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+Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of The Barranca, by Herman Whitaker
+
+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 Mystery of The Barranca
+
+Author: Herman Whitaker
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2011 [EBook #36198]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D Alexander and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE MYSTERY OF
+ THE BARRANCA
+
+ BY
+
+ HERMAN WHITAKER
+
+ AUTHOR OF
+ "THE PLANTER" AND
+ "THE SETTLER"
+
+ NEW YORK AND LONDON
+ HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+ MCMXIII
+
+
+
+
+ COPYRIGHT 1913 BY HARPER & BROTHERS
+
+ PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+ PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 1913
+
+
+
+
+ [Illustration: [See page 248
+ SEYD LIFTED FRANCESCA AND LEAPED]
+
+
+
+
+"_To Vera, my daughter and gentle collaborator, whose nimble fingers
+lightened the load of many labors, this book is lovingly dedicated._"
+
+
+
+
+THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+"Oh Bob, just look at them!"
+
+Leaning down from his perch on the sacked mining tools which formed the
+apex of their baggage, Billy Thornton punched his companion in the back
+to call his attention to a scene which had spread a blaze of humor over
+his own rich crop of freckles.
+
+As a matter of fact, the spectacle of two men fondly embracing can
+always be depended on to stir the crude Anglo-Saxon sense of humor. In
+this case it was rendered still more ridiculous by age and portliness,
+but two years' wandering through interior Mexico had accustomed
+Thornton's comrade, Robert Seyd, to the sight. After a careless glance
+he resumed his contemplation of the crowd that thronged the little
+station. Exhibiting every variety of Mexican costume, from the plain
+white blanket of the peons to the leather suits of the rancheros and
+the hacendados, or owners of estates, it was as picturesque and
+brilliant in color and movement as anything in a musical extravaganza.
+The European clothing of a young girl who presently stepped out of the
+ticket office emphasized the theatrical flavor by its vivid contrast.
+She might easily have been the captive heroine among bandits, and the
+thought actually occurred to Billy. While she paused to call her dog, a
+huge Siberian wolf hound, she was hidden from Seyd's view by the stout
+embracers. Therefore it was to the dog that he applied Billy's remark at
+first.
+
+"Isn't she a peach?"
+
+She seemed the finest of her race that he had ever seen, and Seyd was
+just about to say that she carried herself like a "perfect lady" when
+the dissolution of the aforesaid embrace brought the girl into view. He
+stopped--with a small gasp that testified to his astonishment at her
+unusual type.
+
+Although slender for her years--about two and twenty--her throat and
+bust were rounded in perfect development. The clear olive complexion
+was undoubtedly Spanish, yet her face lacked the firm line that hardens
+with the years. Perhaps some strain of Aztec blood--from which the
+Spanish-Mexican is never free--had helped to soften her features,
+but this would not account for their pleasing irregularity. A bit
+_rétrousée_, the small nose with its well-defined nostrils patterned
+after the Celtic. Had Seyd known it, the face in its entirety--colors
+and soft contours--is to be found to this day among the descendants of
+the sailors who escaped from the wreck of the Spanish Armada on the west
+coast of Ireland. Pretty and unusual as she was, her greatest charm
+centered in the large black eyes that shone amid her clear pallor,
+conveying in broad day the tantalizing mystery of a face seen for an
+instant through a warm gloaming. In the moment that he caught their
+velvet glance Seyd received an impression of vivacious intelligence
+altogether foreign in his experience of Mexican women.
+
+As she was standing only a few feet away, he knew that she must have
+heard Billy's remark; but, counting on her probable ignorance of
+English, he did not hesitate to answer. "Pretty? Well, I should
+say--pretty enough to marry. The trouble is that in this country the
+ugliness of the grown woman seems to be in inverse ratio to her girlish
+beauty. Bet you the fattest hacendado is her father. And she'll give him
+pounds at half his age."
+
+"Maybe," Billy answered. "Yet I'd be almost willing to take the chance."
+
+As the girl had turned just then to look at the approaching train
+neither of them caught the sudden dark flash, supreme disdain, that drew
+an otherwise quite tender red mouth into a scarlet line. But for the dog
+they would never have been a whit the wiser. For as the engine came
+hissing along the platform the brute sprang and crouched on the tracks,
+furiously snarling, ready for a spring at the headlight, which it
+evidently took for the Adam's apple of the strange monster. The train
+still being under way, the poor beast's faith would have cost it its
+life but for Seyd's quickness. In the moment that the girl's cry rang
+out, and in less time than it took Billy to slide from his perch, Seyd
+leaped down, threw the dog aside, and saved himself by a spring to the
+cow-catcher.
+
+"Oh, you fool! You crazy idiot!" While thumping him soundly, Billy ran
+on, "To risk your life for a dog--a Mexican's, at that!"
+
+But he stopped dead, blushed till his freckles were extinguished, as the
+girl's voice broke in from behind.
+
+"And the Mexican thanks you, sir. It was foolhardy, yes, and dearly as I
+love the dog I would not have had you take such a risk. But now that it
+is done--accept my thanks." As the stouter of the embracers now came
+bustling up, she added in Spanish, "My uncle, señor."
+
+At close range she was even prettier; but, though gratitude had wiped
+out the flash of disdain, a vivid memory of his late remarks caused Seyd
+to turn with relief to the hacendado. During the delivery of effusive
+thanks he had time to cancel a first impression--gained from a rear view
+of a gaudy jacket--of a fat tenor in a Spanish opera, for the man's
+head and features were cast in a massive mold. His big fleshy nose
+jutted out from under heavy brows that overshadowed wide, sagacious
+eyes, Indian-brown in color. If the wind and weather of sixty years had
+tanned him dark as a peon, it went excellently with his grizzled
+mustache. Despite his stoutness and the costume, every fat inch of him
+expressed the soldier.
+
+"My cousin, señor."
+
+Having been placed, metaphorically, in possession of all the hacendado's
+earthly possessions, Seyd turned to exchange bows with a young man who
+had just emerged from the baggage-room--at least he seemed young at the
+first glance. A second look showed that the impression was largely due
+to a certain trimness of figure which was accentuated by the perfect fit
+of a suit of soft-dressed leather. When he raised his felt sombrero the
+hair showed thin on his temples. Neither were his poise and
+imperturbable manner attributes of youth.
+
+"It was very clever of you, señor."
+
+A slight peculiarity of intonation made Seyd look up. "Jealous," he
+thought, yet he was conscious of something else--some feeling too
+elusively subtle to be analyzed on the spur of the moment. Suggesting,
+as it did, that he had made a "gallery play," the remark roused in him
+quick irritation. But had it been possible to frame an answer there was
+no time, for just then the familiar cry, "_Vaminos!_" rang out, and the
+American conductor hustled uncle, niece, and her dog into the nearest
+car.
+
+The entire incident had occupied little more than a moment, and as, a
+little bewildered by its rush, Seyd stood looking after the train he
+found himself automatically raising his cap in reply to a fluttering
+handkerchief.
+
+"You Yankees are certainly very enterprising."
+
+Turning quickly, Seyd met again the glance of subtle hostility. But,
+though he felt certain that the remark had been called forth by his
+salute, he had no option but to apply it to the mining kit toward which
+the other was pointing.
+
+"You are for the mines, señor? In return for your service to my cousin
+it is, perhaps, that I can be of assistance--in the hiring of men and
+mules?"
+
+While equally quiet and subtle, the patronage in his manner was easier
+to meet. Undisturbed, however, when Seyd declined his offer, he
+sauntered quietly away.
+
+"_Bueno!_ As you wish."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+"I'll be with you in a minute, folks."
+
+To appreciate the accent which the American station agent laid on
+"folks" it is necessary that one should have been marooned for a couple
+of years in a ramshackle Mexican station with only a chocolate-skinned
+henchman, or _mozo_, for companion. It asserted at once welcome and
+patriotic feeling.
+
+"You know this isn't the old United States," he added, hurrying by.
+"These greasers are the limit. Close one eye for half a minute and when
+you open it again it's a cinch you'll find the other gone. If they'd
+just swipe each other's baggage it wouldn't be so bad. But they steal
+their own, then sue the company for the loss. Here, you sons of burros,
+drop that!" with which he dived headlong into the midst of the free
+fight that a crowd of _cargadores_, or porters, were waging over the
+up train baggage.
+
+Taking warning, the two returned to their own baggage. As they waited,
+talking, these two closest of friends offered a fairly startling
+contrast. In the case of Seyd, a graduate in mining of California
+University, years of study and strain had tooled his face till his
+aggressive nose stood boldly out above hollowed cheeks and black-gray
+eyes. A trifle over medium height, the hundred and sixty pounds he ought
+to have carried had been reduced a good ten pounds by years of
+prospecting in Mexico and Arizona. This loss of flesh, however, had been
+more than made up by a corresponding gain in muscle. Moving a few paces
+around the baggage, he exhibited the easy, steady movement that comes
+from the perfect co-ordination of nerve and muscle. His feet seemed
+first to feel, then to take hold of the ground. In fact, his entire
+appearance conveyed the impression of force under perfect control, ready
+to be turned loose in any direction.
+
+Shorter than Seyd by nearly half a foot, Billy Thornton, on the other
+hand, was red where the other was dark, loquacious instead of
+thoughtful. From his fiery shock of red hair and undergrowths of red
+stubble to his slangy college utterance he proved the theory of the
+attraction of opposites. Bosom friends at college, it had always been
+understood between them that when either got his "hunch" the other
+should be called in to share it. And as the luck--in the shape of a rich
+copper mine--had come first to Seyd, he had immediately wired for Billy.
+They were talking it over, as they so often before had done, when the
+agent returned.
+
+"Why--you're the fellow that was down here last fall, ain't you?" he
+asked, offering his hand. "Didn't recognize you at first. You don't mean
+to say that you have denounced--"
+
+"--The Santa Gertrudis prospect?" Seyd nodded. "He means the opposition
+I told you we might expect." He answered Billy's look of inquiry.
+
+"Opposition!" The agent spluttered. "That's one word for it. But since
+you're so consarnedly cool about it, mister, let me tell you that this
+makes the eleventh time that mine has been denounced, and so far nobody
+has succeeded in holding it." Looking at Billy, probably as being the
+more impressionable, he ran on: "The first five were Mex and as there
+were no pesky foreign consuls to complicate the case with bothersome
+inquiries, they simply vanished. One by one they came, hit the trail out
+there in a cloud of dust, and were never seen again.
+
+"After them came the Dutchman, a big fat fellow, obstinate as one of his
+own mules, and a scrapper. For a while it looked as though he'd make
+good--might have, perhaps, if he hadn't taken to using his dynamite box
+for a pillow. You see, his peons used to steal the sticks to fish, and
+so many of them blew themselves into kingdom come that he was always
+running shy on labor. So, as I say, he used the box for a pillow till it
+went off one night and distributed him all over the Barranca de
+Guerrero. Just how it came about of course nobody knew, nor cared, and
+they never did find a piece big enough to warrant an inquest. It just
+went as accidental, and he'd scarcely, so to say, stopped raining before
+a Frenchman jumped the claim. But he only lasted for a couple of days,
+landed back here within a week, and jumped the up train without a word.
+
+"Last came the English Johnnies, two of 'em, the real 'haw, haw' boys;
+no end of style to them and their outfit. As they had hosts of friends
+up Mexico City, it would never have done to use harsh measures. But if
+the Johnnies had influence of one sort, Don Luis--he's the landowner,
+you know--had it to burn of another. Not only did he gain a general's
+commission during the revolutionary wars, but he's also a member of
+the Mexican Congress, so close to the government that he needs only
+to wink to get what he wants. So just about the time the Johnnies had
+finished development work and begun to deliver ore out here at the
+railroad--presto! freights went up, prices went down, till they'd wiped
+out the last cent of profit. Out go the Johnnies--enter you." With real
+earnestness he concluded: "Of course, there's nothing I'd like better
+than to have you for neighbors. It ain't so damn lively here. But I'd
+hate to see you killed. Take my advice, and quit."
+
+He had addressed himself principally to Billy. But instead of
+discouragement, impish delight illumined the latter's freckles.
+
+"A full-sized general with the whole Mexican government behind him?
+Bully! I never expected anything half so good. But, say! If the mine is
+so rich why don't the old cock work it himself instead of leaving it to
+be denounced by any old tramp?"
+
+"Because he don't have to. He has more money now than he ever can use.
+He is worth half a million in cattle alone. And he's your old-fashioned
+sort that hate the very thought of change. By the way, he just left on
+the up train, him and his niece."
+
+"What, the girl with the dog?" Billy yelled it. "Didn't you see--no, you
+were in the baggage-room. Well, he's our dearest friend--presented Seyd
+here with all of his horses, cattle, lands, and friends. A bit of a
+mining claim ought not to cut much ice in an order like that."
+
+"You met them?" The agent shook his head, however, after he had heard
+the particulars. "Don't count much on Spanish courtesies. They go no
+deeper than the skin. Nice girl, the niece, more like us than Mex,
+and she ain't full-blood, for matter of that. Her grandfather was
+Irish, a free lance that fought with Diaz during the French war. His
+son by a Mexican wife married Don Luis's sister, and when he died she
+and her daughter came to keep the old fellow's house, for he's been
+a widower these twenty years. Like most of the sprigs of the best
+Mexican families, she was educated in Europe, so she speaks three
+languages--English, French, and Spanish. Yes, they're nice people from
+the old Don down, but lordy! how he hates us gringos. He'll repay you
+for the life of the dog--perhaps by saving you alive for a month? But
+after that--take my advice, and git."
+
+While he was talking, Seyd had listened with quiet interest. Now he put
+in, "We will--just as quickly as we can hire men and burros to pack our
+stuff out to the mine."
+
+"Well, if you will--you will." Having thus divested himself of
+responsibility, the agent continued: "And here's where your troubles
+begin. Though donkey-drivers are as thick as fleas in this town, I doubt
+whether you can hire one to go to Santa Gertrudis."
+
+"But the Englishmen?" Seyd questioned. "They must have had help."
+
+"Brought their entire outfit down with them from Mexico City."
+
+After Seyd's rejection of his offer the hacendado had entered into
+conversation with a ranchero at the other end of the platform, and,
+glancing a little regretfully in his direction, Seyd asked, "Do you
+know him?"
+
+The agent nodded. "Sebastien Rocha? Yes, he's a nephew to the General."
+
+"He offered to get me mules."
+
+"He did! Why, man alive! he hates gringos worse than--worse than I hate
+Mexicans. _He_ offered you help? I doubt he'll do it when he knows
+where you're going." In a last attempt at dissuasion he added, "But if
+he doesn't I can't see how you can win out with rates and prices at the
+same mark that wiped out the Johnnies."
+
+"That's our business." Seyd laughed. Then, warmed by the honest fellow's
+undoubted anxiety, he said, "Do you remember any consignment of brick
+that ever came to this station?"
+
+"Sure, three car loads, billed to the Dutchman. But what has that to
+do--"
+
+"Just this--that the man had the right idea. Though the mine is the
+richest copper proposition I have ever seen--besides carrying gold
+values sufficient to cover smelting expenses--it would never pay, as you
+say, to ship it out at present prices. But once smelted down into copper
+matte there's a fortune in it, as the Dutchman knew. He had already laid
+out the foundation of an old-style Welsh smelter, and, though it isn't
+very big, we propose to make it stake us to a modern plant."
+
+"So that's your game!" The agent whistled.
+
+"That's our game," Billy confirmed. "If dear cousin over there can only
+be persuaded to furnish the mules we will do the rest. Go ask him, Bob."
+
+Seyd hesitated. "I'm afraid that I turned him down rather roughly. Let's
+try first ourselves."
+
+For the last half hour their baggage had formed a center of interest
+for the porters, mule-drivers, and hackmen who formed the bulk of the
+crowd, and the snap of the agent's fingers brought a score of them
+running. Each tried to make his calling and election sure by seizing a
+piece of baggage. In ten seconds the pile was dissolved and was flowing
+off in as many different directions when Seyd's answer to a question
+brought all to a sudden halt.
+
+"To the _mina_ Santa Gertrudis."
+
+Crash! the kit of mining tools dropped from the shoulder of the muleteer
+who had asked the question, and it had no more than touched earth before
+it was buried under the other pieces.
+
+"I told you so," the agent commented, and was going on when a voice
+spoke in from their rear.
+
+"What is the trouble, señors?"
+
+The hacendado had approached unnoticed, and, turning quickly, Seyd met
+for the third time the equivocal look, now lightened by a touch of
+amusement. Suppressing a recurrence of irritation he answered, quietly:
+"We wish to go to the hacienda San Nicolas, señor, upon which we have
+denounced the mining claim known as the Santa Gertrudis. For some reason
+no one of these men will hire. Perhaps you can tell why?"
+
+"Now your fat's in the fire," the agent muttered.
+
+Whether or no he had overheard Seyd's answer to the muleteer, the man's
+dark face gave no sign. "_Quien sabe?_ Ask their blood brother, the
+burro. One would have little to do and time to waste if he attempted to
+plumb a mule-driver's superstitions. _Ola_, Carlos."
+
+While he was talking the crowd had continued to back away, but it
+stopped now and stood staring, for all the world like a herd of
+frightened cattle. The big muleteer who had led the retreat returned on
+a shuffling run, and as he stood before the hacendado, sombrero in hand,
+Seyd saw the fear in his face.
+
+"This fellow sometimes works for me. You will need"--he paused,
+overlooking the baggage--"three burros and two riding-mules. He has only
+two. _Ola_, Mattias!" When a second muleteer had come with the same
+breathless haste he gave the quiet order, "You will take these señors to
+Santa Gertrudis."
+
+Bowing slightly, he had walked away before Seyd could lay hands on
+enough Spanish to state his obligation, and as, pausing, he then looked
+back his face once more changed, expressing knowledge and sarcastic
+amusement at the mixed feelings behind Seyd's halting thanks. His bow,
+returning the customary answer, was more than half shrug.
+
+"It is nothing."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"One moment, señor!"
+
+The burrors having departed with their loads, Seyd and Billy were
+mounting to follow when the hacendado called to them from the platform.
+"To-night, of course, you will stay in Chilpancin. But to-morrow? By
+which trail do you travel?" When Seyd answered he added a word of
+counsel: "I thought so. Most strangers take that way. But there is a
+shorter by many miles. Instruct your drivers to take the old trail down
+the Barranca."
+
+Thanking him, they rode on.
+
+In accordance with the mysterious and immutable law which places all
+Mexican cities at least a mile from the railroad, they traveled nearly
+half an hour before sighting, across a barranca, the town cuddled in a
+hollow beneath the opposite hills. Under the rich light of the waning
+sun the variegated color of its walls, houses, churches, merged in warm
+gold, glowed like a topaz in the setting of the dark hills. Paved with
+river cobbles and crooked as a dog's hind leg, a street fell steeply
+down into the barranca from whose black depths uprose the low roar of
+rushing waters. Entering upon it, while still within sound of a freight
+engine puffing upgrade to the station, they dropped back four hundred
+years into the midst of a life that differed but little from that of the
+Aztecs under the Montezumas.
+
+On both sides of the street one-story adobes flamed in all the colors of
+the rainbow--roses, purples, umber, greens--a vivid alternation which
+was toned only by the weathered gray of heavy doors and massive oaken
+grills across the windows. At the tinkle of their bells there would come
+a flash of Spanish eyes in the cool dusk behind the windows, and a
+pretty face would emerge from deep shadow to fade again before Billy's
+smile. The peons and hooded women on the narrow causeways were equally
+reserved. They either passed without according them notice or returned
+to their glances a stolid stare. Theirs were the dark, impenetrable
+faces of old Mexico.
+
+While they were climbing at a snail's pace the opposite hill, dusk fell
+over the town, but presently, riding out of a black alley into the main
+plaza, they emerged on a scene that caused even the matter-of-fact Billy
+to exclaim in wonder. On all four sides hundreds of torches blossomed in
+the dusk, toning with soft rich lights the vivid adobes, tinting the
+cold white blankets and garments of the hucksters who squatted by their
+displays--guavas and pineapples, cocoanuts, mangoes, alligator pears,
+and other fruits of the tropics which shared the same straw mat with
+cabbage, squash, onions, and other familiar produce of the cold North.
+In accordance with the shrewd policy that has always kept the Roman
+Church in close touch with its world, the booths extended to the very
+doors of a stone church which occupied one side of the square, and the
+heavy odors of fried garlic mingled with the breath of incense that
+floated out through the wide doors.
+
+A religious fiesta was in full blast, and they had to turn the mules to
+avoid the stream of worshipers who shuffled across the square, up the
+stone steps, and the length of the paved aisles to the great altar which
+blazed with the light of a thousand candles. Looking, as they rode past,
+they saw a peon--whose spotless blanket shone whiter by contrast with
+the scarlet serape which had fallen backward across his calves--erect
+on his knees, arms extended in a rigid cross, a figure of deathless
+adoration before the Virgin. It required only the brazen storm of bells
+that just then broke overhead to complete the atmosphere of savage
+medievalism. The worshipers might easily have been the first Aztec
+converts crawling before the superior altars of the Spanish conquerors'
+God.
+
+Seyd, always thoughtful and sensitive to impression, felt the influence
+of the scene, and the feeling deepened as their mules struck hollow
+echoes in the vaulted passage of the hotel whose iron-studded gates,
+barred windows, yard-thick walls all bespoke a life which had not yet
+progressed beyond the era of sieges. A runway led down into a wide
+courtyard and to the stables which lay under a tiled gallery, the hotel
+proper, for the cell-like sleeping-rooms used by the better class opened
+upon it.
+
+But the real life of the place surged in the patio, or courtyard, below,
+and, after they had dined on rice, eggs, and beans, or frijoles, Billy
+and Seyd perched on the balustrade of the gallery to watch its ebb and
+flow. Into the great stone inclosure muleteers of Tepic, freighters of
+Guadalajara, potters of Cuernavaca and Taxco, pilgrims to the far
+shrines, and their first cousins in dirt and importunity, the beggars,
+had poured from three main lines of travel, and they were so crowded
+that it was difficult to find space among the mule panniers, crates,
+and bundles for their tiny cooking-fires. On occasion a face, plump
+and darkly pretty, would bloom out of the dusk as a woman fanned the
+charcoal under her clay cooking-pots. Again, a leaping flame would
+illumine a hawk face, deeply bronzed and heavily mustached, or lend a
+deeper dye to the scarlet of some sleeper's serape. In its rich somber
+color the scene made a picture that would have been loved by Rembrandt.
+Just as it had done for centuries before the great master was born to
+his brush, the scene changed and mingled, ebbed and flowed, while its
+units passed among the fires, exchanging the gossip of the trails. The
+hum of it rose to the gallery like the low roar of a distant torrent,
+but out of it Seyd was able to catch and translate isolated scraps.
+
+"Take not thy _aguardiente_ to El Quiss, _amigo_. The administrador--I
+tell it to my ruth, since I was well skinned by him--is a thief of the
+nether world. He would flay a flea for the hide and fat."
+
+"_Ola_, Carlos! The _jefe_ [chief of police] of San Pedro is keeping an
+eye for thy return ever since he bought the last load of charcoal."
+
+"The swine! Is it my fault that he expects good oak burning for the
+price of soft ceiba?"
+
+One remark caused Seyd to prick his ears, for it was addressed to one of
+their own muleteers. "Where go the gringos, _amigo_? To Santa Gertrudis?
+And thou art driving for them? _Hombre_, hast thou so little regard for
+thy neck?"
+
+The answer was lost in the sudden braying of a burro in the stables
+underneath, but the voice of the questioner, a strident tenor, rose over
+all. "An order from Don Sebastien? _Carambar-r-r-r-a!_ And you go by the
+old trail down the Barranca? But, _hombre_! It is--" The voice lowered
+so that Seyd could not hear.
+
+Imagining that the talk bore merely on the condition of the trail, he
+dismissed it from his mind and returned to his study of the crowd,
+permitting his gaze to wander here, there, wherever the incessant
+movement brought to the surface some bit of color or trait of life. In
+this he obeyed a natural instinct. Endowed with a temperament nicely
+balanced between the philosophical and the practical, he had taken an
+auxiliary course in "letters" along with his mining for the sole purpose
+of broadening his viewpoint and widening his touch with life. Indeed, he
+had bent his profession to the same end, using it as a means to travel
+and study, in which he differed altogether from Billy, who was the
+mining engineer in every dimension. Where Billy saw only the externals,
+humors, and absurdities, and the picturesqueness of that teeming life,
+Seyd's subtle intelligence took hold of the primordial feeling under it
+all. Contributing only an occasional answer to the other's chatter, he
+bathed in the atmosphere and absorbed the wild medievalism of it while
+reviewing in thought the events of the day. The girl and her dog, her
+uncle the General, Don Sebastien the hacendado--the latter was in his
+mind when the sudden leaping of a fire at the far end of the patio
+revealed his face.
+
+"Look!" But in the moment Seyd grasped Billy's arm the blaze fell. "I
+thought I saw him--that fellow, Sebastien--talking to Carlos, our
+mule-driver."
+
+"Well, why not?" Billy answered. "I gathered that he lives far out. Like
+ourselves, probably too far to start out to-night."
+
+"Of course." Seyd nodded. "He just happened to be in my mind. Only why
+should he be in talk with our mule-driver?"
+
+"Search me." Billy shrugged. "But if he was, it is easy to prove it.
+There's Carlos now. Call him up here."
+
+The muleteer, when questioned a minute later, shook his head. "No,
+señor, Don Sebastien is not here. He rode out at sunset, is now leagues
+away on the trail."
+
+If he were lying, his brown stolid face gave no sign; and, having given
+him his orders for next day, Seyd returned to his study of the crowd. He
+had forgotten the incident by the time Billy dragged him away to bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+"If we are on the road at daybreak we shall reach the Barranca early
+in the afternoon," Seyd had said, commenting on his order to the
+mule-driver. But, fagged out by the day's hot travel, they did not
+awaken until a slender beam of light stole between the iron window bars
+and laid a golden finger across Billy's eyes.
+
+"We shall have to hustle now." Seyd concluded a diatribe on the Mexican
+_mozo_ in general while they were dressing. "For you must see the
+Barranca by daylight. Without its naked savagery it is as big and grand
+as the Colorado Cañon. Besides, if this trail is as dizzy a proposition
+as the one I went by on the last trip, I'd rather not tackle it after
+dark."
+
+It would have been just as well, however, had they taken their time, for
+after breakfast came Carlos with a tale of cast-off shoes. It was Paz
+and Luz, the mules the señors were riding! And having roundly cursed the
+memory of the fool wife who had been induced by an apparently innocent
+colthood to bestow names of beauty like Peace and Light upon such
+misbegotten devils, Carlos further informed them:
+
+"Never were there such ungrateful brutes, señors. Not content with the
+good barley I had just fed him, Paz it is that takes a piece out of
+Padre Celso's arm one fine day and so gets me cursed with candle and
+Book. And the curse sticks, señors, working itself out by means of this
+devil of a light who, within one week, chooses the fat belly of the
+_jefe_ of Tehultepec as a cushion for his heels. A year's earnings that
+trick cost me, not to mention the prettiest set of blue stripes that
+ever warmed a cold back. Neither is there a tree between San Blas and
+the Arroyo Grande that they have not used to scrape off a load. But this
+shall be the end. They shall feel the knife in their throats at the end
+of this trip." In the mean time would the señors be pleased to wait for
+an hour?
+
+There being no other choice, the señors would, and, returning to their
+last night's perch on the balustrade, they watched the patio disgorge
+its dark life upon the street. Shining in over the low-tiled roofs, the
+sunlight struck and was thrown back by the massive golden walls on the
+opposite side in a flood that set fire to brilliant serapes, illumined
+silver buttons, filled the whole place with light and cheer. Not to
+mention their interest in the saddling and packing of the loads--to
+which some refractory mule contributed an occasional humorous touch--a
+comedy was invariably enacted between the fat landlord and the departing
+travelers, for only after an altercation which always required the
+witness of all the saints to the reasonableness of his charges were the
+gates swung open. With much haggling and confusion of crackling oaths
+they went out, one by one, _cargadores_ __and peons, beggars and
+pilgrims, the tinkling mule trains with their quaint freights, and not
+until the last hoof struck on the cobbles did Seyd think to look at his
+watch.
+
+"Nine o'clock. What has become of those--"
+
+Fortunately they arrived at that moment with Paz and Luz, the damned and
+foredoomed, and a quarter of an hour thereafter their bells tinkled
+pleasantly in the scrub oak and copal which first climbed with the trail
+up a ravine behind the town and then led on through fields where corn
+grew, by some green miracle thrusting stout green stalks between the
+stones.
+
+Though it was still quite early in the day, heat waves trembled all over
+the land. The somnolent hum of insect life, the whisper of a light wind
+in the corn, were alike conducive to sleep. Before they had been riding
+an hour both began to yawn. The sibilant hiss of the muleteers urging
+the mules grew fainter in Seyd's ears, and, though he was conscious in
+a dim way that the trail had led out from the fields and was falling,
+falling, falling downhill through growths of cactus and mimosa into the
+copal woods, he drowsed on till an exclamation from Billy aroused him to
+a grisly sight--the dozen and odd mummies whose withered limbs clicked
+in the breeze as they swung by the neck from the wide boughs of a
+banyan.
+
+"_Bandidos_, señor, thieves and cutthroats." The bigger of the two
+muleteers answered Seyd's question. "They were hanged by Don Sebastien."
+
+"Why, that's our friend back at the station." Billy commented on Seyd's
+translation. "I'm sure that was the name the agent gave him."
+
+"_Si_, señor," the mule-driver confirmed the impression. "And these are
+but the tithe of those that he hanged. For years the whole of this
+country was overrun with _bandidos_ who took advantage of the absence of
+the principal men at the wars to rob and murder at will. They were
+levying regular tolls on the rancheros and hacendados when Don Sebastien
+returned from his schooling. Though only a lad of two and twenty, he
+began by hanging the bandits' messenger in the gates of his hacienda, an
+act that all thought would end by the wiping of the very memory of the
+place from the face of the earth. But instead of waiting to be attacked
+Don Sebastien took the stoutest of his peons and went out after the
+thieves. And he kept after them all that winter, the following summer,
+into the next year. No trail was too long, wet, or weary if he could
+mark its end with a brigand swinging under a tree. Here, there,
+everywhere within a hundred miles of his hacienda of El Quiss he hanged
+them by twos and threes and left them to swing in the wind, and it
+speaks for the fear in which he came to be held that no man, father,
+mother, sister, or lover dared to cut one down. Scarce a cross trail in
+this country that lacks its warning, and through his rigor it came to
+pass that you, señors, might now leave your purses on the open highway
+where a dozen years ago you would surely have left your lives. No man
+would dare touch--"
+
+"--Except Don Sebastien," Seyd put in, laughing.
+
+But the man returned only a stare. "What use would he have of purses,
+señor, that has so many of his own?"
+
+"Perhaps to give to the Church." But he stopped laughing, surprised by
+the sudden cloud that spread on the man's face.
+
+"Never! Though he has a church on his own hacienda, Don Sebastien never
+crosses its threshold. And Mattias, here, can tell you of the talk he
+gives to the priest."
+
+"_Si! si!_" In his eagerness to share the limelight the fellow almost
+shook off his head. "It is, see you, that I am delivering a mule load
+of charcoal at El Quiss on the very day that Don Sebastien hires the
+priest. You are to see him, as I did, sitting on the gallery above
+the courtyard puffing his cigar in such wise--was there ever such
+irreverence!--that the smoke rises in the face of the padre who stands
+before him. And his voice comes ringing down to where Miguel, the
+steward, is trying to beat me down a peso on the price of the charcoal.
+'I have builded you a church, and for performing the offices I shall pay
+you one hundred silver pesos the month, for, though I did not feel,
+myself, any need of your mutterings, they serve to keep my people quiet.
+Over them you shall exercise the usual authorities, and you may come and
+go at will through the hacienda--all but one place. If after this hour
+I find that your foot has touched my threshold I'll hang you in its
+gates.' Thus he spoke, señor, and he would have done it--to a priest
+quicker than a bandit, for of the two it is hard to tell that which he
+hates the most."
+
+"Hum!" Billy coughed when Seyd had translated. Jerking his thumb at the
+grisly witnesses to the tale's truth, he commented: "I now begin to
+understand the general respect for our friend. A man who does things
+like that is entitled to some consideration. Let us be thankful for pump
+guns and automatics. If this had been the day of the old muzzle-loader
+I'm darned if I'd have tackled your hunch."
+
+In the next hour the red-tiled colored adobe hamlets of the small
+farmers began to give place to the _jacals_ of the country, flimsy huts
+with sides of cane stalks and grass-thatched. Then the trail passed out
+from the eternal succession of corn and _maguey_ fields into wastes of
+volcanic scoria, where it began presently to climb mountains, for no
+apparent reason except to fall dizzily into shallow valleys which were
+sparsely timbered with copal and other soft woods. In one valley they
+came upon an Aztec ruin. A huge parallelogram in shape, it was more than
+half buried and so overgrown with brush and creepers that they would
+have passed without notice if the trail had not happened to run along
+the face of one wall. Looking closely, Seyd first observed a monstrous
+squat figure in bas-relief, one of dozens which were interwoven into
+an intricate design; then, riding along, he saw frightfully distorted
+faces peering out from behind a green veil of creepers. Broad and fat,
+long and thin, some were stretched in a wide grin, others thrust out
+tongues in ribald mockery. Here the eyes of one were distorted in a
+painful squint. There a slant upturn of tight-drawn lids revealed the
+quintessence of priestly cruelty. Another was grossly lewd. Through
+anger, violence, lust, fear, the expressions ran the gamut of passion to
+its death in the cold face of the god whose enormous image formed the
+corner. The oblong ears, triangular eyes and nose, parallel lips, were
+such as a child loves to draw on a slate, yet on that enormous scale
+their mathematical lines somehow conveyed an impression of absolute
+force. The Sphynx-like calm of the face stirred Seyd's imagination with
+pictures of captives led to the Aztec altars. Even practical Billy was
+moved to remark:
+
+"Those old chaps couldn't have been very nice neighbors."
+
+"No; and they are the lineal ancestors of the neighbors we shall have
+presently." Later the thought was to recur under conditions that would
+lend it enormous force. He forgot it in the moment of utterance, saying,
+as he glanced at his watch: "We have been doing pretty well. At this
+rate we'll make the Barranca quite early."
+
+He had failed to allow, however, for the demon which, usually content
+with the complete possession of Paz and Luz, suddenly entered into the
+burros and sent them flying downhill through a grove of trees. Entering
+on one side fully loaded, they emerged at the other naked, and by the
+time they were rounded up and reloaded Seyd had to recast his schedule.
+
+"We'll be lucky if we make it now in daylight. We may have to camp at
+the top."
+
+Repeated in Spanish, the latter suggestion drew vigorous headshakes from
+both muleteers. Carlos made answer. "No, señor, at this time of the year
+one would perish of the cold, and there is an inn in the Barranca with
+the finest of accommodations. The trail? It is nothing! A peso for every
+time I have traveled it by night would buy me a rancho--and Paz and Luz,
+devils as they are, could travel it blindfold." And whether, as Billy
+suggested, they were afraid of missing their usual communion with the
+fleas in the inn stables, both he and Mattias began to hustle the mules
+with oaths, hissings, whip-crackings. They kept after them so hard that
+the train trotted out of a forest of upland piñon upon the rim of a
+great valley a full half hour before sundown.
+
+Though prepared by Seyd's descriptions for something unusually fine,
+Billy's blue eyes opened to the limit, and he sat silent upon his mule,
+staring, altogether bereft of his usual loquacity. From their feet the
+land broke suddenly and fell into purple depths from which dark hills
+uplifted ruddy peaks into the blaze of the setting sun. The Barranca
+was so deep, so vast in scale, that he grew dizzy in following with his
+eye the tiny zigzag of the trail down, down, till it was lost in blue
+haze through which even the giant ceibas and tall cedars showed like
+microscopic plants. Across the valley, miles away, naked mountains
+tossed and tumbled, seamed, scarred, gashed by slide and quake, sterile
+and desolate, as on the far day that some world convulsion raised them
+out of the sea.
+
+"Drunk! drunk!" Billy breathed, at last. "Nature gone on a jag. Drunken
+mountains loose in a crazy world. The whole earth is turned on edge.
+Hold me, Bob, before I fall in. How deep do you call this bit of a
+hole?"
+
+"About five thousand feet down to the floor. It falls off a thousand and
+more in a few miles to the coast. You see, we are still in touch with
+the old Pacific. Can't be more than thirty miles or so down to the sea."
+
+"The dear old pond. Isn't that pine on the other side?"
+
+"Sure. An American company is taking out millions of feet, a hundred or
+so miles farther up. That's a great old tree, and quite particular about
+the company it keeps. Look how sharply it draws the line along the
+slope, lifting its skirts from the contamination of the tropics. That
+spark of green in the far distance is sugar cane--two thousand acres of
+it on the General's hacienda of San Nicolas. And you see the gash over
+there, all yellow and green, about three thousand feet down from the
+top--that is us, señor, the _mina_ Santa Gertrudis. And that reminds
+me--we'll have to be moving if we are to make the inn before midnight.
+_Vaminos_, Carlos."
+
+But the muleteer shook his head. "After you, señor, for if these devils
+should take to running again, not in six months should we fish your
+baggage out of the cañons."
+
+Leading down the trail, which zigzagged along the faces of a V-shaped
+wall, Seyd perceived, as he thought, the soundness of the argument, for
+at the first turn a stone from his mule's foot dropped five hundred feet
+plumb before rebounding into greater depths, and at no place did the
+width of the path allow an unnecessary inch for the swing of the packs.
+Deceived by the succession of stairways through which the trail dropped
+down to the thin thread that marked its course along the bottoms, Billy
+objected:
+
+"Three hours, you say? Looks to me as though we could make it in one."
+
+"Less than that--if your mule should happen to slip and take it
+sideways. Let me see--allowing a thousand feet to a bump, about fourteen
+seconds ought to distribute you nicely among the bottom trees. But if
+you elect to follow me around the eight or nine miles of trail you
+cannot see, it will take the full three hours."
+
+Even while he was speaking the ruddy fires on the valley hills were
+suddenly extinguished, only the stark peaks on the other side lifted
+like yellow torches in the last blaze. One by one these also went out,
+and another hour found them journeying in gloom that was intensified
+rather than lightened by the section of moon which achieved a precarious
+balance on the rim above. In darkness and silence that was broken only
+by the scrape of hoofs and rattle of displaced stones they followed
+down and down and down, until Billy presently came under a singular
+hallucination. Repeatedly he put out his hand to repel the rock wall
+that seemed to be animated with a desire to crowd him off into the
+cañon, and because of this pardonable nervousness he endured a real
+trial that would have drawn a quick protest from Seyd--to wit, the
+senseless way in which the muleteers were driving their beasts on his
+heels. Twice he rapped a rough nose that tried to force its way in
+between him and the wall, and he breathed more easily when an easier
+grade permitted them to draw ahead on a gentle trot.
+
+Accustomed, on his part, to leave all to his beast, Seyd rode with a
+loose bridle, lost in thought, his mind busy with mining plans. And thus
+it was that when Paz suddenly stopped, snorting, at the end of a trot
+which had carried them well ahead of the train around a rock wall, he
+almost went over her head. Recovering quickly, he was about to drive in
+the spurs; and a man of slower intuitions would surely have done it.
+With him, however, action invariably preceded thought, from instincts
+almost as acute as those which had brought the mule to a stop.
+Dismounting, he stepped ahead. Then, to the horror of Billy, who heard
+the burros slipping and sliding as they came round the wall on a trot,
+his voice came back.
+
+"Hold on, there! A slide has carried away the trail!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Although he had always doubted the phenomenon, Billy's hair stood on
+end, and when, in the face of Seyd's shouts in Spanish to stop, the
+burros still came on he felt his cap move.
+
+"Billy!" Seyd's command rang out sharply. "Dismount and lie down. It's
+our only chance."
+
+In that tense moment, however, Mr. William Thornton, assayer and
+metallurgist, had done an amount of thinking that would have required
+many minutes of his leisure. He was already on the ground, and as he lay
+there, arms wrapped over the back of his head as a protection against
+the sharp hoofs that would presently grind his face in the dust,
+uncomfortable expectation gave birth to inspiration. As Seyd also braced
+himself for the shock there came the scratch of a match, and Billy's red
+head flashed out in relief against the belly of the leading burro as it
+upreared in fright at the blaze. In the same moment a second blunt head
+shoved itself like a wedge between the first burro and the wall, and as
+the gray body shot off sideways into the chasm Seyd saw first the others
+sliding in a desperate effort to stop, and behind them the mule whips
+swinging to drive them on. As under a flashlight it all flamed out and
+vanished.
+
+In the short time required for Billy to strike a second match Seyd's
+mind registered an astonishing number of impressions. A hoarse yell,
+a sudden scurry of departing hoofs, and Billy's hysterical profanity
+formed merely the background of a sequence that flashed back over the
+events of the day. The scraps of muleteers' talk the night before, the
+runaway, and other minor delays, the drivers' refusal to camp on the
+rim, their insistence that he and Billy should take the lead, all fused
+in a belief which he expressed as the second match flaring up showed the
+trail empty of life between themselves and the next turn.
+
+"It's a frame-up! They knew of the slide. They had it fixed to run us
+off in the dark."
+
+"But where are they now?" Billy gazed down into the dark void. "Surely
+they didn't all go over."
+
+"No such luck. The burros bolted back on them, and they just legged it
+out of the way. Listen!" A scurry of hoofs sounded on the level above.
+"There they go, and it's up to us to keep them going. Back your mule up
+and turn. If we don't give them the run of their lives we'll deserve all
+they tried to give us."
+
+And run they did. Overtaking the burros just as they began to slow down,
+Seyd slipped ahead, struck a match close to the tail of the last, and
+so precipitated the cavalcade once more upon the sweating drivers.
+Whereafter, they took turns and kept the frightened beasts on a
+breathless trot up the heartbreaking grades. Under the flare of a match
+they sometimes caught a glimpse of the muleteers shuffling ahead on a
+tired run. Occasionally their sobbing breath rose over the scrape of the
+hoofs. But first one riding, then the other, they hustled them on
+without mercy till the train opened at last upon the plateau above.
+
+"Now, then! Run them down!" Seyd shouted; but as he swung his mule out
+to go by the burros he almost ran into a horseman who had just reined
+his beast to one side of the trail.
+
+"It is you, señor?"
+
+Here on the top the light of the stars helped out the weak moon, and,
+though the man's face was in shadow, Seyd recognized the upright,
+graceful figure. "Come to see if the job is done." He thought it while
+answering aloud, "As you perceive, señor."
+
+"Not until long after you left did I hear of the break in the trail, and
+I have ridden hard--used up one horse and half killed this poor beast.
+But no matter so long as I am in time."
