had
+your sanity!" he began; "or rather," he added, charmed with the conceit,
+"if knighthood had had it, then the poor don would never have been
+needed to be born at all."
+
+Ignoring the sincerity of the Hapsburg's new philosophy, and how
+tragically it was grounded, Driscoll only smiled in a very peculiar way.
+Knighthood? The word was supercilious cant, and irritated him. During
+that very moment, while listening to Chivalry's devotee, the young
+trooper thought of a little ivory cross in his pocket, a cross which was
+stained with a girl's blood. Murguia had given it to him, to give to
+Maximilian on the eve of execution. But Driscoll had not promised, and
+yet Murguia had implored him to take it, even without promising. The old
+man held faith in vengeance as a spring to drive all souls alike, and if
+Maximilian's last earthly moment could be embittered with sight of a
+cross, then, he firmly believed, the American needed only to be tempted
+with the means to do it. Moreover, in a sudden impulse, Driscoll had
+taken the holy symbol, "to do with as he chose." There was no message,
+Murguia had explained. The Senor Emperador would read the graven name,
+"Maria de la Luz," and that would suffice.
+
+Looking now on the cultured gentleman caressing his beard, Driscoll
+thought again how hellishly distorted was the sign of salvation then in
+his pocket. But he left it there. He, too, had a king's pride, incapable
+of low spite. Charity alone, though, would have held him, if he had but
+known that Maximilian was ignorant of the dead girl's fate.
+
+The archduke for his part had been amiable and conciliatory, because
+there was a certain delicate question he wished to ask.
+
+"Oh by the way, mi coronel," he said abruptly, "I must extend my excuses
+for keeping you waiting in the corridor just now. But there was another
+visitor here. And as we happened to be talking of--well, of a rather
+personal matter, not intended for outside ears----"
+
+"Do not worry. When you raised your voice, I turned and left."
+
+"But perhaps," said Maximilian slowly, "it would have been better if you
+had overheard, either you or another knowing the cruel rumors
+which--which link my recent visitor's name with my own. Then the truth
+would have been made known. That truth, senor," he hastened to add,
+despite a hardening frown between the American's eyes, "means first that
+I have been honored, indeed, in my visitor's----"
+
+He got no further. A broad hand closed over his mouth.
+
+"Another word of that, and I'll--I'll----"
+
+The threat was left unfinished. Gasping in the chair where he had
+fallen, Maximilian found himself alone. He was vaguely nonplussed. There
+had been so many revelations of late that he thought this one simply a
+further re-adjusting of himself to the modern world of men. The present
+instance had to do with the critical juncture where the woman enters.
+But he had learned something else, too. The American loved her, and that
+was important. Yet lovers were very contrary beings, he mused
+lugubriously.
+
+"Still, I shall try again," he decided. "One humble success against my
+career of distinguished failures should not be too much to expect."
+
+The night that followed, a black, favorable night, was the time planned
+for escape. Horses ready saddled waited outside the town under the
+aqueduct. Certain guards were bribed, among them Don Tiburcio. The
+humorous rascal had driven a hard bargain, but only because the money
+was to be had. He would have sold himself as briskly for the cream of
+the jest.
+
+Late the same night there came a frantic pounding at Driscoll's door,
+where he was quartered in the sacristy of the old Capuchin church.
+"Well?" he muttered, alert already.
+
+"Hurry, mi coronel!" a cracked voice blended with the knocking. "Hurry,
+you are wanted!"
+
+"Murgie!" Driscoll exclaimed, flinging wide the door. "Back from San
+Luis, and prowling round here as usual, eh? Well, what's the matter?"
+
+"Quick, senor! Maximilian is sick. Go, go to him!"
+
+Partly dressed, bootless, unarmed, Driscoll shoved the old man aside,
+and sped through the church, hopping over half awakened soldiers as he
+went. Once in the street, he glanced up at the tower room, which was
+Maximilian's, and thought it odd that no light streamed through the
+narrow slits there. The sentinels, too, were gone. But he ran up the
+steps and darted along the corridor, only to strike his head against a
+heavy wooden door that was ajar. He rushed inside the cell, and with
+arms outspread quickly covered the space of it, in the utter dark
+smashing a chair, crashing over a table, cursing a mishap to his toe.
+But he found no one.
+
+"This here's a jail-break," he mumbled under his breath. "Dam' that
+Murgie, he's roped me in to stop 'em!" Whereat, all unconsciously, he
+smiled again at Fatality.
+
+Groping his way back to the corridor, he felt rather than saw three dim
+figures steal past the door. Silently, swiftly, he gave pursuit. He
+heard a fervent whisper just ahead.
+
+"Hasten, dear friends, and may God----"
+
+The next second he was grappling with someone. But his unknown captive
+did not resist.
+
+"There, senor, loosen your fingers. I am not escaping. I am returning to
+my cell. But I had to make the other two think that I was with them."
+
+The voice was Maximilian's.
+
+"Hark! Ah, poor souls, they have failed!"
+
+The prince spoke truly. A fierce "Alto ahi!" sounded below. Then there
+were musket shots and the confusion of many scrambling feet. Murguia had
+routed out the church barracks. And when torches were brought, the
+soldiers discovered that they had hands on Miramon and Mejia. But the
+false sentinels were gone! In leaving the road clear they had used it
+themselves, already.
+
+"You fools!" suddenly a half crazed wail arose. "Fools, _he_ has
+escaped! He----"
+
+"Oh dry up, Murgie," said Driscoll, coming down the steps. "He's gone
+back to his room, I reckon."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE TITLE OF NOBILITY
+
+
+  "Hear, therefore, O ye kings, and understand."
+                       --_Wisdom of Solomon._
+
+
+One more sunset, one more sunrise! And then?...
+
+Maximilian again confronted the ghostly enumeration. But this time his
+last day should be the day of a man's work, in simple-hearted humility.
+He no more searched the skies to find a supernal finger there. He let
+Destiny alone, and did his best instead. For a man's best is Destiny's
+peer.
+
+The fiery June sun was dying in its larger shell of bronze over the
+western sierras, and the self-same blue that vaults beautiful Tuscany was
+taking on its richer, darker hue, when a foreigner in the land, Din
+Driscoll, walked under the Alameda trees, his pipe cold in his mouth, he
+perplexed before his heavy spirits. For he no longer had war to
+distract, to engross.
+
+Maximilian's physician, an Austrian, found him in his reverie. Would the
+Herr Americano at once repair to His Highness attend? The senor's
+presence would a favor be esteemed, in reason that a witness was greatly
+necessitated.
+
+Wondering not a little, Driscoll hastened back into the town. As the
+physician did not follow, he arrived alone. But in the door of the
+archduke's cell he stopped, angry and embarrassed. For his eyes
+encountered a second pair, which were no less angry, which moreover,
+were Jacqueline's. Maximilian and Padre Soria, the father confessor,
+were also there, but Driscoll at first saw no one but Jacqueline. As
+with him, she had been vaguely summoned, without knowing why. A last
+testament was to be signed, she imagined, but in his choice of witnesses
+she thought that Maximilian might at least have shown more delicacy. As
+to cruelty also, she would not confess, but cruelty it was,
+nevertheless. To see again this American was to know memory quickened
+into torture, and days afterward there would still be with her, vividly,
+hatefully, the beloved awkwardness of his strong frame, the splendid,
+roguish head, now so forbidding, and more than all, the way he smiled of
+late. It was a smile so cold, so cheerless, a something so changed in
+him since the old, piquant days of their first acquaintance. Despise
+herself as she might, Jacqueline knew how the sight of the man halted
+there would leave her whole woman's being athirst and panting.
+
+Maximilian's thin white face lighted eagerly when he perceived that
+Driscoll had come. The haggard despair of two days before had given way
+to a serene calm, like that which soothes a dying man when the pain is
+no longer felt. In a gentleness of command that would not be denied, he
+rose and brought the American into the room.
+
+"Colonel Driscoll," he began, "you know, of course, that a witness is
+the world's deputy. He is named to learn a certain truth, but afterward
+he must champion that truth, even against the world. So you find
+yourself here, but first I wish to thank----"
+
+"Please don't mention it," Driscoll interposed. "I'm willing to do
+anything I can."
+
+"Then remember," said Maximilian, "that you are a witness, and a witness
+only. Can you bear that in mind, senor, no matter what you may hear?"
+
+Driscoll nodded, but the very first words all but made him a violent
+actor as well. Maximilian had turned to Jacqueline. For a moment he
+paused, then with a grave dignity spoke.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "reverently, prayerfully, I ask your hand in
+marriage."
+
+She gasped, and so sharp and quick that certainly she was the most
+dumbfounded there. Her utter stupefaction amazed Driscoll as much again
+as the question itself. He stiffened as though struck. If this were a
+revelation? If it could be--if it could be that she really knew no
+reason why she should marry Maximilian?
+
+The archduke observed them both, and his eyes shone with kindliness. But
+making a gesture for patience, he hurried on. "Father Soria here," he
+said, "will come in the morning, just before the--the execution, to
+perform the ceremony. A judge of the Republic will come too, for the
+civil marriage. As to the banns----"
+
+"But why--_why_, parbleu?"
+
+Jacqueline stood before him, stung from her speechless trance by fury.
+Behind narrowed lids the gray eyes hardened as points of steel.
+
+"You shall know, mademoiselle," he answered softly. "It is a boon I ask
+of you, the greatest, and the only one before I go----"
+
+"Why? Tell me why!"
+
+"Because it is _the_ boon a true knight may crave. It is to right
+before the world the noblest woman a knight can ever know----"
+
+"Sire!"
+
+The word was rage and supplication both. It was a hurt cry, piteous to
+hear. Then the glint dying from her eyes blazed to tempestuous life in
+those of the Missourian. But the priest's hand touched his arm, and the
+priest's voice, low and gentle, stayed him.