+
+"Hypocrite!" Seyd thought again. A little nonplussed, however, by the
+tone of assurance, he gave his thought lighter expression. "You would
+not have been if these fellows had had their way."
+
+"_Caramba_, señor! Why?"
+
+If his surprise were assumed it was certainly remarkably well done.
+While Seyd was telling of their narrow escape he sat his horse, silent
+but attentive. With the last word he burst into a fury of action.
+Uttering a Spanish oath, he drove in the spurs and rode his rearing
+horse straight at the mule-drivers, who had turned on Billy with drawn
+knives, lashing them with his heavy quirt over face, head, shoulders.
+Five minutes later his whip was still cutting the air with a shrill
+whistle, and, richly as the fellows deserved it, Seyd and Billy
+shuddered at the pitiless flogging. Strangest to them of all, the men
+endured this without attempt at flight or resistance. They stood, their
+arms shielding their faces, whimpering like beaten hounds.
+
+It was their abject submissiveness that injected a touch of doubt into
+Billy's comment. "It looks, after all, as though they had done it
+themselves."
+
+Seyd shrugged. "Perhaps; in any case we have no proof."
+
+"Now, blind swine, that will serve for a while!" Sebastien's cold voice
+broke in. "Off with you and build a fire, then stake out the mules."
+Seyd's suspicion gave a little more before his quiet assurance. "You
+will have to stay here till morning, señors, for it is many miles along
+the rim to the other trail. Unfortunately, it was your supply mule that
+went into the cañon, so you must needs go hungry. However, we have a
+proverb, 'A warm fire helps the empty belly,' and to-morrow you will be
+able to recover your goods."
+
+Neither did his expression, as presently revealed by the fire, offer
+evidence for doubt. As he stood looking down at the blaze Seyd was
+vividly reminded of the Aztec god, for its cold stone face was not more
+inscrutable than this quiet brown mask. Its inscrutability provoked him
+to ask a sudden question.
+
+"Did I not see you at the hotel last night?"
+
+But the sudden challenge produced only an indifferent shrug. "Perhaps. I
+was there."
+
+He did look up at Billy's vigorous comment on his answer as translated
+by Seyd: "Then why didn't he show himself this morning? Goodness knows
+we left late enough."
+
+He even asked, "What does he say?" And the sense having been softened in
+translation to an expression of mild wonder at his non-appearance, he
+quietly replied, "I do not doubt that the señor's departure was fraught
+with enormous significance for the country at large, but not being
+informed of it, there was no reason for me to cut my sleep."
+
+Though the smile which marked his appreciation of the blush that drowned
+out Billy's freckles when Seyd translated was so slight as to be almost
+imperceptible, it yet increased his anger. "The dago!" he growled. "I'd
+punch his head for five cents Mex. The gall of him! Standing there
+poking fun at us after we have just missed death at the hands of his
+brigands. And you really think that he planned it all?"
+
+"Looks like it. He chose the men, the trail. Was seen last night at the
+hotel. Appears now at the psychological moment. Any jury would--"
+
+"--Pronounce me guilty. They would be mistaken, sir."
+
+Utterly confounded at the interruption which was delivered in fluent
+English--so surprised, indeed, that Billy glanced around to make sure
+that nobody else had spoken--they stared at him across the fire in red
+confusion. When Seyd at last found his tongue he could only stammer the
+obvious question, "You speak English?"
+
+"As you perceive, sir." As he returned Seyd his phrase of a few minutes
+before not even a twinkle betrayed his knowledge of their ridiculous
+situation.
+
+Nor was one needed to increase Billy's anger. "Then why don't you speak
+it?" he roughly blurted.
+
+Ignoring the question, the man went on addressing Seyd. "In accordance
+with the foolish custom that aims to make poor foreigners out of good
+Mexicans I received my education at a boarding-school in the city of
+Manchester, England."
+
+_Manchester, England!_ Center of the Lancashire cotton trade, inner
+shrine of commerce! Commercial essence exuded from the very name; it
+smelled to heaven of tin and rosin. Imagination faltered, nay, refused
+even to attempt to establish a relation between its prosiness and this
+romantic figure with a face cast in the image of the stone gods! Above
+all, a Manchester boarding-school! Seyd almost gasped. For to his
+knowledge of "fags" and "bullies," "form rows," "cribs and crams," and
+education by external application, gained by the perusal of _Tom Brown's
+School Days_, he had added the later, savagely impish realism of
+Kipling's _Stalky_.
+
+And he knew what a living hell the life must have been to a high-strung
+Mexican youth. "Well!" he breathed at last. "I don't envy you the
+experience. I'm told that the English schoolboy isn't particularly
+sensitive or nice in his--his treatment of--"
+
+"--Half-castes. Don't avoid the word. We Mexicans are proud of our Aztec
+blood. They did not love me, but I tell you, señor, that their dislike
+for me was as milk to fire compared with mine for them, and they left me
+alone after a couple had felt my knife. How I hated them--the conceited
+lackeys of masters as much as the bullocks of boys and their ox-like
+fathers. How they lectured me, the lackeys, for my 'cowardice' in using
+a knife--the cowardice of one small boy pitted against a hundred impish
+devils. But they were never able to blind me with their fustian ideals.
+Even then I could see through their sham morality, hypocritical
+humanity, insufferable conceit.
+
+"'England is the workshop of the world!' They dinned it into us. In
+furtherance of the ideal they fouled the air with coal smoke, herded
+their men and women from the open farms into slums and brothels, and as
+they have done by their own so would they like to do for the world--make
+it one huge factory set in a slum." He had spoken all through with great
+heat. Glancing for the first time at Billy, he finished, more quietly,
+"That is why I do not speak English--because I hate both them and their
+tongue."
+
+Now Billy's conception of John Bull and his island had been principally
+formed on the perfervid "tail-twisting" of the common-school histories,
+and Seyd, whose views had been corrected by wider reading, had to smile
+at his emphatic indorsement. "I'm with you. No English, please, in
+mine."
+
+Even Sebastien smiled. "No, you are American--from our viewpoint, much
+worse. Just as sordid as the stupid English, you are quicker-witted,
+therefore more to be feared, and you stand forever at our gates, ready
+to force your commerce and ideas upon us. But much as we hate you, loath
+as we are to have you come among us, I would still have you to believe
+that this business was accidental. I, at least, did not plan your
+death."
+
+"Then you do not speak for them?" Seyd glanced at the muleteers, now
+crouching over a second small fire they had built for themselves.
+
+"_Quien sabe?_" Sebastien shrugged his shoulders. "They would think
+little of it. But what can you do? You have no proof. And I will see to
+it that they play you no more tricks."
+
+Walking over, he kicked first one, then the other, in the small of the
+back. "Up, swine!" And while they stood shivering before them he gave
+them their orders--first to recover the baggage, then to convey the
+señors in safety to their mine. "Fail me in one thing," he concluded,
+with a frightful threat, "and I will pluck out your eyes and turn you
+out on the road."
+
+Turning his back on them, he walked over to the horses, and had mounted
+before Seyd realized his intent. "You are not going?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, it is only five leagues back to the hacienda where I left my own
+horse."
+
+"First let me thank you."
+
+Not seeing the touch of the spur that had caused the beast to rear
+suddenly, he imagined it shied at his outstretched hand. While curbing
+its plungings the other answered: "It is nothing. You owe me nothing. I
+came to repair a mistake and arrived too late. _Adios!_" And swinging
+the fighting beast out of the firelight into the dusk he galloped off,
+leaving Seyd standing with hand outstretched.
+
+Returning to the fire, he passed close to the muleteers, whose faces,
+looking after him, expressed a curious mixture of dislike, suspicion,
+fear. Observing it, Billy laughed. "Our friend's football practice over
+there rather inclines me to favor his theories. I've seen a few
+walking-delegates in my time that I'd like to place under him. I'll bet
+you there are no labor troubles in his cosmos. Fancy a system that
+trains men to put your enemies away without so much as a wink. I call it
+ideal."
+
+"Yes." Seyd laughed. "I have so much respect for it that I propose to
+keep watch and watch on the off chance of an attempt on our throats. If
+you'll just settle down for a snooze I'll take the first trick."
+
+His laughter, however, covered feeling that had been deeply stirred by
+the events of the day. After Billy had curled up close to the fire his
+glance went over to the muleteers, who lay, heads muffled in their
+scarlet serapes, beside their own fire. Their very quiet stimulated
+thoughts which passed back through the medievalism of the "conquest" and
+the savagery of the Aztecs to the dim time that saw the erection of the
+temple they had passed that day. Stimulated by the distant roar of
+waters, the complaint of the wind in the trees, and the voices of night
+that rose out of the valley's black void, his fancies grew and possessed
+him until he saw his own civilization as a flash in the dark space of
+the ages. So absorbed was he that Billy's interruption came as a
+surprise.
+
+"I've slept four hours. Time for your snooze."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+"Phe-ew!" Looking up from a treatise on bricklaying as applied to
+the building of furnaces, Billy pitched a stone at Seyd, who was
+experimenting with a batch of lime fresh drawn from a kiln of their own
+burning. "I'd always imagined bricklaying to be a mere matter of plumb
+and trowel, but this darned craft has more crinkles to it than the
+differential calculus. This fellow makes me dizzy with his talk of ties
+and courses, flues, draughts, cornering, slopes, and arches."
+
+Leaning on his hoe, Seyd wiped his wet brow. "I'm finding out a few
+things myself. I'd always sort of envied a hod-carrier. But now I know
+that the humble 'mort' puts more foot-pounds of energy into his work
+than the average horse. As a remedy for dizziness caused by overstudy,
+mixing mortar has no equal. Come and spell me with this hoe."
+
+"'And the last state of that man was worse than the first,'" Billy
+groaned. "_Can't_ we hire a single solitary peon, Seyd?"
+
+More eloquently than words, Seyd's shrug testified to the sullen boycott
+which had been maintained against them for the past three weeks. On the
+morning of their arrival at the mine, while the fear of Sebastien Rocha
+still lay heavy upon him, Carlos had been half bullied, half persuaded
+into the sale of Paz and Luz at a price which raised him almost
+to the status of a ranchero. But that single transaction summed up
+their dealings with the natives. No man had answered their call for
+laborers at wages which must have appeared as wealth to a peon. The
+charcoal-burners who drove their burros past the mine every day returned
+to their greetings either muttered curses or black stares. They were as
+stubborn in their cold obstinacy as the face of the temple god. Indeed,
+in these days the stony face of the image had become inseparably
+associated in Seyd's mind with the determined opposition that had routed
+his predecessors and now aimed to oust him. He saw it even in the soft,
+round faces of the children who peeped at him from the doorways of cane
+huts, a somber look, centuries old in its stubborn dullness.
+
+Not that he and Billy were in the least discouraged. Once convinced that
+labor was not to be obtained, they had stripped and pitched in. In one
+month they rebuilt the adobe dwelling which had been somewhat shattered
+by the Dutchman's hurried exit, dug a lime kiln, and hauled the wood and
+stone for the first burning. They had completed the laying out of the
+smelter foundation, filling in odd moments by picking for the first
+charge the choicest ore from the hundreds of tons that the Englishmen
+had unwisely mined before they ran head-on into the hostile combination
+of freights and prices.
+
+This last had been an inspiriting labor, for so rich were the values
+which the ore carried that after a trial assay Billy had danced all over
+the place beating an old pan. It is doubtful whether young men ever had
+better prospects; and so, knowing that Billy's present pessimism arose
+from a strong disinclination for physical labor in the hot sun, Seyd
+merely grinned. Sitting down on a pile of brick, he mopped his face and
+stared out over the valley.
+
+Situated, as the mine was, on a wide bench which gave pause to the
+earth's dizzy plunge from the rim three thousand feet above, Seyd sat
+at the meeting-place of temperate and tropic zones. A hundred feet
+below--just where they had climbed the stiff trail out of the jungle
+that flooded the valley with its fecund life--a group of cocoanut palms
+stood disputing the downward rush of the pine, and all along the bench
+piñon and copal, upland growths, shouldered cedars and ceibas, the
+tropical giants. While these battled above for light and room there
+came, writhing snake-like up from the tropics, creepers and climbers,
+vines and twining plants, to engage the ferns and bracken, the pine's
+green allies. A plague of orchids here attacked the copal, wreathing
+trunk and limb in sickly flame. The bracken there overswept the riotous
+tropical life. All along the borderland the battle raged, here following
+a charge of the pine down a cool ravine, there mounting with the tropic
+growths to a sunlit slope. But in the valley below the tropics ruled
+clear down to the brilliant green of the San Nicolas cane fields.
+
+"By the way"--Seyd spoke as his eye fell on these--"Don Luis is back
+from Mexico City. The hunchbacked charcoal-burner told me as he went
+past this morning."
+
+"The deuce he did!" Of all the black looks that came their way that of
+the cripple was the most vindictive. "You must have him hypnotized."
+
+"You wouldn't think so if you had heard his accent. 'El General is
+again at San Nicolas,' just as though he were sentencing me to hang.
+Nevertheless, the news comes pat. I think it would be good policy for me
+to run down and pay the denunciation taxes before we begin work on the
+smelter. No, I don't apprehend any trouble. Your Mexican hasn't much
+stomach for litigation, and no doubt the old fellow feels quite safe in
+his pull with the metals companies and railroads. But while he is still
+in the mind we had better pay the money and complete title. If he once
+gets wind of the smelter--"
+
+"Just so." Billy threw down the hoe. "While you dress I'll saddle up a
+mule--if you will please say to which demon you prefer to intrust your
+precious neck. Light began the day by kicking me through the side of
+the stable. She needs chastening. But then Peace dined on my arm
+yesterday. It's Peace for yours, and I only hope you get it."
+
+"Hum!" he coughed when, half an hour later, Seyd emerged shaved, bathed,
+and clad in immaculate white. "Is this magnificence altogether for el
+General, or did Caliban drop some word of our niece? Really, old chap,
+you look fine. If I were the señorita I'd go for you myself."
+
+Though Seyd laughed, yet the instant he passed out of sight he fell
+into frowning thought which was evidently related to the letter he
+pulled out and reread while he rode down the steep grades. Written in a
+characterless round hand, it covered so many pages that he was halfway
+down before, after tearing it in shreds, he tossed it to the winds. Its
+destruction, however, did not seem to change his mood. He let Peace
+take her own way until, having slipped, slid, and tobogganed on tense
+haunches down the last grade, she felt able to assert her individuality
+by attempting to rub him off against a tree. Next she attempted the
+immolation of a fat brown baby that was rolling with a nest of young
+pigs in the dust outside a hut; and thereafter her performances were so
+varied that he was simply compelled to take some notice of the sights
+and sounds of the trail.
+
+Not the least remarkable were the frequent and familiar scowls of the
+people he met. Various in expression, they ranged between the copious
+curses of the fat señora whose pacing-mule was driven by Peace off
+the trail, and the snarling malice of occasional muleteers; but,
+undisturbed, he pursued his inquiries for laborers at every chance.
+
+"No, señor, we do not desire work."
+
+The stereotyped answer merely stimulated the quiet persistence which
+formed the basis of his character, and he continued to ask at the
+village which raised graceful palm roofs out of a jungle clearing, at
+the ranchos which now began to cover the valley with a green checker
+of maize fields, and at scattered huts, half hidden by the rich foliage
+of palms and bananas. It was while he was questioning a peon who was
+hulling rice with a wooden pole and churn arrangement that the subdued
+hostility broke out in open demonstration.
+
+The trail here ran between a fence of split poles, which inclosed the
+peon's corn and frijoles, and the steep bank of a dry creek bed, so that
+only a few feet leeway was left for the train of burros which came
+trotting out of the jungle behind him. In single file they could have
+passed, but looking around he saw they were coming three abreast.
+
+Had he chosen, there was time to make the end of the fence. But he
+had seen behind the train the sparkling, beady eyes of Caliban, the
+hunchback, and the dark grins of two of his fellows. Flushing with
+quick anger, he backed Peace against the fence, leaned forward over her
+neck, and slashed with his whip at the leading beasts. Checked by this,
+they would have fallen back to single file but for the whips behind that
+bit out hair and hide and drove them on in a huddled mass.
+
+It seemed for a few seconds that he would be crushed. That he escaped
+injury was simply due to the hereditary hate between the mule and the
+ass which suddenly turned Peace into a raging fiend. While her chisel
+teeth slit ragged hides her other and busier end beat a devil's tattoo
+on resounding ribs and filled the air with flying charcoal. Yet even her
+demoniac energies had their limitations. If she held the ground for
+herself and master she could not preserve the inviolability of his white
+trousers, which emerged sadly smudged from the fray. It is a pity she
+could not. Little things always cause the greatest trouble, and but for
+the smudges the incident would probably have closed with Seyd's
+challenge:
+
+"Can't you be content with half the road?"
+
+His patience even survived their insolent grins. Not until the hunchback
+in passing emitted a hoarse chuckle as he surveyed the smudges did
+Seyd's temper burst its bonds. Swinging his whip then with all his
+might, he laid it across the crooked shoulders once, twice, thrice,
+before the fellow sprang, snarling, out of reach. The others, who had
+already passed, came leaping back at his cry, knives flashing as they
+ran, and though they stopped under the sudden frown of a Colt's
+automatic, they did not retire, but stood, fingering their knives,
+muttering curses.
+
+A little sorry on his part for the anger which had turned the sullen
+hostility into open feud, Seyd faced them, puzzled just what to do. It
+was too late to give way, for that would expose him to future insult.
+Yet if, taking the initiative, he should happen to kill a man, he knew
+enough of the quality of justice as dealt out by the Mexican courts to
+realize the danger.
+
+While he debated, the puzzle was almost solved by the peon rice-huller,
+who came stealing up from behind the fence. Not until the man had swung
+his heavy pestle and was tiptoeing to his blow did Seyd divine the
+reason for the glances that were passing behind him. Looking quickly,
+he caught the glint of polished hardwood in the tail of his eye; then,
+without a pause for thought, he dropped flat on the rump of the mule,
+and not a second too soon, for, raising the hair on his brow as it
+passed, the club smashed down through the top rail of the fence. In
+falling backward his weight on the bridle brought Peace scurrying a few
+paces to the rear. When he snapped upright again the fourth enemy was
+also under his gun.
+
+But what to do? The puzzle still remained--to be solved by another, for
+just then came a sudden beat of hoofs, and from behind a bamboo thicket
+galloped first the Siberian wolf hound, then the girl he had met at the
+train.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+So silently did the girl come that the charcoal-burners were forced to
+jump aside, and, springing in the wrong direction, the hunchback was
+bowled over by the beast of the _mozo_ who rode at her back.
+
+"Why, señor!" she exclaimed, reining in. Then taking in the knives,
+pistol, broken club, she asked, "They attacked you? Tomas!"
+
+Her Spanish was too rapid for Seyd's ear, but it was easy to gather its
+tenor from the results. With a certain complaisance Seyd looked on while
+his enemies scattered on a run that was diversified by uncouth leaps as
+the _mozo's_ whip bit on tender places.
+
+"He struck at you?" She broke in on the rice-huller's voluble plea that
+never, _never_ would he have raised a finger against the señor had he
+known him for a friend of hers! "Then he, too, shall be flogged."
+
+"I would not wish--" Seyd began.
+
+But she interrupted him: "You were going toward San Nicolas? Then I
+shall turn and ride with you." Anticipating his protest, she added,
+"I had already ridden beyond my usual distance."
+
+Very willingly he fell in at her side, and they rode on till they met
+the _mozo_ returning, hot and flushed, from the pursuit. He was keen
+as a blooded hound; it required only her backward nod to send him
+darting along the trail, and just about the time they overtook the
+charcoal-burners a sudden yelling in their rear told that the account
+of the rice-huller was in course of settlement.
+
+Passing his late enemies, Seyd could not but wonder at their
+transformation. With the exception of the hunchback, in whose beady eyes
+still lurked subdued ferocity, all were sobbing, and even he broke into
+deprecatory whinings. Having read his Prescott, Seyd knew something of
+the rigid Aztec caste systems from which Mexican peonage was derived.
+Now, viewing their abjectness, he was able to apprehend, almost with the
+vividness of experience, the ages of unspeakable cruelty that had given
+birth to their fear. But that which astonished him still more was the
+indifference with which the girl had ordered the flogging.
+
+Such glimpses of her face as he was able to steal while they rode
+did not aid him much. It was impossible to imagine anything more
+typically modern than the delicately chiseled features lit with a vivid
+intelligence which seemed to pulse and glow in the soft shadow beneath
+her hat. And when from her face his glance fell to her smart riding-suit
+of tan linen he was completely at sea.
+
+Curiosity dictated his comment: "Your justice is certainly swift. Really
+I am afraid that I was the aggressor. At least I struck first."
+
+"But not without cause." She glanced at his smudged clothes. "Tell me
+about it." And when he had finished she commented: "Just as I thought.
+And these are dangerous men. They would have killed you without a qualm.
+In the days that Don Sebastien was clearing the country of bandits he
+counted that hunchback one of his best men."
+
+"Yet he whined like a puppy under your man's whip."
+
+Smiling at his wonder, she went on to state the very terms of his
+puzzle. "You do not know them--the combination of ferocity and
+subservience that goes with their blood. In the old days he who raised
+his hand against the superior caste was put to death by torture, and,
+though, thank God, those wicked days are past, the effect remains. They
+are obedient, usually, as trained hounds, but just as dangerous to a
+stranger. If I had not ordered them flogged they would have taken it as
+license to kill you at their leisure."
+
+"Now I realize the depth of my obligation."
+
+He spoke a little dryly, and she leaped to his meaning with a quickness
+that greatly advanced her in his secret classification. "I have hurt
+your pride. You will pardon me. I had forgotten the unconquerable valor
+of the gringos."
+
+"Oh, come!" he pleaded.
+
+She stopped laughing. "Really, I did not doubt your courage. But do not
+imagine for one moment that they would attack you again in the open. A
+knife in the dark, a shot from a bush, that is their method, and if you
+should happen to kill one, even in self defense, gringos are not so well
+beloved in Guerrero but that some one would be found to swear it a
+murder. Be advised, and go carefully."
+
+"I surely will." He was going on to thank her when she cut him off with
+the usual "It is nothing." Whereupon, respect for her intuition was
+added to the classification which was beginning to bewilder him by its
+scope and variety.
+
+In fact, he could not look her way nor could she speak without some
+physical trait or mental quality being added to the catalogue. Now it
+was the quivering sensitiveness of her mouth, an unsuspected archness,
+the astonishing range of feeling revealed by her large dark eyes.
+Looking down upon the charcoal-burners, they had gleamed like black
+diamonds; in talking, their soft glow waxed and waned. Sometimes--but
+this was omitted from the classification because it only occurred when
+his head was turned--a merry twinkle illumined a furtive smile. Taken in
+all its play and sparkle, her face expressed a lively sensibility
+altogether foreign to his experience of women.
+
+After a short silence she took up the subject again. "But I am giving
+you a terrible impression of our people. It is only in moments of
+passion that the old Aztec crops out. At other times they are kind,
+pleasant, generous. Neither are we the cruel taskmasters that some
+foreign books and papers portray us. You would not believe how angry
+they make me--the angrier because I have a strain of your blood in my
+own veins. My grandfather, you know, was Irish. It was from him I
+learned your speech."
+
+The last bit of information was almost superfluous, for from no other
+source could she have obtained the pure lilting quality that makes the
+Dublin speech the finest English in the world. To it she had added an
+individual charm, the measured cadence and soft accent of her native
+Spanish, delivered in a low contralto that had in it a little break. Her
+laugh punctuated its flow as she came to her conclusion.
+
+"But you will soon be able to see for yourself what terrible people we
+are."
+
+He obtained one glimpse within the next mile. He had already noted the
+passing of the last wild jungle. From fields of maize which alternated
+with sunburned fields of _maguey_ they now rode into an avenue that led
+on through green cane. Rising far above their heads, the cane marched
+with them for a half mile, then suddenly opened out around a primitive
+wooden sugar mill. Under the thatched roof of an open hut half-nude
+women were stirring boiling syrup in open pans, and at the sight of
+Francesca one of them came running out to the trail.
+
+"Her baby is to be christened next Sunday," the girl told him as they
+rode on. "She was breaking her heart because she had no robe. But now
+she is happy, for I have promised to ask the good _mama_ to lend her
+mine, which she has treasured all these years."
+
+Soon afterward as they turned out of the cane into a new planting they
+almost ran down her uncle, who had come out to inspect the work. Only
+his quick use of the spur averted a collision, and as his own spirited
+roan sprang sideways Seyd noted with admiration that despite his bulk
+and age horse and man moved as one. If surprised at the sight of his
+niece in such company, the old man did not reveal it by so much as the
+lift of a brow. It was difficult even to perceive the twinkle in his
+eyes that lightened his chiding.
+
+"_Ola_, Francesca! If there be no respect for thy own pretty neck,
+at least have pity on my old bones. It is you, señor? Welcome to San
+Nicolas."
+
+Neither did Seyd's explanation of his business abate his brown
+impassivity. If assumed, his ponderous effort at recollection was
+wonderfully realistic. "Ah, _si_! Santa Gertrudis? If I remember aright,
+it was denounced before. Yes, yes, by several--but they had no good
+fortune. Still, you may fare better. Paulo, the administrador, will
+attend to the business."
+
+With a wave of the hand, courteous in its very indifference, he put the
+matter out of his province and displayed no further interest until the
+girl told of the attack on Seyd. Then he glanced up quickly from under
+frowning brows.
+
+"You had them whipped? _Bueno!_ The rascals must be taught not to molest
+travelers. And now we shall ride on that the señor may break his fast.
+And thou, too, wicked one, will be late. As thou knowest, it is the only
+fault the good mother sees in thee."
+
+"Would that it totaled my sins," she laughed. "To escape another black
+mark I shall have to gallop. _Ola!_ for a race!"
+
+As from a light touch of the spur her beast launched out and away, the
+roan reared and tried to follow, and while he curbed it back to a walk
+the old man's heavy face lit up with pleasure. "She rides well. I have
+not a vaquero with a better seat. But go thou, Tomas, lest she come to
+a harm. And you, señor, will follow?"
+
+With a vivid picture of the figure Peace would cut in a race occupying
+the forefront of his mind it did not take Seyd long to choose. After the
+girl had passed from sight behind a clump of tamarinds he took note, as
+they rode along, of the peons who were laying the field out in shallow
+ditches wherein others were planting long shoots of seed cane. To his
+practical engineer's eye the hand-digging seemed so slow and laborious
+that he could not refrain from a comment.
+
+"It seems to me that a good steel plow would do the work much cheaper."
+
+"Cheaper? Perhaps." After a heavy pause, during which he took secret
+note of Seyd out of the corner of his eye, the old man went on: "To
+do a thing at less cost in labor and time seems to be the only thing
+that you Yankees consider. But cheapness is sometimes dearly purchased.
+Come! Suppose that I put myself under the seven devils of haste that
+continually drive you. What would become of these, my people? Who would
+employ them? It is true that theirs is not a great wage--perhaps, after
+all, totals less than the cost of your steel plow and a capable man to
+run it. We pay only three and a half cents for each ditch, in our
+currency, and a man must dig twelve a day. If he digs less he gets
+nothing.
+
+"That does not seem just to you?" He read Seyd's surprise. "It would if
+you knew them. Grown children without responsibility or sense of duty
+are they. If left free to come and go, they would dig one, two, three
+ditches, enough and no more than would supply them with _cigarros_ and
+_aguardiente_, and our work would never be done. As it is, they dig the
+full twelve, and have money for other necessities.
+
+"The wage seems small?" Again he read Seyd's mind. "Yet it is all that
+we can afford, nor does it have to cover the cost of living. Each man
+has his patch of maize and frijoles, and a run for his chickens and
+pigs. Then the river teems with fish, the jungle with small game. His
+wage goes only for drink and _cigarros_, or, if there be sufficient
+left over, to buy a dress for his woman. They are perfectly content."
+Slightly lifting his heavy brows, he finished, looking straight at Seyd:
+"I am an old Mexican hacendado, yet I have traveled in your country and
+Europe. Tell me, señor, can as much be said of your poor?"
+
+Now, in preparing a thesis for one of his social-science courses, Seyd
+had studied the wage scale of the cotton industry, and so knew that,
+ridiculously small as this peon wage appeared at the first glance, it
+actually exceeded that paid to women and children in Southern cotton
+factories. In their case, moreover, the pittance had to meet every
+expense.
+
+He did not hesitate to answer. "I should say that your peons were better
+off, providing the conditions, as you state them, are general."
+
+"And they are, señor, except in the south tropics, where any kind of
+labor is murder. But here? It is as you see; and why disturb it by the
+introduction of Yankee methods?"
+
+Pausing, he looked again at Seyd, and whether through secret pleasure at
+his concession or because he merely enjoyed the pleasure of speaking out
+that which would have been dangerous if let fall in the presence of a
+countryman, he presently went on: "Therefore it is that I do not stand
+with Porfirio Diaz in his commercial policies. He is a great man. Who
+should know it better than I that fought with or against him in a dozen
+campaigns. And he has given us peace--thirty years of slow, warm peace.
+Yet sometimes I question its value. In the old time, to be sure, we cut
+each other's throats on occasion. In the mean time we were warmer
+friends. And war prevented the land from being swamped by the millions
+that overrun your older countries, the teeming millions that will
+presently swarm like the locusts over your own United States. As I say,
+señor, I am only an old Mexican hacendado, but I have looked upon it all
+and seen that where war breeds men, civilization produces only mice. If
+I be allowed my choice give me the bright sword of war in preference to
+the starvation and pestilence that thins out your poor."
+
+Concluding, he looked down, interrogatively, as though expecting a
+contradiction. But though, after all, his argument was merely a
+restatement of the time-worn Malthusianism, coming out of the mouth of
+one who had strenuously applied it during forty years of internecine
+war, it carried force. Maintaining silence, Seyd stole occasional
+glances at the massive brown face and the heavy figure moving in stately
+rhythm with the slow trot of his horse, while his memory flashed over
+tale after tale that Peters, the station agent, had told him when he was
+out the other day to the railroad--tales of bravery, hardy adventures,
+all performed amidst the inconceivable cruelties of the revolutionary
+wars. Even had he been certain that the eventual peopling of the earth's
+vacant places would not force a return to at least a revised
+Malthusianism, it was not for his youth to match theories with age. When
+he did speak it was on another subject.
+
+"I have been riding all morning on your land. I suppose it extends as
+far in the other direction?"
+
+"A trifle." A deprecatory wave of the strong brown hand lent emphasis to
+the phrase. "A trifle, señor, by comparison with the original grant to
+our ancestor from Cortes. 'From the rim of the Barranca de Guerrero on
+both sides, and as far up and down from a given point as a man may
+ride in a day,' so the deed ran. Being shrewd as he was valiant, my
+forefather had his Indians blaze a trail in both directions before he
+essayed the running. A hundred and fifty miles he made of it when he
+started--not bad riding without a trail. But it is mostly gone by family
+division, or it has been forfeited by those who threw in their luck on
+the wrong side of a revolution. Now is there left only a paltry hundred
+or so thousands of acres--and this!"
+
+For the first time pronounced feeling made itself felt through his
+massive reserve, and looking over the view that had suddenly opened,
+Seyd did not wonder at the note of pride. After leaving the cane they
+had plunged through green skirts of willow to the river that split the
+wide valley in equal halves, and from the shallow ford they now rode
+out on a grassy plateau that ran for miles along low lateral hills.
+Dotted with tamarinds, banyans, and the tall ceibas which held huge
+leafy umbrellas over panting cattle, it formed a perfect foreground for
+the hacienda, whose chrome-yellow buildings lay like a band of sunlight
+along the foot of the hill. The thick adobe walls that bound stables,
+cottages, and outbuildings into a great square gave the impression of a
+fortified town, castled by the house, which rose tier on tier up the
+face of the hill.
+
+When they rode through the great gateway of the lower courtyard the
+interior view proved equally arresting. Mounting after Don Luis up
+successive flights of stone steps, they came to the upper courtyard,
+wherein was concentrated every element of tropical beauty--wide
+corridors, massive chrome pillars, time-stained arches, luxurious
+foliage. From the tiled roof above a vine poured in cataracts of living
+green so dense that only vigorous pruning had kept it from shutting off
+all light from the rooms behind. Left alone, it would quickly have
+smothered out the palms, orchids, rare tropical plants that made of the
+courtyard a vivid garden.
+
+"They call it the _sin verguenza_." While he was admiring the creeper
+Francesca had joined them from behind. "Shameless, you know, for it
+climbs 'upstairs, downstairs,' nor respects even the privacy of 'my
+lady's chamber.' Thanks to the good legs of my beast, I escaped a
+scolding. Sit here where the vines do not obstruct the view."
+
+If Seyd had been told a few minutes before that anything could have
+become her more than the tan riding-suit he would have refused to
+believe. But now by the evidence of his own eyes he was forced to admit
+the added charm of a simple batiste, whose fluffy whiteness accentuated
+her girlishness. The mad gallop had toned her usual clear pallor with a
+touch of color, and as she looked down, pinning a flower on her breast,
+he noted the perfect curve of her head.
+
+"Room for a good brain there," he thought, while answering her
+observation. "It is beautiful. But don't you find it a little dull
+here--after Mexico City?"
+
+"No." She shook her head with vigor. "Of course, I like the balls
+and parties, yet I am always glad to return to my horses and dogs
+and--though it is wicked to put them in the same category--my babies.
+There are always at least three mothers impatiently awaiting my return
+to consult me upon names. I am godmother to no less than seven small
+Francescas."
+
+"I never should have thought it. You must have begun--"
+
+"--Very young? Yes, I was only fifteen, so my first godchild is now
+seven. That reminds me--she is waiting below to repeat her catechism.
+There is just time--if you would like it."
+
+"I would be delighted. So the position is not without its duties?"
+
+"I should think not." Her eyes lit with a touch of indignation. "I hold
+the baby at the christening after helping to make the robe. When they
+are big enough I teach them their catechism. You could not imagine the
+weight of my responsibilities, and I believe that I am much more
+concerned for their behavior than their mothers. If any of them were to
+do anything really wicked"--her little shudder was genuine--"I should
+feel dreadfully ashamed. But they are really very good--as you shall
+judge for yourself. Francesca!" As, with a soft patter of chubby feet, a
+small girl emerged from a far corner, she added with archness that was
+chastened by real concern, "Now you must not dare to say that she isn't
+perfect."
+
+In one sense the caution was needed. After a brave answer to the
+question "Who is thy Creator, Francesca?" the child displayed a slight
+uncertainty as to the origin of light, added a week or two to the "days
+of creation," and became hopelessly mixed as to the specific quantities
+of the "Trinity"--wherein, after all, she was no worse than the
+theologians who have burned each other up, in both senses, in furious
+disputes over the same question. But better, far better than letter
+perfection, was the simple awe of the small brown face and the devotion
+of the lisping voice which followed the tutor's gentle prompting.
+
+"Fine! fine!" Seyd applauded a last valorous attack on the Ten
+Commandments, and the small scholar ran off clutching a silver coin,
+just so much the richer for his heretical presence. As he rose to follow
+his hostess inside he added, "If all the Francescas are equal to sample,
+the next generation of San Nicolas husbands will undoubtedly rise up and
+call you blessed."
+
+"Now you are laughing at me," she protested. "Though that might be truly
+said of my mother. She is a saint for good works. But come, or I shall
+yet earn my scolding. And let me warn you to take care of your heart.
+All of the _caballeros_ fall in love with mother."
+
+It was quite believable. While seated in the dining-room, a vaulted
+chamber cool as a crypt in spite of the sunblaze outside, a room which
+would have seated an army of retainers, he observed the señora with the
+satisfaction that even a stranger may feel in the promise a handsome
+mother holds out to her girls. In addition to the sweetness of her eyes
+and her tenderly tranquil expression she had retained her youthful
+contour. She exhibited the miracle of middle age achieved without fat or
+stiffness. In her scarf and black lace she was maturely beautiful.
+Waving away his apologies for the intrusion, she was anxiously
+solicitous for his wants through the meal. Yet he noticed that in
+taking his leave an hour later she did not ask him to call again.
+
+Up to that moment there had been no further mention of his business. But
+as he stood hesitating, loath to introduce it, Don Luis relieved his
+embarrassment. "Now you would see the administrador? I am sorry, señor,
+but it seems that he is away at Chilpancin about the sale of cattle. But
+if you will intrust your moneys to Francesca she will see to the
+business and have the papers sent out to the mine."
+
+Neither did Francesca, when saying good-by, ask him to return. But,
+conscious that with all their kind hospitality they still regarded him
+as an intruder, Seyd was neither offended nor surprised. He was even a
+little astonished when Don Luis stated his intention of riding with him
+as far as the cane.
+
+Until they came to the ford they rode in silence. Though only a few
+inches deep at this season, the river's wide bed proclaimed it one of
+those torrential streams which rise from a trickle to a flood in very
+few hours, and when he remarked upon it Don Luis assented with his heavy
+nod.
+
+"_Si_, it is very treacherous. One night during the last rains it rose
+fifty feet and swept down the valley miles wide, bearing on its yellow
+bosom cattle, houses, sheep, and pigs, and it drowned not a few of our
+people. And each year the floods go higher. Why? Because of the cursed
+lust that would mint the whole world into dollars. Year by year your
+Yankee companies are stripping the pine from the upper valley, and,
+though I have spoken with Porfirio Diaz about it, he is mad for
+commerce. He would see the whole state of Guerrero submerged before he
+revoked one charter. And they even try to make me a party to it.
+'General, if you will grant us a concession to do this, that, the other?
+If you will only allow us to run a branch line into your pine we can
+make big money--guarantee you half a million pesos.' When I am in Mexico
+your Yankee promoters swarm round me like hungry dogs. But never have I
+listened, nor ever will!"
+
+He struck the pommel of his saddle a heavy blow, then looked his
+surprise as Seyd spoke. "I should not think that you would. I understand
+your feelings."
+
+"You do? _Caramba!_ Then you are the first Yankee that ever did. In
+return for your sympathy let me offer you advice. You are not the first
+man to denounce on my land, nor is Santa Gertrudis the only location.
+Yankees, English, French, Germans, they have come, denounced claims here
+and there, but no man has ever held one. No man ever _will_. Already you
+have tasted the bitter hostility of my people, and were I to nod not
+even the American Ambassador could save you alive. And this is only the
+beginning. Let me return your money? Mexico is one great mine. Anywhere
+you can kick the soil and uncover a fortune."
+
+"But none like the Santa Gertrudis." Seyd smiled. "Of course, I feel
+it's pretty raw for me to force in on your land; but, knowing that
+if I don't some other will, I shall have to refuse. As for the
+opposition--that is all in the day's work." He finished, offering his
+hand. "But I hope this won't prevent us from being good neighbors?"
+
+Shaking his massive head, Don Luis reined in his horse. "No, señor, we
+can never be that. But next to a good friend I count a hearty enemy, and
+you may depend upon me for that."
+
+With a courteous wave of the hand he rode off; and, watching him go at
+a stately canter, Seyd muttered, "Enemy or friend, you are a fine old
+chap."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You are surely a fine old chap."
+
+Retracing his path through the long succession of farm, jungle, and
+fields, Seyd repeated it, and as he rode along he saw things in a new
+light. As he passed through one village at sundown the entire population
+was filing into church, the peons in clean blankets, their women in
+decent black. The next hamlet was in the throes of a fiesta. Girls in
+white, garlanded with flaming flowers, were dancing the eternal jig of
+the country with their brown swains. And these two functions, church and
+_baile_, marked the bounds of their simple life. A plenty of rice and
+frijoles, a peso or two for clothing, were all that they asked or
+needed.
+
+While prospecting in the Sierra Madres Seyd had drawn many a comparison
+between the happy indolence of the peon and the worry, strain, strife to
+live up to a standard just beyond income that obtains in American life.
+Because the peon had time to think his simple thoughts, listen to bird
+song and the music of babbling streams, to watch the splendors of
+sunrise and sunset over purple valleys, Seyd's suffrage had often gone
+to him. Observing this pastoral life in its tropical setting of palms
+and jungle, the opinion grew into a strong conviction.
+
+"The old fellow's right!" he ejaculated, riding out of the last village
+into the jungle proper. "We have nothing to give his people, and we'd
+surely kill all they have."
+
+Though the profusion of foliage which made of the trail one long green
+tunnel prevented him from seeing it, he was now riding along at the
+foot of the Barranca wall. Its deep shadow already filled the jungle
+with a twilight that thickened into night as he rode. But, knowing
+that whatever her faults of temperament Peace could be trusted to
+fetch her own stable, he left her to take her own way while he
+pursued his thoughts. While the siren whistle of beetles, chatter of
+_chickicuillotes_--wild hens of the jungle--deafened his ears, he tried
+to bring the crowding impressions of the day into some kind of order--no
+easy task when a fire-eating old general and a typical Mexican mother
+had to be reconciled in thought with a young girl who possessed the face
+of a Celt, eyes of a Spaniard, vivacity of a Frenchwoman, and American
+intelligence.
+
+Next he fell to speculating upon the causes which had kept her single at
+an age that, according to Mexican standards, placed her hopelessly upon
+the shelf, and he found the answer in the gossip of the American station
+agent on his last trip out to the railroad. "She could have had her
+cousin Sebastien any time, and there were others around these parts. But
+once let a high-strung girl like her get a glimpse of the outside world
+and no common hacendado can ever hope to tie her shoestring. They say
+she has had other chances--attachés of foreign legations in Mexico City.
+But she turned 'em down--I don't know why, unless it's ideals." With a
+humorous twinkle the agent had added: "Bad things, ideals--always in the
+way. If you happen to have any in stock give 'em to the first beggar you
+meet along the road. Hers are keeping San Nicolas and El Quiss from
+reuniting, but she don't seem to care."
+
+"A fine girl--the man will be lucky that gets her." Seyd now
+re-expressed the agent's homely verdict. "If it wasn't--" He stopped
+short, with a savage laugh. "You darned fool! mooning over a girl who
+would turn up her pretty nose at any gringo, much more one that has
+forced himself in on her uncle's land. Your business is to get a
+fortune out of the mine, and do it quick. And even if it wasn't--"
+
+The thought was never finished, for the last few minutes had brought him
+out into the starlight at the foot of the Barranca wall, and as Peace
+gathered herself for the scramble upward the jungle lit up with a sudden
+flash. Before Seyd's ears caught the report he felt his left shoulder
+clutched, as it were, by a red-hot hand. The next second he was almost
+thrown by the mule's sudden plunge--fortunately, for otherwise the
+bullet that came out of a second flash would have smashed through his
+brain.
+
+"Muzzle-loaders!" In the moment he lay on the mule's neck he divined it
+from the thick explosion. Then the thought, "It will take them a minute
+to reload," followed a quick calculation, "They'll catch me again on the
+first turn."
+
+With him action always sprang of subconscious processes which were
+quicker than thought, and while he crouched on her neck and Peace took
+the turn on a scrambling gallop he turned loose with both of his Colts,
+aiming at the spot from which the flashes had come. And the sequel
+proved his judgment. This time a single flash announced the bullet which
+grazed the mule's rump just as she shot into a patch of woodland.
+
+"Reckon I made one of you sick," he interpreted the single shot.
+
+The burning smart of his wound and the treachery of the attack had
+loosed within him a fury of anger. Reining in, he felt his shoulder. The
+bullet had plowed a furrow in the flesh of the upper arm, but, muttering
+"I guess it's bled about all it's going to," he first tied the mule to a
+tree, then slid the "reloads" into his guns.
+
+It would have been foolish to expose himself in the open trail under the
+clear starlight. Resisting the savage impulse which urged him to close
+quarters, he crawled back to the edge of the timber and again turned
+loose his guns, searching the jungle below with a swinging muzzle. Time
+and again he did it, thanking his stars whenever he reloaded for the
+forethought which had caused Billy to slip an extra box of cartridges
+into the holsters, and not until only one charge was left did he pause
+to listen.
+
+Whether or no it was the firing that had frightened even the night birds
+into temporary quiet, not even a twig stirred in the darkness below. He
+caught only the distant whooping which told that Billy had heard, and as
+this drew nearer with astonishing quickness Seyd rose and went back to
+his mule.
+
+"Coming downhill hell for leather!" he muttered. "If I don't hurry he'll
+break his neck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+One afternoon about a week later Mr. William Thornton was to be seen
+mixing mortar for the bricks he was laying on the smelter foundation.
+Rising almost sheer from the edge of the bench behind him, the Barranca
+wall shut off the western breeze, and from its face the fierce sunblaze
+was reflected in quivering waves of heat. Coming out from an early lunch
+he had noted that the thermometer registered ninety in the shade, and
+he was now ready to swear that with one more degree he himself would be
+able to supply all the moisture required for the operation.
+
+While working he cast occasional glances toward the house; and when, the
+mortar being mixed, he began to lay brick he used the trowel with care
+lest its clink should awaken Seyd. For though the blood loss from a
+severed artery had left him quite weak, he had obstinately refused to
+stop work. To-day he had even balked at the suggestion of a siesta until
+Billy had lain down himself. As soon as Seyd fell asleep Billy had
+slipped out, and when he now paused to listen the concern in his look
+passed into sudden attention as the clink of a shod hoof rose up from
+the trail below.
+
+Five minutes passed before he heard it again, and in the mean time his
+actions bespoke an intelligent appreciation of the needs of the case.
+Picking up a Winchester which leaned against a tree, he crouched behind
+his bricks, and while training it on the point where the trail emerged
+on the bench a ferocious scowl overshadowed his sunburn.
+
+"If we played it your way I'd brown you the second your nose shows," he
+muttered as the hoofbeats grew louder. "Thank your musty old saints that
+we don't. Ah! Eh? Well!"
+
+The interjections respectively fitted the wolf hound, her young
+mistress, and the _mozo_, as they appeared in the order named. As only
+Billy's head showed over the bricks, and both were on the same color
+scheme, he was practically invisible; and, reining up her beast, the
+girl allowed her curious gaze to wander around the bench from the
+gaping hole where the drift ran into the vein over the adobe hut and
+foundation--just missing Billy's head--to the blue-green piles of copper
+ore.
+
+"So this is the _mina_!" Her tone denoted disappointment. "Good heavens!
+Tomas, is this the wealth the gringos seek? What an ado over a pile of
+stones! I should think Don Luis would be thankful to have them carted
+away."
+
+She had spoken in Spanish, but when, having shed his arsenal under
+cover of the bricks, Billy rose and came forward, she addressed him in
+English. "Mr. Thornton, is it not? We have brought the papers from the
+administrador--at least, Tomas has. I am playing truant. Though it is
+only fifteen miles from here to San Nicolas, this is the first time that
+I have seen the place. Where is Mr. Seyd?"
+
+Now than Billy, was there never a young man more naturally chivalrous.
+Usually a locomotive could not have dragged from him a single word
+calculated to shock or offend a girl. But in his confusion at finding
+an expected enemy changed into a charming friend he let slip the naked
+truth. "He was shot--returning from your place."
+
+"Señor! He--he is not--dead?"
+
+There was no mistaking her concern. Sorry for his abruptness, Billy
+plunged to reassure her. "No! no! Only wounded."
+
+"Is he--much hurt?"
+
+It occurred to Billy that a flesh wound was, after all, rather a small
+price for such solicitude. But where a touch of jealousy might have
+caused another to make light of Seyd's wound, his natural unselfishness
+made him paint it in darker colors. "The bullet cut an artery, and he's
+pretty weak from loss of blood. Yet he won't lay off. I had to trick him
+into a siesta to-day. I'll go call him."
+
+But she raised a protesting hand. "No! no! Let him sleep. You can give
+him the papers. Tell him when he awakes that he will hear from us
+again."
+
+With a smile which caused Billy additional regret for his lack of wounds
+she rode off at a pace which filled him with anxiety for her neck. Until
+he caught a glimpse of her, foreshortened to a dot on the trail far
+below, he stood watching. Then, muttering "I'll bet Seyd will raise Cain
+when he awakes," he went back to his work.
+
+Nor was he mistaken, for when Seyd came out, yawning and stretching, an
+hour or so later, the last vestige of sleep was burned up by the sudden
+flash of his eyes. "You darned chump! Do we have visitors so often that
+you let me sleep on like a rotten log?"
+
+Neither was he appeased by Billy's answer, delivered with an irritating
+grin: "Why should she wish to see you when I was around? A pallid wretch
+who has to make three tries to cast a shadow!"
+
+"He has, has he?" Seyd growled. "Well, I'm solid enough to punch your
+fat head."
+
+The atmosphere having thus been cleared, he commented: "Went off to tell
+the General, eh? I wonder how he'll take it?"
+
+"Shouldn't imagine he'd shed any tears--unless at their poor shooting.
+Well, we'll see!"
+
+And see they did, for as they sat at lunch on the second day thereafter
+a yell followed by the crack of a whip brought them out just in time to
+see Caliban, the charcoal-burner, and the peon rice-huller coming on a
+shuffling run ahead of Tomas. The bloody bandages which bound the head
+of one and the leg of the other testified to Seyd's shooting, just as
+their glazed eyes and painful pantings told of the merciless run ahead
+of the _mozo_. It required only the hempen halter which each wore around
+his neck to complete the picture of misery.
+
+"These be they that attacked you, señor?" While the rice-huller squirmed
+under a sudden cut of his whip the _mozo_ went on: "This son of a devil
+was found nursing a wound in his hut, and he told on the other. Don Luis
+sends them with his compliments to be hanged at your leisure. If it
+please you to have it done now--there is an excellent tree."
+
+Too surprised to answer, Seyd and Billy stood staring at each other
+until, taking silence for consent, the _mozo_ began to herd his charges
+toward the said tree. "Here!" Seyd called him back. "This is kind of
+Don Luis, and you will please convey to him our thanks. It is very
+thoughtful of you to pick out such a fine tree, but, while we are sure
+that they would look very nice upon it, it is not the habit with our
+people to hang save for a killing, and I, as you see, am alive."
+
+The _mozo's_ dark brows rose to the eaves of his hair. "But of what use,
+señor, to hang _after_ the killing? Will the death of the murderer bring
+the murdered to life? But hang him in good season and you will have
+no murder. And this is a good tree, low, with strong, wide branches
+ordained for the purpose. See you! One throw of the rope, a pull, a
+knot--'tis done, easily as drinking, and they are out of your way."
+
+It was good logic; but, while admitting it, Seyd still pleaded his
+foolish national custom.
+
+Though his bent brows still protested against such squeamishness, the
+_mozo_ politely submitted. "_Bueno!_ it is for you to say. I leave them
+at your will to cure or kill."
+
+"Now, what shall we do?" Seyd consulted Billy. "If we send them back the
+old Don will surely hang them."
+
+"Well, what if he does? I'm sure that I don't care a whoop--" He paused,
+then suddenly exclaimed: "Are we crazy? Here we have been chasing labor
+all over the valley, and now that it is offered us free we turn up
+noses. Keep them, you bet! Put it into Spanish as quickly as you can."
+
+Smiling, the _mozo_ nodded comprehension. "As you say, señor, a live
+slave is better than a dead thief. They are at your orders to kill by
+rope or work."
+
+Though it was scarcely his thought, Seyd allowed it to go at that.
+Throwing the ends of the halters to Billy, the _mozo_ concluded his
+mission. "It remains only to say that Don Luis will have you come to
+San Nicolas till your wound is cured."
+
+"Fine!" Billy enthusiastically commented, when the invitation was
+translated. "I've said all along that you ought to lay off. Go down for
+a week. By the time you come back I'll have these chaps beautifully
+broken."
+
+"And you unable to speak a word of Spanish--not to mention the risk to
+your throat?" Seyd shook his head. "Besides, the old fellow made no
+bones of his feelings the other day. The invitation is merely in
+reparation for what he considers a violation of his hospitality. If it
+wasn't--My place is here."
+
+Accordingly, the _mozo_ carried back to San Nicolas a note which, if not
+penned in the best Spanish, yet caught its grave courtesy so cleverly
+that its perusal at the dinner table caused Francesca to pause and
+listen, drew an approving smile from the señora, and produced from Don
+Luis his heavy nod.
+
+"The young man is a fine _caballero_. Your ordinary gringo would have
+saddled himself upon us for three months, and we should have been worn
+to skeletons by his parrot chatter. As he lets us off so easily, I must
+ride up to the mine and warn those rascals to play him no tricks."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile Seyd and Billy had been giving the disposition of the said
+rascals considerable thought. After the _mozo_ left, Billy cut the
+halters from around their necks and brought them food and drink from
+the house. But whether or no they considered this fair front as being
+assumed to emphasize future tortures the two kept their sullen silence.
+
+"If we have to stand guard all the time we'd be better without them,"
+Billy doubted.
+
+"Yes," Seyd acquiesced. "Unless we can find some incentive. I wonder
+if they have families." When the two returned nods to his questions
+he continued, hopefully: "There we have it. Your Mexican peon takes
+homesickness worse than a Swiss. If we offer them a fair wage while the
+smelter is building I think they'll prove faithful. At least we can
+try."
+
+To an experienced eye--the _mozo's_, for instance--the sudden
+brightening of the dark faces might have meant something else than
+relief. At first Caliban seemed to find the good news impossible. But
+presently, setting it down as another idiocy of the foolish gringos,
+his incredulity vanished. In one hour he and the rice-huller were
+transformed from sullen foes to eager servants. Indeed, what with their
+willing work that afternoon and next morning, the smelter foundation had
+risen a full yard by the time that Don Luis came riding up to the bench.
+
+Looking up from a blue print of the foundation, Seyd saw him coming at
+the heavy trot which combined military stiffness with vaquero ease, and
+noting the keen glance with which he swept the bench the thought flashed
+upon him, "Now the cat's out of the bag!" He did not, however, try to
+smuggle the animal in again. When, greetings over, Don Luis turned a
+curious eye on the foundation he answered the unspoken question. "A
+smelter, señor."
+
+"A smelter?" For once the old fellow's massive self possession showed
+slight disturbance. "I thought--"
+
+"That it took a fortune to build one." Seyd filled in his pause. "It
+does--to put in a modern plant." While he went on explaining that this
+was merely an old-style Welch furnace of small capacity he felt the
+constraint under the old man's quiet, and was thereby stimulated to a
+mischievous addition. "You see, the freight rates on crude ore from this
+point are prohibitive, but one can make good money by smelting it down
+into copper matte."
+
+"A good plan, señor." Like a tremor on a brown pool, his disquiet
+passed. "And how long will it be in the building?"
+
+"We had calculated on four months. But with the help you so kindly sent
+us we can do it now in two."
+
+He could not altogether repress a mischievous twinkle. But Don Luis gave
+no sign. "_Bueno!_ It was for this that I came--to read these rascals
+their lesson." Menacing the peons with a weighty forefinger, he went on:
+"Now, listen, _hombres_! Since it has pleased the señor to save you
+alive, see that you repay his mercy with faithful labor. If there be any
+failure, tricks, or night flittings, remember that there is never a
+rabbit hole in all Mexico but where Luis Garcia can find you."
+
+Emphasizing the threat with another shake of his finger, he turned
+and went on with quiet indifference to comment upon the scenery. "A
+beautiful spot. Once I had thought to build here, but one cannot live on
+the edge of a cliff, and San Nicolas has its charm. Is it true that we
+cannot tempt you to come down? The señora begs that you reconsider."
+
+But he nodded his appreciation of Seyd's reasons. "_Si, si,_ a man's
+place is with his work--and I have stayed too long. There is business
+forward at Chilpancin, and even now I should be miles on the way."
+
+"Will you not stay for lunch?" Seyd protested.
+
+But replying that he had already lunched at a ranch in the valley, the
+old man rode away on his usual heavy lope. "You see," Seyd commented,
+watching him go, "it is all right for me to accept his invitation, but
+he will not eat of our bread."
+
+"Well, I don't blame him," Billy answered. "I'd feel sore myself if I
+were he. But, say, we're getting quite gay up here. Regular social
+whirl. I wonder who's next? We only need mamma to complete the family."
+
+The remark was prophetic, for, while the señora did not herself brave
+the Barranca steeps, only two days thereafter Francesca and the _mozo_
+reappeared driving before them a mule whose panniers were crammed with
+eggs and cheese, butter and honey, fruit, both fresh and preserved, also
+a full stock of bandages, liniments, curative simples, and home-made
+cordials. While unpacking them on the table in their house the girl
+laughingly explained that if Seyd would not come to be cured the cures
+must needs come to him.
+
+"This is a wash for the wound." She patted a large fat jug. "This other
+is to be taken every hour. Of this liquor you must take a glass at
+bed-time. Those pills must be swallowed when you rise. This"--noting
+Billy's furtive grin, she finished with a laugh--"you will not have room
+for more. Give the rest to Mr. Thornton. But under pain of the good
+mamma's severest displeasure I am to see you drink at least two cups of
+this soup."
+
+"You shall if you stay to lunch," Seyd said. "Billy makes gorgeous
+biscuit, and they'll go finely with the honey."
+
+"If you can eat bacon--we have only that and a few canned things," Billy
+added, a little dubiously, and would have extended the list of
+shortcomings only that she broke in:
+
+"Just what I like. I'm tired of Mexican cooking, and I am dreadfully
+hungry."
+
+That this was no idle assertion she presently proved, and while she
+ate of their rough food with the appetite of perfect health their
+acquaintance progressed with the leaps and bounds natural to youth.
+Before the end of the meal she had drawn Billy completely out of his
+painful bashfulness, and he was telling her with great pride of his
+beautiful sister while she contemplated her photograph with head held
+delicately askew.
+
+"Yes, she's fair," he told her, adding with great pride, "but not a bit
+like me."
+
+"The most wonderful hair!" Seyd volunteered. "Darkest Titian above a
+skin of milk."
+
+"Oh, you make me envious!" she cried, with real feeling. "I love red
+hair. Luisa Zuluaga, my schoolmate in Brussels, had it combined with
+great black Spanish eyes. She got her colors from an Irish great
+grandfather who came over a century ago to coin pesos for the Mexican
+mint. Now, why couldn't I have had them?"
+
+Observing the fine-spun cloud that flew like a dark mist around
+the ivory face, Seyd could not find it in his heart to blame her
+grandfather, and, if good taste debarred him from saying it, the belief
+was nevertheless expressed through the permitted language of the eyes.
+Perhaps this accounted for the suddenness with which her long dark
+lashes swept down over certain mischievous lights.
+
+Any but an expert in feminine psychology might indeed have found himself
+puzzled by certain phases of her manner. Its sympathy, addressing Billy,
+would give place to a slight reserve with Seyd, then this would melt and
+give place to unaffected friendliness. Occasionally, too, she offered
+all the witchery of her smiles, yet the hypothetical expert would never
+have suspected her of coquetry. The feeling was far too mischievous for
+the fencing of sex. Its key was to be found in the thought that passed
+in her mind. "'Almost pretty enough to marry,' you said. The trouble is
+that my girlish beauty is in inverse ratio to my future fatness. What a
+pity!"
+
+Yet this little touch of pique was never sufficiently pronounced to
+interfere with her real enjoyment. As for them--it was a golden
+occasion. If they ate little, they still feasted their eyes on the face
+that bloomed like a rich flower in the soft shadows of the adobe hut,
+their ears on her low laughter and soft woman's speech. They found it
+hard to believe when she sprang up with a little cry: "I have been here
+two hours! Now I have earned my scolding. The _madre_ only let me come
+under a solemn promise to be back before sunset."
+
+Had they been unaware of the principal concomitant in the charm of the
+hour, knowledge would have been forced upon them when she rode away,
+for, though the birds still sang and the hot sun poured a flood of light
+and heat down on the bench, somehow things looked and felt cold and
+gray.
+
+And she? Going downgrade an afterglow of smiles lent force to her
+murmur: "Gringos or no, they are very nice."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+A hard gallop of eight miles carried Francesca to the forks where the
+path to and from Santa Gertrudis joined the main valley trail, and she
+had traveled no more than a hundred yards beyond before she was roused
+from renewed musings by the thud of hoofs. Turning in her saddle, she
+saw Sebastien coming along the valley trail at a gallop. Passing the
+_mozo_, whose beast had lagged, the hacendado pulled his beast down to
+a trot, and as Tomas, answering a question, nodded backward toward the
+hills, vexation swept the girl's face.
+
+It cleared, however, as quickly, and while waiting for Sebastien she
+measured him with a narrow glance. The straight, lithe figure, easy
+carriage, dark, quiet face could stand inspection, and she paid
+unconscious tribute. "If I hadn't gone to Europe I suppose--" A decided
+shake of the head completed while dismissing the thought. In the next
+breath she murmured, "Now for a fight." Yet her expression, saluting
+him, displayed no apprehension.
+
+"Yes, I was at Santa Gertrudis." She quietly answered his question. "Two
+of our people shot one of the gringos as he was leaving our place, and
+the good _mama_ would have it that it was our duty to cure him."
+
+"Ah! the good mother?" He raised his brows. "And she chose you for her
+doctor?"
+
+"As you see."
+
+"Yes, I see. 'No, Francesca, thou canst not go. It would not be right
+for a young girl--well, if you must--' I hear it as though I had been
+there, and wonder that the señora, who was brought up in the letter of
+our conventions, should send her daughter to a gringo camp with only a
+_mozo_ for escort. But Don Luis? Is he also mad?"
+
+"No, only wise." She answered with irritating simplicity. "Take care
+that you do not put heavier strains on a slight kinship. Third, fifth,
+tenth, just what is the degree of our cousinship?"
+
+"God knows!" He shrugged. "The slighter the better. 'Twill serve till
+replaced by a closer."
+
+"Which will be never."
+
+"Only the gods say 'never.'" He quoted the proverb. "But returning to
+your _amigos_, the gringos--"
+
+"My _amigos_?"
+
+"You have received and repaid their visits. But listen! It is not that
+I would set bounds for your freedom, but if you had stood, as I have,
+on a street corner in Ciudad, Mexico, and had heard the gringo tourists
+pass comments on our women--_Dios_! I choke at the thought! If you but
+realized their coxcombry, conceit, the contempt in which they hold us--"
+
+She had flushed slightly, but with a toss of her head she broke in: "It
+is not necessary. I have heard young Mexican men comment on both our own
+and American women. If the gringos can teach them any lessons--"
+
+"Apes!" he burst angrily in. "Fools! The degenerate apes who put on the
+vices of civilization with its collars!"
+
+"Perhaps. But, even so, it makes for the same point--there are gringos
+and gringos just as we have Mexicans _and_ Mexicans."
+
+"And these, of course, are the other sort?"
+
+"Exactly!" She robbed his sarcasm by her quiet. "If one judges, as one
+must, by their behavior. I am pleased to find you, for once, of my
+opinion."
+
+"Of your opinion?" He regarded her with sudden sternness. "That is, to
+be friends with these men who have forced themselves in on your lands?
+I had never expected to hear it fall from the lips of a Garcia. Now
+listen! What if your people did wound this man? Is he the first? Will he
+be the last?" His face darkening under a rush of blood, he continued: "I
+had thought this pair would soon ruin themselves as did the other fools
+before them. But since they are working on a surer plan--"
+
+"What do you mean?" She searched his face.
+
+"So anxious?" he laughed bitterly. "What is it to you?"
+
+"Only that I would not have them murdered."
+
+"And would they be the first? Is there a foot of Mexican soil which has
+not been soaked with good Mexican blood that you should be so careful
+for a gringo?" Slanting through an opening in the trees overhead the sun
+shone on his face, transforming it into a red mask of hate. "As yet no
+one of them has secured himself in the Barranca de Guerrero! So long as
+a Rocha is left to do the duty that belongs to the Garcias no one of
+them ever will."
+
+But now he had touched another string, and, straightening in her saddle,
+she gave him look for look. "When the Garcias need the Rochas to settle
+their quarrels it will be time for you to interfere. I should not advise
+you to speak thus to my uncle."
+
+Nevertheless she flinched a little at his answer. "That is my
+intention--this very night."
+
+With that they rode on, in silence for a while, then speaking of other
+things. But when he left her in the upper courtyard an hour later she
+stood at her door, listening apprehensively to the jingle of his spurs
+along the gallery. When he took a chair beside Don Luis, who sat there
+smoking, she listened for a while. Then, flushing suddenly, she hastily
+went in.
+
+If she had remained there was nothing to hear, for during many minutes
+the conversation ran altogether on the herds as they came winding in
+from distant pastures to the corrals in the square. Night had reduced
+everything to a dark blur before Sebastien commented on a yellow twinkle
+high up on the Barranca wall.
+
+"That will be the gringos' light at Santa Gertrudis." After a long
+pause, "It is now a month past since they came, and--they are still
+here."
+
+Don Luis flicked the ash from his cigar. "What hurry?"
+
+"But this new business? The smelter you spoke of the other day."
+
+"_Si_, the smelter?"
+
+Sebastien gave his own interpretation to the other's slow tone. "Then
+there is something forward?"
+
+"What need? The gringo at the station tells me they have no money. A
+single mistake and they are done." After a sententious pause he added,
+"It is the part of youth to make mistakes."
+
+The dusk did not conceal the other's impatience. "But why this tender
+care? Are they so different from the others? A word from thee and--"
+
+"Yes, yes, a nod and it would have been done long ago. There speaks
+young blood--the hot blood that lost us Texas and Alta California. These
+lads are of good family, Sebastien, and there can be no disappearance
+without inquiry. Their death would be but one more thorn in the side of
+the rabid beast that requires small urging to devour us. No, let them
+make their own end."
+
+"And Francesca? Is she to have the run of their camp?"
+
+Don Luis's deep laugh rumbled through the courtyard. "At last from a
+long cast we come to the quarry. Francesca? She is a wild filly, the
+despair of every staid tabby in the countryside. Long ago I discovered
+that the one way to manage her was to let her have her head. Nor will it
+be the part of wisdom for thee to interfere."
+
+"Neither would I try--yet. Commands are for husbands; lovers must wait.
+That which I propose she will never know. It is--" Answering the other's
+interrogative look, he leaned over, whispering in rapid Spanish.
+
+Don Luis emitted an amused chuckle. "Sebastien, thou art truly a devil.
+Had thy father possessed but the half of thy wit, some things had gone
+different in the last war. Yes, feet that are still spoiling good sod
+would now be rotten bones." After a pause he went on: "It seems a scurvy
+trick, yet it depends on the men themselves. But--if they rise not at
+the bait?"
+
+"If?" Sebastien repeated it with bitter scorn. "Was there ever a gringo
+that would not bite at such? They are kind as goats. I ask only that you
+go there with Francesca at the close of the week."
+
+"And thou?"
+
+"I shall go there to-morrow."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Living in the letter of his intention, Sebastien was up next morning and
+had covered ten miles of the trail before the sun rose over the Barranca
+wall. Early as it was, however, others were already abroad. The sudden
+increase in his family had obliged Seyd to make a journey out to the
+railroad for more provisions, and when Sebastien paused to breathe his
+beast halfway up the grade to the bench, a good glass would have shown
+him Light and Peace gingerly picking their way along the trail that had
+been built by Don Luis's orders around the slide on the opposite wall.
+
+As usual, Sebastien's approach was announced by the ring of hoofs, but,
+imagining it to be some charcoal-burner, Billy, who was already at his
+bricks, did not look up till warned by Caliban's stealthy hiss. In his
+surprise he forgot to reply to Sebastien's greeting, and simply answered
+the other's question.
+
+"Don Roberto? He is not here?"
+
+"No, gone out to the railroad. Won't be back for three days."
+
+"_Caramba!_ After I had climbed these heights to see him!" Though
+his eyebrows and hands both testified to Sebastien's disappointment,
+a sharper eye than Billy's might have discerned the underlying
+satisfaction. Moreover, if he appeared merely inquisitively friendly
+during the hour he stayed to chat, not one minute was wasted. From the
+first question to his final comment on Billy's work, "You gringos are
+certainly a wonderful people," all was directed to one end.
+
+"Yes, we usually get there," Billy modestly admitted, and his next words
+paved a lovely road for Sebastien to come to his purpose. "The building
+would go faster if I hadn't so many things to do. After laying bricks
+all day I have to turn in and cook, and, though it's pretty tough, there
+doesn't seem to be any way out of it. We tried both of the peons at the
+cooking and nearly died of the hash they served up."
+
+"Tut! tut!" Sebastien was there with ready sympathy. "This is too bad.
+Soon you will be completely worn out." After a pause, during which he
+may be imagined as taking Billy's mental temperature, he said: "_Bueno!_
+I have it! I shall send you a cook--one than whom there is no finer in
+all this country."
+
+If he had harbored any suspicions, Billy's beaming smile now wiped them
+out. "That's awfully good of you. Seyd will be ever so glad. When can we
+expect your cook?"
+
+"To-morrow afternoon." Scenting hospitality in Billy's glance toward
+the hut, Sebastien hastily added, "That is, if I reach home to-night--to
+do which I shall have to be going." And refusing the offer of lunch
+which justified his premonition, he rode away, leaving Billy puffed up
+with pride.
+
+"I rather think I turned that trick well," he congratulated himself.
+"Seyd couldn't have done it a bit better." Occasional fat chuckles
+emitted during the afternoon testified to his increasing opinion of his
+own diplomacy. But his rising pride did not attain its meridian until,
+midway of the following afternoon, a pretty brown girl came driving a
+burro up the trail.
+
+Having anticipated a man cook, it required five minutes of vehement
+Spanish, helped out by a wealth of gesticulation, to convince Billy that
+the girl was not an estray from a neighboring hamlet, and while her dark
+eyes, white teeth, and shapely brown arms were engaged in explanation
+they wrought other work. By the time Billy was finally able to
+understand the fact he was hardly in condition to pass upon it.
+
+It is only right to state that he had little time for reflection, for
+from the very beginning the girl took the direction of affairs into her
+own hands. Driving her burro over to the stable she unpacked a stone
+_metate_, or grinding-stone, a pestle, and a quantity of soaked corn.
+She turned the beast out to graze, then dropped at once on her knees and
+began grinding paste for the supper tortillas, or cakes. When, toward
+evening, Billy dropped in for a drink he found her mantle spread on his
+bed and certain articles of feminine wear depending from the nails which
+had hitherto been sacred to his own clothing.
+
+Blushing furiously, he went out--without the drink. But, though his
+colors would have done credit to a girl, they were not to be weighed in
+the same balance with the green peppers stuffed with minced beef that
+she served at supper with the tortillas. While eating with an appetite
+born of a protracted canned diet it is to be feared that he fed just as
+ravenously on the atmosphere shed by her luxurious presence. When, after
+supper, he sat in the doorway and watched the blood-reds of the sunset
+flow through the valley he might, with his fiery stubble, have passed
+for some ancient Celt at the mouth of his cave. Not until he caught a
+second glimpse of the mantle while stealing a look at the girl washing
+up dishes did he return to his usual bashful self. Slipping quietly
+inside, he gathered up the blankets off Seyd's bed and carried them out
+to make his own couch under a tree.
+
+This procedure on his part the girl watched with a certain astonishment
+which she vented on Caliban while giving him his breakfast next day. "I
+had thought differently of the gringos. Be they all like this one--"
+
+"Give time, give time!" the hunchback advised. "Big fish are ever slow
+at the hook, but when they once rise--" The tortilla he used for
+illustration vanished at one gulp. "Wait till thou seest Don Roberto.
+There's a man! Of his own strength he threw a burro off the trail into
+the Barranca and so turned the train that would otherwise have driven
+him and the 'Red Head' into the cañon. 'Tis so. The history of it was
+written by Don Sebastien's whip on the shoulders of Mattias and Carlos.
+And what of the magic that turned my bullet fired at twenty yards, then
+found me and Calixto in black jungle and shot us down from the high
+cliff? Si, chief of the other is he, so waste not thy freshness."
+
+"Bah! am I a fool?" She elevated her nose.
+
+This conversation undoubtedly explains the staidness of her demeanor
+that day. Not that it was necessary to keep Billy at his distance.
+Leaving his painful modesty out of the question, in his ignorance of the
+Mexican peon folk he placed her in his imagination on the same plane
+as a white girl, and as the color of a skin cuts no figure in the
+calculations of the little god, providing that it be fitted smoothly
+over a pretty body, she found favor in his sight. At work both the next
+and the following days he kept always an eye open for the flash of her
+white garments in the doorway. When, with the earthen jar on her head,
+she went to draw water from the spring his glance followed the swaying
+rhythms of her figure. If not actually in love by the time Don Luis and
+Francesca put in their appearance next morning, Billy was at least
+living a tropical idyl, one not a whit less beautiful because its object
+departed far from his ideal in all but her physical perfection.
+
+The visit had been skilfully timed to miss lunch, and Billy was already
+back at his work. Crossing the bench, Don Luis's eye went instantly to
+the girl who had been drawn to the door by the sound of hoofbeats. But
+his expression gave no hint of his grim amusement. The keenest ear would
+have found it difficult to detect sarcasm in his remark.
+
+"I see, señor, that you have added to your family."
+
+Also it need not be said that Francesca's woman's eye had summed at a
+glance the smooth oval face, rounded arms, shapely figure; yet their
+undeniable comeliness brought no pleasure to her expression. If Billy
+had overlooked Don Luis's sarcasm it was impossible to miss her scorn.
+
+"A capable housekeeper--if one may judge from her looks--and quite at
+home. You are to be congratulated, Mr. Thornton."
+
+Looking up in quick surprise, Billy noticed the absence of the sympathy
+that she had shown him during her last visit. Feeling the cold anger
+behind, and sadly puzzled, he was not sorry when, after a few minutes of
+strained talk, Don Luis asked to be shown the vein. Judging by his
+backward glance from the mouth of the tunnel, it would appear that he
+had coined the request to pave the way for that which happened the
+instant they disappeared. For, walking her beast over to the house,
+Francesca spoke to the girl.
+
+"Thy name?"
+
+"Carmelita, señorita."
+
+"Of what village?"
+
+"Chilpancin--I am the daughter to Candelario, the maker of hair ropes."
+
+Though she answered with the glib obsequiousness of her class, the
+appraising glance which swept Francesca from head to heel carried a mute
+challenge and conveyed her full knowledge that a battle was pitched such
+as women fight all the world over. Neither could Francesca's patrician
+feeling smother equal recognition. It was revealed in her next question.
+
+"How long hast thou been in this employment?"
+
+The girl paused. Then, whether it was due to Sebastien's tutoring or her
+own malice, she gave answer. "Eight days, señorita."
+
+"Who hired thee?"
+
+Downcast lashes hid the sudden sparkle of cunning. "Don Roberto." But
+they lifted in time for her to catch the sudden hardening of Francesca's
+face.
+
+"Then see that thou renderest good service, for these be friends of
+ours."
+
+As beforesaid, neither the cold patronage of the one nor the sullen
+obsequiousness of the other could hide the issue from either.
+Francesca's calm, as she turned her beast, did not deceive. Malicious
+understanding flashed out as the girl called after, "_Si_, he shall have
+the best of service."
+
+Returning to the smelter, Francesca began to talk to Caliban, yet
+while questioning him concerning his new employment she could not be
+unconscious of Carmelita lolling in the doorway, hands on shapely hips,
+an attitude gracefully indolent and powerfully suggestive of possession.
+Perhaps it was her acute consciousness of it which injected an extra
+chill a few minutes later into her refusal of Billy's invitation to
+dismount and rest. His suggestion that Seyd was likely to arrive any
+moment drew a still more decided shake of the head. Moreover meeting
+Seyd as they rode downgrade she passed with the slightest nods, nor even
+looked back to see if her uncle were following.
+
+Doubtless because he felt that he could well afford it, Don Luis did
+stop, and before riding on he once more threatened Calixto, the
+rice-huller, who was with Seyd. "This fellow--he still gives good
+service?" His courtesy, however, did not remove the chill of Francesca's
+snub. Hurt and wondering, Seyd passed on up to the bench--to have his
+eyes opened the instant that he saw the girl in the doorway. When, after
+dismounting, he walked across to where Billy was at work on the
+foundation, her big dark eyes took him in from tip to toe in a flashing
+embrace. She studied him while he stood there talking.
+
+"What is _she_ doing here?"
+
+He cut off Billy's welcome with the sharp question, and while listening
+to explanations his gray eyes drew into points of black. In the middle
+of it he burst out, "You don't mean to say that you fell for it as
+easily as that?"
+
+"Fell for what?"
+
+Billy's round eyes merely added to his irritation. "You chump! didn't
+you see the trap?"
+
+"The trap?"
+
+"Yes, trap! _T-r-a-p_, trap! Got it into your fat head? Don't you see
+that you have catalogued us with the San Nicolas people as a pair of
+blackguards forever? Oh, you fat head!"
+
+That was not all. While he stormed on, saying things that he would
+willingly have taken back a minute later, every bit of its usual
+mercurial humor drained out of Billy's face. Over Seyd's shoulder he
+could see the girl in the doorway. A certain dark expectancy in her
+glance told that she knew herself to be the bone of contention. As a doe
+might watch the conflict of two bucks in the forest, she looked on, and,
+meeting Billy's eye, her glance touched off his anger.
+
+"Stop that!" he suddenly yelled. "Stop it or I'll hand you one! I will,
+for sure! What do I care for your San Nicolas people? I didn't come down
+here to do a social stunt, and why should the opinions of a lot of
+greasers cut any ice? Let 'em go hang. The girl looks all right to me."
+
+"All right! You innocent!" Shaking with anger, Seyd turned and spoke to
+Caliban, who was mixing mortar close by. "As I thought! If half he says
+is true her reputation would hang a cat."
+
+But Billy's jaw only set the harder. While he might easily have been
+persuaded out of his idyl, he was not to be driven. Out of pure
+obstinacy he growled: "What of it? I reckon her morals won't spoil the
+food. She's proved she can cook, and that is all I want. She's going to
+stay."
+
+"She's not."
+
+"She is."
+
+For a pause they eyed each other. Though their friendship had survived,
+nay, had been cemented by many a quarrel, never before had a
+disagreement gone such lengths.
+
+"Look here, Billy." Seyd spoke more mildly. "This won't do. She's got to
+go."
+
+"Not till you've shown me--not now," he hastily added, as Seyd began to
+strip. "I'd hate to hit a cripple, and--"
+
+"Come on."
+
+But, ducking a swing, Billy gave ground, genuine concern on his face.
+"No, no, old man! You are still weak. Let it go for another week. That
+left fin of yours--"
+
+Landing at that precise moment on his ear, however, the member in
+question proved its convalescence and ended the argument by toppling him
+sideways. Up in a second, he closed, and for the next ten minutes they
+went at it, clinching and breaking, jabbing and hooking, with an energy
+and science that would have filled the respective souls of a moralist
+and a prize-fighter with disgust and delight. Avoiding both of these
+extreme viewpoints, the account may very well be given in the terms used
+by Caliban in describing the affair next day to one of his _compañeros_,
+a charcoal-burner.
+
+"Like mad bulls they go at it, grappling and tearing, each striking the
+other so that the thud of their blows raise the echoes. It is in the
+very beginning that the Red Cabeza fells Don Roberto, but instead of
+splitting his head with the spade that stands close by--was ever such
+folly!--he helps him up from the ground. I then think it the finish,
+but no, they go at it again, hailing blows in the face hard as the kick
+of a mule, and so it continues for a time with only pauses to catch
+their breath. I am beginning to wonder will it ever come to an end
+when--crack! sharp as the snap of thy whip and so swift that I do not
+see the blow, it comes. The Red Cabeza lies there quietly on the ground.
+Believe it or not, Pedro, he is knocked senseless by a blow of the
+hand."
+
+The immediate consequences may also be left to Caliban. "Their quarrel,
+as I have said, is over Carmelita, the dove of Chilpancin, and I now
+expect to see Don Roberto take her for his own. That she is of the same
+mind is proven when she comes running with her knife for him to finish
+up the Red Cabeza. But again, no! who shall understand these
+gringos?--he gives her the sharpest of looks.
+
+"'_Vamos!_' He shouts it with such anger that she stumbles and falls,
+running back to the house. Also she makes such a quick packing that she
+is driving her burro out to the trail before the Red Cabeza comes to his
+senses."
+
+Billy's eyes, indeed, opened on the departing flash of her garments.
+"You didn't lose much time," he commented, with a quizzical glance
+upward. "Well, to the victor the spoils--or the rejection thereof. That
+was a peach of a punch--the bum left, too, wasn't it?" The old merry
+look flashing out again from the blood and bruises, he asked: "How'll
+you trade? In exchange for one admission from you I'm willing to grant
+you're right."
+
+"Shoot!" Seyd grinned.
+
+"Would you have been as careful of the proprieties if the señorita were
+out of the case?"
+
+Smiling, Seyd raised doubtful shoulders. "_Quien sabe_, señor?"
+
+"Ahem!" Billy coughed. "Now you justify the continuance of my wretched
+existence. All the same, while it may be correct in theory your darned
+morality is mighty uncomfortable practice. That girl could cook. The
+next time you fall in love please--"
+
+"_Now_, what are you talking about?"
+
+"What have I done?"
+
+Before his look of hopeless surprise Seyd's anger faded. "I beg your
+pardon. Of course you didn't know, but--I'm already married."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Me." With grim sarcasm he added, "And you know that it is against the
+law of both God and man for a married man to fall in love."
+
+Feeling dimly that something was expected of him, but debarred from
+congratulations by the other's irony, Billy floundered, bringing several
+attempts at speech to a lame conclusion. "When--when did it--happen?"
+
+"Happen? That's it." Seyd jumped at the word. "It _happened_ in New
+Mexico three years ago when I was down there 'experting' the Calumet
+group. She was the daughter of a mine foreman, pretty and neat as a
+grouse in the fall, but of the hopelessly common type. I don't have to
+describe her. You've seen them, in pairs, swinging their skirts along
+the boardwalks of any small town, their eyes on every man and a burst
+of giggles always on tap. I should never have paid her any serious
+attention if several of her admirers hadn't done me the honor of getting
+jealous. Until one big lout warned me to leave her alone under penalty
+of broken bones it was never more than a mild flirtation, but after that
+I went deeper--so deep that it was soon impossible for me to withdraw.
+At least, I thought it was then, though I have since come to regard my
+marriage with her almost as a crime. You see, I thought it would break
+her heart, but in less than a week after the marriage I discovered that
+she was nothing but a bundle of small vanities bound up in a pretty
+skin, that she hadn't a thought above the money and position she
+expected to gain through me. And how she changed! As a girl she was
+soft, fluffy, and innocent as a kitten, but one by one her small
+vanities and frivolities developed into appetites and passions, and I
+awoke to the fact that she was altogether animal--a beautiful animal,
+prettier than ever in her young wifehood, but without the slightest
+capacity for intellectual or spiritual development.
+
+"If that had been all--one can love a handsome horse or a dog, and I
+have seen women of as low a type to be lifted out of themselves by the
+strength of their love. But she was absolutely selfish--loved only
+herself. What made it even more unbearable, she was conceited with the
+supreme conceit of absolute ignorance that scorns all that is unknown
+to itself. She would try to impose her own inch-and-a-half notions of
+things upon me, and she did not hesitate to pit the scraps of knowledge
+she had picked up around the mines against my professional training. She
+was bound to remold me on her own crude model. Actual wickedness would
+have been easier to bear, and I can assure you that the third month of
+our married life found me absolutely miserable. Fortunately, I received
+a commission just then to 'expert' a group of Mexican mines, and, as she
+preferred civilization as it goes in New Mexico to the hardships of a
+trip through the Sonora desert, I left her behind. Later I came south on
+a prospecting trip through the Sierra Madres, and have never seen her
+since."
+
+All through he had spoken with the furious vehemence of a man easing a
+load off his mind. Thrusting a letter into Billy's hand, he finished,
+walking away: "Read that--I got it at the station yesterday. It reveals
+more than I could tell you in the next twenty-four hours."
+
+And it surely did. The stiff round hand, as much as the bald statement
+of want and desires, revealed a nature blind to all but its own ends.
+Every phrase was a cry or complaint. He had no business to go off and
+leave her alone! All her friends agreed that it was a "shame and a
+disgrace." But he needn't think that she would stand such treatment
+forever! He had better come home, and that at once! So far she hadn't
+tried to "better herself." But it wasn't for lack of the chance! There
+was a gentleman--no fresh dude or college guy, but a rich mining man,
+eminently respectable, who had shown a decided interest! He (Seyd) had
+better look out. Thus and so did the awkward hand run over many pages,
+and, while Billy's eye followed, his expression gradually settled in
+complete disgust.
+
+"Hopelessly common! You poor chap," he muttered, looking after Seyd, who
+was now helping Caliban to arrange the goods as he carried them from the
+mules into the adobe. "To think that you have had this on your mind all
+this time!" After a moment's reflection he added, "But--married or
+unmarried, you are still in love."
+
+Unaware of this frank opinion, Seyd went on arranging the stores. While
+working, the eager vehemence of his manner settled into heavy brooding,
+and it was not for some time that a cheerful flash indicated his arrival
+at some conclusion.
+
+"I've got it!" he murmured. And turning so suddenly that Caliban dropped
+the package he was carrying in, he asked, "Hast thou any acquaintance at
+San Nicolas?"
+
+Reassured that the strange gringo madness was not to be vented on him,
+the hunchback nodded. "One of the kitchen women is daughter to my
+sister."
+
+He nodded again in answer to a second question as to whether his niece
+could convey certain information to the señorita Francesca's ear?
+
+"_Si_, there is always gossip moving among the women. It could be
+passed through Rosa, her maid."
+
+For a man who had just taken offense at the very suggestion that he was
+in love Seyd's face expressed a surprising amount of satisfaction. A
+little sheepishly he now went on: "It must be that thou wouldst care to
+see thy relative? To-morrow is Sunday, and, as thy service has been
+good, it shall be a holiday, and thou shalt have a mule to ride to San
+Nicolas."