+
+Maximilian, though, had seen the outburst. "Ah yes, senor, I remember,"
+he said, and smiled, "one may be slapped upon the mouth, yes, yes, for
+even breathing my lady's name when one talks of rumor."
+
+Jacqueline darted at them a puzzled glance. She did not understand at
+first. Then she divined. And then, wide and gloriously, her eyes opened
+on Driscoll, her defender. But in the instant they sought a safer
+quarter. She could not, and would not, forgive him for being there at
+all.
+
+"However," the obdurate prince continued, "our witness must bear with me
+this time, for I will--_will_, I tell each of you--speak plainly.
+The false scandal does exist. Deny it, dear lady, if you can.--Nay,
+senor, _you_ believe it, or did. So, now, as the world's deputy
+here, you must be armed to foil those venomous tongues. But there is
+only one way. You shall tell them that they talk of Maximilian's
+widow----"
+
+"But----"
+
+Jacqueline, Driscoll, both spoke at once. But the girl flashed on the
+man an angry command for silence.
+
+"Enough, enough!" she cried, "Let me speak, then end it. Whatever others
+may think, Your Highness extends me his respect? Bien, but that gives me
+a certain right, which is the right to consider just one thing in
+answering the question of Your Highness--just one lone, little thing."
+
+"And that?"
+
+"Is--is whether or not I have the honor to love Your Highness. Oh, the
+shame in such sacrifice, the shame you put on me! You should have known
+my answer already."
+
+Her answer? Driscoll stirred uneasily. What, indeed, was her answer?
+
+"Yet later, mademoiselle," pursued her inflexible suitor, "when others
+aspire to your hand, there might come one for whom your answer would be
+favorable. How then, if this suitor, when pausing to hear what the world
+says of you----"
+
+"He'd choke it down the world's throat!" Driscoll burst forth. "He alone
+need know it's a lie."
+
+Jacqueline started as she heard him speak, but the glad and unintended
+look she gave him changed as quick as thought to haughty resentment.
+After all, he was still there.
+
+"But how else," Maximilian persisted, "can such a man know so much?"
+
+Then, a captive absolute to his lofty idea, the poet prince pleaded for
+it as one inspired. All things worked, as by Heaven's own will, to
+sanction what he proposed. There was Charlotte's death. There was his
+own. Dying, he was still a Mexican, and might wed in any station he
+chose. While if he lived, as an archduke of Austria he could not. But he
+detested life. With it he had bettered no one. Yet by his death he hoped
+to save more than life to another. This other was the girl before him.
+He had wrecked her dearest ambition. For France's sake she would have
+lured him from peril. For that, and that alone, she had sacrificed her
+name. Such accounted for their interview at Cuernavaca. Such accounted
+for her coming to Queretaro. Yet through his own blind weakness she had
+failed. France had lost Mexico, he his life, and she--her happiness. But
+the last could yet be restored. And why not purchase it with his death,
+since he must have died in any case?
+
+"Must have," Driscoll interrupted, "must have died in any case?"
+
+The American had listened perplexed, now with a quick, eager start, now
+with crinkled brows. First of all the old mystery and its anguish had
+assailed him. The hideous, gloomy tangle would wound him round again.
+Did Jacqueline care for this prince? Surely, because he had seen the
+evidence. But why had she intrigued against his Empire, why had she
+turned Confederate aid from him?
+
+Then, as the ruined monarch spoke, the other man saw. He saw the truth.
+Truth that reconciled all contradictions. That explained what even the
+theory of her wanton heart had only half satisfied before. Explained
+everything by that heart of purest gold. The lover knew now why she had
+delivered him to Lopez and the Tiger, two years ago, though with the act
+so perversely confessing her love for him. He knew why, at Boone's
+Cordova plantation, she had tempted him to hold her for his own, though
+even then she was returning to the capital, to Maximilian. No, it was
+not wanton sport. It was not contradiction. But it was conflict. In the
+contemplation of that conflict he stood unnerved. It was the conflict
+between a wild yet altogether French scheme of patriotic endeavor and
+her own good woman's love. His eyes wandered to her, half afraid, and
+the chill of months about his heart was gone, as some great berg of ice
+sinks in the warmth of sunny waters. From siren alluring flesh whose
+touch was woe, she was become a sceptred angel, far, far away, so
+tantalizingly far away!
+
+Thus Driscoll listened on, happy in his soul of a man, yet abashed as a
+boy. But listening, at the last he was perplexed anew, though for
+another reason.
+
+"Must have died, sir?" he repeated again. "But that wasn't what you
+thought last night. No sir, last night you thought you could escape. But
+just the same you turned back. You chose to die!"
+
+"His Highness," spoke the gray-haired priest, "returned for the
+senorita's answer."
+
+"My answer?" cried Jacqueline. "You mean, father, for my sake?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Driscoll started violently, perplexed no longer. "By God, sir," he
+swore, and clapped Maximilian on the shoulder, "but you are a man!"
+
+The prince recoiled, his instincts of breeding in arms against the
+savage equality. But then, slowly, a smile that was almost beatific
+touched his lips, and without knowing it, he straightened proudly, as
+majesty would.
+
+"A man?" he murmured, breathing exaltation. "Then am I, at my last
+moment, come into harmony with God's own ordering of the universe. For
+he made man on the sixth day, not a Hapsburg. Man, and after His Own
+Image--Oh, but that is the title the hardest of all to win! You--you
+don't think, senor, that you would like to take it back?"
+
+Driscoll reddened inexplicably. Murguia's ivory cross was still in his
+pocket.
+
+"No!" he blurted out with sudden defiance. "It's the truth!"
+
+"Then," said Maximilian solemnly, "on your word I stake my faith.
+To-morrow, at the judgment-seat, I shall hope to hear myself called so."
+
+"Your Highness," questioned Jacqueline in a kind of daze, "Your Highness
+did not _intend_ to escape last night?"
+
+"No, he did not," Driscoll answered for him. "He got Miramon and Mejia
+started all right, and then, without knowing that your plot had failed,
+he turned back to this cell here, alone."
+
+"Your Highness, you did that for--for----"
+
+Her voice broke, and she stopped abruptly and went to the narrow window.
+With her back to them, she groped for the dainty bit of cambric that was
+her handkerchief.
+
+"So you see, my daughter," said the priest, drawing near her, "what he
+would have given, what, before Heaven, he has given, to tell you what
+you so hotly resent. Do you resent it now?"
+
+The beautiful head shook slowly. She was touching her eyes with her
+handkerchief.
+
+"Then you will not let his sacrifice be in vain? You will marry him?"
+
+Impetuously she turned, and faced them. There were blinding drops, clear
+as diamonds, on the long lashes. "Oh Your Highness, Your--Oh, there is
+something you can tell me that is--that is inexpressibly better?"
+
+"Let me know what it is."
+
+"It is if--if you can forgive me.--Mon Dieu, why did you need to heap
+this terrible sacrifice on me? Why could you not remember that I tried
+to drive you from your empire? That I plotted against you? That----"
+
+"Hush, you would have saved me."
+
+"Oh, only incidentally, and you knew it. Yet you must----"
+
+"Don't! There's nothing to forgive.--But wait, we will grant that there
+really is, but only that I may exact my price of forgiveness."
+
+"The price? Name it."
+
+"That you will marry me, here, to-morrow morning, before I die."
+
+Jacqueline raised her head. "Has Your Highness," she demanded, smiling
+shyly behind her tears, "has he forgotten the woman's, rather my
+consideration, before such a question?"
+
+Driscoll straightened, squared his shoulders to take a blow. To his
+blindness her manner looked like awakening love for the other man--and
+for the man himself, not for the prince! His sense of loss, his agony,
+were extreme. But of the old bitterness he now knew nothing. His rival
+was putting the question. "And according to that consideration,
+mademoiselle?"
+
+Driscoll did not see her swift glance toward himself. He was hurrying
+out lest he might hear her answer. And she let him go--till he reached
+the door. But there, like one frozen, he halted rigidly.
+
+"Helas, I do not love you, sire," Jacqueline had answered, very quietly.
+
+Maximilian, however, did not seem heart broken.
+
+His attention was all for the mere witness. He saw the effect on that
+witness. In Driscoll's glad face he read his own triumph, his own
+purpose achieved. Jacqueline was righted at last.
+
+"No," he agreed, "I could not hope for so much.--But another might."
+
+Then apropos of nothing, he went and flung his arms about Driscoll. The
+astounded trooper could only grip his hand, just once, without a word.
+Then he was gone.
+
+Maximilian watched him go. The priest turned to Jacqueline. She, too,
+stood poised so long as his spurs rang through the corridor. At last
+silence fell on them. For a moment she hesitated. Then, trembling, her
+eyes moist, she held out her hand. "Good-bye," she whispered. But,
+impulsively, she raised her arm and touched the doomed man's forehead
+lightly with her finger tips, making a blurred sign of the cross. And,
+not daring an instant longer, she too fled.
+
+Maximilian was alone with the priest. The room was growing dark. It was
+the last night.
+
+"Now, father, light the tapers, there on the altar. Yes, I am ready.
+Ready? Blessed Mother in Heaven, it is more than I had thought to be!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE ABBEY OF MOUNT REGRET
+
+
+  "O, here
+  Will I set up my everlasting rest,
+  And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
+  From this world-wearied flesh."
+                       --_Romeo and Juliet_.
+
+
+It is curious and humiliating, how Nature does not vex herself in the
+least for the dying of a man. And yet, to the man, the event is so very
+important! Each breath of spaceless night, each twinkle from the
+firmament, though but the phantom of a ray quenched ages before,
+everything, he teases into anxious commentary on his own puny end. There
+could not be more ado if the Universe were in the throes, writhing
+against a reconquering Chaos. Harassed creature, what ails him is only
+the pathetic fallacy, which is a soothing melody and stimulating to
+mortal pride. But the lapses into healthier realization are very, very
+hard to bear.