+
+To tell the truth, the hunchback did not seem overjoyed at the prospect,
+at least not until Seyd tossed a silver peso on the table. "This is to
+buy thee meat and drink by the way, and if it be that thy niece can
+whisper--"
+
+His beady eyes glittering with comprehension, the hunchback broke in,
+"That the dove flew at thy coming. She shall know it, señor--also from
+whose hand she came hither."
+
+The quickness with which the fellow leaped to his meaning was rather
+disconcerting, and Seyd blushed. But, commanding his guilty colors, he
+brazened it out. "But see! She is not to know that it proceeds from me."
+
+"_Si_, señor." The man's quick grin indicated an unearthly
+comprehension. "It will be a bit of gossip from the mouth of a
+muleteer."
+
+It was at this juncture that Billy, who had just returned to work after
+washing the blood from his face, heard a cheerful whistling inside.
+When, an hour later, he went in to help with supper he found Seyd his
+usual cheerful self. Next morning his spirits were still higher, but did
+not attain their meridian until Caliban departed for San Nicolas,
+bravely attired in a gaudy suit which he had dug from some obscure
+corner of the stable. Toward evening, however, a touch of anxiety
+dampened his mood. It might almost have been regarded as premonitory of
+the news Caliban delivered in the dusk outside.
+
+"The señorita Francesca has gone to visit her mother's people at
+Cuernavaca. It is not known when she will return."
+
+"Very well; thou hast done thy share," Seyd answered.
+
+His quiet tone, however, did not deceive the hunchback. "Did I not say
+these gringos were a mad people?" he demanded of Calixto, showing two
+pesos by the light of the stable lantern. "He pays me a peso to bring
+him good news, and gives me two when I return with bad--and to think
+that I was minded to feed him lies. Truly, there is no knowing when to
+have them! 'Tis the truth serves best with fools and gringos."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+"Done--at last!"
+
+Sprawled on the flat of his back, with his curly head propped on his
+hands and his lime-eaten boots spread at a comfortable angle, Billy
+gazed upon their completed labor. The "well"--into which the liquid
+copper matte would presently be flowing--crucible, slag spout, blast
+pipes, or tuyeres, and canvas blowers, even the inclined way that led up
+to the platform over the loading trap, all were finished, and from the
+solid bed to the tip top of the brick chimney shaft Billy's vision
+embraced it all. Including the tons of charcoal that Caliban had burned
+and brought in from the woods, and the piles of ore which Seyd and
+Calixto had broken into smelting size with "spalling" hammers, all stood
+ready for the match that Seyd scratched while echoing Billy's
+observation.
+
+"Done--at last!"
+
+When the shavings and wood were fairly started under the mixed charge of
+charcoal and ore Seyd also lay down to watch the first smoke. Under the
+vigorous blast it quickly appeared--a thin blue spiral which waxed in
+volume and blackness. In thirty minutes it laid a sooty finger halfway
+across the Barranca above the hills, a sinister portent to the rancheros
+and peons, one that found a dark reflection in Don Luis's frown as he
+looked out from the upper patio of San Nicolas, far away.
+
+Unconscious, however, of alien observation, Seyd watched the
+fluctuations of the black smoke with lazy enjoyment. He permitted his
+fancy to float with the waving pennon out over the valley down the
+river, where it set him aboard a log raft with his first shipment of
+copper matte and set him drifting down to the coast, where he could
+either sell to the United Metals Company or ship by sea to California
+smelters. There was nothing impractical about his musings. Independent
+of the gold values it carried, one smelting would transmute their
+thirty-dollar ore into copper matte worth a hundred and twenty dollars a
+ton. At a liberal estimate the extra twenty would pay expenses, and with
+a profit of a hundred dollars on an output of sixty or seventy a week
+during the two months before the rains, there was a small fortune in it.
+Next year they could both import their labor and put in a regular plant.
+Thereafter they would be in a position to deliver "blister" copper
+instead of matte to the market. Why, flaming under the breath of this
+first success, fancy leaped out to all sorts of possibilities, raised
+wharves, bunkers, storehouses in the jungle below, set a fleet of
+flat-bottomed sternwheelers on the river. And never was there such a
+river! He was traveling its long reaches in thought when fancy suddenly
+steered his argosy of dreams into the San Nicolas landing.
+
+The next second he was sitting again in the shaded gallery of the upper
+patio, its flowers and bird song, sunshine and fountain splash in his
+eyes and ears. As on the other day, he watched Francesca bending over
+her godchild, and while he was contrasting her air of tender solicitude
+with the cold hauteur of her face a month ago he thought she looked up
+with a smile. He was answering it when the smiling eyes were wiped out
+by the intrusion of some unpleasant thought.
+
+"You fool!" he chided himself. Then, sitting suddenly up, he smote Billy
+on the thigh with force that drew a yell of anguish. "It's a mint, boy!
+A blooming mint! I wouldn't trade my share for the best gold mine in
+Tonopah. Next year we'll put in a big plant--"
+
+"Reverberatories with water jackets!" Billy enthusiastically took up the
+tale.
+
+"Sure, and we'll build down on the flat by the river and deliver the ore
+by--"
+
+"Gravity. Aerial cable--self-dumping buckets--"
+
+"We'll refine our own matte--"
+
+"Market our own copper and gold." His blue eyes shining, Billy ran on:
+"In five years we'll be rich, then for a rest and a trip. New York,
+London, Paris, with Nice and Monte Carlo thrown in. Europe in a
+touring-car, by golly! Egypt and the Pyramids! A steam yacht and a trip
+around the world! Hurray for us!"
+
+"In the mean time"--Seyd led him gently back to earth--"remember,
+please, that this is your trick. Go and stoke up, or there'll be no
+Paris in yours."
+
+And surely their days of ease lay a long way off. Long and hard as they
+had labored, the completion of the smelter merely marked the beginning
+of still more strenuous tasks. Upon them and the two peons would rest
+the entire weight of running the smelter at its full capacity. Besides
+the breaking of the ore, tapping of the slag, continuous firing, they
+would have to burn their own charcoal after the first supply ran out.
+Though they had spread the strain by dividing day and night into shifts,
+it would have been work enough for four times their number.
+
+Seyd's first shift ended at twelve that night, but, though he sent
+Caliban off to his sleep, he himself sat up to wait for the first matte,
+which was due to come trickling from the spouts at any moment. Reclining
+his head, propped on his hand, he watched Billy and Calixto, both now of
+one color, each at his task, one working the blowers while the other
+dumped fresh ore and charcoal into the loading trap. At such times the
+blast would send a burst of flame high over the chimney top, lighting
+the house, stables, green ore mounds, showing ghostly trees beyond as
+under a calcium glare. Though the roar of the blast fell like a lullaby
+on his tired ears, excitement kept him awake till the first matte flowed
+in a red stream out of the tap.
+
+"She'll go a hundred and fifty to the ton!" Billy exclaimed, after a
+careful examination of a cooled sample. Then, waving his hand at the
+huge ore mounds, he groaned: "What a shame that we hadn't enough labor
+and capital. We could have run it all through before the rains."
+
+"Pig! Hog!" Seyd found a vent for his own surplus feelings by punching
+Billy in the chest. "Think how much worse off we should have been if we
+had had to mine it. Go down on your American knee bones and thank your
+lucky stars for the English Johnnies."
+
+Still smiling, he lay again to watch the glowing matte as Billy ladled
+it out of the well. It was the culmination of their long labor, but he
+was too tired even to think, and, giving himself up to a dim luxurious
+feeling, he insensibly passed into sleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Wake up, Bob, and go to bed. You still have four hours."
+
+Only half aroused, he arose and stumbled across to the adobe, threw
+himself down on the bunk without waiting to remove even his boots, and
+fell into slumber at once so dead and dreamless that it seemed as if his
+head had no more than touched the pillow before Billy's voice again
+rang in his ear.
+
+"Seven o'clock, Bob. I gave you an extra hour."
+
+"Oh, quit your joshing." He murmured it, rolling over, and was again
+almost asleep when a sudden report, louder than thunder, but with a
+peculiar vibrant note, brought him swiftly to his feet. A second later
+the door banged to and stuck, but not before they had caught a glimpse
+of a huge cloud plume, densely yellow, shooting upward above the
+smelter.
+
+During the moment required to wrench the door from its frame the adobe
+rocked under the concussion and scattered mud bricks, and there was a
+rain of stores from the shelves to the floor. It did not require
+Caliban's frightened yell on the outside, "_Explosion! Una explosion_,
+señores!" to tell them what had happened. The first glance, as they
+rushed out over the broken door, merely filled in the details of the
+vivid mental picture each had formed for himself. Hundreds of feet in
+mid air, the explosion cloud floated like a yellow balloon above the
+stump of a stack, the half-fused bricks of which were scattered over the
+bench. A cavity had been torn downward through the solid brick bed to
+the clay beneath, and, looking down into it, Seyd read the sign.
+
+"Dynamite! What was the last thing you did?"
+
+"Stoked up and sent Calixto to call Caliban while I came for you.
+Luckily for him that I did."
+
+The charcoal piles were also leveled and spread over half an acre, and,
+walking to and fro, Seyd began to pick up and break the larger pieces.
+And it was only a few minutes before he called out: "Look here! Stick
+dynamite, broken in two and gummed over with charcoal dust--a bushel of
+it right here."
+
+"Do you suppose--" Billy glanced toward the peons, who stood close by.
+
+Seyd shook his head. "No, they had nothing to gain by it, and everything
+to lose. It was the easiest thing in the world for anybody to steal into
+the woods at night and slip a ton of this into the charcoal piles."
+
+"Man, why didn't we think of it?" Billy groaned.
+
+In moments of stress no two natures will express themselves in quite the
+same way. As they stood looking gloomily over the wreck big tears slowly
+forced themselves out of Billy's inflamed eyes and washed white runnels
+down the soot. Heartbroken, he looked up in sudden fright as Seyd burst
+out laughing.
+
+"Bob! Bob!" he pleaded. "Have you gone crazy? Get a grip on yourself,
+there's a good fellow!"
+
+But his pathetic anxiety merely caused Seyd to laugh the more. It was
+not that he was hysterical. Somehow the thought of the pain and
+travail, trouble, anxiety, and discomforts they had endured during the
+past three months touched his sense of humor.
+
+"We have to allow that they made a pretty clean job," he said, wiping
+his eyes. "Let's be thankful that you were out of the way."
+
+"Where are you going?" Billy called out, as he began to walk away.
+
+"To finish my sleep and catch up a few hours on all that I have lost in
+the last three months. Take a nap yourself."
+
+"Oh, I couldn't."
+
+He undoubtedly thought so, yet when Seyd came out again, having slept
+the clock round, it was to find Billy curled up and snoring hard under
+the shade of the palm mat that Caliban had stretched between him and the
+sun. "Quit your fooling," he broke in severely on Seyd's chaffing.
+"Don't you know that we are down to our last dollar?"
+
+"Thirty-three dollars and sixty cents Mex," Seyd gravely corrected.
+Kicking a chunk of cooled matte, he added: "But we now have this. It
+ought to stake us for a new start."
+
+Billy, however, was not to be so easily separated from his grief. "Where
+are you going to raise capital," he demanded, "with every spare dollar
+in California locked up in the Nevada gold fields? If this had happened
+a year ago, before the Tonopah rush, we might have done it. But now?" He
+shook a doleful head.
+
+"Well--New York?"
+
+"Worse and more of it. The New Yorkers want all the bacon for killing
+the pig. Might as well give them the mine at once. No, Bob, it's all
+off. We're done--cooked a lovely brown in our own grease. Why _didn't_
+we guard those piles! Who do you suppose did it? Don Luis?"
+
+Seyd shrugged. "_Quien sabe?_ Doesn't look like his style. Of one thing,
+however, we can be certain. Your common peon doesn't habitually walk
+around with dynamite in his jeans. If I was going to lay any money, I'd
+place it on your friend Sebastien. But we haven't any time to fool on
+detective work. The question is--what's to be done?"
+
+It was no light problem. As Billy had said, every dollar of Western
+mining capital was invested in Nevada, and Mexican projects, however
+good, would have to wait till the new gold fields were completely
+exploited. A canvass of moneyed friends yielded no results, for, while
+the wreck lay there under their eyes to emphasize the possibility of
+similar future troubles, they could not but feel it to be a hazardous
+venture for any person of limited means. Night brought no conclusion.
+But, having slept on it again, they arose and began once more,
+unconscious of the fact that while they lay in the heavy shade of a wild
+fig tree, proposing, debating, rejecting various plans, the solution was
+fast approaching upon its own legs.
+
+Obviously, neither of them recognized the solution in the person of Don
+Luis when, about the middle of the forenoon, his horse lifted him up
+over the edge of the grade. On the contrary, it is doubtful whether
+smiling fortune was ever met with a blacker scowl than Billy's.
+Growling, "He's come up for a huge gloat," he would undoubtedly have
+returned some insult to the old man's greeting but for Seyd's stealthy
+kick on the shins.
+
+Prepared as he was by the reports that charcoal-burners had brought to
+San Nicolas, Don Luis's face expressed his utter astonishment at the
+extent of the ruin. "We but heard of it last night," he told them. "It
+was, I suppose, accidental? I understand that these furnaces--dynamite?
+_Señor?_" He glanced with an interrogative frown at the peons asleep in
+the shade of the adobe. "It was not they?"
+
+Reassured on that point, he nodded in confirmation of Seyd's statement
+that it would be foolish to hunt for the culprit. "As well try to single
+out a flea on a peon's dog. I warned you, señor, to expect an enemy in
+every stone of the Barranca. It would have been well had you listened.
+But"--his eyes, hands, and shoulders expressed his acceptance of
+fate--"it is done. And now?"
+
+"We shall rebuild--as soon as we can raise the money."
+
+Turning to survey the destruction, Don Luis hid a sudden gleam that was
+evenly compounded of admiration and irritation. When he spoke again,
+shrewd calculation peered from his half-closed eyes. "This time you will
+build a larger--"
+
+"--Plant?" Seyd supplied the word. "No."
+
+"But I am told, señor, that the larger the plant the greater the
+profits."
+
+Seyd raised comical brows. "Fifty thousand dollars, señor--gold?"
+
+"A small sum to your rich American capitalists."
+
+"But we are not capitalists. No, we shall have to get along with a small
+furnace."
+
+The calculation deepened in the old man's brown eyes. After a pause, to
+their utter astonishment, it took form in words. "But if you could raise
+the money?"
+
+"What's the use of talking; we can't."
+
+"If I were to lend it to you?"
+
+"_You!_" It was Billy who expressed their wonder. Seyd added, after a
+pause, "But we have no security to offer--that is, nothing but the
+mine."
+
+"And if we ran away?" Billy suggested, grinning. "Took your money and
+never came back?"
+
+For the first time in their acquaintance a touch of humor lightened the
+heavy bronzed face. "There are some in this valley, señor, who might not
+count it too high a price. But as you say"--he bowed to Seyd--"the mine
+is security enough. Now that you have shown how, I might even work it
+myself. To put in a complete--"
+
+"--Plant." Billy supplied the strange word.
+
+"How long?"
+
+"Between six and nine months. We should then require a little time to
+smelt some ore and realize. We could not--"
+
+"_Si, si!_" In his impatience Don Luis relapsed into Spanish. "_Si_, one
+would not expect immediate repayment. Perhaps five thousand pesos at the
+end of a year--"
+
+"Oh, we could do better than that. Ten thousand of a first payment,
+fifteen for the second, the remainder at a third with interest--"
+
+"Interest? I had not thought of that." But he yielded to their
+insistence. "Very well, if you will have it! Shall we say five
+per-cent.? _Bueno!_ You will, of course, have to make a trip to the
+United States to buy your material. If you will call at San Nicolas on
+your way the administrador will have letters prepared to my bankers in
+Ciudad, Mexico."
+
+With a shrug that expressed relief at the conclusion he changed the
+subject. Riding forward to obtain a closer view of the furnace, he again
+clucked his surprise at the complete destruction, wagged a grave head
+over the half bushel of dynamite that the peons had picked out of the
+charcoal, curiously examined a piece of copper matte, lifting heavy
+brows over the statement of its values, then rode quietly away, leaving
+Seyd and Billy to recover as best they could from this fortunate
+stroke.
+
+"Am I dreaming?" Billy's exclamation defined their mental condition.
+"Hit me, Bob. I want to make sure that I'm awake."
+
+Convinced, he gasped with his first breath: "Fifty thousand dollars!
+By golly! Why, we can put in a complete outfit."
+
+"Reverberatories with water jackets." Seyd took up the tale again.
+"We'll build down in the valley."
+
+"Aerial cable--"
+
+"--With iron self-dumping buckets--"
+
+"--A flat-bottomed sternwheeler to--"
+
+"--Take our copper down to the coast."
+
+Blinded by the sudden light that had flashed out of their black despair
+they stood for some time looking out over the Barranca with shining eyes
+which saw a small mining town rising out of the jungle's tangles. It was
+fully ten minutes before Seyd came back to earth.
+
+"I wonder what is behind all this? Seems rather funny that the old chap
+should come to our help?"
+
+"Not knowing, can't say and don't care a darn! So far as I am concerned,
+at fifty thousand a throw he can be just as inconsistent as he jolly
+well likes."
+
+"Nevertheless," Seyd mused, "I'd give three cents to know."
+
+Meanwhile, Don Luis pursued his quiet way, now at a heavy canter, again
+on a stately trot, through the jungle out to the first village beyond
+the forks of the trail. As he passed the little _fonda_ Sebastien Rocha
+rode out from a group of rancheros who stood drinking at the rough bar.
+
+"They told me of the passing," he said, nodding backward. "And I waited.
+What news? Did the gringos go up with their furnace? No? Still they will
+now have their bellies full of Guerrero?"
+
+But his face dropped at Don Luis's answer. "No, they are to build
+again."
+
+"But I thought--was it not the agent at the station who said they had no
+money?"
+
+"Neither had they." It was always difficult to read the massive face,
+but now it expressed just a shade of malicious amusement. "I have lent
+them fifty thousand pesos."
+
+"_Thou!_" For once the man's usual cynical calm was completely
+disrupted. In his vast astonishment he whispered it: "_Thou? Fifty
+thousand pesos?_"
+
+"_Yo._" Smiling slightly, he went on: "Now listen, Sebastien. Not to
+mention thy little attempt on their virtue, this is the third on their
+lives, and all badly bungled. So do not wonder that I thought it time to
+take them into my own hand. Now that they are there, let there be no
+mistake--the meddling finger is likely to be badly pinched. From this
+time--they are _mine_."
+
+"But--why give them money?"
+
+"To forestall others." Had he been there to hear, the following words
+would fully have answered Seyd's question. "The elder of these lads is
+no common man. By hook or by crook he would have raised a company--if he
+had to rope and tie down his men on the run. Then, instead of these two,
+we should have a dozen gringos, with Porfirio and his rurales to back up
+their charter. But do not fear."
+
+From the cleared fields through which they were riding it was possible
+to see Santa Gertrudis, and, turning in his saddle, he extended his
+quirt toward its green scar.
+
+"Do not fear."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+It was in the middle of the rainy season. Stepping out of his office,
+where he had just added a few drops of Scotch to the water he was
+absorbing at every pore, the station agent came face to face with the
+engineer of the down train.
+
+"Nine hours late?" The engineer gruffly repeated the other's comment.
+"We are lucky to be here at all. Besides being sopping wet, the wood
+we're burning is that dosey it'd make a fireproof curtain for hell. This
+kind of railroading don't suit my book, and I'm telling you that if they
+don't serve us out something pretty soon that smells like wood I know
+one fat engineer that will be missing on this line." Jerking his thumb
+at the lone passenger who had descended at the station, he added: "But
+for that chap we'd never have got through. When the track went out from
+under us at La Puente he pitched in and showed us no end of wrinkles. If
+you've got anything inside just give him a nip for me."
+
+"Hullo, Mr. Seyd!" Coming face to face with the passenger after the
+train had gone on, the agent thrust out his hand. "What a pity you
+weren't on the other train. She was twenty hours late--in fact, only
+pulled out a couple of hours ago. Miss Francesca was aboard, and she
+just left."
+
+"Not alone?"
+
+The agent laughed. "Sure! She don't care. Three weeks ago she came
+galloping in through one of the heaviest rains and took the up train."
+
+"So she has been home since I left?"
+
+"Let me see--that's nigh on three months, isn't it? Sure, she came home
+just after you left."
+
+With this bit of information lingering in the forefront of his mind
+Seyd, a little later, rode out from the station. Not that it engrossed,
+by any means, the whole of his thought. Even had he been free, the hard
+work and bitter disappointment of the first venture, and the equally
+hard thought and careful planning for the second during his long absence
+in the States, would have been sufficient to keep her in the background.
+If he had never happened to see Francesca again she would probably have
+lingered as an unusually pretty face in the gallery of his mind. While
+it was only natural that he should wonder if the news that he sent in by
+Caliban had ever reached her ear, it was merely a passing thought. His
+mind soon turned again to his plans. Up to the moment that, four hours
+later, he came slipping and sliding downhill upon her she was altogether
+out of his thought.
+
+For that very reason his fresh senses leaped to take the picture she
+made standing in the gray sheeting rain beside her fallen horse, and
+through its very difference from either the tan riding habit or virginal
+batiste of his memory her loose waterproof with its capote hood helped
+to stamp this figure upon his brain. Before she said a word he had gone
+back to the feelings of four months ago.
+
+The pelting rain had washed all but a few clay streaks off her coat.
+Touching them, she explained: "The poor beast fell under me. I fear it
+has broken a leg."
+
+While speaking she offered her hand; and if that had not been
+sufficient, her friendly smile more than answered his speculation.
+Caliban's niece had certainly done her duty! Indeed, while he was
+stooping over the fallen animal a quick glance upward would have given
+him a look evenly compounded of mischief and remorse. It gave place to
+sudden sorrow when he spoke.
+
+"It is broken, all right. There is only one thing to be done. If you
+will lead my horse around the shoulder of the hill I will put the poor
+thing out of its pain."
+
+Her life had been cast too much in the open for her to be ignorant of
+the needs of the case. Nevertheless, he saw that her eyes were brimming
+as she led his horse away; and, remembering their black fire on the day
+that she had ordered the charcoal-burners flogged, he wondered. It
+would have been even harder to reconcile the two impressions had he
+seen the tears rolling down her cheeks when the muffled report of his
+pistol followed her around the hill. But she had wiped them away before
+he rejoined her. If the sensitive red mouth trembled, her voice was
+under control.
+
+"No, I had not waited long," she answered his question. "You see, the
+poor creature lost a shoe earlier in the day, and I had to ride back to
+have it replaced. It would have been better had I stayed there."
+
+For the moment he was puzzled. An hour ago he had ridden past the last
+habitation, a flimsy hut already overcrowded with the peon, his wife,
+their children, chickens, and pigs. All around them stretched wide
+wastes of volcanic rock and scrub. They were, as he knew, on the
+hacienda San Angel, but the buildings lay five leagues to the north.
+With hard riding he had expected to make the inn at the foot of the
+Barranca wall that night. She might do it by taking his horse. But if
+anything went wrong? She would be alone--all night--in the rain! He felt
+easier when she refused the offer of his beast.
+
+"And leave you to walk? No, sir."
+
+A second offer to walk by her side not only ran counter to the prejudice
+of a race of riders, but also aroused her sympathies. "I could never
+think of it!" After a moment of thought she propounded her own solution.
+"Your beast is strong. I have ridden double on an animal half his size.
+We will both ride."
+
+Now, though Seyd had long ago grown to the sight of rancheros on their
+way to market in the embrace of their buxom brown wives, the suddenness
+of it made him gasp. But by a quick mounting he succeeded in hiding the
+rush of blood to his face. Also he managed to control his voice.
+
+"Fine idea! Give me your hand."
+
+Just touching his foot, she rose like a bird to the croup. When, as the
+horse moved on, she slid an arm around his waist his demoralization was
+full and complete. If he glanced down it was to see her fingers resting
+like small white butterflies on his raincoat. Did he look up, then a
+faint perfume of damp hair would come floating over his shoulder. He
+thrilled when her clasp tightened as the horse broke into a gentle trot,
+and was altogether in a bad way when her merry laugh restored order
+among his senses.
+
+"Now we can play Rosa and Rosario on their way to market. It will be for
+you to grumble at prices while I rail at the government tax that puts
+woolens beyond the purse of a peon."
+
+"I prefer to ask what brought you out in such weather." He returned her
+laugh. "A pretty pickle you would have been in if I had not come along."
+
+He felt the vigorous shake of her head. "I should have walked back to
+the last hut, and an oxcart would have taken me in to the station."
+
+"But then you would have been out all night."
+
+"I should have loved it." Though he did not see the sudden blooming
+under her hood, he felt the unconscious squeeze which testified to the
+sincerity of her feeling. "I love them--the roar of the wind, black
+darkness, the beat of the rain in my face. Mother would have had me stay
+in Mexico till the rains were over, but when Don Luis wrote that the
+river was at flood nothing could hold me." He had thrilled under her
+unconscious pressure, but her conclusion proved an excellent corrective.
+"I am afraid that the site for your new buildings must be under water."
+
+"How can that be?" He spoke quickly. "We are building well back from
+last year's mark, and Don Luis said that it was the highest known."
+
+"But this year it has gone even higher--and all because of the Yankee
+companies that are stripping the upper valley of timber. There were
+great fires, too, last year which broke away from their servants and
+burned hundreds of miles of woods."
+
+Her quiet answer went far to allay his sudden suspicion, but not his
+anxiety. He spoke of Billy. "It is over a month since he came out to the
+station for stores, and the agent told me that none of your people had
+seen him for weeks."
+
+"But he has with him Angelo"--she gave Caliban his correct name--"and
+he, as I once told you, was counted Sebastien's best man in his war
+against the brigands. Though he may not show it to you, he is not
+ungrateful for the gift of his life. If food is to be had in the
+country, Mr. Thornton will not go lacking."
+
+He spoke more cheerfully. "Then I don't care; though if the site _is_
+flooded we shall be thrown back at least three months with our work."
+
+"And what is three months?" she added, laughing.
+
+To him it was a great deal. Before paying over the loan Don Luis's
+lawyers had taken Seyd's signatures upon certain instruments which
+exhibited the General in the new light of a shrewd and conservative
+business man. Withal, having still plenty of time, he answered quite
+cheerfully when she turned the conversation with a question concerning
+his plans. Under the stimulation of her curiosity, which surprised him
+by its intelligence, he went into details, talking and answering her
+questions while the horse trudged steadily on into the darkening rain.
+If the trail had not suddenly faded out, night would have caught them
+unnoticed.
+
+In that volcanic country, where for long stretches a hoof left no
+impression, the loss of a trail was a common experience, and, trusting
+to the instinct of the beast, Seyd gave it the rein. Left to its own
+devices, however, it gradually swerved from the beating rain and
+presently turned on to a cattle track which swung away into gum copal
+trees and scrub oak at an imperceptible angle. Had he been alone Seyd
+would have soon noticed the absence of the Aztec ruin. As it was, but
+not until an hour later, Francesca was the first to speak.
+
+"That's so," he agreed, when she drew his attention. "We ought to have
+passed it long ago. The animal evidently picked up a wrong track coming
+out from the rocks." After a moment's reflection he said: "It would be
+worse than foolish to try to go back. We could never find the trail in
+this black rain. Better follow on and see where it will bring us." With
+a sudden remembrance of what it might mean to her, a young girl brought
+up in the rigid conventions of the country, he repentantly added: "I'm
+awfully sorry for you. I ought to be kicked for my carelessness."
+
+"No, I have traveled this trail much oftener than you," she quietly
+protested. "If any one is blamed I should be the one."
+
+Sitting there in black darkness, lost in those lonely volcanic hills,
+with the rain dashing in his face and the roar of the wind in his ears,
+he was prepared to appreciate her quiet answer. "You are a brick!" he
+exclaimed. "Nevertheless, I feel my guilt."
+
+"Then you need not." She gave a little laugh. "Did I not say that I
+enjoyed being out at night in the rain?"
+
+"And now the gods have called your bluff."
+
+"_Bluff?_" She laughed again at the meaning of that rank Americanism.
+"It was no bluff, as you will presently see."
+
+And see he did--during the long hour they spent splashing along in black
+darkness, up hill, down dale, fording swollen arroyos, through chaparral
+which tore at them with myriad claws and wet woods whose boughs lashed
+their faces. Up to the moment that the roof of a hut suddenly loomed out
+against the dim, dark sky she uttered no doubt or complaint. When,
+having tied his horse under the wide eaves, he lit a match inside, its
+flare revealed her face, quiet and serene.
+
+Also it showed that which, while not nearly so interesting, had its
+immediate uses--a candle stuck in a _tequila_ bottle; and its steadier
+flare presently helped them to another find--a chemisette and other
+garments of feminine wear, spotlessly clean and smoothly ironed,
+arranged on a string that ran over a bunk in one corner.
+
+"The fiesta wear of our hostess," Francesca remarked. "How lucky! for I
+am drenched."
+
+"And look at that pile of dry wood!" he exclaimed. "The gods are with
+us. I'll build a fire, then while I rub down the horse you can change.
+What's this?"
+
+It was a rough sketch done with charcoal on the table. Two
+parallelograms with sticks for legs were in furious pursuit of certain
+horned squares which, in their turn, were in full flight toward a
+doll's house in the far corner.
+
+"Oh, I know!" the girl cried, after a moment of study. "Here, in the
+wild country where they never see man, are raised the fighting bulls for
+the rings of Mexico. This hut belongs to a vaquero of San Angel, and
+this is an order, left in his absence, to drive the bulls into the
+hacienda." Laying her finger on a triangle which had evidently been
+added later, she continued, laughing: "This shows that his woman has
+gone with him. They were evidently called away unexpectedly, for she had
+already set the corn to soak in this _olla_ for the supper tortillas.
+And the saints be praised! Here are dried beef, salt, and chilis. Now
+hurry the fire, and you shall see what a cook I am."
+
+While he was building it in the center of the mud floor she made other
+finds--a cube of brown sugar, coffee, a cake of goat's cheese; and her
+little delighted exclamations over each discovery both amused him and
+proved how sincere was her acceptance of the situation. "She's a brick!"
+he told the horse, rubbing him down, outside, with wisps pulled out from
+the under side of the thatch. "Thoroughbred in blood and bone." As the
+animal had already experimented with the thatch and found it quite to
+its liking, the question of provender was settled. But in order that
+Francesca might have ample time to change, Seyd rubbed and rubbed and
+rubbed till a rattle of clay pots inside gave him leave to come in.
+
+At the door he paused to admire the picture she made in the red glow of
+the fire. In place of the slender girl of the stylish raincoat a pretty
+peona raised velvet eyes from the stone _metate_ on which she was
+vigorously rubbing soaked corn for the supper tortillas. By emphasizing
+some features and softening others strange attire always gives a new
+view of a woman. The sleeveless garment showed the round white arms and
+foreshortened and filled out her slender lines.
+
+Glancing down at her arms, she confessed, with an uneasy wriggle: "I
+don't like it, though I wear décolleté every evening when we are in the
+city. But I shall soon get used to it."
+
+Conscious of his admiring eyes, she found them employment in watching
+the tortillas. But, having grown accustomed to the new dress by the time
+supper was ready, she left him free to watch the white arms and small
+hands which hovered like butterflies over the clay pot. In the lack of
+all other utensils, they used bits of tortilla for spoons, dipping
+alternately into the pot which she had set between them; nor did he find
+the chili any the worse for its contact with the tortilla which had just
+taken an impression of her small teeth. It required only an after-dinner
+pipe, to which she graciously consented, to seal his content.
+
+After the wet and fatigue of the trail the warmth and cheer of food and
+fire were extremely grateful, but not conducive to talk. While he sat
+watching the tobacco smoke curl up into the blackened peak of the roof
+she leaned, chin in her hands, elbows on crossed knees, studying the
+fire. Leaping out of red coal, an occasional flame set its reflection in
+her deep eyes, and as his gaze wandered from her around the rough
+_jacal_ Seyd found it difficult to realize that it was indeed he, Robert
+Seyd, mining engineer of San Francisco, who sat there sharing food and
+fire with a girl, on the one hand scion of the Mexican aristocracy,
+descendant on the other of a line which ran back into the dim time of
+the Aztecs. The thought stirred the romance within him and helped to
+prolong his silence. It would have held him still longer if his musings
+had not been suddenly interrupted by her merry laugh.
+
+"_Si?_" he inquired, looking suddenly up.
+
+"I was thinking what they would say--my mother, Don Luis, the
+neighbors?"
+
+"Horrible!" he agreed. "Your mother? What would she say?"
+
+As the white hands flew up in a horrified gesture it was the señora
+herself. "_Santa Maria Marissima!_"
+
+"And Don Luis?"
+
+Her expression changed from laughter into sudden mischievous demureness.
+"His remarks, señor, are not for me to repeat."
+
+"Well--the neighbors?"
+
+Once more her hands went up. "'Was it not that we always said it of that
+mad girl! Maria, thou shalt not speak with her again.'" Smiling, she
+added, "For you must know, señor, that I have been held as a horrible
+example of the things a girl should not do since the days of my
+childhood."
+
+"Like the devil in the old New England theology," he suggested, smiling,
+"you make more converts than the preacher?"
+
+He had to explain before she understood. Then she laughed merrily. "Just
+so. What they would do were I to marry, die, or reform, I really cannot
+tell. It would leave a gap almost equal to the loss of the catechism."
+She finished with a mock sigh, "They will never appreciate me till I'm
+dead."
+
+"Any present danger?"
+
+The smiling mouth pursed demurely under his whimsical glance. "I am
+afraid not. You saw my performance at supper. I am the despair of my
+mother, who would have me more delicate and refined."
+
+"Marriage?"
+
+"No one wants me."
+
+"Don Sebastien?"
+
+It slipped out, and he was immediately sorry, but she only laughed.
+"Tut! tut! A cousin?"
+
+Surveying him from under drooping lashes, a glance soft and warm as
+velvet, she added: "I will confess. There _were_ others. Some too fat,
+some too thin, all too stupid, here at home. In Mexico they were
+triflers--or worse. But on the honor of a lone maid, señor, never a man
+among them." With a sudden relapse into seriousness she repeated, "Among
+_all_ of them--never a man." Though she was looking directly at him, her
+glance seemed to go on, fly to some further vision which, for one
+second, set its reflection in her eyes. Then her long silky lashes wiped
+it out. When they rose again it was over mischievous lights. "Never a
+_man_," with a change of accent.
+
+"But he will come--some day," he teased.
+
+"And go--after the fashion of dream men."
+
+"And dream women."
+
+For a while she studied him curiously. "Then she has not come?"
+
+"Yes," he answered, with sudden impulse. "But--"
+
+She softly filled the pause. "'But' and 'because' are woman's reasons."
+
+"Unhappily, sometimes man's," he gravely answered; and, feeling,
+perhaps, that the conversation was drifting into unsafe latitudes, he
+rose and began to pull dry grass from the under side of the thatch. "For
+you," he exclaimed, with a glance at the bunk. "I knew you wouldn't care
+to sleep there."
+
+Having arranged a thick layer at a safe distance from the fire, he
+gathered another armful, and was going outside when she called him back.
+"To make my bed," he answered her question.
+
+"In the wet?"
+
+"Oh, it isn't so bad--here under the eaves."
+
+"Only an inch of water," she answered him, with pretty sarcasm; and,
+indicating certain small trickles that were coming through the cane
+siding, she gave him his orders. "You will sleep here--inside."
+
+"But--" he began.
+
+"Señor, I said that you would sleep _inside_."
+
+As a matter of fact, the "prospect" outside was not inviting, and his
+acquiescence lowered the quick colors his previous obstinacy had raised.
+She had already settled down on one elbow; and when, having arranged a
+bed on the opposite side of the fire, he lit a second pipe, she studied
+him through the smoke, wondering what pictures were responsible for his
+earnest gaze. But warmth and comfort presently produced their natural
+effect, and she began to nod. After a few shy, sleepy glances that
+showed him still staring moodily into the fire her head sank upon the
+white fullness of her doubled arm.
+
+As a matter of fact, it was his wife's face that returned his steady
+gaze from a nest of red coal. Absorbed in bitter musings, he received
+the first intimation of Francesca's sleep from a sigh which caused him
+to start as though at the report of a gun. Then while the warm blood
+streamed through his drumming pulses, every sense vividly alive, he
+looked down upon her. With all the timid awe that Adam must have
+displayed when he awoke to the sight of Eve he studied this greatest of
+masculine experiences, a woman clad in the soft armor of sleep.
+
+For some time his senses dwelt only on the fact, and gave him merely the
+soft sigh of her sleep, the play of firelight over the unconscious
+figure. But presently his mind began to work, to compare the broad
+forehead, oval contours, fine-cut nostrils, delicate chiseling of her
+features, with the common prettiness of his wife. Even the little foot
+and slender ankle, freed by relaxation from the jealous skirt, helped to
+emphasize differences wide as those between a hummingbird and a pouter
+pigeon. It had required the rigid selection of a thousand generations,
+the pre-eminence in strength and brains of a line of fighters to produce
+the one, just as the slacker choice of a commoner breed had created the
+other; and Seyd, whose own blood had come down through the clean
+channels of good Colonial stock, recognized the fact. As never before he
+was impressed with the fatuity of his chivalric rashness. While the
+firelight rose and fell he strained at the ties which stretched over
+mountains, desert, plains, binding him to the coarse woman in
+Albuquerque.
+
+His sudden jerk forward was the physical equivalent of his mental
+strain. Though homely, even slangy, his mutter, "Your cake is baked,
+son. The sooner you let this girl know it the better," was none the less
+tragic. The thought was the last in his waking mind.
+
+Before going to sleep he performed one last service. Noticing that she
+shivered under the wet breath of the night, he took off his coat,
+tiptoed across, and, after laying it softly across her shoulders,
+returned with equal caution. She did not stir or even change the slow
+rhythm of her breath, but he had no more than lain down before her eyes
+slowly opened. When his deep respirations told that he was fast asleep
+she rose on one elbow and looked at him across the fire.
+
+In her turn, with glances shyly curious as those with which Eve, newly
+formed, may have eyed Adam still in "deep sleep," she noted the
+wide-spaced, deep-set eyes, strong nose, the ideality of the brows, the
+humorous puckers at the corners of his mouth. Though she did not analyze
+their individual meanings, the totality made a strong appeal to instinct
+and intuitions formed by the vast experience of the race. Her impression
+phrased itself in her murmur, "A wholesome face."
+
+Only the cleft chin seemed to carry a special meaning. Surveying it, a
+gleam of mischief shot through the soft satisfaction of her look, and
+she murmured beneath her breath in Spanish, "Oh, fickle! fickle! Thy
+wife will need the sharpest of eyes."
+
+The thought brought a little laugh, and for a minute thereafter she sat,
+a finger upon her lip, listening for a break in his breathing. When it
+did not come she rose slowly, stole like a mouse across the floor, and
+laid his coat, light as a feather, over his unprotected shoulders. Back
+again on her own couch, she looked across at him again; a glance naïve
+in its enjoyment of the romantic impropriety of the entire proceeding.
+Then, curling up under her raincoat, she fell fast asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Thoroughly fagged out by six weary nights on the train, Seyd slept like
+the dead, and did not awaken until a sudden clatter of pots aroused him
+to knowledge of a golden cobweb of light streaming in between the flimsy
+siding of the hut. Through the open doorway he obtained a glimpse of a
+bejeweled world, resonant with the song of birds. After informing him of
+these facts, his eyes reintroduced him to the young lady in the tan
+riding habit who had ousted the pretty peona of last night from her
+command over fire and dishes. The satisfying odor of hot coffee
+completed the verdict of his senses.
+
+"Breakfast all ready? I must have slept like a log."
+
+"You did." She laughed. "I rattled the dishes in vain. I was just about
+to throw something at you."
+
+Now, his last waking thought had outlined a purpose to inform her at
+once of his marriage, and while they were eating breakfast it recurred
+again. But not with the same force. That which, when imbued with the
+sentimental values of firelight and silence, appeared necessary and
+right somehow appeared almost absurd when viewed in broad day. Checking
+sentiment, too, by its very friendliness, her manner did not invite
+confession.
+
+"It would be impertinent," he concluded. "She has no personal interest
+in me."
+
+If he had observed her only an hour earlier re-entering the _jacal_
+after a shivering exchange outside with the peona he might not have been
+quite so sure. Once or twice she had indulged in softer thought, whose
+key was to be found in her murmur just before she tried to awake him:
+
+"_Adios_, Rosario."
+
+Also the morning had brought its own problem to fill his mind. He could
+not but see that their appearance at the inn in the Barranca so early in
+the day would be a confession of their breach of the most rigid of
+Spanish conventions. But how to broach the subject without offense?
+Though he racked his brains while saddling the horse and, later, when it
+was carrying them double upon their way, he had come to no conclusion up
+to the moment that she settled it herself with a little cry.
+
+"Now I know where I am." She was indicating an outcropping of rock on a
+sterile hillside. "We strayed miles away from our trail. We shall soon
+come to a path that leads past a rancho where I can borrow a horse."
+
+Almost as they spoke the cattle track they had been following joined a
+trail, and shortly after she spoke again, laughing. "And now, Señor
+Rosario, I must bid you good-by. This good beast has done nobly, but we
+shall gain time if one rides forward to the rancho and sends back a
+horse. Which shall it be?"
+
+But he was already on the ground, hat in hand. "Rosa, _adios_."
+
+Laughing, she rode on while he sat down on an outcropping of rock to
+wait, for he was not minded to wade through the wet grass and brush of
+some woods at the foot of the hill. Until she passed from sight he sat
+watching, then, feeling a little lazy, he fitted his angles into a sort
+of natural couch in the rock and fell to musing, reviewing again the
+incidents of the night. He had not intended to sleep. But what with the
+warmth and stillness, he presently passed quietly away, was still
+unconscious when the stroke of a hoof on a rock awoke him to the sight
+of two horsemen with a led beast.
+
+"For me," he thought. Then, as he recognized Sebastien Rocha in the
+second horseman, he whistled his consternation. If the hacendado had not
+actually met Francesca he must surely have pumped the _mozo_ dry, and
+now the sight of him, Seyd, would fully reveal their case!
+
+"Now for a big fat row," he told himself. But, greatly to his surprise,
+Sebastien passed on with a nod, and presently turned from the trail,
+following their fresh hoof tracks over the hill. The _mozo_ had already
+gone on to retrieve Francesca's saddle from the dead horse, and,
+irritated and alarmed, Seyd mounted the led beast and rode on at a
+gallop. But, quickly realizing that his further company was not likely
+to improve the girl's case, he presently pulled the beast back to a
+walk. Lost in frowning thought, he rode on slowly until, an hour later,
+there came a beat of galloping hoofs, and Sebastien rode up from behind.
+
+His reiteration of the thought "Now for the row!" was colored by the way
+in which the hacendado's hand went to his holster. But Seyd's hand,
+which moved as quickly to his own gun, dropped, and he blushed crimson
+as the other held out his brier pipe.
+
+"Merely _this_, señor." He glanced meaningly at Seyd's gun. "For _that_
+you would have been too late. I could have shot you through the back.
+After this do not let your foolish Yankee pride stop you from looking
+behind."
+
+Though both angry and alarmed, the cold impudence of it made Seyd laugh.
+"Yes? How did you resist the temptation?"
+
+"It was a temptation." He gravely approved the word. "Your back made
+such a fine smooth mark. I could see the bullet splash in the center."
+
+"Then why didn't you? Since you are so frank I don't mind saying that I
+believe that you already had a hand in at least one of three attempts on
+my life! Is it that you would prefer to have me blown up?"
+
+"Like your predecessor, the Hollander?" Sebastien's shrug might have
+meant anything. "I have, of course, my preferences, and some day I shall
+have to decide in just which way I would wish you put to death. In
+passing the opportunity now you ought to feel complimented, for let me
+tell you that I would never leave any Mexican lips free to tell of your
+experiences last night."
+
+The man's tone of quiet certainty robbed the words of extravagance; and,
+accustomed now to a life that out-melodramaed melodrama, Seyd knew
+better than to take them for jest. "That's very nice of you," he quietly
+answered, and as just then the trail narrowed to pass through a copal
+grove he added: "Forewarned is forearmed. Just to keep you out of
+temptation--will you please to go first?"
+
+"With pleasure."
+
+Faint though it was, the smile that loosened the firm mouth made it
+easier for Seyd to continue when they were riding once more side by
+side. "For the young lady's sake I am glad to have you take such a
+sensible view of an unavoidable situation. I take it that you were going
+the other way. If you can trust me--"
+
+"Trust no one and you will never be deceived. If I had my way of it
+there would be an end to the girl's wild tricks. But since she _will_ be
+abroad, what better escort could she have than her kinsman?"
+
+"None," Seyd agreed. "I overtook her by accident, cared for her the best
+that I could; now she is in your hands."
+
+Sebastien shook his head. "Not so swiftly. She would hardly thank me for
+your dismissal." While the shadow of a smile lifted the corner of his
+thin lips he added: "The last time I mixed in her affairs she refused to
+speak with me for over a year, and I have no mind to repeat the
+experience. We are all going to San Nicolas. It would be foolish to ride
+apart."
+
+"Very well," Seyd agreed, not, however, with any great degree of
+pleasure. Apart from the strain involved by a day's travel with a man
+who had just confessed to a permanent intention of killing him he felt
+more disappointment than he would have cared to admit at the spoiling of
+the tête-à-tête with the girl. In fact, the feeling was so acute that he
+found it necessary to justify it in his own thought. "It was only for a
+day," he mused, slightly changing his previous conclusion to fit the
+case, "and I'd like to have seen it out."
+
+"So! so! The storm proved a little too much for this one."
+
+They had just ridden into copal woods, and, looking up, Seyd saw that he
+was pointing at a pile of bones and wet tatters of clothing that lay
+under a swinging fray of rope. If possible, it was more grisly of
+appearance than a second mummy which still swung, clicking its miserable
+bones in the wind. Whether or no he noticed Seyd's shiver of disgust
+Sebastien ran easily on:
+
+"He was a stout rogue, this fellow, with a keen eye for a pretty woman
+and small scruples as to how he got her. It was, indeed, through this
+little weakness that we caught him, using a girl to bait the trap. But
+he died game--with a joke on his lips. 'Señor,' he said, as the mule
+went from under him, 'if but one-half of my brats walk in my steps thou
+wilt have need of an army to finish us up.'
+
+"He had humor, too. He it was that stole the altar service from the
+church of San Anselmo to pay the priest of Guadaloupe to say a thousand
+masses for the repose of his soul. He was dead and the masses said
+before the service was traced by a pilgrim to the Guadaloupe shrine, and
+ever since the priests have been at war--both over the return of the
+service and to decide the burning question as to whether it is possible
+to nullify a heavenly title obtained through fraud. It makes a pretty
+point in theology, and the battle still rages. Being debarred from
+physical expression, the brute in a priest exercises itself through the
+tongue, and they will not leave such a choice morsel till the last shred
+of meat has been gnawed from the bones."
+
+In presence of those dumb witnesses to its truth, the grim banter
+sounded even grimmer. During the long white nights that followed hard
+days at work on the smelter nothing had suited Caliban more than to be
+drawn on to talk of the war against the brigands. Under the red light of
+a camp fire, with the vast night of the Barranca yawning below, the
+tales had been spun--tales that had outdone the dime novels of Seyd's
+youth. Of them all, that which had ended with the hanging of the last
+bandit in this very glade had outdone all in sheer desperation.
+
+Kindling to the romance of it all, he took stealthy note, as they rode
+on, of the lithe muscular figure, which was as extraordinary in its
+balanced strength as the calm power of the quiet brown face. When memory
+drew a vivid contrast between Sebastien and his early training in the
+sober atmosphere of the English commercial boarding-school Seyd
+wondered, and finally put his wonder into words.
+
+"Didn't you find the transition from Manchester rather sudden? It must
+have been like plunging head first into a romance."
+
+"Romance?" For the first time that morning, for matter of that, in all
+their intercourse, Sebastien laughed outright. "Oh, you Anglo-Saxons!
+Romance is a creature of your own dreamy idealism. We do not know it. We
+are passionate, nervous, hysterical, gross, materialistic, but for all
+our heat we see life more clearly than you. It would be better for us if
+we did not. For where in the mirror of your imaginings you see your
+strength enormously magnified our clearer perceptions show our
+weaknesses. Even at the point of death you neither see nor accept
+defeat. But we, cowering before it, are swept the quicker away." Just as
+on that other occasion when he stood talking beside their fire on the
+rim of the Barranca, this came out of his quiet with volcanic heat.
+Dropping as quickly into his usual calm, he finished, "No, I did not
+find it romantic--merely amusing."
+
+Nettled a little by his amused contempt, Seyd quickly retorted: "I fail
+to see how you can claim to have no ideals? You who are striving with
+all your might against the American invasion?"
+
+Sebastien shrugged. "Racial aversion--backed up by the instinct of
+self-preservation. Even cattle will band together against the wolves.
+But remove the danger and the bulls fall at once fighting for command of
+the herd. Before Diaz we had sixty-five rulers in sixty years, very few
+of whom died in their beds. Once remove his iron hand from our throats
+and we shall go at it again, revolution upon revolution, for the sole
+purpose of satisfying some man's personal ambition, lust, or individual
+greed. No, señor, we are individualists in the extreme. We have nothing
+in our make-up to correspond to the racial ideal that makes you Northmen
+subordinate personal interest to the general good. And because of our
+lack you will eventually rule us."
+
+"Yet you strive against it?"
+
+"For the one reason, as I told you, that the weaker wolf declines to be
+eaten. Individually, I find it amusing. I would much prefer shooting
+gringo soldiery to hanging Mexican bandits."
+
+"And the General--Don Luis?"
+
+Once again Sebastien laughed. "That old revolutionist? He would deny all
+I have said as rank heresy, though he himself is its most startling
+example. He would say that he was for Mexico, but Mexico, to him, is
+Mexico with a Garcia for president. Selfish to the backbone, every one
+of us."
+
+In a phrase he had described Don Luis, and, while he could not but smile
+at its truth, Seyd was just a little startled by the keen intelligence
+and flashing intuition. Even after allowing for advantages of travel and
+education the man's sharp reasoning and originality were remarkable.
+Like a clear black pool his mind sharply reflected all that passed over
+it, and always the conception stood out as under a lightning flash.
+
+"No, señor," he went on, after a pause, "we are individualists, and as
+such can only obtain happiness by following our own bent. If we are held
+back for a while by Porfirio, be sure that sooner or later we shall
+return with greater zest to our ancient pastime of cutting each other's
+throats."
+
+His uncanny intelligence, too, threw sinister lights on everything they
+passed. "I told you we were gross," he said, indicating a youth and a
+brown girl who were flirting through the barred windows of an adobe
+ranch house. "The proof--the bars. With us love is a passion; the ideal
+exists only in our songs."
+
+Shortly thereafter they rode out on the rim overlooking the Barranca,
+and the necessity of riding in single file down the zigzag staircases
+brought an end to their talk. Neither did he begin it again as they
+crossed the bottom flat to the inn. Coming after a long silence, the
+invitation which he delivered at last, as they rode into the patio, came
+as a greater surprise.
+
+"I feel certain, señor, that my cousin will wish you to lunch with us."
+
+Because another trait in Sebastien's nature was not revealed until, a
+few minutes later, he knocked at Francesca's door, Seyd failed to see
+that which, after all, was perhaps even more surprising. As he entered
+in response to her call she rose and stood, one hand resting on the
+small altar where burned a tiny taper; and as he stood looking at her
+across the length of the room the inquiry in her wide eyes became
+touched with fear.
+
+"It is you?" she broke the silence. "They told me that you spent last
+night here. How was it that I did not meet you on the way?"
+
+"Simply because I had happened to turn in at the Rancho del Rio to look
+at some cattle. But I overtook the _mozo_ you sent back with the horse
+for the gringo. Also I called in at the _jacal_ of Miguel, the vaquero
+of San Angel, where I found Maria, his woman, just returned. She was
+rejoicing over a supernatural visitation. It seems that while she and
+Miguel were away the Virgin Guadaloupe abode in their house, and even
+honored Maria by putting on her best fiesta clothes. In proof thereof
+she showed me a silver peso that the Virgin left tied up in one corner
+of her chemisette. It was truly remarkable, and I was well on my way to
+a healthy conversion when I happened to stumble on the gringo's pipe--at
+least, he claimed it on sight."
+
+"And you immediately turned about to tattle this to me?"
+
+He merely smiled under her bright scorn. "To see you home."
+
+"Where you will proceed to make my mother eternally miserable, and
+uncle--"
+
+"--Infernally angry? On the contrary, I am prepared to back up with
+pistol and knife the tale of Maria's visitation. Why should I wish to
+bring suffering to the good mother? It was a hap of the trail, and, much
+as I hate all gringos, it was far better that you should have been in
+this man's hands. Some day I may have to kill him, and I shall do it
+with greater pleasure because of this!"
+
+"If the attempt does not fail as miserably as that which you made on his
+soul."
+
+"Put it morals, cousin, just to bring it within the bounds of my
+comprehension. You know my beliefs as to souls."
+
+"In any case it was a mean trick."
+
+"Tricks are tricks only when they fail. Successful, they rise to the
+dignity of strategems. And he ought not to complain. Did he not come out
+of the ordeal unscathed, tricked out in the flowers of virtue? He's
+really in my debt. But returning to my point, some day I shall kill him;
+but in the mean time I have asked him to lunch with us. As he looked
+hungry, I should suggest a little haste."
+
+"I am ready now." Going toward him, she spoke, hesitantly: "Let
+me--thank you. Were you always thus, Sebastien, we should be better
+friends."
+
+"_Gracias_, anything but that." Bowing, he stood aside to permit her to
+pass. "The half liking that you deal out to Anton, Javier, and other
+fat-jowled hacendados, your admirers, would never do for me. I prefer
+your--fear."
+
+"But I am not afraid of you." She looked straight in his eyes passing
+out.
+
+"You will be--some day."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Coming out from luncheon--at which Sebastien had presided with a grave
+courtesy which lifted the inn's humble fare of eggs, tortillas, and rice
+to epicurean heights--Seyd and Francesca came face to face with Tomas,
+her _mozo_, who had just ridden into the patio. At sight of his mistress
+the _mozo's_ teeth flashed in the golden dusk under his sombrero, but he
+shook his head when she reached for the letter which he took out of his
+saddle bags.
+
+"It is for the gringo señor. The _jefe_ did not know of your coming."
+
+It was, of course, from Don Luis. Couched in terms massively dignified
+as his own reserve, it apologized for the floods as for some personal
+fault, and finished by placing hacienda San Nicolas at Seyd's service.
+
+"So you will ride on with us," Francesca commented upon its content.
+
+As Sebastien had gone to order fresh horses, there was no one but Seyd
+to observe her evident pleasure. But if he thrilled, yet he persisted,
+pleading that he intended to establish headquarters there at the inn and
+would be head over heels in business, freighting machinery and supplies
+in from the station.
+
+He smiled at her further objection that he would hardly find the
+accommodations of the inn to his liking. "They are better than at the
+mine. If they prove too bad I shall run down to San Nicolas to beg a
+meal."
+
+"Very well, señor, we shall expect you."
+
+Her little backward nod, riding away with Sebastien a few minutes later,
+reaffirmed it, but while Seyd bowed in acknowledgment his thought ran
+oppositely. Unaware how quickly circumstances would compel the visit, he
+formulated a hardy resolution. "Now, young man, no more sentimental
+fooling. It's you for work. The first thing is to get across to Billy."
+
+When, however, he took counsel with his fat brown host concerning the
+hire of a dugout the latter held up pudgy hands in horror. _Santissimo
+Trinidad!_ The very idea was madness! With the river running a mile wide
+at its narrowest? Not a peon would venture upon it! And under the
+inspiration of his belief that a live customer was to be preferred to
+even a drowned gringo he worked privately against Seyd's suicidal
+intention. So well did he scatter his pessimistic seed that when Seyd
+succeeded in finding a dugout he had to buy it outright; nor could he
+persuade a single peon to dare the flood.
+
+It was while returning to the inn late in the day that he obtained his
+first glimpse of the river from a knoll which lifted him above the
+drowned jungle. Around wooded islands, which were usually dry hills, a
+waste of waters, thick and brown as chocolate, swept madly. Along the
+edge of the jungle it boiled in fat eddies which sucked and licked the
+trailing greenery. Farther out it was whipped into a yellow cream by the
+thrashing branches of uprooted trees, ceibas and cedars, huge as a
+church, which rolled and tumbled as their submerged limbs caught on the
+bottom. Everywhere it was studded with debris, trees and brush, whole
+acres of water lilies which here massed like a garden around a floating
+hut, there wreathed the carcass of some drowned beast.
+
+In all the world there is nothing more melancholy than the voice of a
+flood. Its resurgent dirge stirs vague forebodings which root in the
+calamitous experience of the race. Standing there alone, with the call
+of rushing waters, patter of rain, and sough of a sad wind in his ears,
+Seyd was able to understand the peons' superstitious fear. Yet he
+remained undeterred. The water being far too deep for poling, he made a
+pair of oars and fitted wooden thole pins in the dugout that evening,
+and next morning put off by himself on the tangled breast of the flood
+with such food as he had been able to buy.
+
+Once afloat, he found navigation even more precarious than the direst
+prophecy of his host. Now backwatering until an opening showed in a
+bristle of brush and water lilies, he would next almost crack his back
+in a supreme effort to cross the currents which ran like millraces
+between wooded islands. Once a quick spurt saved him from disastrous
+collision with a derelict log; and, dodging or running, he was kept so
+busy that Billy's sudden hail came as a surprise.
+
+"Hello, Seyd! Got any decent grub? We've lived on frijoles straight for
+the last thirty days."
+
+The monotonous diet, however, did not seem to have impaired Billy's
+customary cheerfulness. At the sight of eggs, honey, chickens, and
+bananas in the stern of the boat his freckles loomed like brown spots on
+a shining sun. Neither had misfortune affected his industry. Though--as
+Francesca feared--ten feet of water now covered the new foundation, he
+had immediately started another on a bench which rose fifty feet above
+the flood. And, now munching a tortilla rolled in honey, he led the way
+to where Calixto and Caliban, with half a dozen others, were hard at
+work. It was their first meeting since Seyd left for the States, and
+there was, of course, no end to the things each had to tell. Then, in
+reviewing the new work and planning for more, the day slipped rapidly
+away.
+
+Indeed, afternoon was drawing on before Seyd pushed off again. He had
+intended to land as close as possible to the inn and have the dugout
+carried back upstream the following day. But he could not, of course,
+foresee the event which, a third of the way across, caused him to stop
+rowing and stare with all his eyes. For as he backwatered to avoid a
+huge ceiba that bore down upon him with a slow, leisurely roll he spied
+a patch of white amidst the branches, and as it drew closer this
+presently resolved into a drenched chemisette which clung to the limbs
+of a young girl.
+
+A slim brown thing under thirteen, terror had drained away every
+particle of her natural color, leaving her big dark eyes looming dead
+black in the pale gold mask of her face. Though she had seen Seyd first,
+the inborn humility of her subject race deterred her from making any
+outcry. She just sat perfectly still astride the thatched peak of a
+submerged hut which, caught in the branches, acted as an outrigger to
+keep the great tree on an even keel. Only her eyes expressed the pitiful
+appeal whose utter hopelessness was emphasized by flash of wonder when
+Seyd drove the dugout in among the branches.
+
+Rising, then, she leaped into the bows, and, whether because the mass
+rode in a balance too delicate to endure the sudden change of weight or
+that a submerged branch happened to catch just then on some obstruction,
+the tree rolled heavily upon the dugout while Seyd was pulling his oars.
+Fortunately, the one heavy stroke had carried them out from under all
+but the thinner branches, and, though the dugout was capsized and forced
+under, it rose instantly, with Seyd and the girl clinging at each end.
+The hut on which she had been floating also emerged, and, working
+alongside, Seyd was able to right his craft and bale it out with his
+Stetson sombrero. A few yards away he recovered one oar, and, using it
+as a paddle, he tried to work across the flood.
+
+By the time he had gained half the way, however, he was miles below the
+inn, and dusk found him floating on the wide lake which now covered the
+San Nicolas cane fields. Here, where the water ran more slowly, he made
+way faster toward the shore, and through a leaden dusk he presently made
+out red twinkles which grew, in another half hour, into the lights and
+fires of the hacienda. Soon his oar struck bottom, and, using it as a
+pole, he drove rapidly into a landing.
+
+The night rains had already set in and they came down in sheets which
+soaked him to the skin and made of the girl, who had fallen asleep in
+the bows, a dim white nude. She had given him her simple history--how,
+of the five who were asleep in the hut when it was swept away by a
+cloudburst, she alone had survived. Utterly tired and exhausted, she did
+not awaken when he picked her up, and she lay quietly in his arms during
+the long sloppy tramp across the upland pastures. She was still asleep
+when, aroused by the baying of his dogs, Don Luis peered down from the
+upper patio upon their draggled figures.
+
+"_Hombres! hombres!_" Looking up as his heavy bass boomed through the
+hacienda calling the _mozos_, Seyd caught a glimpse under the portal
+lantern of Francesca's face in its frame of dark hair through a
+glittering mist of rain. The next moment she came flying down the great
+stone stairs, followed by an irruption of brown maids.
+
+"The _niña_! Oh, the poor _niña_!" Though she was wearing an evening
+dress of delicate white, she gathered the soaked child into her bosom,
+and, a center of flying skirts and soft womanish exclamations, hurried
+her away to the upper regions.
+
+In the longer time required for him to descend, Don Luis subdued his
+first astonishment, but it broke bonds again when Seyd explained his
+plight. "You crossed and recrossed the flood? _Por Dios mio!_ I would
+never have dreamed that man could do it and live! You are wet to the
+skin. Come up at once."
+
+"I had not expected--" Seyd began.
+
+But the old man cut him off at once. "You gringos are difficult folk to
+please. Surely a dry bed in San Nicolas is to be preferred to a wet
+night on the river."
+
+Nevertheless he was not displeased. Conferring with Francesca concerning
+a change of clothes after Seyd was safely bestowed in a bedroom, he
+expressed his secret admiration. "See you, an enormous ceiba rolls over
+and sends him and the _canoa_ to the bottom, yet he speaks of it with
+shamed laughter as though of a fault. Also he would have borrowed a
+_mozo_ and horse to travel back to the inn. What a man he would have
+made for the old wars!"
+
+A _charro_ suit, so close to Seyd's size as to be almost a fit, was the
+best that Francesca, after a voluble consultation with her maids, could
+offer in the way of change, and, though he experienced modest qualms at
+the sight of himself in tight trousers and short bolero jacket of soft
+leather gorgeously embroidered with silver, they undoubtedly brought out
+qualities of limb which were altogether lost in his usual clothing. If
+he could have seen the touch of admiration that softened the mischief in
+Francesca's dark eyes when he entered the living-room, his misgivings
+might have vanished. But the phenomenon occurred behind his back, and
+his recent vow against "sentimental fooling" did not prevent him from
+coloring at her whispered remark:
+
+"You remind me of one Señor Rosario."
+
+Later, he was to spend considerable time trying to appease conscience
+with plausible explanations of his feeling, to set it down to relief
+that their adventure had brought her no trouble. But while relief may
+have entered in, it was principally due to the fact that she had chosen
+to retie the thread of their acquaintance just where it had been severed
+by Sebastien's intrusion. Yet, whatsoever its constituents, his pleasant
+embarrassment did not paralyze his tongue.
+
+"I cannot return the compliment."
+
+Neither could he. With Rosa, the pretty peona, this young lady in foamy
+white had nothing in common, and Rosa would have certainly felt out of
+place amidst the luxurious appointments of the room. Ample in all its
+dimensions, the furnishings had evidently been selected from the
+garnered treasures of several generations, with such taste, however,
+that the unmatched pieces made a harmonious whole. The old hangings
+which excluded the damp night, the old rugs on the mahogany floor, and
+old furniture lent each other countenance, melted into a rich design.
+Even the grand piano, undoubtedly the latest addition, was taking the
+tone of age. Only the bookcases which flanked the great fireplace
+displayed a modern note, for in them fine editions of English classics
+crowded the novels and plays of Cervantes and Lope Felix de Vega,
+Daudet, Flaubert, Anatole France, De Maupassant, competed for room with
+Spanish and English translations of the modern Russians.
+
+"Her taste," Seyd had summed the room. "Your books?" he asked, with a
+nod at these astonishing shelves.
+
+"Yes, no one else reads them." She added, with smiling directness: "Or
+could understand. If the dear mother read French, oh, what a bonfire we
+should have!"
+
+"And you like them--the Frenchmen?"
+
+"Some--in some things." Her brows arching in the effort for clear
+expression, she went on: "They know life, and one cannot but enjoy their
+beautiful style. But"--the delicate penciling drew even finer--"they
+see only with the eye. They are brilliant--as diamonds, and just as
+hard, cold. They analyze, dissect, probe life, take it apart, then
+forget to put it together. Love they see only as passion devoid of
+sympathy, affection, friendship. Their art is of the senses, their
+refinement--of manner. Under the veneer they are gross and hard."
+
+To his astonishment she had expressed his own feeling for French
+literature, and, intensely curious, he went on probing her with
+questions, in his interest forgetting both his clothes and hunger till
+Don Luis interrupted.
+
+"Lindita, the señor cannot live on words. The girls are calling dinner."
+
+But after the meal--which was set out with silver, glass, napery, all of
+the finest, and served by brown maids who moved in and out with the soft
+stealth of bare feet--they went at their talk again, gleaning in fields
+of common knowledge while Don Luis alternately smoked and dozed by the
+fire.
+
+It was a revelation for Seyd, and while he watched the play of feeling
+over her face, the flow of her soft color, the swift moods of the arched
+brows, and the lighting and lowering of dark eyes in unison with the
+change of her talk, his hardy resolution of yesterday--already sapped by
+his present luxurious comfort--underwent further disintegration.
+
+"After all," he thought, "why shouldn't I run down and see them
+occasionally?"
+
+Following Don Luis to his bedroom, he arrived at this conclusion, and in
+his argument with Conscience he reaffirmed it with even greater force.
+"After all the old man's kindness it would be blackly ungrateful to
+flout his hospitality."
+
+"No reason why you should," Conscience conceded, but added the
+unpleasant rider, "providing you don't sail under false colors."
+
+"Of course!" Seyd here grew quite huffy with Conscience. "I always
+intended to let her know I was married--not that it is necessary. I'm
+not so conceited as to think that she feels the slightest personal
+interest in me."
+
+If it were really sincere his belief might have been shaken, could he
+have reviewed a little scene that was being enacted at that very moment
+across the patio. After the waif from the floods had been bathed and fed
+she was put to bed on a couch in Francesca's own room, and, aroused by
+the brilliant sheen of wax candles on the dresser, she lay and watched
+with eyes of awe the young lady at her toilet. In her simple sight the
+dresser, with its big French mirror and gleaming silver appointments,
+doubtless appeared as the altar before which was being accomplished the
+marvelous transmutation of a woman into the exact semblance of those
+angels of light pictured on the stained windows of the church of
+Chilpancin. From the plaiting of the dark cloud of hair into a thick
+cable, to the final assumption of filmy white, she remained quiet as a
+mouse. Francesca had risen to blow out the candles before a small voice
+rose behind her.
+
+"He said you were beautiful. Could he but see thee now!"
+
+After a sudden start Francesca moved over to the couch and collapsed
+beside it in a white heap.
+
+"Awake, _niña_? What is this? He said I was beautiful? Who?"
+
+"The gringo señor. When I began to cry for my mother and little Pedro
+that was drowned with her in the flood he said for me to take comfort,
+that he was going to place me with the most beautiful señorita in all
+Guerrero--one that would be kinder to me than my mother."
+
+"And that I will be." Drawing her close, Francesca kissed the small gold
+face. "But did he really say--No, you shall tell me all about it from
+the very beginning."
+
+While the tale was proceeding in soft lisping Spanish Francesca's eyes
+eloquently illustrated its varied course. But their wide horror, moist
+pity at the drowning of the poor brown mother, suspense until Seyd and
+the child had climbed back into the dugout, merged in a soft glow at the
+repetition of his promise. "'The most beautiful señorita in all
+Guerrero?' Then he could not have meant me."
+
+"_Si._" The girl emphatically nodded. "Also he said you would take me
+into your service."
+
+"And so I will. I shall have thee trained for my own little maid. I
+shall call thee Roberta, after him, and every night it will be thy duty
+to speak for him in thy prayers. Are they said?"
+
+"_Si_, señorita. I said them to the big girl, Rosa, but I will say one
+now for him--with thee."
+
+Could Seyd have heard the soft voice following Francesca's gentle
+promptings he would undoubtedly have suffered another onslaught from
+Conscience. As it was, just to prove his disinterestedness he rose at
+dawn. Leaving a note of thanks on the table, he went out on a hunt for
+peons and mules to haul the dugout back to the inn, and, having found
+them, went sternly on about his business.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+For two weeks thereafter Seyd held fast to his work, suppressing with
+iron firmness successive vagrant impulses which urged a second visit to
+San Nicolas. Then having proved to himself his perfect indifference
+toward Francesca, he rode down one day--strictly on business--to ask Don
+Luis's assistance in obtaining more men and mules.
+
+"I shall return this evening," he arranged with Conscience, starting
+out.
+
+He had forgotten, however, to make allowance for the probable action of,
+in legal verbiage, the party of the second part, for upon his arrival he
+received from Francesca as stiff a lecture on his folly in leaving the
+other day in half-dried clothes as ever fell from the lips of an anxious
+mother. Upon it, too, Don Luis set the stamp of his heavy approval.
+
+"One may do it in the high altitudes, señor, but here in the tropics
+such carelessness leads to the fever. This time we shall not let you
+forth till properly fed and dried."
+
+Now while a girl's acceptance of flowers, candy, and other favors may
+mean anything or nothing, no sooner does she begin to concern herself
+with a man's health and clothes than the affair becomes serious, for it
+clearly proves that she has been touched in the mother instinct, which
+forms the basis of woman's love. In his masculine ignorance of this
+fundamental truth, however, Seyd gave her solicitude a sisterly
+interpretation, and congratulated himself upon the fact that their
+acquaintance was established at last on such solid ground. Agreeing with
+himself that it would be the worst of taste for him to disturb a purely
+friendly relation with any reference to the squalid tragedy of his
+marriage, he continued silent.
+
+It is to be feared, also, that several subsequent visits were based upon
+rather frivolous excuses. In the next month he carried down to San
+Nicolas the news of at least a dozen cases of destitution through the
+floods, and when, for some inexplicable cause, deliveries of his
+material at the railroad suddenly ceased he plunged head over heels into
+the relief work which had been instituted under Don Luis's direction.
+Sometimes alone, more often with Francesca and Tomas, he rode up and
+down the valley hunting out the sufferers. And it was on one of these
+journeys that the fates which dog insincerity laid bare his pretense.
+
+It came--his awakening--a week or so after a sudden fall of the floods
+foretold the end of the rains. Though the river still ran wide of its
+banks, most of the ranches with intervening patches of jungle had come
+again to the surface; and, riding through one of the latter on his way
+to San Nicolas, Seyd overtook Francesca and Tomas.
+
+"Is it not good to see the fields again?" she greeted him. "The crops
+will be late this year, but Don Luis says that the yield will be all the
+richer because of the flood. But the jungle! The poor jungle! It has
+been swept clean of shrubs and flowers."
+
+It did look most forlorn. Shorn of its luxuriance, the orchids and wild
+flowers, and all the tide of vegetation which usually flowed everywhere
+in waves that rose and tossed a froth of green creepers into the tops of
+the tallest trees, the jungle was now a fat black marsh littered with
+bejucos which lay in twisted masses like drowned snakes. Edged with
+draggled grass, still others hung down from the trees, writhing darkly
+in the wind that had sprung up in the last hour. Taken in all, it was
+weird, gruesome, a fit setting for the tragedy that lay waiting for them
+amid the roots of a dead ceiba just ahead. Twisted back and forth by the
+storms of the last month, the tree now stood in a hole of mud, ripe and
+ready for the gust that snapped the rotten tap root just as Francesca
+was riding by.
+
+Without noise the tree inclined, reaching out huge arms above her head.
+So silently it fell that Francesca never saw it at all, and Seyd, who
+was riding just behind her, received first warning from the sudden swing
+of a bejuco across his eyes. Leaning over his horse's neck, he lashed
+her beast across the quarters. Almost unseated by the wild forward
+plunge of her beast, the girl recovered her seat and looked back just in
+time to see him knocked out of the saddle. Had he been struck by one of
+the main branches, thick as a barrel, both he and his horse had surely
+been crushed down into the mud beyond need of other burial. But though
+he had gained almost from under, even a twig strikes a shrewd blow after
+describing a three-hundred-foot arc, and he lay in the mud under her
+eyes, white and still, with an ugly bruise showing across his brow.
+
+"Tomas! Tomas! Ride thou for help!"
+
+Crying it, she leaped from her horse, sank beside Seyd in the mud, and
+lifted his head into her lap. With water from a pool which was soaking
+her skirt she laved the bruise with one hand, intently studying his
+face; and when, some minutes later, he gave no sign of life, her dark
+anxious eyes blazed with a sudden passion of fear. Gathering his head in
+against her bosom, she rocked back and forth with passionate murmurs:
+"Oh, he is dead! He is killed--for me!" But though, if told of it, he
+would have sworn that such treatment would really have brought him back
+from the dead, he neither felt, saw, nor heard the soft cradling arms,
+burning black eyes, the broken murmurs in English and Spanish.
+
+He did feel her lips when, stooping suddenly, she kissed the bruise,
+because it happened just as her lowered face hid the first quiver of his
+eyelids. Also he felt the unconscious embrace and saw the deep blush
+which told that she knew he had felt her kiss. But she did not try to
+avoid his gaze. From the midst of her blushes she answered it with the
+bravery of love, discovered and unafraid.
+
+"_Querido_, I had thought thee dead."
+
+In the wonder of it, the foolish, tender wonder, Seyd, on his part,
+forgot all else. Perhaps the delicate brain plexuses which govern memory
+were still stunned, leaving his mind clean as a new slate till some
+stimulus should presently rewrite upon it the pretty, common face of his
+wife. Conscious only of this new bursting love, he reached up at her
+murmur and pulled her face down to his. Then it came, the stimulus. With
+the powerful association of some other kiss, the moist clinging of her
+lips started the wheels of memory, but, remembering, he did not desist.
+For simultaneously there had burst upon him a vision of love, rounded
+and complete, with the perfect fullness which satisfies every instinct
+and need. Already he had felt that at every point her personality met
+and complemented his, and in the fullness of the realization his whole
+being rose in rebellion against that other tie. He was kissing her with
+furious abandon when she suddenly broke away.
+
+"Oh, I wonder if he saw us?"
+
+Looking quickly up, he saw Tomas returning through the trees. "I don't
+know," he reassured her, "but I'll find out. If he did--just leave him
+to me."
+
+After Tomas, but at a safe distance, came three peons whom he had called
+from the nearest rancho, also a _mozo_ who had been sent out from the
+_meson_ to overtake and deliver a letter to Seyd.
+
+"If you'll permit me?" he asked. But his head still swam; and when he
+tried to read it the angular chirography danced under his eyes,
+describing such curious antics that he was driven at last to ask her
+aid.
+
+It was from Peters, the station agent, and announced the arrival of a
+consignment of American provisions; and, as Billy had been condemned to
+straight Mexican diet for the last two weeks, the news called for Seyd's
+instant return. While the soft voice was reciting its content he
+oscillated between mixed feelings of chagrin and relief, for after its
+long sleep outraged Conscience was now working overtime. He felt like a
+hypocrite when she spoke.
+
+"You are still weak. You must not go."
+
+"I'm afraid that I shall have to."
+
+"But suppose that you are taken ill on the way?"
+
+"The _mozo_ will be with me--anyway, I'm all right."
+
+Though she looked disappointed, she gave way when he explained Billy's
+need; the more readily, perhaps, because she felt within her the
+stirrings of the feminine instinct to hide and brood over her new
+happiness all alone. The feeling even formed her speech. "The poor señor
+Thornton! He must be very lonely over there all by himself, and he must
+be fed. I shall not mind--for a few days. You have given me--so much to
+think about. But then--you will come?"
+
+He groaned inwardly at the thought of that which their next meeting
+entailed, and had it been possible he would have preferred to make open
+confession there and then. As it was not, he let her ride away with her
+own clear happiness undimmed, unconscious of the stab inflicted by her
+last tender whisper.
+
+"Surely I shall come," he had answered; and, after mounting his horse,
+he sat and watched her ride away among the trees. When, with a parting
+wave, she disappeared, his sun went out, yet through his bitter feeling
+he remembered his promise.
+
+"Tomas!" He called the _mozo_ back. Ignorant of just how much the fellow
+had seen, he tried him out with the Spanish proverb, "'The saints are
+good to the blind.'"
+
+At the sight of the five-peso note in Seyd's hand the _mozo's_ white
+teeth flashed in a knowing grin. "_Si_, señor," he answered in kind,
+"neither do flies enter a closed mouth." And, pocketing the note, he
+galloped after his mistress, leaving Seyd to go his own way.
+
+It was not pleasant, either, the path that Seyd pursued the next few
+days. Going back to the inn, following the mules out to and back from
+the railroad, crossing and recrossing the river with Billy's supplies,
+fits of rebellion alternated with moods of black self reproach.
+
+"If you had declared yourself in the beginning she would never have
+given you a second thought."
+
+Up to the moment when he turned his horse's head once more toward San
+Nicolas, a few days later, this formed the text of his musings; and if
+he winced when the gold of the hacienda walls broke along the green
+foothills it was not in pity for himself. If it would have freed her
+from pain he would have hugged his own with the savage exultance of a
+flagellant. But too well he knew that in these things there is no
+vicarious atonement, and the face that he carried into the San Nicolas
+patio was so grim and sad that it provoked Don Luis's comment.
+
+"Señor, you are sick? Before she left Francesca told us of the accident.
+'Tis plain that you are not yet recovered."
+
+"Before she--left?"
+
+Out of feeling in which surprise and relief struggled with bitter
+disappointment Seyd's question issued. At Don Luis's answer despair
+rolled over all.
+
+"_Si_, señor. She is gone to Europe--for a year."
+
+Through his amazement and despair Seyd felt the justice of the stroke.
+As yet, however, the smart was too keen for submission. In open mutiny
+once more against the scheme of things, he repeated the phrase, "Gone?
+To Europe?"
+
+"_Si_," Don Luis nodded. "Our kinswoman, the señora Rocha, mother of
+Sebastien, has been ailing for a great while, and now goes to Europe for
+special doctoring. As she speaks only our own tongue, she could not
+journey alone, and, like the good girl that she is, Francesca consented
+to accompany her."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+As a matter of fact, Don Luis knew even less than Seyd of the real
+reason behind his niece's departure. Like many another and much more
+important event, it was brought about by the simplest of causes, which
+went back to the afternoon when, on her arrival at San Nicolas,
+Francesca found Sebastien waiting there with the news of his mother's
+illness.
+
+First in the sequence of cause and effect which sent her away stands
+Seyd's five-peso note; next, Pancho, Sebastien's _mozo_, for the
+conjunction of these two gave birth to the event. Ordinarily, that is,
+when in full possession of his simple wits, Tomas, Francesca's _mozo_,
+would have suffered crucifixion in her cause, and had he chosen any
+other than Pancho to assist in the transmutation of Seyd's note into
+alcohol at the San Nicolas wine shop the process would have been
+accomplished without damage to aught but his own head. But when in the
+cause of their tipplings Pancho began to enlarge on the benefits that
+would follow to all from the blending of their respective houses by
+marriage Tomas began to writhe under the itch of secret and superior
+knowledge. From knowing winks he progressed to mysterious hints, and
+finally ended with a clean confession of all he had seen that afternoon.
+
+"But this is not to be spoken of, _hombre_," he warned Pancho, with
+solemn hiccoughs, at the close. "By the grave of thy father, let not
+even a whisper forth."
+
+As being less difficult to find in a country where parenthood is more
+easily traced on the feminine side, Pancho swore to it by the grave of
+his mother. But, though he added thereto those of his aunts,
+grandmother, and entire female line, the combined weight still failed to
+balance such astonishing news. Inflamed by thoughts of the prestige he
+would gain in his master's sight, he moderated his potations. After he
+had seen Tomas comfortably bestowed under the _cantina_ table he carried
+the tale straight to Sebastien's room.
+
+In this, however, he showed more zeal than discretion, for in lieu of
+the expected prestige he got a blow in the mouth which laid him out in a
+manner convenient for the quirting of his life. Not until Sebastien's
+arm tired did he gain permission to retire, whimpering, to his straw in
+the stable; and next morning both he and Tomas trembled for their lives
+when Sebastien arraigned them before him.
+
+"Listen, dogs!" He struck them with his whip across their faces. "For
+this piece of lying the tongues of you both should be pulled out by the
+roots. If I spare you it is because until now you have both been
+faithful servants. But remember!" He swore to it with an oath so
+frightfully sacrilegious that both shrank in anticipation of a bolt from
+the skies. "But remember! If ever, drunk or sober, there proceeds out of
+either of you one further word 'twill surely be done."
+
+Leaving them shaking, he passed out and on upstairs to the patio where
+Francesca was sitting, with Roberta at her knees, in the shade of the
+_corredor's_ green arches. The drone of hummers, fluting of birds in the
+patio garden set her soft musings to pleasant music, and she looked up
+with sudden vexation at the jangle of his spurs.
+
+"So this is the child that we have renamed in his honor?"
+
+Last night they had parted better friends than usual, for out of the
+pity bred of her own realized love she had done her best to please him.
+Love had also sharpened her naturally sensitive perceptions. Divining
+his knowledge from the concentrated anger of his look, she rose,
+instinctively nerving herself for the encounter.
+
+"Just so." He divined, in turn, her feeling. "Between those who
+understand words are wasted. Send the child away."
+
+As he said "understand" a surge of passion wiped out the weary lines
+left by a night of hate. But while the child was passing along the
+corridor he controlled it and became his usual sardonic self. He was
+beginning "Thanks to the excellent Tomas--" when she interrupted with an
+angry gesture.
+
+"Then it _was_ he! I'll have him--"
+
+"_Caramba!_" He shrugged. "What a heat! But easy--do not blame Tomas for
+your gringo's fault. What else could you expect from a peon that found
+himself enriched at a stroke? The wonder is that he did not proclaim his
+news from your topmost wall. Be content that he will never whisper one
+word again."
+
+"You didn't--" she began, alarmed now for her servant.
+
+"No. Pancho, to whom he told it, I flogged for the liar he now thinks
+Tomas, and Tomas--is trembling for his tongue. Except between us the
+matter is dead. Yet Tomas served his purpose. Thanks to him, we may now
+pass words and come to terms."
+
+"Terms?" She faltered it after a silence.
+
+"Terms!" he repeated, gravely. "That is, if you would save your gringo
+alive. Supposing this were to escape to the good uncle? Soft as he has
+been with these gringos of late, supposing that he were to hear of both
+this and that other night in the hut, how long, think you, would the man
+last?"
+
+Her eyes told. After a pause her mouth opened with a small gasp.
+"You--oh! you will not?"
+
+"Not if you obey. Now see you, Francesca." He dropped into a tone of
+grave confidence which was really winning. "If I had not known that his
+death at my hands would place you forever beyond me the man had never
+seen the dawn of another day. Whether he sees its setting depends on
+you. If you will go with my mother to Europe--"
+
+"_Si_--if--I--go?" It issued between pauses of pain after a long
+silence.
+
+"He lives. I will even protect him till he arrives at the end of his
+fool's rope."
+
+"And--then?"
+
+"There will be no 'then.' I know these gringos. They will disappear like
+their vanishing gold."
+
+Her slight flush indicated defiant unbelief. But knowing that this was
+in deadly earnest, that Seyd's life hung by a hair, she let him go on.
+"Let there be no misunderstanding. I shall require your promise, on the
+word of a Garcia, not to attempt communication." He added, turning away,
+perhaps in pity for the misery of her face: "There is no hurry. Take
+time to think it over--an hour, two if you wish."
+
+He could easily afford, too, the concession, for her love was playing
+into his hands. None knew better than she that a contrary answer would
+make of Seyd an Ishmaelite with every man's hand raised against his
+life. He could never escape. With that dread fact staring her in the
+face she could give but one answer; and while, later, she spent hours
+pacing her bedroom in restless strivings to find a way out, she reached
+her decision before he gained the end of the gallery.
+
+"I will go."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+"Really, I don't know what to make of it. That last car load of
+machinery rusted for a month in the damp heat of the Tehuantepec tropics
+before we got it traced. It has happened so often now that I'm almost
+tempted to suspect a design."
+
+Seyd's complaint to Peters, the agent, nearly a year later summed the
+exasperating experiences which had retarded the building of the new
+smelter. Beginning before the end of the last flood, the failure in
+deliveries had multiplied as the work of construction proceeded, until
+it seemed to Seyd that his material had been distributed on a thousand
+side tracks by an impartial hand. While two high-priced American
+mechanics had spent their expensive leisure shooting and fishing he had
+spent most of his own time tracing the shipments, and now, with the
+rains almost due again, another month would be required to finish the
+work.