+
+How cold it was, when Maximilian awoke! The chill seemed creeping nearer
+his heart, nearer the citadel. And how black the night, before the dawn!
+But where, now, were his matches? He had the same monotonous trouble of
+any other morning in getting one to light. Then the two candles guttered
+fitfully, sordidly, just as they had always done. The white cloths of
+the last communion seemed a ghostly intrusion on what was of every day.
+Maximilian drew his cloak about him. The chill was simply of the
+plateau, of the night, not the portent of death. The world without was
+dark and desolate, but that had no reference to the tomb. The world was
+merely taking its normal sleep. The heavy cloak ought to answer--but, it
+did not.
+
+He took up the snuffers, coaxing the yellow flames to brighter promise,
+then set the candles before him on the table. A piece of dripping tallow
+fell upon his hand, and the hand jerked back. The man pondered. So, even
+his flesh was part of Nature too, and heeded trivial pain, with no
+thought of the bullets to drive through it shortly.
+
+He wrote two or three letters yet remaining, to friends, to his brother,
+the Emperor of Austria. He penned words of farewell, yet even as the
+tears welled in his eyes, he needed to stop and make sure that he had
+indeed not more than three hours yet to live. It was difficult, though,
+with the candles spluttering there, in the ordinary, every-day fashion.
+He signed the last letter, to his mother. He gazed at the signature, of
+characters squarely formed. He might have written it yesterday, or the
+year before. It looked the same. But the pen he had just dropped had
+dropped forever. No, no, that should not be! And he snatched it up
+again, and wrote, scribbled, covered paper, fearing to stop. But at last
+he did stop, with a shivering laugh. He must face this thing, he
+decided. And over and over again he told himself, "I have written my
+last. Yes, my last!" and steadfastly resisted the taunting, airy quill
+lying there. So, what was harder than farewell to loved ones, he nerved
+himself to end the small actions of his daily existence.
+
+Maximilian had his life long been a dreamer, ever gazing wide-eyed as a
+child on the wonderful fantasies that came, whether entrancing or
+dreadful. But the child's fantasies are kindred with man's philosophies.
+Often, as he lay awaiting sleep, there was one particular thought that
+would bring him quickly, stark, staring awake. And this thought was, how
+certain things always came to pass. No matter how far away, nor how very
+slow their approach, making vague the hope or horror of them, yet the
+actual, present hour of their happening always struck at last. There was
+the eve of the day when he should be of age. Oh, but he had longed for
+that day! He had longed until he craftily suspected it never would
+arrive. And yet, despite those leaden-footed oxen, the minutes, arrive
+it did, in very fact. The eve of that day was a happy bed-time; but over
+his ardent reveries, over the vista of future achievements, there
+suddenly, darkly loomed another thought, a foretoken and clammy shroud,
+which smote the young prince with trembling. For would not the day of
+his death, however far away also, sometime be the present, passing
+moment, as surely, just as surely, as this anniversary of his birth?
+Here was a terrifying glimpse of mortality.
+
+When, not fifteen years later, Maximilian opened his eyes in the black
+Capuchin cell, and comprehension grew on him of the present day's
+meaning, he recalled how the fantasy of a morning of death had first
+come to him. He was a boy, and he was to go on a voyage. The boy had
+awakened when there was scarcely light as yet, and heard his mother at
+the door. "It is time, dear." She spoke low, not liking to break his
+slumber. But in the silence of all the world her voice was clear, and
+very sweet, and the words stood forth against his memory ever afterward.
+He was to be gone from her for a time, and this was in her mind as she
+called him. The boy, though, could think of nothing except that his
+little excursion among new and strange adventures was to begin, actually
+to begin. But then, quite unaccountably, there fell over his eagerness
+a chilling gloom. The delightful sprite named Expectation, who had
+whispered so piquantly of this same eventful morn, had basely changed
+herself into a hideous vampire, and she muttered at him, in frightful,
+raucous tones. Yet the hag's snarls were true promises. There was
+to come, surely, inexorably, a certain other eventful morn, and
+he would awake, and without his mother's calling him, he would
+know--_know_--that it was time!
+
+Back in that childhood hour he had lain for a while quite inconsolable,
+until his mother came again, and rested her hand on his head, and told
+him--"Why, one would think the little goose was going away forever!" It
+was broad daylight by now, too; and wholly comforted, he had sprung up,
+joyfully alive. Eternity did not worry him any more for a week.
+
+But the awakening of this later morning, in a Mexican prison! And when
+he understood that the old familiar fantasy was become a fact! When he
+remembered how once he had been consoled in his boyhood! For a moment
+the sense of loss and of helplessness was stifling, and he
+yearned--yearned frantically, as he never had as a boy--for the touch of
+his mother's hand, for her voice, so low and sweet. The horrid cruelty
+he could not, during that moment, bear. He felt that he must cry out for
+her, like a very child. And though he wept, it was the man, and the
+man's despair that his was not now the boy's need of comfort.
+
+But when they came in the first dawn and knocked at his door, they found
+him serene, untroubled, and only the wonted shade of melancholy on his
+brow. He greeted them courteously, and was desirous that they should
+have no unnecessary difficulties on his account. Being dressed already,
+punctiliously, and in black, he himself went to call Miramon and Mejia,
+and brought them to his own cell, where they received the last sacrament
+together.
+
+Later the three condemned were at breakfast--bread, chicken, a little
+wine and a cup of coffee--when horses' hoofs rang abruptly in the street
+below, and as abruptly ceased under their window. There was a command,
+and sabres rasped against their scabbards to gain the light. Maximilian
+raised eyes filled with pity to his two companions. Mejia, an Indian
+thoroughly, made a gesture of impatience. The handsome Miramon, of
+French blood, shrugged his shoulders. Then both glanced timidly in their
+turn at Maximilian, and each finding a hand stretched forth, grasped it
+silently. But the priests of the condemned, who were waiting apart, felt
+their blood turn to icy beads. For them the quick metallic gust of
+strident life down in the street had the merciless quality of hammering
+upon a coffin lid.
+
+Troops filed up the stairs, and along the corridor. They halted, faced
+the door, grounded arms. An officer stepped out, fumbled with a
+document, and read the death sentence. Maximilian gently released
+himself from one and another of those present, and turning to the
+Austrian physician, handed him his wedding ring. "You will give it to my
+mother," he said. Father Soria's eyes filled with tears, one plump fist
+clenched pathetically. Maximilian passed an arm over the good man's
+shoulder, and with him walked out among the soldiers. He nodded to them
+encouragingly, and so started on his little journey.
+
+Three ramshackle public hacks, set high over wabbling wheels, and drawn
+by mules, waited at the door. Maximilian smiled an apology as he
+motioned Father Soria to precede him into the first. The troops used
+their spurs. A whip cracked. The springs jolted. Everywhere, on the
+curbs, in windows, on housetops, there were people. The archduke had the
+impression of breath tensely held, and of eyes, eyes strained, curious,
+and awed, like those of children who witness suffering and cannot
+understand.
+
+Passing the convent of Santa Clara, Maximilian peered upward at the
+windows; and, as he hoped, he saw Jacqueline. She was leaning far out,
+and tremulously poised. Tender compassion was in every line of her tense
+body, but as their gaze met she tried to smile, bravely and cheerfully,
+and until the hack swung round the corner, there was her hand waving him
+farewell. The little journey might have been, a fete, and somehow, he
+was comforted.
+
+"I wonder," he mused, "if I've done very much for her, after all. Or for
+that American, named Driscoll? Will she--" He shook his head, and
+sighed. "No, she is not the lass to have him, not after my little scene
+of last night. But, the choice does rest with her, now. And for a girl,
+that is everything.--Alas, poor young man!"
+
+His rueful prophecies were that moment interrupted by a woman's scream.
+It rose piercingly over the clatter of their march. Maximilian put out
+his head and looked back. The woman was running beside Mejia's hack,
+panting, stumbling through the dust, her black hair streaming. She held
+a babe in her rebosa, but with her free hand she clutched weakly at the
+spokes. To the clumsy, pitying soldiers who would force her away, she
+cried again, "Mercy ... Mercy ... Mercy...." A low murmuring grew on
+every side. Maximilian flung open his cab door. But the same instant it
+was slammed against him. He sank to his seat, with a stare of dumb pain
+in his eyes that the priest beside him never afterward forgot. The woman
+back there was Mejia's wife. And Maximilian had had one glimpse of the
+husband's face. It was a face stretched to agony, deadened to the color
+of lead.
+
+"May I, may I--_pay_ for this!" moaned the one-time Emperor. "O
+God, grant Thou that I do pay for this, hereafter!"
+
+Beyond the last hovels of the suburbs, at the foot of the Cerro de las
+Campanas, the condemned were told to alight. Here again there was a
+throng, hundreds and hundreds of swarthy faces, blank in awed pity. One
+gaping fellow pointed wonderingly.
+
+"Look, there they are! There--los muertos!"
+
+Maximilian overheard, and a cold shiver crossed his spine. To be
+identified already as "the dead one!"
+
+Then he beheld his coffin, there, the longest of the three being borne
+up the hill. They were boxes of cheap wood, unpainted inside, smeared
+with black on the outside. A wavy streak of carmine simulated the
+drooping cord and golden tassels of richer caskets. It was the pomp and
+circumstance that pertains to the humblest peon clay.
+
+Four thousand serried bayonets squared the base of the hill, and made a
+compact, bristling hedge to hold back the common people. Through it
+marched the doomed Imperialists, each with his confessor and a platoon
+of guards, and so toiled on up the slope. The archduke looked about him.
+There were many privileged spectators within the cordon, but nowhere did
+he see a former friend. All, all, had kept away, and in his heart he
+knew that it was better so. He could not ask that much of them. But
+stay--yes, a remembered figure caught his attention; a shriveled
+decrepit figure. Here, too, mid every color Republican, he beheld in the
+man's garb a last surviving uniform of the vanished Empire. It was,
+however, scarcely to be distinguished as such. The red coat was
+threadbare, and soiled with dust. The ragged green pantaloons, held by a
+knotted rope, were grotesquely faded. Yet the prince, who had once
+gloried in dashing regimentals and mistook them for power, was deeply
+touched. He recognized a lone unit of what had been none other than the
+Batallon del Emperador. He paused, to have a word with the miserable
+derelict.
+
+"So, you would be near me, even now?" he said. "Ah, ever faithful little
+old man, but are you brave enough for the horror of it? Are you?"
+
+Red eyeballs rolled upward in their sockets, and for a space met the
+archduke's kindly gaze. Then the steady repellant hate in them seemed
+disconcerted, and the withered form cowered under the touch of the pale
+white hand. Inaudible words rattled in the old man's throat, and he
+trembled, as though to turn and run. Maximilian regarded him
+benevolently, thinking it a crisis of emotion.
+
+"There, there," he said, "go if you wish. It's not well, you see, to
+think of me so much. But you must not imagine that I am ungrateful. When
+you believed yourself unseen, certainly when you had no hope of reward,
+throughout my misfortunes, you have always hovered near me, on the
+battlefield, and more lately under my prison window. Yes, yes, I have
+seen. And now, and now I thank you." The bloodshot eyes roved the
+ground, but did not lift again. "As humble, as loyal as a dog,"
+Maximilian murmured as he turned away.
+
+They indicated to him that he should take his place before a wall of
+adobe blocks which had been piled together near the crest of the hill,
+only a little lower than those very fortifications built by the
+Imperialists themselves. With a gesture of assent, he complied. The
+priests fell sorrowfully back behind the soldiers, and he and Miramon
+and Mejia were alone together, three tragic isolated figures in a little
+oblong patch of bare rocky hillside. One end of the oblong was the adobe
+shield. The other three sides were walls of living men, massed shoulder
+to shoulder, with bayonets pointed outward against the jostling peering
+crowd. The three who were to die could now see no human being beyond the
+dense, double row of soldiery. The remainder of earth for them was the
+hollow square, bounded by the slouching backs clothed in blue, by the
+white flats of the kepis, by the line of light playing over the thorns
+of steel. Beyond was the early morning sun; above, the mystery of space.
+
+Through the gap of an instant the shooting squads tramped in, nearer and
+nearer, until they halted opposite the condemned. Maximilian then
+perceived which squad was to be his own. It numbered seven tiradores and
+a yellow, beardless officer. The seven were low, cumbersome, tawny, and
+they shuffled awkwardly. Their stripling chief thrust out his stomach,
+and he handled his large sword with an unaccustomed flourish. The
+pompous severity was, after all, only insolence. He had need to keep
+guard on his importance; he did not wish to hear the pounding of his
+heart. Yet his muscles twitched unbecomingly, which jerked his mouth,
+and sometimes his head.
+
+Maximilian stepped forward and addressed them. To each he gave a gold
+piece bearing his effigy. It was his last expenditure in that coin. He
+requested them earnestly, gently, to aim at his body, not at his head.
+He was thinking of his mother. He would not have her see him with
+mangled features. Then with a final reassuring word, he turned back to
+the wall.
+
+They were going to place him between the other two, but with a smile and
+shake of the head, he would not have it so. His last act was for
+precedence. Affectionately he drew Miramon to the place of honor, so
+that Mejia was on the right, and himself on the left.
+
+Then the _fiscal_ of the Republic appeared, and read the military
+law. For any who should ask the lives of the condemned, death was
+prescribed. But if there was anything the condemned themselves wished to
+say....
+
+Maximilian removed his hat. "Mexicans," he said, "may my blood be the
+last to be spilled for this country's welfare. Long live Independence!
+Long live Mexico!"
+
+He spoke the words calmly, gravely, and having concluded, he carefully
+adjusted a large handkerchief, so that his beard might not be burned by
+the powder. Then he crossed his arms on his breast, and gazed steadily
+into the barrels of the leveled muskets, waiting.
+
+A wave of motion, of tendons stiffening, passed along the thick wall of
+flesh. Against it the tide without swelled higher, stronger. Tension
+strained upward to the supreme crash. The quiet of a multitude is pain.
+
+But the other two Imperialists had not spoken yet. Mejia shook his head
+passionately. He saw only his young wife with her babe, panting,
+stumbling through the dust. He held a crucifix, and would not take it
+from his lips. Miramon, however, raised his voice to protest against the
+charge of treason. Of that crime he died innocent. But he pardoned, as
+he hoped for pardon. Then he cried, "Long live Mexico! Long live the
+Emperor!"
+
+Maximilian started. These were the words that he thought he should like
+to hear. But now they grated. They recalled the mistake he had lived,
+the anachronism of his life. They were scorpions. They stung like the
+needle in an ulcer. He turned sharply, in tearful reproach. But a sword
+flashed, the volley came, and the three men fell, as under a crushing
+rock, one against the wall; his head broken over upon his breast. The
+pert young officer pointed his blade at three convulsive bodies, and
+through each a last bullet sped, burying itself in the earth beneath.
+The crowd pressed, surged, stood on tiptoe.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was one other among the spectators, but keeping himself hidden,
+whom Maximilian would have been concerned to see there. He was Driscoll.
+He came to watch the shriveled derelict, Murguia. He came to stand guard
+over a soul, Maximilian's. What peace that soul had found should not be
+destroyed. And so he screened himself in the crowd, holding ready to
+crush a viper whose fangs were heavy with poison. When Maximilian paused
+and spoke to the old man, Driscoll was very near, near enough to hear,
+and to strike. But the old man had only wheezed and mumbled. Though why
+that old man did not utter a first word, though why he could not, will
+never be explained. But this much is true, that the ambushed soul,
+moving so calmly toward eternity, then stepping so near the coiled
+serpent, was yet its own guardian, unwittingly.
+
+Until the very end Driscoll staid there alert. The old man, baffled,
+insatiate, might yet cry out what he knew. Driscoll's gaze never
+relaxed. He felt as though he watched a murderer while the murder was
+being done. But the old man only listened. Unable to see within the
+hollow square, he listened, and waited. His lower jaw hung open, and
+over his lip a white froth grew and grew, until it broke and trickled
+down his chin. The red eyeballs gleamed ravenously, as still he waited.
+
+"When this is over," Driscoll said to himself, "he'll plump down in a
+fit and blow out. Else he'll go raving crazy. Lord, that look!"
+
+When it _was_ over, Driscoll went to him. He had but to reach forth
+a hand and fasten on his shoulder. He held him against a scurrying of
+spectators, whom the tragedy's close had that instant brought to life.
+
+"Here, Murgie, here's something that belongs to you," he said. "Well,
+what's the matter? Take it, I don't want it."
+
+The old man looked up. An ivory cross was dangling from the other's
+fingers. The cross still showed bloodstains; no later flowing of blood
+had washed _them_ away. But the father of Maria de la Luz stared,
+stared vacantly at the trinket. The masterful, consuming rage of two
+years past was gone out of his eyes. Instead they were watery and
+senile. The brows, and even the lashes, had turned as white as the thin
+strands of hair, and contrasted gruesomely against the yellow, mottled
+skin, which stretched like clouded parchment over the bony death's head.
+At last the old man put out his hand and took the cross, not
+comprehending.
+
+"No, I didn't give it to him," Driscoll explained bluntly. "I told you I
+wouldn't."
+
+Yet no spasm of chagrin distorted the weazen face.
+
+"This chain here, it's--it's _gold_!" the old man cried.
+
+Then he sputtered, choked. What had he betrayed? Would the strange donor
+reclaim the gift, knowing it was gold? He leered craftily at Driscoll,
+and with a hungry, gloating secrecy--his old slimy way of handling
+money--he smuggled the holy symbol under his jacket. But from cunning
+the leer changed to suspicion and quick alarm. He delved into his
+pockets, one after another. He searched greedily, wildly, until the last
+coin on him lay in his palm. Quaking in every feeble bone, he counted
+his poor wealth again and again. There was very little left. He glared
+at Driscoll. He glared at townsmen, officers, blanketed Inditos, all
+swarming past to gaze on the three corpses. He cried "Thief!" first at
+one unheeding passer-by, then at another.
+
+"I had more than this!" he whined. "More--more than this! There was my
+hacienda, my peons, my cotton, my mills, my canvas bags. There was my
+blockade runner. She was Clyde-built, she was named _La Luz_, she
+cost twenty thousand English gold pieces. Who has taken these things
+from me? Who--where----Curse you, do _you_ know?"
+
+Dissipating his hoards, sacrificing his last chattel, all that was now a
+blank. But his hoards, his chattels, were all that were now worth while,
+and the miser clamored for them, and them only. Vengeance, however, is
+an ironical bargainer. Vengeance kept her pay, and "abhorred Styx, the
+flood of deadly hate," had dried and left a stranded soul, parched by
+avarice. Driscoll was moved by a pity half ashamed.
+
+"Look here, Murgie," he threatened terribly, "Do you say _I_ stole
+your----By the Great Horn Spoon, I'll----" He flung his hand to his
+revolver.
+
+The counter-irritant had instant effect. All moisture died out of the
+rat eyes, leaving them two little horrible beads. The miser shrank,
+groveled, in mortal terror of some physical hurt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE CONTRARINESS OF JACQUELINE
+
+
+  "Much adoe there was, God wot;
+  He wold love, and she wold not."