+
+"You have sure had your share of bad luck." While sympathizing with him,
+Peters discouraged the idea of premeditation. "You don't know these
+Mexican roads. Our charter calls for the employment of sixty-five per
+cent. of Mexican help, and, if you'll believe me, that means six hundred
+per-cent. of inefficiency. Take this _mozo_ of mine. He's been with me
+six years. But, though I show him the correct way to do a thing a
+thousand times, the moment my back is turned he'll go at it in some fool
+wrong-headed way of his own. The wonder to me is not, that your freight
+goes wrong, but that it ever arrives. Nevertheless, you've had, as I
+say, your fill of bad luck. If I were you I'd just jump the up
+train--she's due in twenty minutes--and call on the general traffic
+manager in Mexico City. He can do more for you in five minutes than I
+can in ten days."
+
+It was sound advice. Quick always to perceive advantage, Seyd answered,
+"Give me a ticket."
+
+Because of his isolation, the agent's wells of speech were always
+brimming, and while waiting for the train he delivered himself of
+several pieces of news. "By the way, Don Luis went up yesterday to lodge
+a protest with the government against the dam a gringo company is
+building across the valley fifty miles north of San Nicolas. It is
+located just below the Barranca de Tigres, a cañon that drains all the
+watershed west of the volcano. They have cloudbursts up there, and when
+one lets go--well, old Noah's deluge isn't in it. When I was hunting
+jaguar in the cañon a couple of years ago I saw watermarks a hundred
+and fifty feet up the mountainside. Boulders big as churches were piled
+up in the bed of the stream like pebbles, and if that dam was built of
+solid concrete instead of clay they'd go through it like it was dough.
+Though I'd be the last man to go back on my own folks, I'm bound to
+confess that we do carry some things with a bit too high a hand. If that
+dam ever breaks, the wave will sweep the barranca clean between its
+walls. But, Lordy! that won't cut any figure with the paint-eaters that
+hedge in Diaz. To secure a rake-off they'd see all Guerrero drown, and
+I'm doubting that the General's kick will do any good."
+
+Seyd nodded. "No, the times are against him--both in this and his other
+efforts to hold back civilization. So far, he and Sebastien have
+succeeded pretty well in checking it here in Guerrero. But it is
+creeping in around them--some day will flow over their heads. They might
+as well stand in the path of a barranca flood."
+
+The naming of Sebastien brought the second piece of news. "That reminds
+me--you almost had him for a fellow traveler. I forwarded a cable
+message last night that his mother had died in France. I rather thought
+that he'd be in for this train."
+
+"Then she is coming back?"
+
+Seyd meant Francesca. But Peters misunderstood. "Yes, they've shipped
+her by a German line that runs to Havana and Vera Cruz. By mistake the
+cable was sent to another Rocha somewhere up in Sinaloa, and, being a
+Mexican, he slept on it a week before replying that his mother was
+there, quite lively and frisky at home. So it arrived here ten days
+late--long enough to put Miss Francesca and her mother into Vera Cruz.
+Yes, the señora was there--had just joined them--luckily, for death is
+too grim a thing for a young girl to face by herself." Just then the
+train drew into the station, and as Seyd climbed on, he added: "If you
+could find time to pass the word on to Don Luis he'd surely appreciate
+it. He puts up at the Iturbide."
+
+Seyd's nod was purely automatic, for the news had loosed once more
+bitter tides which had lain dormant these last few months under the
+weight of his business cares. Unconscious, too, of the import that
+events would presently give to such apparently trivial consent, he
+nodded again when Peters asked permission to look through a batch of
+American papers which had come for him by yesterday's mail.
+
+For that matter, it would have been difficult to discern anything
+unusual or alarming in the spectacle of Peters as he sat in his office
+after the departure of the train, heels on the table and chair
+comfortably tilted, while he slit, one after the other, the covers of
+Seyd's papers. Yet while he smoked and read his way down through the
+pile he unconsciously but surely prepared the way for the event which
+was approaching at the top speed of Sebastien's horse. Had he read, or
+Sebastien ridden, a little faster or slower things had gone differently.
+But, just as though it had been predoomed and destined, eyes and hoofs
+kept perfect time. Just as Peters opened Seyd's Albuquerque paper
+Sebastien walked in.
+
+"Left--an hour ago." Yawning, Peters laid down the Albuquerque paper on
+top of the pile, and as the train usually ran from two to twelve hours
+late three hundred and sixty-five days in the year he lent a sympathetic
+ear to Sebastien's vitriolic curses.
+
+"I can wire for a special," he suggested. "They could send an engine and
+car down from Cuernavaca in little more than an hour."
+
+"If you will be so kind, señor."
+
+In all Guerrero, Peters was the one gringo with whom Sebastien was on
+speaking terms, and he now accepted both a cigar and a paper to while
+away the time. After one glance had shown it to be a gringo sheet he
+would have cast it aside, but the one word "Mexico!" in scare heads
+caught his eye. Setting forth the international complications that were
+likely to come from the lynching of a Mexican in Arizona, it held his
+interest. He not only read it to the bottom of the column, but followed
+over to the next page, upon which heavy ink lines had been scored around
+a local article.
+
+As the heading caught his eye he started, looked again, then bent over
+the paper and read to the end. For a few seconds thereafter he sat
+thinking. A stealthy glance showed Peters at the key clicking off the
+call for the special. Quietly folding the paper, he slid it beneath his
+coat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+With Seyd and his cargo of reflections aboard, the train meanwhile
+puffed steadily up the four-per-cent. grades which carry the railway
+eleven thousand feet high to the shoulder of the old giant volcano,
+Ajuasoa. While he stared out of the window the vivid panorama of the hot
+country, the green seas of corn or cane which surged around white-walled
+haciendas, the chocolate peons behind their wooden plows, and the pretty
+brown girls at the stations gradually gave place to volcanic lava fields
+and gloomy woods of piñon, and these again merged into the innumerable
+hamlets which spread brown adobe skirts around Mexico City unseen by
+him.
+
+"She is coming back! She is coming back!" It ran all the while in his
+mind, and formed the undertone of his conversation with Don Luis in the
+patio of the Iturbide that evening. When the old man stated his
+intention of taking the night train down to the Gulf it was only by a
+powerful effort that Seyd avoided the lunacy of offering to accompany
+him. All that night he burned in a flame of feeling, and as a
+consequence he rose tired out and presented such a picture of meekness
+when ushered into the office of the general manager, one so opposite to
+the usual fiery mien of the wronged shipper, that the stony heart of the
+official was melted within him.
+
+"You certainly have a kick coming," he admitted. "A big one, at that.
+I'll look into this myself, and if you'll please return at four I hope
+to have news of your freight."
+
+In their passage down through the departments, however, his inquiries
+soon came to a stop. "So this is the fellow who has been bucking old
+General Garcia in the Barranca de Guerrero?" he commented to his third
+assistant; and his further remarks were equally enlightening. "Well,
+politics are politics, but this has gone far enough. I like the boy's
+looks, and this railroad isn't going to be used to fight the General's
+battles any longer. After this, Mr. Chauvez, see that Mr. Seyd gets his
+freight. Where is that last car?"
+
+The third assistant's shoulders executed the Latin equivalent of "Search
+me!" At last news, peon "brakies" on the Nacional had been using it as a
+roller coaster on the mountain grades going down to Monterey. If
+Providence had intervened before it ran off into the sea Mr. Chauvez
+opined that it would most likely be found on that city's wharves. All of
+which, after some clicking and humming of wires, culminated in the
+manager's report to Seyd at four.
+
+"It seems that your freight was switched by mistake over to Monterey.
+If you leave it to us"--his stern eye loosed a twinkle--"you'll probably
+get it sometime in the next six months. But if you'll take these passes
+for the evening train and hunt it up yourself you can have it tagged
+onto the train that leaves to-morrow night."
+
+Though the vicissitudes of thirty years' railroading had almost
+petrified his heart, the organ stirred faintly as Seyd returned hearty
+thanks. Watching him go out, he even muttered: "It's a damned shame! But
+I'll take care that he's bothered no more."
+
+More grateful on his part than he had any legal right to be, Seyd would
+have been better pleased had the passes read to Vera Cruz. Knowing that
+Francesca must pass through Mexico City on her way home, he would have
+preferred even to stay where he was. But the thought of Billy fretting
+himself thin at the mine reinforced his naturally strong sense of duty,
+and he took the train out that night. And his steadfastness made for his
+good. During his three days' absence the flame of feeling which was
+consuming his resolution and blinding his thought burned itself out. The
+morning after he had seen his car billed through to his own station he
+rose with his mind clear and a renewed purpose to do the right thing.
+
+"At the first favorable opportunity I shall tell her," he told himself,
+in the coach going down to the station. With the thought strong in his
+mind he stepped on the train and--came face to face with Francesca
+herself.
+
+"Oh! it is _you_!"
+
+"I--I--thought you were already gone!"
+
+While he blushed and stammered confusedly his senses, nevertheless, took
+cognizance of the fluttering rush of her hands, the happy eyes in the
+midst of her flushes, other things that answered, without words, several
+questions which had greatly perplexed him. Whatever the cause behind her
+long silence, it was neither the resurrection of her racial pride nor,
+as he had sometimes suspected, her discovery of his marriage. Indeed,
+her very next words gave him an inkling.
+
+"You must have wondered why I did not write? But I--could not help it."
+She glanced at her mother, who, with eloquent hands, was telegraphing
+him welcome from the other end of the car. "I will tell you later--all."
+
+In his surprise and gladness his mind still clung to his resolve, and,
+nearly as possible, he kept his pact with himself. "I also have
+something to tell."
+
+She looked up quickly. But his eyes indicated no diminution of the old
+feeling. Satisfied, she asked, with a little sigh: "The mine? Something
+gone wrong? You will tell us--now."
+
+The señora, who had caught the last sentence, added her word. "_Si_, for
+we, you know, are your friends." Making room for him by her side, she
+punctuated his tale of the summer's mishaps with pitiful exclamations,
+and comforted him at the end with maternal solicitude. "_Si_, at the
+first glance I saw it, that you had suffered. But, courage, _amigo_, it
+will make for your greater enjoyment in the end."
+
+Francesca had taken the seat opposite, and, catching her eye just then,
+Seyd saw, along with the sympathy and understanding, a gleam of
+exultation. "You suffered, _si_, but I'm glad for--'twas for me." Her
+glance said it plainly as words, and he ached to answer it; but, in
+accordance with the honest course he had laid out for himself, he
+refrained, and went on talking to her mother.
+
+"Don Luis," she answered his question, "is in the front car with
+Sebastien--in attendance on our dear friend, his mother."
+
+He knew that he had no part in their grief, and, tentatively, he began,
+"If I can be of any help--"
+
+Divining his feeling from the pause, she answered at once: "You are very
+kind. Francesca, poor _niña_, has been under a great strain. 'Twill be a
+mercy if you will stay here and talk."
+
+Now that her first blushes had died, he could see it for himself. Her
+smile added the soft confession, "You did not suffer alone."
+
+Under her look Seyd felt his resolution weaken; to save it he looked out
+of the window, whereupon it gained strength from the thought of his
+impending confession. But it relaxed again the next time their glances
+met; and, as love is an anarchist who scoffs alike at law and death,
+their communications proceeded with alternate thawings and freezings,
+while, in reverse order, the black lava fields and gloomy piñon gave
+place to the painted hamlets, pink churches, and villages of huts in
+green seas of corn. Yet, if a little worse for wear, his resolution
+held. Indeed, it found definite expression when the train stopped at
+last at their station.
+
+"I must see you soon!" he said, as they went out. "I have something very
+serious to say."
+
+Once more she looked up quickly. "We shall be at El Quiss, Sebastien's
+place, for three days. After that you will find me at home. But do not
+come alone!" The hasty addition threw more light on the causes behind
+her sudden departure. "As you value your life--nay, you were always
+careless of that--promise, for my sake, that you will not come alone?
+When you go out anywhere take with you at least one man."
+
+"Is it so serious as that?" But he stopped laughing when he saw she was
+hurt. "There! I promise!"
+
+She paid him, alighting, with a clasp of her hand that left its soft
+clinging pressure tingling after she disappeared in the crowd of
+rancheros and hacendados, Sebastien's retainers and friends, who filled
+the station. His sharp gray eye had already singled out his car on a
+side track, and while he waited for the agent Sebastien and Don Luis
+passed, walking behind the coffin.
+
+He was seen, moreover, by them, and after they had mounted and were
+riding side by side at the head of the funeral procession Sebastien
+spoke. "Your gringo was at the station."
+
+Don Luis nodded. "_Si_, he came down on the train."
+
+After a silence Sebastien spoke again. "It seems that he has been having
+trouble with his freight."
+
+Ignoring the subtle suggestion conveyed by the accent, Don Luis
+laconically answered, "He is not the first."
+
+"But will be the last. Ernestino Chauvez, my second cousin, is in the
+department of freights. Yesterday he told me that, by special order,
+there are to be no more miscarriages of this man's freight."
+
+The heavy brown mask refused even a sign. "This had better happened a
+year ago."
+
+"Then he is near the end of his rope?" Sebastien leaped to the
+conclusion.
+
+"His first note of hand to me is due next month."
+
+"And--"
+
+Don Luis's massive shoulders rose. "How should I know, _amigo_, what
+money he has?"
+
+"But if he pay not?"
+
+Again Don Luis shrugged. "Sebastien, how often am I to tell it--that no
+gringo shall force in on my lands."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In happy ignorance as yet of the significance implied in their
+conversation, Seyd at that moment was reading and rereading, with
+incredulous joy, a newspaper clipping which had been forwarded by a
+friend in Albuquerque.
+
+     MRS. ROBERT SEYD, WIFE OF PROMINENT MINING ENGINEER, GRANTED
+     DIVORCE
+
+The content below ran as is usual when feminine enthusiasm over its
+wrongs has been unchecked by fear of a reply, and in handing down his
+decision the local Dogberry--who was unaware that the notice of the
+plaintiff's remarriage would appear in the same issue with his
+remarks--had pronounced it the most heartless case of desertion in all
+his experience upon the bench. Reading a second clipping which set forth
+the marriage, Seyd indulged in a grin. But this quickly faded. Pity and
+sympathy colored his remark.
+
+"Poor thing! I hope she'll be happy." Self reproach vibrated in the
+addition, "She was not, never could have been, with me."
+
+With that she passed out of his thought just as she had already gone
+from his life. His mind leaped to review the consequences. Free! Free!
+In the first flush of his joy he exulted over the fact that his
+intended confession was now unnecessary. But later and more sober
+reflections caused him to shake his head.
+
+"No!" He laid down the law peremptorily for himself. "There's been
+enough and to spare of shilly-shallying. You will go to her and tell
+her--all! And if she refuses you there'll be no one to blame but
+yourself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+In the calendar of love days count as weeks, months as years; but,
+though the following week conformed to this universal law, Seyd managed
+to extract from its laggard hours his modicum of joy. Following the
+mules on two trips between the mine and station he lived in a glow of
+feeling, the natural reaction of his late despair. By turns relief, joy,
+hope governed his reflections, finally uniting in optimism that drowned
+his customary caution. Whereas only a week ago he had begun to plan for
+a trip home to California to raise money to meet their first note he now
+determined to put it off until he should have seen Don Luis, and then,
+if necessary, send Billy.
+
+"I'll call on him immediately after the funeral," he said, talking it
+over with Billy. "If he demands his pound of flesh there'll still be
+time for you to go north."
+
+This settled, he had gone about his business in happier mood than he had
+known for many a year. It seemed to him as if the tangled run of his
+life was beginning to unfold straight and plain. But while he worked,
+the evil fates which had made such a ravel in his personal skein were
+equally busy inventing fresh tangles. On the day that saw at once the
+delivery of the last piece of machinery and the arrival of the first
+seasonal rain Sebastien and Francesca joined battle at the El Quiss
+hacienda.
+
+Until, the morning after the funeral, Sebastien called her aside to
+thank her for her care of his mother she had shown him only the sympathy
+due his sorrow. But under it resentment still smoldered, and it was
+fanned to a flame by his accidental expression.
+
+"It was the kinder because I had forced you away. If I can make any
+return--"
+
+"You can." She filled his pause. "During the last six months I had time
+for reflection, and the more I thought of it the more I wondered at
+myself for my easy yielding to your will. It is not that I was unwilling
+to do that or more for your mother. But to be sent away like a naughty
+school girl under a solemn vow against correspondence--"
+
+"The price of your consent, you remember, was the gringo's life?" His
+eye lit with the old saturnine sparkle. "As you see, he still cumbers
+good Mexican earth."
+
+"You dared not have harmed him in any case."
+
+"No?"
+
+"No." She met without flinching his look of sarcastic interrogation.
+"Porfirio Diaz will not stand for the killing of _Americanos_. As you
+well know, Sebastien, he would surely have hunted you down."
+
+"If there had been any to tell? Even your folly would hardly have arisen
+to that."
+
+"'Twould not have been necessary. If I had warned him, placed your
+threat on record with his friends, 'twere sufficient. If not, there is
+still another argument that would have held you."
+
+"And that?"
+
+"The sure knowledge that I would hate you forever."
+
+"Good reasons, both of them." He shrugged. "But you overlook the fact,
+my cousin, that a whisper in the ear of the good uncle would have taken
+the matter out of my hands."
+
+"That would not have cleared you--with me. Now listen, Sebastien. I
+yielded because at the time it seemed the only way, and after I realized
+my folly I still lived up to my promise. But now I give you warning.
+Henceforth I shall not permit your interference in my affairs."
+
+"Your love affairs?"
+
+"_Bueno!_" Looking him straight in the eye, she accepted the correction.
+"My _love_ affairs."
+
+"It will not be necessary."
+
+Instead of the violent outburst she expected he stood looking at her, in
+his eyes a peculiar light half of pity, half vindictive. A trifle
+nonplussed, she returned his gaze. Perhaps, with feminine inconsistency,
+she was not altogether pleased by his tame acceptance, for her color
+rose and one small foot tapped the polished floor tiles. "I am glad you
+take it so reasonably."
+
+Again he failed with the expected outburst, and her uneasiness grew in
+correspondence with the pity in his glance. "You mistake me. I said it
+would be unnecessary. Read!"
+
+He turned and went out, a mercy she appreciated when, after a puzzled
+glance at the paper he had stolen from Peters, her eye was guided by the
+heavy ink scorings to the article that set forth Seyd's divorce. At
+first she hardly realized its import. But when she did--surely the hand
+that guided the pen had achieved revenge far beyond its owner's blackest
+hope! Going out, Sebastien heard the paper crackle. Looking back, he saw
+her standing frozen, eyes wide and black in her mute white face; and,
+stricken with sudden pity, he softly closed the door.
+
+But he did not go away. He knew her too well. Given her wild Irish blood
+plus her Spanish pride there could come but one result, and while she
+struggled toward it within he paced the _corredor_ without. When at last
+she opened the door and came on him there he knew that he had won by the
+scorn that set her soft mouth in straight red lines. In the dusk of the
+_corredor_ her face loomed, pale and drawn, the eyes red and swollen.
+But when she saw the deep pity in his stern eyes her own lost something
+of their hardness.
+
+"You were always kind--and wise." Her mouth quivering, she gave him both
+hands. "'Twould have made for my good had I listened to you more."
+
+For him it was a perilous moment. The touch of her hands aroused an
+intense desire to seize and comfort her with kisses. Had he given way to
+it she would have surely been shocked out of the resolution that had
+been born of her anger and shame. But the habit of years enabled him to
+keep the impulse under restraint. She went quietly to the end.
+
+"I am very grateful--I would like to make some return. If we had not
+grown up together I should no doubt have loved you from the beginning in
+the way you wished, for you are closer to the man of my girlish dreams
+than any other I have ever known." She smiled wanly. "He does not exist,
+my dream man, or, if he did, what use could he have for such a wild,
+naughty girl as I? So, if you still want me--"
+
+"Want you!" He would have drawn her to him, but she pulled back.
+
+"Not yet! I like you, have always loved you--in a sisterly way. I must
+have time to change my viewpoint. Give me a month?"
+
+"And then--"
+
+"If you still wish it I will be your wife."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+As before said, the last piece of machinery and the first rain arrived
+simultaneously at Santa Gertrudis. The break in the summer heat came
+with a south wind which herded mountainous vapors in from the warm
+Pacific. All night the rain fell in sheets that set the thirsty arroyos
+running bank-high and raised the river ten feet. Then, after the
+pleasant tropical fashion, the downpour ceased, and day broke with a
+blaze of sunlight over the Barranca.
+
+"Sinbad's valley of diamonds!"
+
+It was Billy's metaphor when he came out with Seyd from breakfast, and,
+trite as the comparison might be, nothing else could better describe the
+millions of wet jewels that flashed in the dark mantle of pine above and
+embroidered the green cloak of the jungle beneath. Yesterday had seen
+the last touches put on the aerial cable which would be soon dropping
+buckets of ore into the red jaws of the furnace two thousand feet below.
+From the edge of the plateau it ran, a streak of silver fringed with
+glittering rain drops, down and out to the smelter; and when, in the
+pride of his heart, Billy loosed the brakes the first vibration threw
+off a cloud of prismatic spray.
+
+"Balanced to a hair! You see, the weight of one full bucket is
+sufficient to start the chain."
+
+"Fine!" Seyd echoed. "Runs like a clock. Another week and we'll be
+running steady."
+
+Standing there, watching the buckets sail up and down like great
+iron birds, they gave themselves up to the joy of accomplishment;
+as once before, permitted fancy to run amuck through the golden
+future. And after their hard labors and prolonged anxieties a little
+self-congratulation was quite in order. If, one way or another, they
+succeeded in meeting their first note they really could be counted in
+splendid shape, for their shipments of copper matte would be on the
+market before the second fell due.
+
+Billy nodded assent when Seyd spoke. "Francesca said they would be home
+to-day. I think I'll run down there and tackle Don Luis."
+
+Between them were no secrets, and when Seyd rode away an hour later with
+Caliban at his heels Billy called after him: "And say, old man, have it
+out with the girl. If she has half the brains I have always allowed her
+she'll easily see the accidental way in which it all came about."
+
+Though the advice merely restated his own intention, Seyd found it
+inspiring. Riding down the Barranca staircases, he whistled and sang.
+While following the trail through the long succession of ranchos,
+jungle, hamlets, he lived over again that first ride with Francesca.
+Very plainly he now perceived that it dated his love, that in the
+pauses of his stealthy study she had ensnared him with her rich
+personality.
+
+"She got you then," he mused, adding, with a burst of feeling that
+astonished himself, "And now I'll get her--if I have to take her by
+force."
+
+Planning and dreaming, he rode along until the sight of the river,
+flowing swiftly and deep over the San Nicolas ford, broke up his
+reverie. Only a mile away, on the other side, the hacienda lay in full
+view, yet it appeared at first as if they would have to turn back. But
+after nosing up and down the banks Caliban presently flushed a peon and
+a dugout. With the horses swimming behind, they were ferried over, and
+rode across the tree-studded pastures, which were still clad in summer
+brown.
+
+At the sight of the amber walls in their setting of low brown hills
+Seyd's pulses had quickened, and, interpreting everything by his own
+feeling, it seemed to him that the dark women who peeped from their
+doorways, the swart vaqueros, and the slender girls that passed to and
+fro with _ollas_ balanced ahead, all turned faces of welcome. But when
+at last he reined in before the shut gates of the _casa_ he experienced
+a sudden, cold revulsion. Like so many eyes, the iron studs stared from
+the oaken face of the door, until the sudden sliding of a hatch revealed
+the wrinkled visage of Paulo, the Spanish administrador.
+
+With his employer's toleration of the gringo the administrador had no
+sympathy. Malice sparkled in his small brown eyes while he answered
+Seyd's question. "As you see, señor, the _casa_ is empty. The señora and
+the _niña_"--he used the family diminutive for Francesca--"are still at
+hacienda El Quiss. Don Luis? He has gone again to Ciudad, Mexico, to
+talk with Porfirio Diaz himself about the gringo dam. I do not know when
+he will return," he replied, further, "nor the señora."
+
+His high spirits dashed to the ground, Seyd sat his horse, oppressed
+with heavy forebodings, for the disappointment raised vivid memories
+of the suddenness with which the girl had been snatched out of his life
+on two other occasions. Sick at heart, he refused for himself the
+refreshment that the house's tradition compelled Paulo to offer, and
+spent the hour required for the beasts' feeding in heavy brooding.
+
+From this, however, he roused himself presently to a lighter mood.
+"After all, the week is only up to-day," he urged. "She might easily
+be detained beyond her expectations."
+
+At first he thought of leaving a note. But, realizing the formal terms
+in which it would have to be couched might make an unfavorable
+impression, he left, instead, verbal regrets. That settled, he had time
+to think of Don Luis, and, being now on practical ground, came to a
+quick conclusion. Forgetting all about his promise not to travel alone,
+he sent Caliban back to the mine while he went himself straight out to
+the station.
+
+On his arrival there, however--so late that he had to call Peters out
+of his bed--he was not a little surprised to find that nothing had been
+seen of Don Luis. It was, of course, easily possible that he had boarded
+the train at a flag station ten miles up the line that was nearer to El
+Quiss. But when, next evening, a thorough search of his usual haunts in
+Mexico City failed to yield sight or sign of Don Luis, Seyd began to
+grow suspicious. Suspicion developed into a certainty when on his return
+two days later Peters informed him that Don Luis had taken the up train
+that very morning.
+
+"He came from San Nicolas, too," Peters added. "I shouldn't wonder if he
+was there all the time. Looks to me like he's trying to dodge you."
+
+Intentional or not, it left Seyd in a serious plight. A second trip to
+Mexico City would take three days. Adding two more to get Billy away in
+the event of Don Luis's refusal of further time, less than three weeks
+would be left of their month of grace. It was not to be thought of; and,
+though the afternoon rains were draping the mountains with heavy gray
+sheets, he rode out to the inn that night. Crossing the river early next
+morning, he sent Billy away at once.
+
+"You'll have to spend twelve hours in Mexico City anyway," he instructed
+him, concerning Don Luis, "so you might as well try to find him. If you
+succeed, no trifling! Get his fist on a written extension. If he
+doesn't come through--and I have my doubts--chase right on home to
+California. With the photos of the prospect and plant you ought not to
+have much trouble in raising enough to cover the note. And the minute
+you get it wire me credits on Mexico City."
+
+Hardly expecting it, he was not surprised when Billy wired, two days
+later, that he was leaving that evening for the States. Under the
+message Peters had scribbled, "Don Luis came in to-day on Number Nine.
+Go right down and see him."
+
+Half an hour after receipt of the message Seyd and Caliban were again on
+their way.
+
+For nearly a week now it had rained heavily night and day, and here and
+there on the bottoms small inundations gave early warning of coming
+floods. Though the river still ran in its banks opposite San Nicolas,
+the dugout in which they crossed was swept with the swimming horses half
+a mile downstream before they made a landing, and it was easily to be
+seen that another week's rain would cut off travel on that side of the
+stream.
+
+Riding in to the great square, Seyd's pulses beat a lively accompaniment
+to the thought: "It is now the end of the second week. She is sure to be
+home." Yet in the moment of its riotous birth the hope gave place to
+black misgivings at the sight of the shut house.
+
+His spirits touched zero when the sliding hatch left Paulo's wrinkled
+visage framed again in the blank oaken face of the door. "Don Luis is
+still in Mexico, señor." He anticipated Seyd's question.
+
+"But he returned--was seen the day before yesterday at the station."
+
+"At the station, señor? How could that be?" His brown beads of eyes
+blinked in uneasy surprise; then in an instant the wrinkled mask fell
+into an expression of simple cunning. "Or, if so, then it must be that
+he has gone to join the señora and the _niña_, who are still at El
+Quiss."
+
+She was not there! For the third time he found himself confronted by
+silence, mysterious and complete as that which had attended her previous
+disappearances. But, though oppressed by a weight of care, he tried to
+hide his bitter disappointment from the administrador's inquisition.
+Once again he spent a black hour while the beasts were feeding. His
+broodings, riding homeward, shed no light on the enigma. A night of dark
+thought left him baffled, furious, in good fettle for the news that
+Caliban gleaned from a passing charcoal-burner.
+
+"Don Luis must have been there, señor, for Benito saw him ride forth
+this morning. He has gone north to see for himself the gringo dam."
+
+"Oh, he has, has he!" Seyd ground the words out between his teeth. "The
+old fox! But now I'll chase him into his earth."
+
+In this, however, he had forgotten to allow for the rains which, driving
+down the Barranca in great wet sheets, caused Don Luis to put in at El
+Quiss, there to wait in the leisurely fashion of the country until the
+weather should break and Sebastien have time to accompany him. Arriving
+at the power plant after two days' wallowing on jungle trails, Seyd
+found himself foiled once more in their little game of hide and seek.
+
+The trip, however, was not altogether wasted, for the pert young
+Chicagoan in charge gave him uproarious welcome. "So you're the fellow
+that has been bucking the whole state of Guerrero! I'm awfully glad to
+know you, Mr. Seyd, though I'm puzzled yet as to how you managed to hold
+out. It took a whole regiment of Diaz's _rurales_ to establish us here,
+and if they were withdrawn even now we wouldn't last long."
+
+Also it was worth the labor to see the dam. A huge earthen structure,
+nearly a hundred feet high, it spanned the Barranca just where the
+valley nipped in from a wide angle to a passage a quarter mile wide.
+Behind it a muddy lake stretched as far as the eye could reach, and
+while standing in the center Seyd recalled and quoted Peters's
+prediction.
+
+"'Boulders big as churches were piled up in the bed of the stream like
+pebbles, and if that dam was built of solid concrete instead of clay
+they'd go through it like it was dough.'"
+
+The Chicagoan, however, laughed at the quotation. "If the devil himself
+was bowling them I'd defy him to knock off a single chip. She's solid,
+and the sluiceways allow ample flood escape. Nothing but an earthquake
+could touch it--a jim dandy, at that."
+
+Nevertheless, while that enormous volume of water hung suspended, as it
+were, over the valley, Seyd felt nervous. Traveling homeward the next
+day, he measured with a careful eye the valley floor, and, using last
+year's high-water mark as a base for his calculations, concluded that
+only San Nicolas, the smelter, and one or two haciendas that stood on
+higher ground would escape destruction if the dam should happen to
+burst. Approaching El Quiss, he noted, in particular, that, standing on
+level ground, it would surely be inundated.
+
+For some fifteen miles his trail ran through Sebastien's lands, and,
+climbing in one place over a knoll, it afforded a view of the hacienda
+buildings across the rain-swept pastures. As, reining in, Seyd watched
+the faint pink of the walls flash out and fade in the shifting vapors he
+was seized with a mad impulse to ride in. But his native good sense
+quickly reasserted itself, for a moment's reflection showed that the
+intrusion could only result in humiliation for Francesca and himself.
+The knowledge, however, did not render her proximity less maddening. He
+was sitting there restlessly chafing when Caliban's voice suddenly rose
+behind.
+
+"If it were desired to leave a message there is one I know that could
+place it in her own hands."
+
+Startled, Seyd swung in the saddle. He had known long ago that kindly
+usage had transformed the hunchback into a faithful friend, but he was
+not prepared either for the sympathy that softened his glittering beads
+of eyes or his uncanny divination.
+
+"_Si._" The hunchback nodded. "A cousin of my woman is in Don
+Sebastien's household service. 'Twould be easy to pass a paper by the
+little maid you picked out of the river. The señorita keeps her always
+close to her own body."
+
+Before he finished Seyd had cut a pencil and was writing on the back of
+an envelope under cover of his raincoat. At first he gave free vent to
+his feelings, but, remembering the danger of interception, he tore it
+up and wrote instead a humorous protest against her continued absence.
+Then, after instructing Caliban to take all the time necessary to
+procure an answer, he journeyed on alone.
+
+It was well, too, that he gave the hunchback free rein, for three days
+elapsed before he returned to the mine soaked to the marrow by the
+continuous rains that had raised the floods almost to last year's mark.
+"With Don Sebastien one goes slowly," he explained. "If the sharp eye
+of him had once touched me 'twould have been a short shrift under the
+nearest tree. For two days I lay close in the _jacal_ of my woman's
+cousin before she brought me this."
+
+It was a considerable package, and Seyd rather wondered at its size
+while tearing away the dried corn leaves in which Caliban had wrapped
+it. When the last leaf fell off he stared at first in surprise, then,
+as his eye fell on the ink scores, in utter consternation at the
+Albuquerque _Times_. Minutes passed before he could command words to
+send the hunchback away, then, sitting down by the table, he leaned his
+head on his hand and remained for some time plunged in black reflection.
+
+From a long distance in time and space his first insincerity had come
+home to roost. But, while he saw himself as the designer of his own
+undoing, he was by no means resigned. Presently hard, mutinous lights
+broke in his gloomy eyes. The stubborn fighter awoke. Throwing the
+traitorous sheet across the room, he picked up a pen and began to write.
+
+Wasting no time in wonder at the fortuitous chance that had placed the
+paper in Francesca's hands, he wrote steadily on the story of his love
+from the first doubtful beginnings to its actual consummation. Very
+clearly he explained his first natural dislike to intrude his personal
+affairs upon people for whom he had no reason to suppose they would have
+the slightest interest, the later honorable intention that had always
+been frustrated by unfavorable circumstances. And he finished with a
+statement that is never unwelcome in a woman's ear:
+
+"No matter what comes I shall always love you."
+
+Steady rain all that day and night had given the floods another lift and
+sent the river roaming wide through the jungle. Once again the valley
+opposite the mine was converted into a great lake dotted with wooded
+islands between which swift currents hurtled floating debris. Profiting
+by last year's lesson, Seyd had had two roomy dugouts fitted with oars
+and rowlocks, and early the next morning he rowed Caliban across
+himself. Returning, he was to send a smoke signal to call the boat, and
+when, on the afternoon of the fourth day, Seyd spied the thin blue
+spiral through a break in the drifting rain he almost cracked his back
+rowing across the flood.
+
+But his glowing hope died at the shake of the hunchback's head. "The
+señorita is gone with her mother and Don Luis to San Nicolas, señor. But
+she is to return to El Quiss in a few days. The cousin of my woman had
+it from Roberta, the little maid. She is still there, and will deliver
+the letter when the señorita returns."
+
+The news was not altogether bad, for Francesca, at least, was now at San
+Nicolas. Within the hour Seyd crossed the river to the inn--where a
+horse was to be had for hire--and his purpose gained strength from a
+wire that he found waiting there from Billy.
+
+     "San Francisco burned to the ground. Not a cent to be raised in
+     California. Am going east."
+
+In view of the aforesaid game of hide and seek he had been playing with
+Don Luis the situation looked very dark. But, serious as it was, when,
+halfway to San Nicolas, he met Paulo riding at the head of a mule train
+loaded with fagots it was wiped altogether out of his mind.
+
+"We go to build beacons along the rim of the Barranca to give warning
+against the bursting of the gringo dam," he answered Seyd. "_Si_, Don
+Luis and the señora are at the _casa_. The señorita?" His creases drew
+into a malevolent grin. "The señora, you mean. She was married two hours
+ago to Don Sebastien."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+"What!" In the language of the good old romances, Seyd roared the word.
+
+In the main, Paulo was not a bad old chap. To further the interests of a
+Garcia he would cheerfully have surrendered his old bones to be boiled
+in oil, and in his joy at the event he allowed his natural garrulity to
+dominate his prejudice against the gringo.
+
+"_Si_, señor, they were married at the hacienda by the priest of
+Chilpancin. On account of the death of Don Sebastien's mother Don Luis
+and the señora only were present, and immediately afterward the young
+couple went home alone to El Quiss. A sensible practice, say I! When
+young hot blood mixes it should be left to cool and settle. Over there
+at El Quiss the fur will be flying before the end of a week, and put me
+down as a liar if Francesca do not keep him busy. She has run too long
+single not to kick at double harness. But she'll settle to it, and like
+the fine wench she is, there is to be no European travel or such
+kickshaws as now are common with our rich young folk. No, in the good
+old Mexican fashion she goes from the church straight to her man's
+home, there to stay till the first babe makes us all completely happy."
+
+Over and above his real joy in the event the old fellow was undoubtedly
+aware of its effect on Seyd. While speaking, his small red eyes searched
+his victim's face for the pain beneath its confusion. But even under the
+spur of race hatred his imagination could not divine a tithe of the
+torture he was inflicting. Like all lovers, Seyd had dreamed long moving
+pictures of himself and Francesca as husband and wife, and now, with the
+speed of light, the reels spun backward, exhibiting her with another in
+the thousand and one intimacies of married life. Through all, his stiff
+Anglo-Saxon reserve persisted, and, finding egress at his heels, the
+pain that he tried to hide brought the situation to a ludicrous close.
+Springing from the unconscious pressure of his spurs, his horse, a
+mettled little beast, collided with Paulo and knocked him flat on his
+back.
+
+More hurt in his pride than body, the old fellow scrambled up and stood
+shaking his fist and cursing. But Seyd rode on without attempt to check
+the animal, whose top speed ran slower than his own hot thought. Indeed,
+when, from sheer fatigue, it slowed he laid on with quirt and spur, and
+kept on at a gallop till violent exercise had withdrawn the blood from
+his swelling brain.
+
+In place of pulsing waves of confused pain came the tortures of
+clear thought. In turn he was ruled by anger, despair, unbelief. The
+thought of Francesca as he had seen her on the train, quiet, lovely,
+sympathetic, inspired the last. It was not possible! Then up would rise
+the blank ink scores round the divorce notice to provide the motive and
+plunge him back into deep despair. Lastly came anger, blind and
+unreasoning, in furious gusts.
+
+Occasionally through his welter of feeling there flashed a glimmer of
+reason. "She's married now! She's married! That ends it--for you!" But
+instead of despair the thought produced furious reactions. "I don't
+care! She's mine! I'll have her--I have to take her by force!" It rose
+again and again, his cry on the trail of the other day.
+
+By instinct rather than conscious thought he had turned his horse into a
+path which presently curved at a sharp angle into one that led from San
+Nicolas up to the rim of the Barranca where at this season ran the only
+passable trail. At the forks he came on the fresh tracks of shod horses
+that led up the zigzag staircases.
+
+Overlapping each other on the narrow trail, they might have been made
+by two or a half dozen, and not until he saw two sets clearly imprinted
+side by side crossing a small plateau did he think of the riders.
+If proof were required it was presently furnished by the little
+handkerchief that hung, fluttering in the rain and wind, on a
+"crucifixion thorn."
+
+As, reining in, he examined the corner initial a whiff of violets rose
+in his nostrils. Under the sudden crush of his hand it shed a rain of
+tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Fifteen miles away along the rim Francesca and Sebastien had just reined
+in. On a bare knoll close to the trail which led down to El Quiss three
+peons were building a beacon of dry wood around a core of hay, and while
+Sebastien talked with them the girl looked out over the valley.
+
+Ever since, in a burst of anger at Seyd's message, she confirmed her
+conditional promise she had lived in a fever of feeling which precluded
+clear thought. In the same way that a sufferer from toothache
+anticipates with almost revengeful pleasure the wrench of the extraction
+she had looked forward to marriage as though it were to bring the end of
+her pain. Not until the words that made her a wife fell like a chill on
+her fever did she perceive the illusion. Riding along the trail, the
+consequences had presented themselves, and they grew with every mile
+until they filled her mind with horror. She had shrunk in fear and
+revulsion when Sebastien offered the ordinary courtesies of the road.
+When he buttoned his own big rain capote around her she trembled under
+his hands. Again, when her beast slipped and he threw his arm round her
+to lift her out of the saddle, she uttered a nervous cry, and, though he
+released her at once, she shuddered under her cloak. Yet, with all her
+pain, when she gazed out over the storm-beaten valley her old passion
+for nature asserted itself through her agony.
+
+Along the Barranca the south wind herded great fleecy clouds. There they
+piled themselves up in shadowy hills, there they rolled and tumbled like
+thistledown in a breeze, and again cascaded down to lower levels to
+dissolve with muttering thunder in slaty sheets of rain. One minute the
+vapors filled the Barranca, flowing, a ghostly river, between the
+towering walls. The next a sudden rent in the veil permitted a fleeting
+glimpse of the trail falling like a yellow snake with myriad writhings
+into the treetops thousands of feet below. Enormous in scale, the scene
+was rendered more impressive by the roll of low thunders and flash of
+pale lightnings amidst leaden writhing shapes. Watching it, Francesca
+was forgetful until, through a sudden rift, she caught the distant pink
+flash of the El Quiss walls. Then she shivered, and she was still
+trembling when, turning from the peons, Sebastien spoke.
+
+"It is one of a chain of beacons they are building up and down the
+valley to warn the people if the gringo dam should burst." Noticing her
+shiver, he added: "You are cold, _querida_? Let us ride on."
+
+His usual stern gravity had given place in the last few hours to a look
+soft, pleasant, and very human. If she had looked into his eyes she
+might have read there both sympathy and understanding. But softness in
+him just then merely added to her fear. Following downhill, too, she
+watched him closely with dark, frightened eyes. In the past his strong
+face and lithe figure had aroused in her a certain admiration, but now
+they inspired revulsion. A lost spirit descending into Hades could not
+have battled more fiercely than did she descending the interminable
+staircases, and the struggle left her so pale and exhausted that
+Sebastien remarked upon it when they rode out at last on the valley
+floor.
+
+"You are tired? We shall soon be there."
+
+That started her again upon a conflict which continued all the way
+across the pastures to the hacienda gates and reached its climax when
+she entered her room--not the one she had occupied before, but that
+which had chambered before her the line of wives and mothers which began
+with the Aztec bride of Flores Rocha, the conquistador. In that long
+line the room may have harbored a bride fully as unhappy, but none more
+mutinous than its present occupant.
+
+"The señora is fatigued. She will have the meal served in her room."
+Sebastien's quiet order had dispersed the brown maids who flocked about
+her like cooing pigeons with greetings and offers of service. Unaware
+that he would observe it himself, she sprang out of her chair and ran a
+few steps toward the barred window when a tap sounded upon her door. In
+her relief when it proved to be only Roberta, she pulled the child in to
+her bosom.
+
+"It is thee, _niña_! Oh! I had thought--what is this?"
+
+Her sudden flush betrayed her recognition of Seyd's writing on the
+package the girl held out. In the few seconds she stood hesitating her
+changing expression revealed the struggle between her misery and her
+sense of wifely honor. The issue was not long in doubt, for, suddenly
+murmuring "'Twill do no harm to read it," she ripped off the cover.
+
+While she read the blush faded. At the end her low distressed cry,
+"Francesca, see what thy hasty pride has done! A little patience would
+have saved thy happiness and his!" told of the deep impression. Sinking
+into a chair, she was beginning to read it again when the door trembled
+under a heavier rap.
+
+Thrusting the letter into her bosom, she leaped up, under the urge of
+the same wild instinct to escape, retreated toward the window, and so
+stood, with Roberta tightly held against her skirts. Seconds passed
+before she managed a tremulous "Enter!" and the face she turned to
+Sebastien presented such a passion of fear, revulsion, and despair that
+he stopped and stood gazing at her from the door. If surprised, his
+look, however, was still kind. He even smiled. Not until, retreating as
+he came forward, she stopped only with her back against the wall,
+Roberta still between them, did his smile give way to sudden dark
+offense.