+         _--Ballad of Phillida and Corydon._
+
+
+Maximiliano I. of Mexico was dead. His dynasty and his Empire were the
+frippery of a past time. Yet there was his capital, still holding out
+against the Republic. Leonardo Marquez, the Leopard, spitefully refused
+to capitulate. But why he would not, no one knew, neither the starving
+City, nor the patient besieger outside. No one, unless it was
+Jacqueline. The very day of the triple execution she called on Escobedo,
+commander in chief at Queretaro. She desired to return to the capital,
+and she wanted a pass through the Republic's lines there. She mentioned,
+in case it were any inducement, that the place would fall within
+twenty-four hours after her arrival. Jacqueline had difficulty to speak
+at all. She could not endure the general's monstrous flaps of ears, his
+rabbinical beard, his cruel black eyes.
+
+"Maria purisima," he exclaimed, "you cannot mean, senorita, that you,
+all alone, will deliver the City of Mexico into our hands?"
+
+"It will certainly be an incident of my stay there," she replied.
+
+The hard, Jewish features lighted cunningly. "Then, por Dios, you are as
+wonderful as I've always heard! But may--may one be allowed a little
+curiosity?"
+
+"I _might_ say," and Jacqueline forthwith said it, "that I have
+just had a cipher telegram from Louis Napoleon."
+
+"Which," breathlessly demanded the other, "will interest Marquez, eh?
+Will disappoint him? Will cause him to surrender?"
+
+"Your Excellency is of course entitled to his own conjectures."
+
+But the commander-in-chief was satisfied. "We must hasten your going by
+every means," he declared. "You shall have an escort. You----"
+
+"Then I choose the Gray Troop--because," she added carefully, "they're
+the best."
+
+Now, why, by all that's feminine, was she surprised next morning when
+the Gray Troop gathered round her coach, as though that were a
+coincidence? At least she arched her brows, and lifted one shoulder
+petulantly, and unmistakably showed that she expected a tedious time of
+it. The sunburned colonel of the Grays beamed so with happiness too, as
+he drew rein to report to her. They met for the first time since
+Maximilian's embarrassing little scene for their express benefit.
+Driscoll noted her disdain, and it is likely that he only grinned. He
+did that because he knew how helpless he was, and how merciless she
+could be. For she was not only beautiful, she was pretty--a demure,
+sweet, and very pretty girl. Some vague instinct of self-defense guided
+him. His broad smile was exasperating in the last degree, and it was not
+she, but the other young woman in the coach, whom he addressed.
+
+"I got some side saddles, Miss Burt," he announced, "and a few extra
+mustangs, whenever anybody gets tired of traveling behind curtains."
+Curiously enough, both girls wore riding habits. "Oh, by the way," he
+inquired suddenly, "how's Miss Jack'leen this morning? Is she well
+and--docile?"
+
+Jacqueline's chin dropped in astonishment. She seized the old canvas
+window flap and jerked it down. But at once she raised it again, and
+thoughtfully contemplated the trooper.
+
+"I wonder," she mused aloud, in that quaint accenting of the English
+which cannot be described, "when is it that you are going to grow up,
+_ever_?"
+
+"I did start to," Driscoll informed her soberly, "but it got tiresome as
+all creation, and I reckon I've backslided just since"--a world of
+earnestness came into his lowered voice--"well, just since we had that
+talk with poor Maximilian."
+
+The old canvas curtain fell for good then, and very abruptly.
+
+A moment later, however, she was avenging her flushed cheeks on Mr.
+Daniel Boone, who rode at the other side, also sunburned, also effulgent
+with happiness.
+
+"If it isn't the _animal disputans_!" she exclaimed. "Look Berthe,
+and rejoice; our sighing Monsieur le Troubadour!"
+
+Driscoll hovered near a moment, then reluctantly rode ahead of his
+battered dusty warriors. So he and the wilful maid from France began a
+second journey together, yet far, far apart. But only after many
+torturing hours did his first joy consent to perceive the distance
+between them.
+
+Now and then, though rarely, and never when he hoped for such a thing,
+she would ride with him. And then he usually stirred up hostilities
+before he knew it, and notwithstanding all that was tender and humble
+which he meant to tell her. There was, however, cause enough for
+savagery. She made him the least of the troop, though he arranged each
+detail of speed and comfort, laid out tempting noon-day spreads,
+improvised cheer in the cheerless hostelries, and all with a forethought
+showing pathetically how his every thought was of her. But if she
+divined the inwardness of this, which of course she did, outwardly she
+contrived to be oblivious. She thanked him sincerely and simply, the
+while that he craved repayment, as the heart repays. He yearned for only
+a chance to speak his mind, and to force hers. But now craftily she
+would bring the others flocking round, to decide for her if they did not
+think monsieur absurdly mistaken in this or that! The same instant she
+would conjure up the most trivial of arguments, and be vastly shocked
+over the ridiculous contentions which she herself assigned to Driscoll.
+
+She grew honestly fond of the other Missouri colonels, with their ranger
+uniforms, and brawn scarred by weather and battle, and they and the
+marchioness became great friends. She was a dainty flower among them,
+but they were prime comrades, and she, the mad-cap tomboy her life long,
+took to them in the impulse that here were her own kind. Driscoll was
+proud to see it, without need of being generous. She gathered Berthe, as
+a soberer sister, into the merry communion, and she rode with Clay of
+Carroll, with Carroll of Clay, with Reub Marmaduke, with Crittenden,
+with cherubic Old Brothers and Sisters, with Hanks the bugler, and she
+mocked Meagre Shanks, that disputatious animal, because he tried to
+monopolize Berthe and would not dispute at all. She asked them
+questions. She asked Harry Collins if his tribe were the same as that of
+ces Missouriens-la, and the Kansan confessed that the two tribes had
+been a bit hostile of late, but what with raiding, razing, and
+murdering, he guessed they'd laid the foundation for a mutual
+self-respect, as behooved valiant redskins. So she often got strange
+answers for her inquisitiveness, but she had grown wary among
+Westerners, and she usually paid them back. They were a happy party. But
+Driscoll wanted a more definite focusing of the joy. And at times,
+indeed, yielding to temptation herself, she permitted him to lose his
+heart deliciously over again. Shadows were lifted now, and she was just
+a lovable girl, just sweet Jacqueline. And he loved her with the boy's
+young strength of adoration and diffident awe. Precisely in which state
+she made him suffer exquisitely. No one could be more contrary and
+capricious than the lovable girl of a moment before. Whereat storms
+brewed within him.
+
+There was one of the rare times when the Missourian and the maid rode up
+and down the winding white ribbon of a Mexican highway, and for awhile
+both were quiet. This once they dared the risk--she did, rather--which
+lurks in the silence that requires no words. For him it brought the old
+time, and the rides of that time, when he wondered what was the matter
+with him, and she knew all along. And he thought how during the hard
+winter in the Michoacan mountains and swamps, he had caught himself
+almost crying aloud, that he wanted her, that he wanted her--wanted
+again the subtle comradeship of those silences which require no words.
+And here, at last, here she was, riding beside him!
+
+He looked at her furtively. She was in profile. He looked again, to be
+sure that it was not memory, but the breathing girl herself. Yes, for a
+fact, it was the girl herself. And here was her own queenly head, here
+its regal poise, here the superb line of the neck to the shoulder.
+Reverence grew on admiration, for as he gazed he beheld her character
+revealed, of lines as stately, as womanly, and withal as flexible, too,
+before the cheery glow of each moment's life. He stirred, and was
+vaguely restive, and perhaps a little frightened also, because of the
+deep mystery of something within himself which he could not understand.
+The classic outline of her features was softened now in the warmth of
+flesh. Her vivacity was off guard, in the forgetfulness of reverie. The
+pure white of the little tip of ear was tinged with pink. Her eyes were
+lowered to the saddle horn. They were melting. They were almost blue.
+
+"Jack'leen!" He burst out fervently, before he thought, with an arm half
+lifted toward her.
+
+The drooping lashes raised. The eyes were gray again. She regarded him
+for awhile without speaking.
+
+"Why don't you quarrel?" she asked finally.
+
+The spell was broken. Her pounding heart had vent in a nervous laugh of
+raillery. She touched her horse with the riding crop in her gauntleted
+hand. Somehow she would not leave that dumb brute, the horse, in peace.
+Driscoll's old Demijohn, however, was used to the game by now. He
+pointed his ears, and checkmated that last move by bringing his master
+once more to the lady's side.
+
+"You used to," she went on, as though there had been no interruption,
+"nicely. You were of an interest then. In fact, I reck-_on_--I know
+no one that I had rather have quarreled with."
+
+But still he would not, though that "reckon" from her lips was most
+alluring. She stole a mischievous glance at his face, but the fixed look
+there made her lift _her_ hand toward _him_. Perhaps, if he
+had seen and had spoken then--But he did see.
+
+"Eh bien, since monsieur won't fight, won't, _won't_," she cried,
+"then it's more fun to----"
+
+Evidently to seek livelier company. For she wheeled the mustang, swerved
+from a grasp at her bridle, and went galloping back to the coach. He
+twisted in his saddle, pushed his sombrero higher on his head, and
+dubiously watched her flying from him, a lithe, trim figure in snug
+Hungarian jacket, the burnished tendrils fluttering on the nape of her
+neck, the soft white veil trailing like a fleecy cloud from her black
+_amazona_ hat. He bent a perplexed gaze to the road. "It's 'way,
+'way beyond me," he told himself. Then he grew aware of a sense of
+warmth on his forearm. Yes, he remembered. For an instant she had laid a
+hand on his sleeve, and he had thrilled to the ineffable token of
+nestling. He was never immune from her tantalizing contradictions. He
+felt this one yet.
+
+Hoofs pounded behind, and Mr. Boone drew up alongside. "She came back,
+and made me get away from the coach," he announced. "Prob'bly she wanted
+to cry some; she looked it."
+
+Yet another of her contradictions!
+
+"Then why in the nation," Driscoll demanded, "do you keep hanging round
+that coach for? Look here Shanks, you make me plum' weary. The idea of
+you falling in----"
+
+"No more'n you, you innocent gamboling lamb of an ol' blatherskite." But
+Daniel's steel blue eyes had softened to their gentlest. "Say Jack," he
+added, "she's going back to Paris."
+
+"Don't I know it? Lord A'mighty!"
+
+"Go on, never mind me," said Mr. Boone. "Groan out loud, if you want to.
+For she sho'ly is, yes, back to Paris. Now Buh'the"--The Troubadour's
+_r's_ always liquefied dreamily with that name--"Buh'the has been
+telling me a few things, and I'm sure reporter enough to scout out the
+rest of the story, and it's just this--Jack, she's fair broken-hearted."
+
+"Miss Burt?"
+
+"No, no, the marchioness. She staked out a campaign over here, and it's
+panned out all wrong, and it wasn't her fault either. Poor girl, no
+wonder she might like to cry a little. She's lavished everything she had
+on it too, ancestral chateau, and all that."
+
+"But," said Driscoll quickly "she'll not suffer. There's her title----"
+
+"Title?" exclaimed Daniel. "W'y, she's going to give that up too, not
+having any chateau any more, and she'll trip blithely down among the
+people again, where she says it's more comfortable anyhow. Title? Well,
+you've suhtinly noticed that she always did take that humorously. Her
+grandfather--Buh'the says--was right considerable of a jurist, used
+scissors and paste, and helped make a scrap-book called the Napoleonic
+code, and Nap the First changed him into a picayunish duke. But wasn't
+the nobility of intellect there already? Sho'ly! Miss Jacqueline,
+though, likes the father of her grandfather the best. He never was
+noble, technically I mean. His was the nobility of heart, and he'd have
+scorned to be tagged. He just baked bread, and fed most half of Saint
+Antoine for nothing at times, while the Dauphin at Versailles was
+throwing cakes to the swans. Howsoever," Mr. Boone added hastily, as sop
+to his softness for princes, "I reckon that there Dauphin was noble too.
+Both of 'em fed the hungry mouths that were nearest."
+
+"But," demanded Driscoll, "doesn't her title carry some sort of a--a
+compensation?"
+
+"Not a red sou. The majorat--that's the male line--died out with her
+father, which means that the annuity died out too."
+
+"W'y, Great Scot, she's----"
+
+"She's tired and disheartened, that's what she is, and she's going back
+to Paris, and you--" Boone paused, and glared at his companion, "--and
+you mean to let her!"
+
+Old Demijohn felt a spur kicked against his flank, and he lifted his
+fore feet and sped as the wind. It was fully an hour later when Meagre
+Shanks caught up with horse and rider again. Rather, he met them coming
+back. His conversation was guileless, at first.
+
+"Do you know, Din," he began, "those two girls are only half educated?
+Yes sir, gastronomically, they are positively illiterate, and it's a
+shame! W'y, they don't know hot biscuits and molasses. They don't know
+buttermilk. They don't know yams. Nor paw-paws, nor persimmons. They
+don't even know watermelon. Now isn't France a backward place?"
+
+"Don't, Shanks!" Driscoll begged. "You'll have me heading for Missouri
+in a minute. You didn't, uh, mention peach cobbler?"
+
+"_And_ peach cobbler, big as an acre covered with snow. And just
+think, it's roastin' ea'ah time up there now, _now_!" How Daniel's
+voice did mellow under a tender sentiment! "And to think," he went on,
+"of the marchioness living on in such ignorance! It's a thing that's
+just got to be remedied, Jack."
+
+"Then suppose you take her to Missouri," growled his friend, "and let me
+alone."
+
+"_I_ take _her_? Oh come now, Din, I see I've got to tell you
+something which is--" The Troubadour's accents grew low and fond, and
+the other man respected them, with something between a smile and a sigh
+for his own case. "Which is--well, nobody's noticed it, but the fact is
+that Buh'the, that Miss Buh'the----"
+
+"Dan," interrupted Driscoll severely, "you're not going to tell me any
+secret. You mean that you weren't mistaken when you mistook her for a
+queen."
+
+"That--that's it!" ejaculated Daniel. "Of coh'se," he added soothingly,
+"the other one is a--a mighty nice girl, but----"
+
+"Oh, _is_ she? But Miss Burt is _the_ one you want to take to
+Missouri? Well Dan, why don't you?"
+
+"Because," was the doleful reply, "those two are just like orphan
+sisters together, and--well, she won't desert. She _is_ a queen, by
+God, sir! Miss Jacqueline might make her, but I haven't got the heart to
+ask it. Now, uh, if--if you would just bring along the other one?"
+
+So, here was the goal of all of Daniel's manoeuvering!
+
+Driscoll cast a leg over the pommel of his saddle, and faced Boone
+squarely. "Shanks," he demanded with tense vehemence, "do you suppose I
+need your woes for a prod? Don't you know how much--Lord A'mighty, how
+much!--I'd like to oblige you? But--she won't let me--even speak.
+There's, there's something the matter."
+
+Boone's lank jaw fell. "What, I wonder?"
+
+"And don't I wonder too?" Driscoll muttered savagely. "But it's
+_something_."
+
+From which moment until the end of the journey, and afterward, there
+were two men who pondered on what could be the trouble with Jacqueline.
+But while one pondered gloomily and fiercely and with a semi-comic grin
+under the lash, the other let perplexity delve and ferret into the
+mystery. For Mr. Boone had grown aware that an enormous heap of
+happiness for four depended on himself alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE JOURNALISTIC SAGACITY OF A DANIEL
+
+
+  "Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears
+  To-day of past Regret and future Fears."
+                                      _--Omar._
+
+
+At last Jacqueline stabbed a dot after the word "Finis," and so rounded
+out her chapter on "Failure." Beyond doubt that tiny punctuation point
+saved many lives. The besiegers were waxing impatient to assault, and
+within the City famine mobs ran the streets, crying, "Corn and wood!
+Corn and wood!" Those who could fled to the Republican camp. The
+Austrians practically mutinied. Starving and dying thousands clamored
+for surrender. Yet the ugly, revolting pigmy who was lieutenant of the
+Empire held them back in the terror of his heartless cruelty.
+
+Then the angel of mercy came. From her Marquez the tyrant learned that
+his speculation in treachery had collapsed. Louis Napoleon wanted no
+more of that stock. Besides, every French bayonet was needed in France.
+The rabid Leopard heard, and that night meanly crept away to save his
+own loathsome pelt. Bombs had begun to fall into the City, when a
+Mexican general worthier of the name took upon himself the heroic shame
+of unconditional surrender. The Oaxacans outside marched in, led by
+their young chief, Porfirio Diaz, and they fed the people, and of
+"traitors" shot only a moderate few.
+
+Renovation became the order of the days that followed. The President of
+the Republic was to be welcomed back to his capital. The stubborn old
+patriot's heart must be gladdened by every contrast to the dreary, rainy
+night years before when he fled into exile. Mexico would honor herself
+in honoring the Benemerito of America. So bunting was spread over every
+facade, along every cornice, green, white, and red, a festival lichen of
+magic growth. Flags cracked and snapped aloft, and lace curtains decked
+the outside of windows. Soldiers put on shoes and canvased their brown
+hands in white cotton gloves, and military bands rehearsed tirelessly.
+
+Din Driscoll sat on a bench in the shady Zocalo, and contemplated the
+Palacio Nacional and the Cathedral in process of changing sides from
+Empire to Republic. Innumerable lanterns being hung along their massive
+outlines were for incense to a goddess restored. The Mexican eagle had
+prevailed over monarchial griffins, and held her serpent safely in the
+way of being throttled. The blunt homely visage of Don Benito Juarez,
+luxuriously framed, looked out from over the Palace entrance. It was a
+huge portrait, surrounded by the national standards. Among the emblems
+there was one other, the Stars and Stripes. The gaze of the
+ex-Confederate was fixed. It was fixed steadily on the Stars and
+Stripes. Now and then he felt a rising in his throat, which he had
+difficulty to swallow down again.
+
+"Well, Jack?"
+
+Boone stood over him. Driscoll's eyes were oddly troubled as they turned
+from that flag opposite.
+
+"Sure it's hard," said Boone quietly, "mighty hard, to forgive our
+enemies the good they do."
+
+"What enemies?"
+
+"W'y, them," and Daniel pointed to a flag as to a nation. "Yes sir, the
+Yanks have kept faith. Do you see a single one of their uniforms down
+here? Do you notice anywheres that Yankee protectorate we were
+predicting? No sir, you do not! The Yanks--" But the term was damning to
+eloquence. Mr. Boone found another. "The _Americans_, I repeat,
+have hurled back the European invader. They have given Mexico to the
+Mexicans. They have endowed a people with nationality. But they have not
+gobbled up one solitary foot of territory. Which is finer, grander, than
+your Napoleonic glory! And yet it's selfish, of coh'se it is. But listen
+here, there'll never be any Utopia, Altruria, Millennium, or what not,
+that don't coincide with self-interest. And first among the races of the
+earth, the Americans have _made_ 'em coincide, and I want to know
+right now if the Americans are not the hope of the world!"
+
+The orator paused for breath. He had to. And then surprise the most
+lugubrious unexpectedly clouded his lank features. "Darn it, Jack," he
+exclaimed in alarm, "if I ain't getting Reconstructed, right while I am
+standing here!"
+
+"_Talked_ yourself into it," Driscoll observed scornfully. "But
+Dan, you can just put the South along with your Americans. The French
+laughed at the North alone, but later, when--Well, just maybe it's a
+good thing we did get licked."
+
+Mr. Boone gasped. Sparks of indignation darted from his steel blue eyes.