+
+"Are you ill?" He spoke sharply. "Or is this the usual way of a bride?
+If I were a tiger and you alone in the jungle 'twould be impossible to
+show more fear."
+
+"I wish you were!" The confession burst out of her miserable fear.
+"'Twere preferable a thousand times! Oh, why did I do it--commit this
+great wrong? Love is, can be, the only cause for marriage, but in my
+hasty pride I sought only revenge--on him. Oh, 'twas a sin--a sin
+against you, Sebastien, who have always been so kind. Somewhere there
+must have been a woman who would have borne you children out of her
+love. And now--I have not only sealed my own misery, but also yours.
+For, though I do not, never _can_ love you, I am--your wife."
+
+To repeat, it came out of her in a wild burst, without consideration.
+But with the last word she looked her apprehension. He, however, took it
+quietly. Already the flash of offense had faded. Only the measured tone
+betrayed restraint.
+
+"It is so--we are husband and wife. But do not let that fact disturb
+you. Did you think me so much of a beast as to believe that I would take
+you stone-cold! Neither need you grieve over your sin in marrying
+without love, for I took you on those terms. I knew very well that you
+were falling to me through anger. My only fear was that it might cool
+before you were placed forever beyond the gringo's reach. But now that
+is accomplished, have no fear, we stand as we were. You are still
+Francesca, to be wooed with a larger license, but still to be wooed and
+won to my love."
+
+"Oh, you are--as always--kind!" A little of the terror had died out of
+her face, and if she had never received Seyd's letter, had lacked the
+reassurance that lay warm in her breast, his generosity might have
+prevailed. Pitifully, she was going on, "I am sorry--" but he
+interrupted.
+
+"Let us have none of that. Pity is the last thing I ask of you. The
+issue between us lies clearly--can be settled only one way." His dark
+eyes lighting, he went on after a pause: "It needs not for me to remind
+you of the birth of my love, for it reaches back beyond your memory.
+When you were still a lovely child I gleaned a fallen eyelash from your
+dress and carried it for years--ay, until it was displaced by a stolen
+curl clipped while you slept by the maid I bribed. With you my love
+grew--grew with you from that lovely girl into a beautiful woman. The
+place which your foot had trod was, for me, the only holy ground. You
+were my church, the only one I ever believed in, the only one that
+gained my prayers. For me you and you alone held the keys of heaven,
+and be sure that now that they have passed through your own act into my
+hands I shall never rest till they have opened for me the doors."
+
+"You will always have my liking and respect--"
+
+He cut her off again. "Idle words--they are not enough. And you owe me
+one thing--your willingness to help. I shall try hard, harder than I
+have ever done, to win you, but without that my efforts will be in vain.
+And remember--for your own sake--if you do not help me it may be that
+you yourself will reap the pain. The immortality of love is the wild
+talk of poets. One cannot love a statue. The eye tires at last of the
+most beautiful marble, goes roving after warm flesh. So take care that
+you do not awake too late to find yourself unloved, pining for the
+affection you once rejected."
+
+Through all he had maintained his dark calm, speaking quietly with a
+touch of sadness. Yet, the stronger for its suppression, vibrant feeling
+pulsed in the appeal. Had Francesca still been smarting under the lash
+of hurt pride he might have caught her on a second reaction. For she was
+moved. Pity and distress governed her answer.
+
+"Oh, I feel wretchedly ungrateful. But what can I do? I cannot--oh, give
+me time?"
+
+"All that you need, _querida_. You are to have your own time and terms.
+Now listen! I am going away."
+
+He smiled a little grimly at her start of relief. "So _very_ glad? Then
+I am sorry it will not be for longer. I shall be back in a few days.
+Word came to the administrador yesterday that the gringo dam is greatly
+endangered by warm rains that have added the volcano's snows to the
+flood. A hundred feet deep, the waters are pouring down the Barranca de
+Tigres, and if they once top it the dam will go." He uttered a bitter
+oath. "A curse on it! If it were not that the wave would sweep the
+valley clean I would send one to hasten the end with a charge of powder.
+But that must wait for the dry season. I go now with every man and mule
+I can muster to raise and strengthen it. Signal beacons such as we saw
+at the trail head have been built all along the rim, and, if the dam
+goes, smoke by day or fire by night will flash timely warning. But if
+you are timid--San Nicolas stands on higher ground. If you would prefer
+to return--"
+
+"No! no!" Her fervent gratitude prompted her to attempt some return. "I
+shall stay here--to care for our people."
+
+He smiled at the "our." "Spoken like a Rocha. You never lacked courage,
+Francesca, but be careful. At the first signal leave everything, fly
+with the people up to the hills. If it should happen that the place is
+spared you can come back again. If not, follow the upper trail down to
+San Nicolas."
+
+Her fright had now altogether faded. While he was giving a few last
+instructions a touch of anxiety diluted her brimming thankfulness. But
+when he went out without having attempted anything more intimate than
+his usual bow, this vanished. And his restraint gained him more ground.
+Walking to the window which overlooked the patio, which was now thronged
+with a motley mixture of peons, mule-drivers, and serving women, she
+watched him mount and ride away at the head of the mule train. Looking
+backward from the great gates, he saw and answered the wave of her hand.
+But it was too far for him to catch either her wistful expression or
+pitiful murmur "If it had not been--"
+
+Inside her bodice Seyd's letter crackled under her hand. The blush with
+which she withdrew it indicated a doubt that his letter had a right to
+further tenancy in that warm nest. Roberta had followed Sebastien out to
+watch his departure. After placing the letter on the table she sat, one
+oval cheek propped on her hand, her dark head drooping over it like a
+tired flower. Once she made to pick it up, then snatched back her hand
+as though from a flame.
+
+"No! no! It would be wrong--after his kindness." After a few minutes'
+further musing she added: "'Tis now of the past. By your hand was it put
+there, Francesca. Now remains only to make a finish."
+
+Taking a match from a tray at her elbow, she lit the letter and threw
+it, all flaming, to the center of the tiled floor. While its pages
+withered her face quivered in sympathy, and when suddenly a single line
+stood blackly out in the expiring glow--"I love you--shall always love
+you!"--her breath came in a sudden sob.
+
+Rising, she gathered the ashes into a small tray, carried them across
+the room to the little altar that stood against the wall--an action
+significant as it was conscious. Kneeling, she bowed her head in her
+hands. She remained there a full hour, and when she rose no one of the
+ten generations of women whose soft knees had worn a depression in the
+tiles was ever animated by a more honest sense of duty. The face she
+turned to little Roberta, who came bursting in a few minutes later, was
+quiet and serene.
+
+"Oh, señorita!" In her excitement the child gave her the maiden title.
+"Pancho, the administrador, will have you come at once. Smoke is rising
+northward along the rim. Also there comes a horseman at full speed."
+Lowering her voice, she added: "Pancho showed him to me through Don
+Sebastien's far-seeing glasses. It is the señor Seyd."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+Riding at a hard gallop, Seyd had cut down Sebastien's lead by a full
+hour in the run along the rim. At the sight of the beacon--which the
+peons were now thatching with grass--he, also, reined in. But, having
+learned from them that Sebastien and Francesca had passed two hours ago,
+he rode on down the staircases at a pace which showed little respect for
+his neck.
+
+Nearly an hour later he stopped again on the very knoll from which he
+had overlooked El Quiss. If he had looked northward it would have been
+possible to see Sebastien at the head of the mule train which was
+wriggling like a mottled brown snake across the wet green pastures. But
+during the quarter hour that Seyd remained there his gaze never left the
+distant pink of the hacienda walls.
+
+Somehow their solid realism cooled his fever and brought order to his
+rioting senses. "Well, you are here! Now what are you going to do? What
+_can_ you do?" The still small voice of Reason rose above the storm.
+"These, you know, are not the days of chivalry. It is no longer the
+fashion for a jilted lover to snatch his bride from the horns of the
+altar. And if it were"--Reason here observed a deadly pause--"what
+chance would you have against Sebastien and his retainers?"
+
+"But I must see her! I _will_ see her!" The still small voice was
+drowned in a gush of passion. "There have been too many accidents
+already. Not till I hear from her own lips that she has done this of her
+free will shall I quit."
+
+"Sounds good." Reason agreed only to differ. "But it has one
+drawback--she might not care to be interviewed in her bridal chamber."
+
+The suggestion was ill-timed, for it started a new riot among his
+senses. "I'll see her! I _will_ have speech with her!" It went roaring
+through his brain.
+
+But how to compass it? Had he known the name of Caliban's woman's cousin
+it would have been difficult enough! Not knowing it, the thing was
+almost impossible. He was tossing on successive waves of feeling that
+now urged him forward, again carried him back in the undertow of
+despair, when there came a patter of nude feet behind him.
+
+"Señor! señor! _Mira!_ The beacons! The beacons!"
+
+It was one of the peons whom he had left above. "Ride, señor! Ride and
+give warning lest they have not seen it at El Quiss! I go to my woman
+and children!" Shouting it, he swung at right angles and flew down the
+valley at top speed.
+
+Almost as quickly Seyd galloped off. One glance had shown the tall smoke
+plumes which were rising like ghostly sentinels above the black edge of
+the pine, and with it there burst upon him a vivid picture of the muddy
+sea behind the great dam. Crossing the river that morning, he had
+noticed that the floods were running above last year's highest mark, and
+almost as plainly as by actual sight his imagination pictured the wave
+which had just leaped, like a huge yellow hound, over the broken dam. A
+solid wall of water, he saw it sweeping down the valley, lapping up
+villages, ranches, _jacals_, with greedy tongues. Roweling the flanks of
+his tired beast, he drove on. Yet, despite his apprehension, the phrase
+rang in his mind like a clashing bell:
+
+"I shall see her! Now I shall see her!"
+
+While he was still half a mile away he saw two mounted men dash out of
+the patio gates and ride off at right angles, north and south. After
+them came a crowd on foot, and as they opened to let him through Seyd
+noted with wonder that all were women. His surprise deepened when,
+driving in through the gates, he almost rode over Francesca, who stood
+with Roberta against her skirts in the deserted patio. While, breathing
+hard after his wild ride, he sat looking down upon her she returned his
+gaze with big mournful eyes.
+
+"You are--alone?"
+
+"Yes." Hesitating, she went on, "Don Sebastien left an hour
+ago--immediately after our arrival--with the men to work on the dam."
+
+He almost shouted. It was inconceivable, except on a supposition that
+filled him with sudden hope. "Then it isn't true? If it were, he would
+not have left you. He lied! Paulo lied! All day I have ridden hard on
+your trail to disprove it! He lied! Tell me that Paulo lied!"
+
+It was not necessary to reply in words. The slender weaving fingers, her
+quivering distress, the pity and grief of her eyes, made answer.
+
+"Oh, how could you?" But his natural sense of justice instantly asserted
+itself. "But no! I have only myself to blame. I played the fool all
+through. Yet, I meant well--but I explained that in my letter."
+
+"I only received it two hours ago. Oh, why didn't you send it sooner?"
+
+"I did--wrote the instant I got the paper. It lay here four days."
+
+Now, only twenty miles away, at speed swifter than bird flight, the wave
+was leaping over the jungle with plumage of tangled debris streaming out
+behind. Even then they might have caught its distant roar. But, blind to
+all but the fortuitous chance that had dogged their love to this unhappy
+conclusion, they stood gazing at each other in distress and despair.
+
+"We have been unfortunate, you and I." She spoke, mournfully, at last.
+"And this is the end."
+
+He would not accept it. In thought he was storming the barrier her act
+had placed between them when her sorrowful voice answered the mute
+appeal of his eyes. "_Si_, the end. If Sebastien had not been so kind!
+He took advantage of my anger to place bars between you and me, but
+there he rests. His consideration deserves some return, and the least I
+can offer is the outward semblance of good wifehood. You must go!"
+
+"What! Leave you--now?" Recalled to a sudden realization of their
+imminent danger, he pleaded, "First let me place you in safety?"
+
+"No." She nodded toward a saddled horse under the gateway. "In a few
+minutes I can overtake the people. With you will go my--"
+
+While they talked Roberta had wandered over to the gates. Now she
+suddenly cried: "Oh, señora! Don Sebastien!"
+
+Seyd's view of the trail was limited by a swing to the south that cut
+off all but a couple of hundred yards. As he made, instinctively, to
+move forward Francesca caught his bridle. "No! no! He must not see you!
+If he finds you here--with me--oh, has there not been trouble enough?"
+Her distracted glance circled the courtyard. "See, the old guardhouse!
+Dismount--quickly! Lead in your horse, then I will ride with the child
+to meet him!"
+
+As a matter of fact, he felt like anything but hiding. His eye lit with
+a hard gray gleam. But in these premises that he had forced upon her it
+was not for him to pick and choose. He yielded to her pleading, "For my
+sake?"
+
+Dismounting, he led his horse in through the arched doorway, and as she
+closed the door upon him Francesca added a last hurried instruction. "He
+will undoubtedly turn with me. Give us time to gain cover under the
+oaks, then take you the trail to the south. It reaches high ground
+quickly. And ride hard"--her voice broke in a sob--"for if you should be
+overtaken by the water what in this miserable world would be left for
+me?"
+
+"And this is the end?" He caught her hand between the closing doors.
+
+"The end--for thy sake." She dropped into the tender second person of
+the Spanish. "_Si_, if you wish it."
+
+Left alone, Seyd stood listening, the soft touch of her lips thrilling
+upon his. In the guardhouse, used now for a storeroom, all but one
+window was blocked by piles of sacked maize, but as his eyes grew
+accustomed to the half gloom he made out the massive beams which held up
+the heavy roof. The wall from which the one window looked out formed
+part of the hacienda's southern face, and, remembering that the trail
+inclined in that direction, he moved over to it when he caught the
+clatter of departing hoofs. Deeply recessed in the thick wall, the low
+sill afforded standing room, and by peering obliquely through the bars
+he caught first the flutter of her skirt, then gradually she forged into
+full view. About three hundred yards away the trail ran in among shade
+oaks, cedars, and great spreading banyans, that were strewn in clumps
+all over the pastures. But just before she rode in among them Sebastien
+and Pancho, his _mozo_, galloped out from among the trees.
+
+Even if the wind had not been dashing the sheeting rain in his face it
+would have been impossible for Seyd to have caught a distant murmur of
+voices. But he saw the _mozo_ lift Roberta from Francesca's beast, and
+lead off, with his mistress following. Then Sebastien came galloping on
+toward the gates.
+
+"Coming for something--money or papers," Seyd thought. "Just for fear he
+looks in--"
+
+At the far end of the room a pile of sacked beans formed a natural
+stall, and he had no more than gotten his horse behind it when the
+clatter of hoofs broke in the court. He could not, of course, see
+Sebastien dismount. But, faint as they were, his highly keyed senses
+recorded the vibrations of the other's footsteps as he followed the
+muddy horse tracks across to the guardhouse.
+
+Outside the door Sebastien stopped. In the tense pause that followed
+Seyd's hand went to his gun. At first the act was due to the natural
+instinct of self protection, but in the very moment of its inception
+that gave place to a second, more powerful impulse that dyed his face
+and neck with a dark flush. Drawing the weapon, he trained it across a
+sack at the door, and at that moment no primitive man in hiding at the
+mouth of his enemy's cave was ever obsessed by a fiercer lust to kill.
+All of his trials and long travail, despair, seemed in his disordered
+fancy to materialize just then in Sebastien's person. And it would be so
+easy! A slight pressure of his finger the instant he showed in the
+doorway, then--the flood!
+
+In a flash the pros and cons of it passed through his mind. If the
+circumstances were reversed he knew exactly the course that Sebastien
+would take. And almost as he thought it came proof--first the grating of
+the key in the lock of the inner door, next the groaning complaint of
+rusty hinges as Sebastien swung to the iron outer doors which had not
+been used for a score of years, finally the wooden crash of the oaken
+bars falling into their staples.
+
+It was all over before Seyd really understood. With knowledge there
+flashed upon him the thought of the flood. Rushing across the floor, he
+leaped and threw all of his weight against the inner door. It hardly
+shook, and the recoil threw him flat on the floor. As he rose came the
+clatter of Sebastien's departing hoofs, and running across to the window
+he was just in time to see him come in view. On the skirts of the timber
+he reined suddenly in and sat his beast, listening. Then, after a quick
+glance northward, he galloped on.
+
+And Seyd, at the window, also heard.
+
+Above the sough of the wind which drove the sheeting rain into his face
+he caught the roar of the oncoming flood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+In the few minutes that passed before she met Sebastien Francesca had
+regained self control. To his reproof, "This was foolish; why did you
+linger?" she calmly replied, "I wished to make sure that all the people
+were out."
+
+He nodded approval. "Then no one is left?"
+
+"No one."
+
+"_Bueno!_ We have no more than time to make the hills. Pancho's beast is
+stronger than yours. Give him the child." She had begun to hope, but it
+died within her as he went on: "In my rooms are valuable papers. 'Twill
+take but a moment to get them. Ride on, you. My horse goes two paces to
+your one. I can catch you halfway to the hills."
+
+She almost fainted when he rode off, for just as surely as though she
+had seen him questioning the fugitive women she knew now that he was
+aware of Seyd's presence. She reined her animal around to follow, then
+checked it sharply under a sudden inspiration.
+
+"Why do you wait, Pancho?" she asked, sharply. "While you sleep the
+flood will be on us. Ride! Ride your hardest! I will follow."
+
+The _mozo_, to tell the truth, was damning with inward tremblings the
+luck that had placed him in such jeopardy. Only the fear of Sebastien
+had kept him from bolting, and now, without even a backward glance, he
+laid on with quirt and spurs and galloped off with Roberta, leaving
+Francesca free to carry out her plan.
+
+It was quite simple. In this, the rainy season, the shade trees were
+draped from crown to foot with green lace of morning glories, and on the
+outer edge of the nearest clump a banyan had been converted into a huge
+tent which would have stabled a hundred horses. Parting the lacework of
+leaves with one hand, after she had ridden under it, Francesca obtained,
+through the gateway, an oblique view of the guardhouse at the moment
+Sebastien closed the iron doors. The crash of the bars carried to her
+tree, and had he looked that way he might have seen the curtain of
+leaves swing under the forward move of her beast. But, controlling the
+impulse, she reined it back again. When Sebastien raced past a couple of
+minutes later she dropped her hand and shrank in sudden fear.
+
+It was, however, impossible for him to see her. Moreover, the
+intervening clumps prevented him from discovering that she was not with
+Pancho until he came bursting out on his heels in open pasture half a
+mile ahead.
+
+"_Tonto!_ where is thy mistress?"
+
+The _mozo's_ look of frightened surprise proclaimed at once his
+ignorance and fear. Both had reined in, and under the other's deadly
+look Pancho cowered behind his bent arm. Sickly green patches stained
+his dull chocolate. When Sebastien pulled a pistol from his holster he
+bowed down to the saddle horn, his face in his hands. Leaning over,
+Sebastien placed the muzzle against the fellow's head. His finger even
+had tightened. Then, checking the impulse, came Roberta's whimper,
+"Señor! oh, señor!" Above it rose a distant thunderous roar, and,
+glancing northward, he saw in the far distance a writhing movement in
+the jungle beyond the pastures.
+
+"Off, fool! Save the child!"
+
+Striking the man's shoulders with the pistol, he wheeled his horse and
+shot away, heading back to the hacienda. Riding, he kept one eye on the
+green wave that was moving with the speed of the wind over the jungle.
+As he passed in among the shade trees it boiled over the far edge of the
+pastures, and from beneath the swaying trees emerged a muddy wall
+crowned with bristling black. Traveling more swiftly in the open, it
+came on at an acute angle which had its point in the flooded lands along
+the river, its base in the jungle close to the hills, and when Sebastien
+dashed out of the timber the point had passed the hacienda.
+
+Even then he must have known it for hopeless. The thunderous diapason
+had risen into a furious crescendo which was spaced by the tear and
+crash of uprooted trees, and, higher than his head, the liquid wall was
+coming on under the pressure of the yellow frothing sea that stretched
+behind to the limit of sight. Yet, laying on quirt and spurs, he raced
+down its front in a desperate spurt for the gates.
+
+While he was still a hundred yards away the wave struck the northern
+wall of the compound that fenced the buildings. Built solidly of stone,
+it melted, vanished without a premonitory shiver, and in its overthrow
+accomplished good. Catching root and branch in the debris, the grinding
+welter of fallen trees hesitated, then piled in a huge tangled bar upon
+the line of cottages and stables which intervened between the wall and
+house.
+
+To Sebastien, however, this brought no respite. Shooting along the
+eastern wall, the wave outraced him and beat him to the gate by a long
+fifty yards.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While Francesca was still under the banyan she had heard the roaring
+diapason of the flood. Clothed in dripping lacery of leaves and flowers
+torn away by the beast's leap from the spur, she galloped into the
+patio, and when she dismounted the vines still twined around her limbs.
+Without waiting to tear them off she threw all of her strength into a
+vain effort to swing the bars of the guardhouse doors, but, swollen by
+the rain, they were fast in the staples.
+
+"Oh, _what_ shall I do?"
+
+Her cry carried through to Seyd. After a fruitless attempt on the door
+he was just about to attack the window bars with an oaken club he had
+found in one corner. Now, tearing away the sacks of maize that blocked
+the one small square window on her side, he thrust it between the bars.
+
+"Knock them up with this!"
+
+But after the bars yielded the rusty doors defied her strength. "They
+will not budge! Oh, I cannot move them!"
+
+Again his practical sense served. "Slip a stirrup over the staple, then
+start your horse gently. Fine!" He heard the groan of the moving door.
+"Key gone! Never mind, I can shoot out the lock. Stand away--off to one
+side."
+
+Above the roar of the flood Sebastien heard the shots. A few seconds
+later he saw Seyd look out of the gateway, then rush back in. Behind the
+gates an iron ladder led up to a lookout post on top of the guardhouse,
+and, racing down the front of the wave, Sebastien saw Seyd rise above
+the low parapet and lift Francesca to his side.
+
+At the same moment they saw him. In Francesca's outstretched hands
+Sebastien saw her impulse to save. In the sudden covering of her eyes he
+read his fate. The fifty yards that lay between him and the gates might
+just as well have been a thousand, for, less than half the distance
+away, the great yellow comber rose high over his head.
+
+Before it broke, however, he did two things--reined his horse to face
+it, then, just before he went under the grinding welter, with the same
+easy courtesy which he would have shown to a kinsman or a friend, he
+turned in the saddle and waved his hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+From the time Seyd rode into the hacienda up to that moment less than
+twenty minutes had passed, but events had leaped to a conclusion.
+
+The barrier of debris across the outer buildings had diminished the
+force of the blow upon the house, and had the water gained instant
+access to the interior and equalized the pressure it might have stood.
+As the wave raced past, level with the high wall, the patio presented
+for an instant a curious resemblance to a square vessel pressed down
+till its edges just rose above the water. The next, its stout walls fell
+inward, and over them a yellow wave leaped at the house. Reinforced by
+its partition walls, it withstood for a few seconds the enormous
+pressure. Then above the cracking and grinding of debris and the mingled
+roar of the flood rose the boom of doors and windows blown out of their
+frames.
+
+Because of its length the guardhouse went first. Feeling it tremble
+under his feet, Seyd lifted Francesca and held her face in against his
+breast. Not that he was in the least resigned. Never in all his life had
+he felt a keener desire to live. His glance darted hither and thither,
+and when, freed by the fall of the stone lintels, a patio gate sprang
+out of the yellow cauldron almost at his feet he snatched up Francesca,
+leaped, and landed in its very center. Falling under her, he was, for an
+instant, breathless. But in the few seconds that he lay there gasping
+circumstances worked in their favor. Thrust by the impact into the
+recoil of the wave from the house wall, the gate was heaved out of the
+patio, and passed the guardhouse just before the heavy tiled roof
+collapsed with the walls.
+
+Almost in an instant the house crumbled and melted with scarcely a
+splash. Sitting up a few seconds later, Seyd looked back on all that was
+left of El Quiss, the barrier of debris rising, a black reef, out of a
+yellow sea. A mile ahead the wave roared on, its furious crescendo again
+reduced to a booming diapason. While the gate was being carried with
+incredible swiftness across the El Quiss pastures the roar sank to a
+distant hum, and presently died altogether, leaving only the quiet
+lapping of the waters in the falling dusk.
+
+So quickly had it all passed that Seyd found it hard to believe they
+were floating in comparative safety. The gate, which was ten feet by
+twelve in size and four inches thick, floated evenly, and if an
+occasional wave ran across it the tepid rain water of the tropics caused
+no discomfort. Neither were they in danger from the debris, logs, and
+uprooted trees which floated at equal speed on currents that were
+setting back to the river. With a pole that he picked up Seyd was able
+to keep out of the way of the few that rolled and tumbled when their
+branches caught on the bottom, and when at last they drifted on the
+deeper, slower currents of the river he turned to Francesca, who had
+remained a huddled, sobbing heap just where she fell.
+
+She looked up when he touched her shoulder. "Oh, I feel wicked!" she
+cried, remorsefully. "If I had only waited for a few more days, given
+you time to explain, he would still be alive."
+
+"It was perfectly natural," Seyd comforted her. "He would absolve you
+from all blame were he here, for with all his faults he was big and
+brave."
+
+"You really think that he would?" She looked up with tearful anxiety.
+
+"I'm sure of it. How could he do otherwise?"
+
+"But he was--my husband. And I left him--for you."
+
+"Yet I do not think that he held you in blame."
+
+Kneeling beside her, with one arm around her shoulders, he gave his
+reason--Sebastien's last salute. Even if this started her tears anew
+she, nevertheless, felt comforted. When a black shape forged out of the
+dusk alongside, and he had to return to his pole, her natural spirit
+reasserted itself.
+
+"Here am I, crying like a child instead of helping. What can I do?"
+
+There was really nothing. But to keep her from brooding he placed her on
+watch. "If you'll keep a lookout I'll take a shove at everything that
+floats in reach. The current is setting across the river, and we have
+nearly twenty miles to work in. With any old luck we ought to be able to
+land at Santa Gertrudis."
+
+Thick dusk presently merged into night, but they were helped by a full
+moon which shed a dew of light through the falling rain. Not that they
+voyaged without hazard. Twice they were almost swamped by trees which
+rolled over under the thrust of Seyd's pole. Farther down they narrowly
+escaped shipwreck on wooded islands. Yet, thrusting and hauling, he
+worked steadily with the favoring current, and they had gained almost
+across when, rounding a bend, they sighted a distant light.
+
+"Caliban's, for sure! Only another hour to food and fire!" Seyd cheered
+her.
+
+He had, however, his own misgivings. As they drew into the shadow of the
+Barranca wall the moonlight grew fainter, and, drifting later over the
+submerged jungle, they were hard put to avoid the treetops which
+upreared like huge mushrooms above the flood. More than once they were
+almost swept off the raft by bejucos, vegetable cables, which stretched
+from top to top, and as these grew thicker Seyd saw that disaster was
+merely a question of time. He was hoping desperately that their
+capsizing would not entail too long a swim, when out of the obscurity
+rose a huge black shape.
+
+With a shock that threw them both down, the raft grounded in shallow
+water.
+
+It was the plateau on which the new smelter stood. But, changed as it
+was in the new geography of the flood, Seyd did not recognize it until,
+scrambling ashore with Francesca, he saw above the dark mass of the
+buildings the cable and iron ore buckets in dim outline against the sky.
+
+"Why, it's the smelter!" he shouted, in glad surprise. "Ever since the
+explosion we have kept a man here on guard. _Ola!_ Calixto! _Ola! Ola!_"
+
+While he was calling a yellow oblong broke out of the building's mass,
+framing the black silhouette of a man. "It is the _jefe_!" They heard
+his comment to his woman inside, then, uttering a volley of surprised
+"_Caramba's!_" he came rushing down the bank with his lantern.
+
+When Francesca's pale wet face shone under its sudden glow he dropped
+the lantern, which, fortunately, did not go out. Picking it up again, he
+lighted their way to the adobe that had served Billy for house and
+office while the smelter was building.
+
+For use during the rains, a chimney and wide hearth had been installed
+in the adobe, and while Calixto was building a roaring fire Seyd
+directed a piratical raid on Billy's trunks. At first his search
+returned only muddy overalls and soiled clothing of various sorts, but
+at the very bottom--just as they had been placed by the hands of a
+careful mother--a new suit of flannel pajamas and a voluminous woolen
+bathrobe appeared. When, with some misgivings, and confused, he
+suggested a change, a touch of the girl's old archness flashed out. Her
+smile was almost mischievous as she returned thanks.
+
+"I'm sorry there's nothing better to offer." The smile emboldened him to
+add: "But they will serve till we have something to eat. Then you may
+have the fire all to yourself to dry your own things."
+
+She smiled again when, returning with food and coffee prepared by
+Calixto's woman, he exclaimed, "You look like the Queen of Sheba!"
+
+With the brown-black hair swinging almost to her knees and the
+bathrobe--a gorgeous affair in pink chosen with an eye to Billy's vivid
+taste--belted in to her waist and pajamas ballooning beneath over small
+bare feet, she did look Oriental. When the coffee and food had relit her
+eyes and restored her usual faint color he was sure that she had never
+looked so distractingly pretty. The effect was not diminished either by
+her small vexed frowns at the revelations of smooth whiteness caused by
+the persistent slipping of the wide sleeves. When, as they sat by the
+fire after the meal, warmth and fatigue moved her to a yawn and he
+caught the full redness of her mouth before she could cover it the
+intimacy of it all sent the blood drumming through his pulses. If her
+serious eyes restrained him, they did not repress his thought.
+
+"I have you--now! I have you at last, and I'll never let you go again!"
+
+Undoubtedly she furnished the inspiration which kindled a sudden light
+in his eyes. "Why not?" he urged against the one objection that occurred
+in his thought. "It's an awful smash at the conventions, but--it's the
+only way. He locked me in to drown--and do you suppose that he'd
+hesitate if he were here now in my shoes? I guess not. And if he would,
+I won't. By the Lord, I'll do it!"
+
+He rose soon after reaching his conclusion. "You must be very tired, so
+I'll go now and leave you to dry your things. You know, we start early
+in the morning."
+
+"Start early?" She opened her sleepy eyes.
+
+"Listen!" He took her gently by both shoulders. "We have been held apart
+so far by all sorts of accidents and misunderstandings. You know how
+closely we came to utter shipwreck?" Her shiver answering, he went on,
+"Now, will you trust--leave all to me?"
+
+She had been no woman if she had not divined the restraint behind his
+quiet during the last warm hour, and, rising suddenly upon small bare
+toes, she paid him for his consideration. "I will do anything you say."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Breaking through the stream of ocean vapors, the morning sun showed the
+jungle raising a languid head above the ruins of the flood. Long rents
+in its green mantle, bare patches of yellow mud, dark bruises where
+acres of debris had been piled in twisted masses, testified to the force
+of the wave. But, overlooking the wreckage from the smelter, Seyd took
+notice principally of a fact that suited his purpose--the river had been
+swept clean of driftwood. Not since the beginning of the rains had it
+shown such open stretches.
+
+"Good!" he muttered. "The sooner we get away the better. I'll call her
+at once."
+
+When, however, he knocked at the office door Francesca answered "Come!"
+When he entered she smiled at his surprise. "You said that we were to
+start early. Here I am, dressed and dried."
+
+"Not before breakfast," he laughed. "It is ready. I'll have it brought
+right in."
+
+All through the meal her eyes questioned, but, denying her curiosity, he
+talked of anything and everything but that which filled her mind. Even
+when, clothed in his waterproof, she took her seat opposite him in the
+stern of the dugout he denied their eloquent appeal. While sending the
+boat with vigorous strokes flying downstream he drew her attention to
+this and that phase of devastation and commented on the beauty of the
+morning, but not a word as to his purpose. It was cruel, and her eyes
+said so. But, remorseless, he held on till, about midway of the morning,
+they sighted San Nicolas. All the way down he had hugged the Santa
+Gertrudis side, and she received the first inkling when he replied to
+her question if it were not time to pull across.
+
+"We are not going there."
+
+"Not going there?" she repeated, surprised.
+
+"No, we shall keep right on--down to sea."
+
+"The sea?"
+
+"The sea." He nodded firmly. "And the minute we land there we're going
+to be married."
+
+The idea was altogether too radical to be absorbed at once. No doubt she
+thought he was joking, for a smile broke around her mouth. Not until
+they were almost opposite San Nicolas did it give place to puzzled
+alarm.
+
+"But, señor--Rob--Roberto." She changed it in answer to his quick look.
+"But, Roberto--"
+
+"Might as well make it Bob," he cut in, crisply. "It may seem strange at
+first, but seeing that we're to be married you might as well begin to
+get used to it now."
+
+The San Nicolas walls now lay, a long, warm band, across their beam.
+From them her glance returned to the pendulum swing of his body.
+Finality centered in his steady stroke. It told that he had settled down
+for the day. Had he calculated its effect beforehand he could not have
+done better. Accustomed to Spanish deference, she was nonplussed by his
+authoritative air, yet its very unusualness invested it with a certain
+charm.
+
+"But--Bob?" Somehow the curt appellation acquired grace and softness
+from her Spanish lisp. It fell so prettily that he made her repeat it.
+But, though she added to its attraction an appealing glance, he remained
+grimly obdurate.
+
+"Give me time to think?"
+
+"All you want. At this speed"--the oars creaked under his stroke--"you
+will have about twenty-four hours."
+
+She looked at him, frightened. "_Please?_ At least let us talk it over."
+
+The cheerful roll of oars in the rowlocks returned wooden answer.
+
+"Won't you?"
+
+He stopped rowing and sat regarding her sternly. "I'm allowing you more
+time than you gave me. If"--he paused, then, judging it necessary,
+relentlessly continued--"if _he_ were here in my place do you suppose--"
+
+"Oh, he would! He did! After he had insured me against--"
+
+"--Me," he supplied, with a dogged shake of the head, then went on,
+"Well, even if he would, I won't." As he bent again to the oars the
+touch of admiration that leavened her undoubted fright paid tribute to
+his stubborn logic. Settling to his stroke, he began again: "Supposing
+that I complied and put you ashore at San Nicolas? Do you think that Don
+Luis would be any more favorably inclined toward me? You know that he
+wouldn't. I should do well to escape with my life. But if you go back as
+my wife--well, the most they can do is to turn us out. Of course I can
+understand your feeling. It will be a frightful breach of the
+conventions--"
+
+"No, it is not that," she interrupted him. "My friends will be
+scandalized, _si_, but they are long ago broken to that. They would be
+dreadfully disappointed if I did not fulfil their predictions by making
+a shameful end. And it isn't--he. It is wicked to acknowledge it, but I
+know--I know now that no matter how hard I tried to school myself I
+should sooner or later have run away to you. They'll think it
+shocking--my friends, my mother--but I can endure it."
+
+"And that can be avoided. I'll take you away--throw up everything
+here--make a new start somewhere else."
+
+"No! no!" She shook her head. "Your work is here, and I am just as proud
+of it as you could be. Let them chatter. No, it isn't even that."
+
+"Then what is it?"
+
+"You wouldn't understand. It is silly, just a woman's reason. No, you
+would not understand."
+
+"I'll try."
+
+"It is _so_ foolish." Nevertheless, encouraged by his sympathy, she
+continued: "Do you know that since the first kiss passed between us a
+year ago we have had speech together only for a few minutes in the
+presence of others? And her courtship is of such supreme importance in a
+girl's life. It is her love time, and she loves to lengthen and draw out
+its lingering sweetness. And ours has been so short."
+
+It was the poignant cry of her girl's heart expressing the yearning of
+her starved love, and, coming from such spirited lips, it moved him
+deeply. Slipping the oars, he seized her two hands and pulled her
+forward into his arms. Then, while her dark head lay pillowed upon his
+shoulder, he continued the argument to better advantage.
+
+The walls of San Nicolas had dwindled to a golden streak before she
+looked up in his face. "Supposing that I had refused?"
+
+"I'd have carried you off in spite of yourself."
+
+And, whether she believed him or not, she clung the closer in that
+embrace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The new day opened a new and fertile country before Seyd's sleepy eyes,
+a country wonderfully beautiful with variegated foliage of coffee,
+rubber, palm, and banana plantations.
+
+During the night the Barranca walls had, while growing lower, closed in
+to a long gorge through which the river ran like a millrace. For two
+hours their ears were dinned and deafened by the roar and thunder of mad
+waters, but, as the boulders of the one rapid were buried thirty feet
+deep, they sustained nothing worse than a slight deafness and natural
+apprehension at the hair-raising speed with which they were catapulted
+onward. Excepting those two hours when he had to use both oars to hold
+the dugout's head in the center of the current, Francesca had slept in
+his arms, and, nestling upon his shoulder the moment they emerged upon
+quieter waters, she had fallen asleep once more, nor did she move till
+the sun pointed a golden finger down between two clouds.
+
+Awakening, she uttered a small cry and lay for a few seconds looking up
+into Seyd's face, her eyes blank with bewildered terror. Then,
+recognizing him, she gave a sob of relief. "Oh, I was dreaming--that I
+was at El Quiss--to stay there--forever!" She paused and sat for a
+moment looking into his tired face, then burst out: "Oh, little animal!
+All night I slept while you kept watch. Now you shall sleep."
+
+Taking his place in the stern, she forced him, with pretty authority, to
+cushion his head in her lap. "_Si_, I will awaken you before we reach
+the harbor, but do not dare to open an eye till then."
+
+The command was unnecessary, for, completely fagged, he had no more than
+lain down when he was fast asleep. Until sure of the fact she sat
+perfectly still. Then, with a rueful glance at her soiled and shrunken
+garments, she murmured, "Nevertheless, we must try to look our best."
+
+After a second shy study of his sleeping face she let down her hair and
+began to comb it out with her slender fingers. Because of the length and
+thickness of the dark masses this proved a long task. The dugout had
+drifted miles before she finished the coiffure with small feminine pats.
+Reassured that he still slept, she dipped her handkerchief overside and
+washed her face and neck.
+
+Her own toilet completed, she next essayed his. After warming the wet
+handkerchief against her own cheek she cleansed his face with delicate
+touches, then, with the same soft white comb--her fingers--smoothed his
+hair. Discovering, in the process, a few gray hairs, she murmured: "Oh,
+_pobre_! See what I have cost thee!"
+
+Very gently she began to trace and smooth out the lines of worry upon
+his face, and, rediscovering his cleft chin, she repeated, with a soft
+laugh, her comment made that night in the shepherd's hut. "Oh, fickle!
+fickle! I said thy wife would need the sharpest of eyes, but they will
+needs have nimble fingers that steal thee from me."
+
+Her face at that moment formed a playground for all that was arch, but
+presently it took the shadow of sadder thoughts. Brimming over, a big
+tear rolled down her cheek. Yet, while sincerely sorry for Sebastien,
+she was perfectly frank with herself in thought. "I would not, if I
+could, bring him back. 'Twould mean only more trouble--for all of us.
+Now, at least, he is at peace.
+
+"They will think me hard and cruel." Her musings continued. "The whole
+Barranca will throw up hands of horror--the hands that applauded the
+greater sin when I gave myself without love in marriage. _Bueno!_" She
+scornfully tossed her head. "Wicked or not, I will do it--for thee."
+
+She squeezed his face so hard, murmuring it, that he stirred, and for
+fully a minute thereafter she sat holding her breath. But he slept on.
+During the last hour the river had widened, and along its banks tufted
+cocoa palms were woven with the brighter foliage of bananas into the
+rich green damask of the bordering jungle. Also the sun had prevailed
+for a few hours in the daily battle with the mists, and under the
+golden spell of light and warmth the girl's musings grew happier as they
+floated on. When she awoke him to the sight of the blue harbor opening
+up from behind a long bend, Seyd looked up at a smiling face.
+
+"That's the American consulate." After rubbing the sleep out of his eyes
+he pointed out a white stone building which perched, like a gull, on a
+terrace above the flaming rose and gold of the adobe town. "We'll go
+there. The consul is a fine old fellow. He'll help us all he can."
+
+First, however, they were destined to encounter the unexpected, for
+when, an hour later, Seyd pulled the dugout into a ragged wooden pier an
+officer in the silver and gray of the Mexican rurales pushed through the
+peon laborers who thronged the wharf.
+
+"You are from up river, señor? Then you can tell us of the flood in the
+Barranca. A cousin of mine, Don Sebastien--_Caramba!_" At the sight of
+Francesca he broke suddenly off. "It is surely the señorita Garcia? You
+will remember me, Eduardo Gallardo, upon the occasion that I visited, at
+San Nicolas, your uncle, the excellent General Garcia, with my wife, who
+is of your kinsfolk?"
+
+Recognizing him while he was still in the crowd, Francesca had gained
+time to prepare. His use of her maiden name proved that here at the port
+they had heard nothing as yet of her marriage, so, after briefly
+describing Sebastien's death and the destruction of El Quiss, she
+concluded: "I was saved by the señor, here, who rode in to warn us. But
+for him I also should have drowned."
+
+And Seyd availed himself of the opening. "As the señorita is completely
+exhausted, señor, you will please to excuse us. We go to the American
+consulate."
+
+"But why the consulate, señor," the rurale politely objected, "when she
+owns here the house of her kinswoman? The señora, my wife--"
+
+"_Si_, I have heard of her--nothing that is not lovely." Drawing him a
+little aside, Francesca proceeded to heal, with winning smiles, the
+wound in his pride. "You shall give her my love, cousin. Tell her that I
+should prefer to visit her, but, having taken my life from the hand of
+this señor, I cannot do otherwise than fall in with his plans."
+
+Deferring with Latin politeness to her wish, his pride was none the less
+hurt, and while they climbed the hill to the consulate he hurried home
+to his wife, whose feminine intuitions placed the whole matter in an
+entirely new light.
+
+"A gringo, sayest thou? Then it will be he for whose sake she was sent
+away to Europe. Medium tall, is he, with a straight nose, hollow cheeks,
+quick gray eyes? The very man that Paulo, the administrador, described
+to me on his last visit to the port. _Caramba!_ Here's fine bread for
+the baking! 'Tis told all over the Barranca that she has this man in
+her blood, and count me for a liar if she comes with him this far for
+any purpose but marriage. 'Twill never do to have Don Luis knocking at
+our door to ask why we let her go before our very eyes. He is a power,
+_hombrecita_, with the government, thy master, and, fail or win, we lose
+nothing by trying to trip her run. And 'twill be easy! A word in the ear
+of the _jefe_, judge, and priest, and 'tis done. And do not sleep on it.
+Away with you--at once."
+
+In his cool white salon on the hill above, the consul--a portly old
+fellow with a clean, good-natured face--was counseling Seyd at that
+moment in almost the same terms.