+The recoil needed a full minute to spend itself. Then a greater horror
+appalled him, a horror of himself. "The Lawd help me," he burst forth,
+"but you're right, Din Driscoll! You are! It _was_ for the best.
+But don't you ever think I'm going to admit it again, to nary a living
+mortal soul, myself included. W'y, it would, it would knock my editorial
+usefulness--all _to_ smash. There," he added, "that's decided,
+we're going back. The colonels want their mamas. They've been men long
+enough, and they're plum' homesick. All the old grudges up there must be
+about paid off by now, so's an ex-Reb can live in Missouri without train
+robbing. _Libertas et natale solum_--It's our surrender, _at_
+last."
+
+Driscoll rose abruptly. "Lay down your pen, Shanks," he said. "You're
+only trying to convert the converted. Of course I'm going too. That
+there flag, being down here, did it. And don't you suppose _I've_
+had letters from home too?"
+
+Meagre Shanks jumped with relief. He straightened throughout his spare
+length. As the smell of battle to the war charger, the pungent odor of
+printer's ink wet on galley proofs assailed his nostrils. There were
+visions, of double-leaded, unterrified thunderbolts crashing from the
+old Gutenberg, back in Booneville.
+
+"Missouri," he breathed in fire, "Missouri will sho'ly stay Democratic."
+
+Both men glowed. They were buoyant, happy. But these two could not so
+soon be quit of the enervating Land of Roses. A pair of countenances
+fell together. Daniel voiced their mutual thought.
+
+"And Miss Jacqueline?" he queried boldly, with the air of meaning to
+persist, no matter what happened.
+
+Driscoll showed weariness, anger.
+
+"And Miss Burt?" he parried.
+
+"She won't desert, I told you once."
+
+"You mean that she's going to Paris too? I say, Shanks, they're leaving
+to-morrow."
+
+Shanks knew that much, quite well enough.
+
+"Have you _tried_ to stop her?" he demanded sternly.
+
+Driscoll only looked disgusted.
+
+"But have you--_asked_ her?"
+
+Driscoll's head jerked a nod, of wrath ascending.
+
+The inquisitor wisely swerved. What her answer had been was, to say the
+least, palpable. But her reason for it was _the_ question with
+Daniel.
+
+"Is it," he pursued, "is it because she hasn't any dot? You know, Jack,
+that in France, when a young lady----"
+
+"No, it's not that. I know it's not."
+
+"Oh ho," said Daniel, "so you've been guessing too! And how many guesses
+did she give you? No, let me try just a few more. It ain't because,
+because she's an aristocrat?"
+
+"But I _want_ an aristocrat," cried the young Missourian, "one to
+her finger tips, enough of one to be above aristocracy. And _she_
+is."
+
+"Then," said his friend in despair, "it's because she don't, just simply
+don't care for you?"
+
+"You're a long time finding that out."
+
+"What! You don't mean----"
+
+"Fact," said Driscoll. "Even I guessed it at last. I told her I had been
+reckoning that she----"
+
+"Cared, yes?"
+
+Driscoll made a wry face. "And she said I mustn't jump at conclusions, I
+might scare 'em."
+
+The Troubadour chuckled heartlessly. Neither was Driscoll's sense of
+humor entirely gone.
+
+"'Oh, awful goddess! ever dreadful maid!'" Mr. Boone quoted.
+
+"She's sure a wonder," the other owned gloomily.
+
+"And you are a blind dunce, Jack."
+
+"Don't talk axioms at me," said Driscoll, with a warning light in his
+eye. "I don't need 'em."
+
+"Well, now," drawled Mr. Boone, "I can't help it if I associate with you
+any longer, so I'll just mosey round to the flower market. As they leave
+to-morrow, they'll be wanting some violets."
+
+And he went, and Din Driscoll sat down again and hated him.
+
+Daniel wended his way slowly, an attenuated ranger in gray mid carriages
+and blanketed forms. "Sho'", he mused, "that girl's heart is fair
+bleeding for him, can't _I_ see! Her eye-lashes, they're
+_wet_, every now _and_ then. And whatever the matter with her
+is, it's nothing. But nothing is the very darndest thing to overcome in
+a girl. There's got to be strong measures. It's got to be _jolted_
+out of her. _Archimagnifico, there's_ the point!"
+
+Mr. Boone drew out a black cigar, and mangled it between his teeth. He
+pondered and pondered, absent-mindedly kicking at natives he bumped
+into. "Kidnap 'em!" he cried at length. "N-o," he reflected, "they go in
+the public stage, and what with the escort, somebody'd get hurt. We
+don't want any dead men at this wedding. Old Brothers and Sisters would
+balk anyhow, and our ecclesiastical officiator is the boy we _do_
+need. Now what the everlasting----"
+
+He meant what salutary jolt he _could_ invent, barring holdups, but
+in the same breath he meant also a most startling scene which revealed
+itself as he turned the corner.
+
+A deafening crash of musketry was the first thing, and he looked up. He
+had come into a small plaza before a church, and against the church's
+blank wall a scene was taking place before an awe-stricken throng. He
+understood. Another proscribed "traitor" had just been caught; and
+executed, naturally. But no, not executed! For as the officer of the
+shooting squad approached to give the stroke of mercy, the prostrate
+victim raised himself by one hand and knocked aside the pistol at his
+head. Then he laughed in the officer's face, the most diabolical and
+unearthly mirth any there had ever heard. There was not a stain of blood
+on him. He had dropped in the breath of eternity before the bullets
+spattered past. But his uplifted face, with chin tilted back, was
+swollen, black, distorted, corded by pulsing veins, and one of the
+eyes--a crossed eye--bulged round and purple out of its socket, and
+_gleamed_. The demon of pain was tearing at the man's tissue of
+life, but by grip of will unspeakable the agony in that grimace changed
+to a smile.
+
+"Yes, poison! Vitriol!" he chattered at them hideously. "Adios,
+imbeciles. It's my last--jest!"
+
+Whereat he fell, writhing as the acid burned to his soul. Before the
+astounded officer could shoot, he had grown entirely quiet.
+
+Boone strained and pushed against the crowd until he reached the spot.
+The cadaver was in tight charro garb of raw leather. His sombrero lay
+near, on which was worked a Roman sword, meaning "Woe to the conquered!"
+Boone turned inquiringly to the officer. The man, who was pallid,
+touched his thumb to his cap, recognizing the uniform of the Grays.
+
+"You should know him, mi coronel," he explained. "His name was Tiburcio.
+He deserted from the Imperialistas at Queretaro, but afterward he joined
+the plot for Maximilian's escape. We had his description, and I found
+him. He wanted to take me to Marquez and Fischer, whom we would also
+like to find. He said that he risked himself here, to spy on them, and
+that he knew where they had fled, the Leopard disguised in the padre's
+cloak. But of course I paid no attention. I did not delay even to tie
+his hands. As Your Mercy observes, I had the honor to do my duty, at
+once."
+
+"I see," replied Boone dryly. "Lawd, this _is_ a jolt!"
+
+Then he got himself away from there.
+
+"A jolt," he muttered to himself again. "But shucks, it can't--Yes, it
+can," he decided fervently, "it can be used. We've got to have something
+terrifying, and poor cock-eyed Don Tibby won't care. He'd appreciate it.
+And anyhow, I don't seem to be able to stir up inspirations to-day, and
+this is the only thing."
+
+He was as pallid as the shooting squad he had just left.
+
+"No matter," he reflected, "I'll need just this ghastly state of mind.
+But here, goodness gracious, I've got to be in a sweat," with which he
+began to run, a lank knight in gray dented armor.
+
+"Worse luck," his thought pounded along with him, "this here's the first
+time I've ever faked. And it's a heap the hottest story I've ever
+handled, too. Our little Parisienne will get a frisson all right, all
+right, and such a one she'll not be wanting any of again very soon.
+Dixie Land, I mustn't smoke, I'm to be too excited."
+
+He came into the Zocalo, and drew up before Driscoll, who was still
+there and still ruminating.
+
+"Listen here," Boone panted, "here's your cue.--In ten minutes--to the
+second--arrive--knock at her door--appear!"
+
+"With violets?" inquired Driscoll.
+
+"Oh shut up!--Quit, don't stop me, I'm getting cooled off!--Only do what
+I say.--In just ten minutes--that is--if you want the girl."
+
+And Daniel was off again, "with high and haughty steps" towering along.
+
+"That Meagre Shanks, there, isn't a fool," Driscoll mentally recorded,
+and he took out his watch.
+
+The two girls were stopping at a hotel in Plateros Street, for
+Jacqueline had returned to find her beautiful residence, salon and all,
+ruthlessly dismantled, looted, robbed by Marquez while she was in
+Queretaro, which was a manner of levying contributions not unfamiliar to
+the Lieutenant of the Empire.
+
+In the balcony room of their hotel suite the two girls strove valiantly.
+Crisp gowns and dainty allied mysteries lay spread over the upholstery.
+They were vanishing into cavernous trunks, with crushing indifference if
+Jacqueline seized on a garment, but gently when Berthe rescued it, which
+she always did. Through the double glass doors of the balcony the street
+sounds below rose to their ears, clarion notes and vivas, hurrying feet
+and prancing hoofs, and the National hymn a few blocks away in the
+Zocalo.
+
+Suddenly a grim apparition loomed before the glass doors on the balcony.
+Berthe half screamed, in dismay clutching at ruffles and laces to hide
+them, when into the sweet-scented confusion strode Mr. Daniel Boone. He
+was the grim apparition. Jacqueline withheld her opinion, but she had
+one. The intruder's spurs were iconoclastic of carpeting, his abrupt
+presence of feminine sensibilities. But the lean, perspiring face drove
+away all thought of the conventions. Jacqueline snatched up a fleecy
+bank of petticoats, making room for him on the sofa. Daniel stared
+vacantly. The two girls looked very pretty. They were just flurried
+enough, and they wore white lawn, with sleeves short to the elbow. His
+fingers groped, and soon they closed over a small, instinctive hand. He
+kept hold upon that hand for strength, at the same time collapsing on
+the sofa.
+
+"Now, if you please," said Jacqueline calmly, "what----"
+
+"O Lawd!" Boone gulped, fighting for breath. "It don't matter
+much--maybe--to you all, but--O Lawd, I got to tell somebody!"
+
+"Tell us, tell us!" cried she of the captured hand.
+
+Daniel had sufficient presence of mind to retain it.
+
+"You know that--that poor devil Tiburcio?" he gasped.
+
+"Yes, yes!" But what anti-climax was here?
+
+"Well, he--he's dead. I saw him.--Lawd!"
+
+"Oh!" It was a little cry of relief.
+
+"But some were--were killed--taking him." Boone noted Jacqueline's
+intake of breath, her first tremor of alarm. "He fought like a--a
+wildcat. He had a knife--and a machete--and a pistol--and----"
+
+"_Who_ was killed? Monsieur--Oh, mon Dieu, what _can_ you have
+to tell me?"
+
+Daniel almost repented, there was that in her gray eyes.
+
+"Among them was my--" He nerved himself to it, some way--"my best
+friend, that peerless----"
+
+"Who?" Her command was imperious, her white teeth were set.
+
+"Din Driscoll!"
+
+The man blurted it out like a whipped schoolboy. He could not look up.
+He could only feel that she stood there, stricken, suffering.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+He could not believe that this was her voice. It was hardened, tearless,
+without emotion.
+
+"Monsieur--where is he?"
+
+The girl at his side sprang up with a sharp cry to her who questioned.
+Then he raised his eyes. Jacqueline was unaware of the sobbing girl who
+clung to her. Her face was changed to marble, her body as rigid.
+
+"Take me to him," she spoke again, still with that deathly authority of
+the grave.
+
+The man stammered before what he had done. The great beads stood out on
+his forehead. "You would not--you must not--you----"
+
+"He is mine," she said simply. "Wait, I shall be ready, at once." She
+passed into an inner room, the portieres falling after her.
+
+"She's--she's getting on her hat," Boone muttered inanely. "Buh'the,
+she's got to be stopped! She's--God, why don't he come? It's shuah ten
+minutes. It's--What's that?"
+
+Someone had knocked. In the instant Boone had the hall door ajar.
+
+"Round to the balcony window, hurry!" he whispered.
+
+Then he turned, caught Berthe by the hand, and drew her quickly out into
+the hall. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the portieres
+rustle, but he dared not look back.
+
+Jacqueline stepped into the room, and her hat was upon her head. It was
+of straw, with a drooping brim. She had thrown a long cloak over her
+thin dress. There was ice in her veins on this tropical June day. She
+paused, for she saw that the room was deserted. But no--there was a
+shadow between her and the balcony door. She stared at it, and her eyes
+grew big. The cloak slipped to the floor, and her fingers worked in the
+tapestry behind her. She fluttered weakly, like a wounded dove on the
+ground. Her knees trembled under her. And the man there? He was gazing
+about him in a puzzled way, for the glare outside still blinded him.
+Then he saw. He reached her, and caught her as she sank. He felt two
+soft arms, but icy cold, drop as lead around his neck. The white form he
+held was rigid, and he thought of shrouds and the chilled death sweat.
+With savage despair he crushed her to him. After a time her body slowly
+began to relax.
+
+"Oh, oh, my lad, my lad!" he heard her crying faintly, in a kind of
+hysteria.
+
+He touched her hair dazedly, with unutterable tenderness.
+
+"There, there--sweetheart!"
+
+The word came, though he had never used it before.
+
+Blood awoke, and coursed, sluggishly at first, through her being, until
+her heart tripped and throbbed and pounded against his own. Her head lay
+on his breast, the hat hanging by its ribbons over her back, and with
+the pulsing life the head and her whole body nestled closer. The soft
+arms grew warm against his neck, and tightened fiercely, to hold and
+keep him. Gently he forced up her chin, and her eyes, wet with hottest
+tears, opened under his. He bent and kissed the long lashes. But a small
+moist hand flattened against his brow and pushed back his head, and she
+raised on tiptoe. He understood, and--their lips met.
+
+"Tu sais," she murmured deliriously--nothing but her own dear French
+would answer now--"tu sais, que--oh, mon coeur, que je--que je
+_t'aime_!"
+
+The oddest contrasts fall over life's most sacred moments. The tone of
+her words thrilled him, set every fibre tingling, yet he thought of dry
+conjugations and declensions, conned over and over again in school, and
+he was conscious of vague wonderment that those things really, actually,
+had a meaning. Meaning? He believed now that no words in English could
+tell so much. He did not have to understand them. They bore the flesh
+and blood, the passion and the soul, of a woman who told him that she
+loved him.
+
+With a hesitant gentleness which bespoke the deep and reverent awe in
+his yearning, he pressed her head back against its resting place. A man
+can do without words of any kind. She grew very quiet there. The tense
+quivering ceased, and she crept closer, and at last she sighed,
+purringly, contentedly.
+
+But of course there was more which she simply had to say. And this time,
+when she raised her eyes, they were calm and earnest, and her beautiful
+forehead was white and very grave. "Do you know, dear," she said, "I
+should not care to live, I would not have lived, if what he said
+were--were--" But the eyes filled with tears, and angry with herself,
+she planted her fists against him to be free, and as impulsively crying,
+"Oh, my--my own dear lad!" she flung her arms about his neck again. "Oh,
+oh," she moaned, "he said that you were dead!"
+
+For the first time it dawned on Driscoll that all this must have had a
+cause, and for the first time since entering the room he remembered
+Boone.
+
+"_He_ told you--He----"
+
+But Driscoll did not finish. Putting her from him he sprang to the door
+and flung it open. There he waited. Boone was outside, and Boone walked
+expectantly in. Without a word Driscoll raised his fist, drew it back,
+his cruel arm muscled to kill. Jacqueline saw his anger for her,
+terrible in murder. She threw herself upon him, got hold of the knotted
+fist, got it to her lips. Another woman, too, had darted between him and
+the other man, and she faced him. The gentle Berthe was become a little
+tigress.
+
+"Not that, not that!" It was Jacqueline's voice. "Listen, mon cheri,
+I--I thank him. Au contraire, I do! And--and you must, too!"
+
+Driscoll stared at all three, first at one, then at another. He
+floundered, stupefied. Here was this loving girl, clinging to him as
+though he might vanish, and he had left her that morning a disdainful
+beauty. Then here was this Meagre Shanks with his mysterious ten
+minutes, and here was this dumfounding product of those ten minutes.
+Driscoll put forth an open hand.
+
+"Dan," he muttered incoherently, "you're a--a wonder, too!"
+
+Boone clenched the proffered hand in his own. "I never once thought,
+Jack," he said earnestly, contritely, "never once, that she cared so
+ever-_lastingly_ much."
+
+"Well," said Driscoll, "don't do it again."
+
+"Not unless," ventured Boone, "not unless she should ever want a little
+antidote for ennui. By the way, mademoiselle, do you thank me for the
+quaver of emotion, for the frisson?"
+
+"Frisson?" she repeated scornfully, with loathing. For once she had been
+unaware of the prized knife-like tremor. In the fear of losing one dear
+she had lost consciousness of self. She had _lived_ the tremor, the
+agony, and it was too dreadful, "No, monsieur," she said, "I want no
+more of art. I--I want to _live_!"
+
+"You needed something, though," said Berthe, "to make you find it out."
+
+Driscoll looked curiously at the two girls.
+
+"Yes, J-Jack'leen"--how quaintly awkward he was, trying her old tomboy
+nickname without the "Miss!"--"Yes, what was the matter with you,
+anyhow?"
+
+"Parbleu, I forgot!" cried Jacqueline in dismay. "I was not to have
+monsieur, no!" And Jacqueline's chin, tilting back with elaborate
+hauteur, was meant to indicate that she was in her first mind about it.
+
+Berthe laughed outright, and softly clapped her hands.
+
+"Sho'," declared Mr. Boone, "the matter was nothing, nothing _at_
+all!"
+
+But before feminine caprices and scruples it is wiser to bow low into
+the dust. Jacqueline turned on the editorial personage with vast
+indignation. "You leave the room, Seigneur Troubadour," she commanded,
+"and Berthe, you march with him. Haste, both of you!"
+
+They went, meekly. Their attempt to hide content over the dismissal
+together was extreme, but transparent.
+
+"What was it?" Driscoll insisted, when he and Jacqueline were alone once
+more.
+
+"You mean," she exclaimed, "that you are going to quarrel--now?"
+
+"Jack'leen, what was it?"
+
+"I reck-on," she observed demurely, "that the animal disputans was--was
+right, after all. It was nothing, I--reck-on."
+
+He noted mockery, defiance. There was much too much independence after
+her late surrender. He went up to her and deliberately reassumed the
+mastery. He held her, by force. "Mon chevalier," she murmured softly. So
+she confessed his strength.
+
+"Tell me," he said.
+
+"And you did not guess? You--Oh, how I hated you! How I never wanted to
+see you, never again! Not after, not after--Mon Dieu, you were two
+exasperating idiots, you and poor Prince Max! He virtually _threw_
+me into your arms. But I, monsieur, am not a person to be thrown. That
+is, unless--unless I do it myself, which--I did, helas!"
+
+The trooper's grip tightened on her arms. "Then you," he said earnestly,
+"would have let me lose you?"
+
+She laughed merrily at him.
+
+"And would not you have followed after me?"
+
+"W'y, little girl, I reckon I certainly would of."
+
+"Don't," she gasped. "Let me come--closer. Oh dear, how can the bon Dieu
+let people be so happy--s-o happy!"
+
+
+
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