+
+"As you say, this is no time to stand on conventions--especially after
+the man had locked you in and left you to drown. After seeing the young
+lady"--his smiling glance went to the door through which Francesca had
+just gone with his wife--"I should feel less than ever like protracted
+mourning. Besides, it is now or never. If you don't marry her at once
+the chance may never come again. If Eduardo Gallardo hadn't seen you it
+would have been quite simple. I could have fixed it up for you all
+right. But he is counted something of a sneak, and if he once sniffs the
+wind--well, you can be sure he won't let such a chance slip to better
+himself with General Garcia. You've simply got to beat him to it."
+
+After a pause of thought he went on: "In their usual course, both the
+legal and ecclesiastical procedures are very slow. It takes about a week
+for the lawyers to coin the bridegroom's natural impatience into ready
+money, and after they are through the Church holds out its hand for
+what's left. It's an awful graft, but has its advantages, for if the
+wheels are well greased they spin like lightning. Shut up! I don't have
+to be told that you emerged from the flood with empty pockets. I'll
+attend to that, and you can settle with me any old time. All you have to
+do"--taking Seyd by the shoulders, he marched him into his own
+bedroom--"is to take a shave and bath and make yourself look as much as
+you can like a happy bridegroom."
+
+With a last order, "Help yourself from my clothes," he went out
+laughing. But when he returned an hour later his smile was obscured by a
+vexed cloud. "Eduardo wins," he reported to Seyd, who had just come out
+on the veranda. "He must have gone right to it, for when I arrived at
+the _edificio municipal_ they were already primed. The judge and
+_jefe-politico_ both count themselves of mine, but they wouldn't do a
+thing. Really you can't blame them. _El general_ Garcia is a name to
+conjure with down here, and they are all afraid of their official heads.
+'Much as we would like to serve you,' and so forth, 'but in the case of
+a young lady of such high family we dare not proceed without her
+guardian's written consent.'
+
+"And the _jefe_ gave me good advice. _El capitan_, Eduardo, it seems, is
+not only ambitious, but not a bit too scrupulous about the way by which
+he gains his ends. So you must not go out alone. It would be quite easy
+to trump up some charge, arrest, and then shoot you as an escaping
+prisoner under the law of _El Fuga_. You wouldn't be the first to be
+shot inside the prison and then thrown outside, and, though I should
+most certainly hold an inquiry and kick up an awful row, that wouldn't
+bring you back to life. Also we shall have to look out that they don't
+kidnap your girl."
+
+While the consul was thus easing his bosom of its load of doubt Seyd had
+stared out over the blue harbor at a steamer that was taking cargo from
+a dozen lighters. Suddenly he asked, "What ship is that?"
+
+"The _Curaçao_, of San Francisco."
+
+"American, then. When does she sail?"
+
+"To-morrow morning at five."
+
+"How far outside the harbor does Mexican jurisdiction extend?"
+
+"The usual three miles beyond the headlands."
+
+Seyd came to his point. "Then what is to prevent her skipper from
+marrying us?"
+
+"_Bueno!_" The consul slapped him on the back. "He'll do it sure, for
+he's a friend of mine. Bravo! Trust your lover to find a way."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+Instead of the steps of a church, which form the natural way to their
+new estate for the great majority of brides, Francesca stepped into hers
+from the companion ladder of the _Curaçao_. But there had been various
+happenings--the visit of the Doña Gracio de Gallardo y Garcio to urge,
+in her own stout black person, Francesca's acceptance of her house and
+contents, her husband's equally hospitable offer of horses and escort
+for her safe conduct to San Nicolas, also his subsequent espionage and
+the means by which they evaded it. And now she was stepping from the
+companionway into the launch which was to take the newly married pair.
+
+Just as the consul had done his best for Seyd, so, with a woman's
+natural enthusiasm for a wedding, his wife had dressed the girl. By
+means of a few pins plus a basting needle a pretty dress had been pulled
+into a perfect fit, and out of its foam her shapely head now rose like a
+delicate dark flower. In the dusk of a crushed panama her clear-cut face
+glowed with unusual color. Swaying there on Seyd's arm, she made a
+picture which drew the admiration of the men and the tender sympathy of
+the women passengers who looked down upon them from the rail. While
+Seyd was handing her into the launch a storm of rice broke overhead and
+fell softly into the water, and when, leaving them dancing in its wake,
+the big hulk of the ship moved on, a hearty cheer floated back to them.
+
+If not so boisterous, the congratulations of the consul at the pier were
+equally hearty. "You didn't do it a bit too soon," he informed them.
+"Just after you left friend Eduardo notified me that it had been decided
+in a family council that your wife should go at once to the house of her
+relative. Without actually saying it he gave me to understand that a
+charge of kidnapping lay behind the demand. Just for the fun of it I let
+him wander along, and when I sprang it, and told him that by this time
+you were undoubtedly married, you should have seen his face. He won't
+trouble you again--neither will he furnish you horses."
+
+"That doesn't matter," his wife put in. "I have that all arranged."
+
+"What?" The consul looked his surprise. "What's this? A conspiracy? I
+expected that you would stay with us at least a week?"
+
+"No." His wife took the answer into her own hands. "You know,
+Francesca's mother and uncle are grieving in the belief that she is
+drowned. And she has other reasons of her own--and yours," she added for
+Seyd. "Though you are not to bother her with questions."
+
+At the consulate breakfast was waiting, and in the cheer of the
+following hour and bustle of departure, Seyd forgot his momentary
+wonder. It did not revive until, early that afternoon, they reined in to
+rest their horses on the crest of the first hill in the chain that led
+in giant steps up to the plateau above the Barranca. As they rode on,
+after a last look at the harbor, which lay like a huge turquoise within
+its setting of hills, he looked inquiringly at Francesca.
+
+"Can you not guess?" she asked. When he shook his head she rallied him
+with a happy laugh upon his dullness. "I think your memory is very poor,
+Señor Rosario."
+
+"What--Rosa!" For instantly there flashed up a picture of her wet face
+looking at him from under her capote hood on the day that he found her
+standing in the rain beside her fallen horse.
+
+"So you recognize me at last?"
+
+"You don't mean to say--"
+
+"_Si_, señor, my husband"--contradicting her laugh, a deep thrill
+inhered in the words--"it is even so. In the days before the railroad,
+when there was great travel between San Nicolas and the port, Don Luis
+maintained houses a day's journey apart. Though none of our family has
+visited them in the last two years, they were in good condition when
+Paulo passed this way at the beginning of the rains. So to-night,
+Rosario, we bide in our own house."
+
+Again did her accent on the "our" move and thrill him. Always
+undemonstrative, however, he merely caught her hand, and so, linked like
+children, they rode on side by side. At first they observed a happy
+silence, but presently the trail took on such remarkable likeness to the
+one they had traveled that other day, proceeding from the stretches of
+black volcanic rock through copal and scrub oak to sparsely grassed
+barrens, that the strength of the associations forced them into talk.
+
+"That's where your horse fell," he began it. When she agreed, he asked,
+"I wonder if you had any conception of the risks you were running when
+you rode behind me?"
+
+Though she knew very well what he meant, she pretended ignorance and
+made him explain in detail his feelings at the sight of her hands
+resting like white butterflies on the front of his coat, his sudden
+emotion when the scent of her wet hair floated over his shoulder, utter
+intoxication whenever a slip of his horse caused her to tighten her hold
+on his waist.
+
+"You hid it very cleverly," was her comment upon these revelations.
+
+"And you never knew it?"
+
+"Of course I did." To which she added the brazen confession, "Or I would
+not have done it."
+
+Shooting over a hill not long thereafter, the trail suddenly fell
+through copal and oak woods into a sheltered valley where, with a
+suddenness that drew an exclamation of admiration from Seyd, they came
+in sight of the house. A small adobe, washed with gold with pale-violet
+borders, it stood under a great banyan tree within the embrace of a
+grove of tall palms. Almost across its doorway a bright arroyo ran
+swiftly, to disappear in the dark shade of clump tamarinds. All the
+afternoon the sun had pursued a futile struggle with the ocean mists,
+and now, completing the beauty of the place, it shot a last coppery
+shaft between two clouds.
+
+"A happy augury," was Francesca's greeting to the pathway of light. "Now
+let it rain."
+
+The door was unlocked, and, entering with her, he found the interior
+equally to his taste. The solid walls were cream-tinted, and after he
+had lit the wood which was ready on the open hearth they reflected a
+comfortable glow on massive tables and chairs of plain oak, wide
+settees, and roomy lounges. His satisfaction was complete when she told
+him that it stood alone. The knowledge that they would be barred by
+leagues of distance, shut in by the rainy night from the rest of the
+world, filled him with deep content. From a survey, conscious of warmth
+and comfort, his satisfied gaze returned to the fingers which were
+fluttering like white butterflies from button to button down her
+raincoat.
+
+"Lazy one!" She spoke with a pretty assumption of wifely authority.
+"Stable the horses--but first bring in the bundle from my crupper.
+While you are out I shall prepare our meal."
+
+"What! Do we really eat? How thoughtful! It had never occurred to me."
+
+"A pretty beginning," she made demure answer, "for a wife to starve her
+husband."
+
+Neither could there be any complaint of the meal that faced him on his
+return, for it represented the best that could be bought or borrowed by
+the consul's wife. Afterward Seyd would have washed the dishes, but,
+taking him by the shoulders, Francesca marched him back to the fire.
+
+"No, I shall do it myself. Please?" She headed off the mutiny betrayed
+by his eyes. "If you knew how often I have peeped into our work-folks'
+adobes at night to watch, with envy, some little peona preparing her
+man's meal, you would understand." So, smoking by the fire, he watched
+with huge comfort the play of dimples in her arms and the fluttering of
+the small hands which seemed so hopelessly at odds with their task.
+
+While working she chattered happily, but after the last dish was ranged
+in the plate rack on the wall she came to him and sank in a graceful
+heap beside his chair. Head pillowed on one white arm spread across his
+knee, she gazed thoughtfully into the fire; and, looking down upon her,
+Seyd's thought reverted once more to the shepherd's hut. Again he had
+difficulty in realizing that it was indeed he, Robert Seyd, mining
+engineer, who was sharing food and fire with this, his wife, daughter on
+one side of a proud Spanish house and on the other of descent that ran
+back into the dim time of the Aztecs.
+
+Her voice called him out of his wonder, and while the fire leaped and
+crackled in defiance of the wind and rain without they talked of this
+and that, their trials and travail, absent thoughts, hopes; and in
+the telling of it they obtained surcease from the smart of past
+misunderstandings. Also there were confessions. Each told--she with a
+blush--how they had overlooked each other's sleep in the shepherd's hut.
+Because opportunity for such communion had been altogether lacking,
+they talked late. Their murmurs died with the last light of the fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+At high noon two days thereafter Seyd and Francesca drew rein on the rim
+of the Barranca above San Nicolas.
+
+During the moment that the horses rested their thoughts reverted to the
+last occasion when they had overlooked the great void, and if the
+thought of Sebastien brought a touch of sadness into the girl's
+reflections it caused no bitterness. She turned with a low laugh when
+Seyd produced from an inner pocket the handkerchief he had picked up
+that day on the trail.
+
+"It did," she said, when he told how it seemed to drip tears. "I had
+cried all the way up the trail to the rim."
+
+After the usual nightly downpour the sun had come out, and under a flood
+of golden light the valley floor stood out in relief, with its wooded
+hills and hollows diminished to toy proportions by the awful depth. In
+the center the _casa_ of San Nicolas sat like a gold cup in the wide
+green saucer of surrounding pastures. Beyond, the river lay, a band of
+fretted silver, splitting the valley; and, following its course upward,
+the girl's eye paused at the yellow scar, high on the opposite wall,
+which marked Santa Gertrudis.
+
+"My beacon on many a dark day." She pointed.
+
+"And that reminds me that it is in great danger of being extinguished,"
+Seyd answered. "Our first payment was due the day before yesterday.
+Unless Billy has returned in my absence with the money--and I haven't
+the slightest hope--the property is forfeited to your uncle."
+
+"But he will not claim it." Out of her simple woman's faith she went on:
+"He is too good and kind to advantage himself by your misfortune. In
+spite of his hate for the gringos, he likes you personally. Now that you
+are--my husband, he will not attempt your harm."
+
+In view of his present clear view of Don Luis's machinations, Seyd was
+not so sure. Unwilling to hurt her, he conceded: "Well, we shall see.
+Let us ride on down."
+
+"Not together, dear." Leaning over, she caught his arm. "I must see him
+first alone. He will be furiously angry, of course. But the angrier the
+better, for just so much sooner will follow the calm."
+
+"But he may try--"
+
+"--To take me from you?" She took the words out of his mouth. "He
+cannot. In a day, a week, a month, sooner or later, I should escape.
+They could not forever keep me locked up. But he will not try. You know,
+he stole his own wife, snatched her away while she was going to church
+to marry another, and he comes of a race that gained wives as often as
+not by the sword. He cannot blame you without condemning himself, and I
+am sure that he will not try. If you give me a little time to conquer
+him and soothe my poor scandalized mother it will come out all right. So
+you must go on to Santa Gertrudis now and see if there be any news of
+Señor Thornton. And to-morrow--you may come."
+
+"If you have the slightest doubt"--loath to let her out of his hands, he
+hesitated--"I would ride on to the station. Beautiful as is this place,
+and much as I have come to love it, I would rather abandon all than
+incur the risk."
+
+"But there is none, husband mine." She looked up in his face, tenderly
+smiling. "He will rage and roar like an old lion, but that is all. I
+should be only half a woman to have come to my age without learning to
+manage him. Remember, for the second time you have saved my life, and,
+being already married, he cannot deny us. So go in peace, and"--she put
+up her mouth--"love."
+
+In spite of her reassurance, he watched her go with apprehension that
+took a blacker tinge when, arriving at the inn late in the afternoon, he
+found no word from Billy. Though the inn's meager accommodations had not
+been improved by a slap from the wing tip of the wave, he remained there
+all night in preference to crossing and recrossing the river. With so
+much at stake, Santa Gertrudis could take care of itself for another
+day. Sleeping with anxiety for a bedfellow, he rose and was on the road
+at daybreak--but not a bit earlier than Francesca, who met him halfway.
+
+"I knew you would be anxious," she explained, "so I saddled a horse and
+stole away while all of San Nicolas was still asleep. But not for
+nothing are you to have my news. _Si_, it is good!
+
+"'Twas as I said," she went on, having received her reward. "The _madre_
+had already cried herself beyond further tears, and was glad to have me
+on any terms. The good uncle, of course, stormed. Never was there such a
+battle since the French wars, and had you been there 'twould not have
+lacked its killed and wounded. Until midnight we fought; then, after
+cursing the blood of the Irishman that has always led me astray, he gave
+in. ''Tis not for an old soldier to cross tongues with a woman,' he
+growled. 'To-morrow bring me thy man.' But he knew that he was beaten,"
+she finished, confidently, "for when I kissed him he laughed in his
+throat and patted my hair."
+
+Again Seyd refused to dash her hope, but he was not quite convinced, and
+when they entered the big living-room where Don Luis stood with Paulo in
+waiting his dark gravity cast its shadow over the girl's glad face. His
+immobility afforded no clue to the feeling that lay behind the
+stereotyped greeting, "The house, señor, is yours.
+
+"I am the more pleased to see you," he went on, "because Paulo reminded
+me an hour ago of a matter of business that lies between us. Such things
+stick not in my memory. But I believe it concerns some money."
+
+"Señor!" Her face flaming with the scarlet of shame, Francesca was
+moving forward.
+
+He stopped her with a shake of his heavy head. "This is between me
+and--your husband. The papers, Paulo. Hand them to the señor."
+
+It was a legal process, signed and sealed according to Mexican law, and
+before opening it Seyd knew it for the end. More out of curiosity than
+for information, he rapidly scanned the terms which had taken Santa
+Gertrudis and its mined riches forever out of his hands. While he read,
+Don Luis studied his face. If he looked for signs of deep hurt there
+were none to be seen, for in the long game between them Seyd was
+confronted for the first time by the expected. He looked up, squaring
+his shoulders.
+
+"The victory is yours, señor."
+
+To Francesca's anxious eyes it seemed that the old man's gravity
+lightened by a shade. "You will concede, señor, that I warned you--that
+no gringo would ever force himself in on my lands?"
+
+"Yes, and I did my best to disprove it. For my partner's sake I am
+sorry. For my own"--he looked at his wife--"I am glad."
+
+"Well spoken, señor." The shadow of a smile illumined the old man's
+dark reserve. "But if I warned you, it does not follow that I have not
+watched with some sympathy your struggle. In watching, too, my old eyes
+have been opened upon truths that I had refused to see, though they lay
+under my nose. We are an old people, señor, we Mexicans. The old blood
+of Spain added no effervescence to the Aztec strains that were grown
+stagnant long before Cortez landed, and when a people ages nature
+removes it to make way for younger stock. _Si_, though I refused to
+acknowledge it, I have known many years that just as the Moors overran
+Spain, and the Spanish overran the Aztecs, so will your people overrun
+Mexico from the Northern Sierras to the Gulf.
+
+"Once I had thought to stay it. But time cools the hottest blood, and
+the one I had counted upon to uphold my old hands is gone to his place
+forever. Also I have seen that no man can dam the tide or shut the gates
+that Porfirio Diaz opened. As it went with Texas and Alta California so
+will it go with all our states. Against your Yankee our softer people
+can never stand. In the time to come only those of us that mix blood
+with shrewder strains will be able to withstand the flood, and thus it
+is I, who would have killed once the man that said I should ever take
+a gringo for kinsman, accept you with resignation. Perhaps it is the
+easier because one such mixture gave us this bright girl. And if you
+took time by the forelock 'tis not for me to grumble. One word more--"
+He threw one arm around Francesca, who had crossed to his side. "It has
+never been the habit of the Garcias to overlook a good dower to one of
+the house, and the fact that my niece has given you herself in exchange
+for her life does not cancel _my_ debt. Give me the papers. The others,
+Paulo--to the señor."
+
+While Seyd gazed at the title deeds to Santa Gertrudis, made out to
+himself and Billy, the old man slowly tore up the forfeiture. Applying a
+match to the pieces, he threw them on the hearth, and, blazing up, they
+added warmth to the grim smile that accompanied his words.
+
+"I told you, señor, that no gringo should ever _force_ himself in on my
+land."
+
+                              THE END
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
+
+Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise,
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
+intent.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of The Barranca, by Herman Whitaker
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA ***
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mystery of the Barranca, by Herman Whitaker.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
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+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
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+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of The Barranca, by Herman Whitaker
+
+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 Mystery of The Barranca
+
+Author: Herman Whitaker
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2011 [EBook #36198]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D Alexander and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 308px;">
+<img src="images/icover.jpg" class="jpg" width="308" height="500" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<div class="centerbox bbox">
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h1>THE MYSTERY OF<br />
+THE BARRANCA</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>HERMAN WHITAKER</h2>
+
+<p class="center">AUTHOR OF<br />
+&#8220;THE PLANTER&#8221; AND<br />
+&#8220;THE SETTLER&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 66px;">
+<img src="images/i001logo.jpg" width="66" height="80" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<h3>NEW YORK AND LONDON<br />
+HARPER &amp; BROTHERS PUBLISHERS<br />
+MCMXIII</h3></div>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT 1913 BY HARPER &amp; BROTHERS</p>
+
+<hr class="tiny" />
+
+<p class="center">PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA<br />
+PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 1913</p>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 328px;">
+<img src="images/i003.jpg" width="328" height="500" alt="[See page 248
+SEYD LIFTED FRANCESCA AND LEAPED" title="" />
+<span class="caption"><span style="margin-left: 14.5em;">[See page <a href="#Page_248">248</a></span><br />
+SEYD LIFTED FRANCESCA AND LEAPED</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+<div class="centerbox2 bbox2"><p>&#8220;<i>To Vera, my daughter and gentle collaborator, whose nimble fingers
+lightened the load of many labors, this book is lovingly dedicated.</i>&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" width="35%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" summary="CONTENTS">
+   <col width="48%" />
+   <col width="4%" />
+   <col width="48%" />
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#THE_MYSTERY_OF_THE_BARRANCA">Chapter I</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">Chapter XV</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">Chapter II</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">Chapter XVI</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">Chapter III</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">Chapter XVII</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Chapter IV</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">Chapter XVIII</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">Chapter V</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">Chapter XIX</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">Chapter VI</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">Chapter XX</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">Chapter VII</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">Chapter XXI</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">Chapter VIII</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">Chapter XXII</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">Chapter IX</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">Chapter XXIII</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">Chapter X</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">Chapter XXIV</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">Chapter XI</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">Chapter XXV</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">Chapter XII</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">Chapter XXVI</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">Chapter XIII</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">Chapter XXVII</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">Chapter XIV</a></td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">Chapter XXVIII</a></td></tr>
+
+</table></div>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h1><a name="THE_MYSTERY_OF_THE_BARRANCA" id="THE_MYSTERY_OF_THE_BARRANCA"></a>THE MYSTERY<br />
+OF THE BARRANCA</h1>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<p style="float: left; font-size: 100%; line-height: 80%; margin-top: 0;">&#8220;</p><p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">O</span>h Bob, just look at them!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Leaning down from his perch on the sacked mining tools which formed the
+apex of their baggage, Billy Thornton punched his companion in the back
+to call his attention to a scene which had spread a blaze of humor over
+his own rich crop of freckles.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, the spectacle of two men fondly embracing can
+always be depended on to stir the crude Anglo-Saxon sense of humor. In
+this case it was rendered still more ridiculous by age and portliness,
+but two years&#8217; wandering through interior Mexico had accustomed
+Thornton&#8217;s comrade, Robert Seyd, to the sight. After a careless glance
+he resumed his contemplation of the crowd that thronged the little
+station. Exhibiting every variety of Mexican costume, from the plain
+white blanket of the peons to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>leather suits of the rancheros and
+the hacendados, or owners of estates, it was as picturesque and
+brilliant in color and movement as anything in a musical extravaganza.
+The European clothing of a young girl who presently stepped out of the
+ticket office emphasized the theatrical flavor by its vivid contrast.
+She might easily have been the captive heroine among bandits, and the
+thought actually occurred to Billy. While she paused to call her dog, a
+huge Siberian wolf hound, she was hidden from Seyd&#8217;s view by the stout
+embracers. Therefore it was to the dog that he applied Billy&#8217;s remark at
+first.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Isn&#8217;t she a peach?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She seemed the finest of her race that he had ever seen, and Seyd was
+just about to say that she carried herself like a &#8220;perfect lady&#8221; when
+the dissolution of the aforesaid embrace brought the girl into view. He
+stopped&mdash;with a small gasp that testified to his astonishment at her
+unusual type.</p>
+
+<p>Although slender for her years&mdash;about two and twenty&mdash;her throat and
+bust were rounded in perfect development. The clear olive complexion was
+undoubtedly Spanish, yet her face lacked the firm line that hardens with
+the years. Perhaps some strain of Aztec blood&mdash;from which the
+Spanish-Mexican is never free&mdash;had helped to soften her features, but
+this would not account for their pleasing irregularity. A bit
+<i>r&eacute;trous&eacute;e</i>, the small nose with its well-defined nostrils patterned
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>after the Celtic. Had Seyd known it, the face in its entirety&mdash;colors
+and soft contours&mdash;is to be found to this day among the descendants of
+the sailors who escaped from the wreck of the Spanish Armada on the west
+coast of Ireland. Pretty and unusual as she was, her greatest charm
+centered in the large black eyes that shone amid her clear pallor,
+conveying in broad day the tantalizing mystery of a face seen for an
+instant through a warm gloaming. In the moment that he caught their
+velvet glance Seyd received an impression of vivacious intelligence
+altogether foreign in his experience of Mexican women.</p>
+
+<p>As she was standing only a few feet away, he knew that she must have
+heard Billy&#8217;s remark; but, counting on her probable ignorance of
+English, he did not hesitate to answer. &#8220;Pretty? Well, I should
+say&mdash;pretty enough to marry. The trouble is that in this country the
+ugliness of the grown woman seems to be in inverse ratio to her girlish
+beauty. Bet you the fattest hacendado is her father. And she&#8217;ll give him
+pounds at half his age.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Maybe,&#8221; Billy answered. &#8220;Yet I&#8217;d be almost willing to take the chance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As the girl had turned just then to look at the approaching train
+neither of them caught the sudden dark flash, supreme disdain, that drew
+an otherwise quite tender red mouth into a scarlet line. But for the dog
+they would never have <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>been a whit the wiser. For as the engine came
+hissing along the platform the brute sprang and crouched on the tracks,
+furiously snarling, ready for a spring at the headlight, which it
+evidently took for the Adam&#8217;s apple of the strange monster. The train
+still being under way, the poor beast&#8217;s faith would have cost it its
+life but for Seyd&#8217;s quickness. In the moment that the girl&#8217;s cry rang
+out, and in less time than it took Billy to slide from his perch, Seyd
+leaped down, threw the dog aside, and saved himself by a spring to the
+cow-catcher.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you fool! You crazy idiot!&#8221; While thumping him soundly, Billy ran
+on, &#8220;To risk your life for a dog&mdash;a Mexican&#8217;s, at that!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But he stopped dead, blushed till his freckles were extinguished, as the
+girl&#8217;s voice broke in from behind.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And the Mexican thanks you, sir. It was foolhardy, yes, and dearly as I
+love the dog I would not have had you take such a risk. But now that it
+is done&mdash;accept my thanks.&#8221; As the stouter of the embracers now came
+bustling up, she added in Spanish, &#8220;My uncle, se&ntilde;or.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At close range she was even prettier; but, though gratitude had wiped
+out the flash of disdain, a vivid memory of his late remarks caused Seyd
+to turn with relief to the hacendado. During the delivery of effusive
+thanks he had time to cancel a first impression&mdash;gained from a rear view
+of a gaudy jacket&mdash;of a fat tenor in a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>Spanish opera, for the man&#8217;s
+head and features were cast in a massive mold. His big fleshy nose
+jutted out from under heavy brows that overshadowed wide, sagacious
+eyes, Indian-brown in color. If the wind and weather of sixty years had
+tanned him dark as a peon, it went excellently with his grizzled
+mustache. Despite his stoutness and the costume, every fat inch of him
+expressed the soldier.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My cousin, se&ntilde;or.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Having been placed, metaphorically, in possession of all the hacendado&#8217;s
+earthly possessions, Seyd turned to exchange bows with a young man who
+had just emerged from the baggage-room&mdash;at least he seemed young at the
+first glance. A second look showed that the impression was largely due
+to a certain trimness of figure which was accentuated by the perfect fit
+of a suit of soft-dressed leather. When he raised his felt sombrero the
+hair showed thin on his temples. Neither were his poise and
+imperturbable manner attributes of youth.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was very clever of you, se&ntilde;or.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A slight peculiarity of intonation made Seyd look up. &#8220;Jealous,&#8221; he
+thought, yet he was conscious of something else&mdash;some feeling too
+elusively subtle to be analyzed on the spur of the moment. Suggesting,
+as it did, that he had made a &#8220;gallery play,&#8221; the remark roused in him
+quick irritation. But had it been possible to frame an answer there was
+no time, for just then the familiar <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>cry, &#8220;<i>Vaminos!</i>&#8221; rang out, and the
+American conductor hustled uncle, niece, and her dog into the nearest
+car.</p>
+
+<p>The entire incident had occupied little more than a moment, and as, a
+little bewildered by its rush, Seyd stood looking after the train he
+found himself automatically raising his cap in reply to a fluttering
+handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You Yankees are certainly very enterprising.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Turning quickly, Seyd met again the glance of subtle hostility. But,
+though he felt certain that the remark had been called forth by his
+salute, he had no option but to apply it to the mining kit toward which
+the other was pointing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are for the mines, se&ntilde;or? In return for your service to my cousin
+it is, perhaps, that I can be of assistance&mdash;in the hiring of men and
+mules?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While equally quiet and subtle, the patronage in his manner was easier
+to meet. Undisturbed, however, when Seyd declined his offer, he
+sauntered quietly away.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Bueno!</i> As you wish.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<p style="float: left; font-size: 100%; line-height: 80%; margin-top: 0;">&#8220;</p><p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">I</span>&#8217;ll be with you in a minute, folks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To appreciate the accent which the American station agent laid on
+&#8220;folks&#8221; it is necessary that one should have been marooned for a couple
+of years in a ramshackle Mexican station with only a chocolate-skinned
+henchman, or <i>mozo</i>, for companion. It asserted at once welcome and
+patriotic feeling.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know this isn&#8217;t the old United States,&#8221; he added, hurrying by.
+&#8220;These greasers are the limit. Close one eye for half a minute and when
+you open it again it&#8217;s a cinch you&#8217;ll find the other gone. If they&#8217;d
+just swipe each other&#8217;s baggage it wouldn&#8217;t be so bad. But they steal
+their own, then sue the company for the loss. Here, you sons of burros,
+drop that!&#8221; with which he dived headlong into the midst of the free
+fight that a crowd of <i>cargadores</i>, or porters, were waging over the
+up train baggage.</p>
+
+<p>Taking warning, the two returned to their own baggage. As they waited,
+talking, these two closest of friends offered a fairly startling
+contrast. In the case of Seyd, a graduate in mining of California
+University, years of study and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>strain had tooled his face till his
+aggressive nose stood boldly out above hollowed cheeks and black-gray
+eyes. A trifle over medium height, the hundred and sixty pounds he ought
+to have carried had been reduced a good ten pounds by years of
+prospecting in Mexico and Arizona. This loss of flesh, however, had been
+more than made up by a corresponding gain in muscle. Moving a few paces
+around the baggage, he exhibited the easy, steady movement that comes
+from the perfect co-ordination of nerve and muscle. His feet seemed
+first to feel, then to take hold of the ground. In fact, his entire
+appearance conveyed the impression of force under perfect control, ready
+to be turned loose in any direction.</p>
+
+<p>Shorter than Seyd by nearly half a foot, Billy Thornton, on the other
+hand, was red where the other was dark, loquacious instead of
+thoughtful. From his fiery shock of red hair and undergrowths of red
+stubble to his slangy college utterance he proved the theory of the
+attraction of opposites. Bosom friends at college, it had always been
+understood between them that when either got his &#8220;hunch&#8221; the other
+should be called in to share it. And as the luck&mdash;in the shape of a rich
+copper mine&mdash;had come first to Seyd, he had immediately wired for Billy.
+They were talking it over, as they so often before had done, when the
+agent returned.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why&mdash;you&#8217;re the fellow that was down here <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>last fall, ain&#8217;t you?&#8221; he
+asked, offering his hand. &#8220;Didn&#8217;t recognize you at first. You don&#8217;t mean
+to say that you have denounced&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;The Santa Gertrudis prospect?&#8221; Seyd nodded. &#8220;He means the opposition
+I told you we might expect.&#8221; He answered Billy&#8217;s look of inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Opposition!&#8221; The agent spluttered. &#8220;That&#8217;s one word for it. But since
+you&#8217;re so consarnedly cool about it, mister, let me tell you that this
+makes the eleventh time that mine has been denounced, and so far nobody
+has succeeded in holding it.&#8221; Looking at Billy, probably as being the
+more impressionable, he ran on: &#8220;The first five were Mex and as there
+were no pesky foreign consuls to complicate the case with bothersome
+inquiries, they simply vanished. One by one they came, hit the trail out
+there in a cloud of dust, and were never seen again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;After them came the Dutchman, a big fat fellow, obstinate as one of his
+own mules, and a scrapper. For a while it looked as though he&#8217;d make
+good&mdash;might have, perhaps, if he hadn&#8217;t taken to using his dynamite box
+for a pillow. You see, his peons used to steal the sticks to fish, and
+so many of them blew themselves into kingdom come that he was always
+running shy on labor. So, as I say, he used the box for a pillow till it
+went off one night and distributed him all over the Barranca de
+Guerrero. Just how it came about of course nobody knew, nor cared, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>and
+they never did find a piece big enough to warrant an inquest. It just
+went as accidental, and he&#8217;d scarcely, so to say, stopped raining before
+a Frenchman jumped the claim. But he only lasted for a couple of days,
+landed back here within a week, and jumped the up train without a word.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Last came the English Johnnies, two of &#8217;em, the real &#8216;haw, haw&#8217; boys;
+no end of style to them and their outfit. As they had hosts of friends
+up Mexico City, it would never have done to use harsh measures. But if
+the Johnnies had influence of one sort, Don Luis&mdash;he&#8217;s the landowner,
+you know&mdash;had it to burn of another. Not only did he gain a general&#8217;s
+commission during the revolutionary wars, but he&#8217;s also a member of the
+Mexican Congress, so close to the government that he needs only to wink
+to get what he wants. So just about the time the Johnnies had finished
+development work and begun to deliver ore out here at the
+railroad&mdash;presto! freights went up, prices went down, till they&#8217;d wiped
+out the last cent of profit. Out go the Johnnies&mdash;enter you.&#8221; With real
+earnestness he concluded: &#8220;Of course, there&#8217;s nothing I&#8217;d like better
+than to have you for neighbors. It ain&#8217;t so damn lively here. But I&#8217;d
+hate to see you killed. Take my advice, and quit.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had addressed himself principally to Billy. But instead of
+discouragement, impish delight illumined the latter&#8217;s freckles. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;A full-sized general with the whole Mexican government behind him?
+Bully! I never expected anything half so good. But, say! If the mine is
+so rich why don&#8217;t the old cock work it himself instead of leaving it to
+be denounced by any old tramp?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because he don&#8217;t have to. He has more money now than he ever can use.
+He is worth half a million in cattle alone. And he&#8217;s your old-fashioned
+sort that hate the very thought of change. By the way, he just left on
+the up train, him and his niece.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What, the girl with the dog?&#8221; Billy yelled it. &#8220;Didn&#8217;t you see&mdash;no, you
+were in the baggage-room. Well, he&#8217;s our dearest friend&mdash;presented Seyd
+here with all of his horses, cattle, lands, and friends. A bit of a
+mining claim ought not to cut much ice in an order like that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You met them?&#8221; The agent shook his head, however, after he had heard
+the particulars. &#8220;Don&#8217;t count much on Spanish courtesies. They go no
+deeper than the skin. Nice girl, the niece, more like us than Mex, and
+she ain&#8217;t full-blood, for matter of that. Her grandfather was Irish, a
+free lance that fought with Diaz during the French war. His son by a
+Mexican wife married Don Luis&#8217;s sister, and when he died she and her
+daughter came to keep the old fellow&#8217;s house, for he&#8217;s been a widower
+these twenty years. Like most of the sprigs of the best Mexican
+families, she was educated in Europe, so she speaks three
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>languages&mdash;English, French, and Spanish. Yes, they&#8217;re nice people from
+the old Don down, but lordy! how he hates us gringos. He&#8217;ll repay you
+for the life of the dog&mdash;perhaps by saving you alive for a month? But
+after that&mdash;take my advice, and git.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While he was talking, Seyd had listened with quiet interest. Now he put
+in, &#8220;We will&mdash;just as quickly as we can hire men and burros to pack our
+stuff out to the mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, if you will&mdash;you will.&#8221; Having thus divested himself of
+responsibility, the agent continued: &#8220;And here&#8217;s where your troubles
+begin. Though donkey-drivers are as thick as fleas in this town, I doubt
+whether you can hire one to go to Santa Gertrudis.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the Englishmen?&#8221; Seyd questioned. &#8220;They must have had help.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Brought their entire outfit down with them from Mexico City.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After Seyd&#8217;s rejection of his offer the hacendado had entered into
+conversation with a ranchero at the other end of the platform, and,
+glancing a little regretfully in his direction, Seyd asked, &#8220;Do you know
+him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The agent nodded. &#8220;Sebastien Rocha? Yes, he&#8217;s a nephew to the General.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He offered to get me mules.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He did! Why, man alive! he hates gringos worse than&mdash;worse than I hate
+Mexicans. <i>He</i> offered you help? I doubt he&#8217;ll do it when he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>knows
+where you&#8217;re going.&#8221; In a last attempt at dissuasion he added, &#8220;But if
+he doesn&#8217;t I can&#8217;t see how you can win out with rates and prices at the
+same mark that wiped out the Johnnies.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s our business.&#8221; Seyd laughed. Then, warmed by the honest fellow&#8217;s
+undoubted anxiety, he said, &#8220;Do you remember any consignment of brick
+that ever came to this station?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sure, three car loads, billed to the Dutchman. But what has that to
+do&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just this&mdash;that the man had the right idea. Though the mine is the
+richest copper proposition I have ever seen&mdash;besides carrying gold
+values sufficient to cover smelting expenses&mdash;it would never pay, as you
+say, to ship it out at present prices. But once smelted down into copper
+matte there&#8217;s a fortune in it, as the Dutchman knew. He had already laid
+out the foundation of an old-style Welsh smelter, and, though it isn&#8217;t
+very big, we propose to make it stake us to a modern plant.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So that&#8217;s your game!&#8221; The agent whistled.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s our game,&#8221; Billy confirmed. &#8220;If dear cousin over there can only
+be persuaded to furnish the mules we will do the rest. Go ask him, Bob.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd hesitated. &#8220;I&#8217;m afraid that I turned him down rather roughly. Let&#8217;s
+try first ourselves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For the last half hour their baggage had formed a center of interest for
+the porters, mule-drivers, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>and hackmen who formed the bulk of the
+crowd, and the snap of the agent&#8217;s fingers brought a score of them
+running. Each tried to make his calling and election sure by seizing a
+piece of baggage. In ten seconds the pile was dissolved and was flowing
+off in as many different directions when Seyd&#8217;s answer to a question
+brought all to a sudden halt.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To the <i>mina</i> Santa Gertrudis.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Crash! the kit of mining tools dropped from the shoulder of the muleteer
+who had asked the question, and it had no more than touched earth before
+it was buried under the other pieces.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I told you so,&#8221; the agent commented, and was going on when a voice
+spoke in from their rear.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is the trouble, se&ntilde;ors?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The hacendado had approached unnoticed, and, turning quickly, Seyd met
+for the third time the equivocal look, now lightened by a touch of
+amusement. Suppressing a recurrence of irritation he answered, quietly:
+&#8220;We wish to go to the hacienda San Nicolas, se&ntilde;or, upon which we have
+denounced the mining claim known as the Santa Gertrudis. For some reason
+no one of these men will hire. Perhaps you can tell why?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now your fat&#8217;s in the fire,&#8221; the agent muttered.</p>
+
+<p>Whether or no he had overheard Seyd&#8217;s answer to the muleteer, the man&#8217;s
+dark face gave no sign. &#8220;<i>Quien sabe?</i> Ask their blood brother, the
+burro. One would have little to do and time <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>to waste if he attempted to
+plumb a mule-driver&#8217;s superstitions. <i>Ola</i>, Carlos.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While he was talking the crowd had continued to back away, but it
+stopped now and stood staring, for all the world like a herd of
+frightened cattle. The big muleteer who had led the retreat returned on
+a shuffling run, and as he stood before the hacendado, sombrero in hand,
+Seyd saw the fear in his face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This fellow sometimes works for me. You will need&#8221;&mdash;he paused,
+overlooking the baggage&mdash;&#8220;three burros and two riding-mules. He has only
+two. <i>Ola</i>, Mattias!&#8221; When a second muleteer had come with the same
+breathless haste he gave the quiet order, &#8220;You will take these se&ntilde;ors to
+Santa Gertrudis.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Bowing slightly, he had walked away before Seyd could lay hands on
+enough Spanish to state his obligation, and as, pausing, he then looked
+back his face once more changed, expressing knowledge and sarcastic
+amusement at the mixed feelings behind Seyd&#8217;s halting thanks. His bow,
+returning the customary answer, was more than half shrug.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is nothing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+
+<p>&#8220;One moment, se&ntilde;or!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The burrors having departed with their loads, Seyd and Billy were
+mounting to follow when the hacendado called to them from the platform.
+&#8220;To-night, of course, you will stay in Chilpancin. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>But to-morrow? By
+which trail do you travel?&#8221; When Seyd answered he added a word of
+counsel: &#8220;I thought so. Most strangers take that way. But there is a
+shorter by many miles. Instruct your drivers to take the old trail down
+the Barranca.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thanking him, they rode on.</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with the mysterious and immutable law which places all
+Mexican cities at least a mile from the railroad, they traveled nearly
+half an hour before sighting, across a barranca, the town cuddled in a
+hollow beneath the opposite hills. Under the rich light of the waning
+sun the variegated color of its walls, houses, churches, merged in warm
+gold, glowed like a topaz in the setting of the dark hills. Paved with
+river cobbles and crooked as a dog&#8217;s hind leg, a street fell steeply
+down into the barranca from whose black depths uprose the low roar of
+rushing waters. Entering upon it, while still within sound of a freight
+engine puffing upgrade to the station, they dropped back four hundred
+years into the midst of a life that differed but little from that of the
+Aztecs under the Montezumas.</p>
+
+<p>On both sides of the street one-story adobes flamed in all the colors of
+the rainbow&mdash;roses, purples, umber, greens&mdash;a vivid alternation which
+was toned only by the weathered gray of heavy doors and massive oaken
+grills across the windows. At the tinkle of their bells there would come
+a flash of Spanish eyes in the cool dusk <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>behind the windows, and a
+pretty face would emerge from deep shadow to fade again before Billy&#8217;s
+smile. The peons and hooded women on the narrow causeways were equally
+reserved. They either passed without according them notice or returned
+to their glances a stolid stare. Theirs were the dark, impenetrable
+faces of old Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>While they were climbing at a snail&#8217;s pace the opposite hill, dusk fell
+over the town, but presently, riding out of a black alley into the main
+plaza, they emerged on a scene that caused even the matter-of-fact Billy
+to exclaim in wonder. On all four sides hundreds of torches blossomed in
+the dusk, toning with soft rich lights the vivid adobes, tinting the
+cold white blankets and garments of the hucksters who squatted by their
+displays&mdash;guavas and pineapples, cocoanuts, mangoes, alligator pears,
+and other fruits of the tropics which shared the same straw mat with
+cabbage, squash, onions, and other familiar produce of the cold North.
+In accordance with the shrewd policy that has always kept the Roman
+Church in close touch with its world, the booths extended to the very
+doors of a stone church which occupied one side of the square, and the
+heavy odors of fried garlic mingled with the breath of incense that
+floated out through the wide doors.</p>
+
+<p>A religious fiesta was in full blast, and they had to turn the mules to
+avoid the stream of worshipers who shuffled across the square, up <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>the
+stone steps, and the length of the paved aisles to the great altar which
+blazed with the light of a thousand candles. Looking, as they rode past,
+they saw a peon&mdash;whose spotless blanket shone whiter by contrast with
+the scarlet serape which had fallen backward across his calves&mdash;erect on
+his knees, arms extended in a rigid cross, a figure of deathless
+adoration before the Virgin. It required only the brazen storm of bells
+that just then broke overhead to complete the atmosphere of savage
+medievalism. The worshipers might easily have been the first Aztec
+converts crawling before the superior altars of the Spanish conquerors&#8217;
+God.</p>
+
+<p>Seyd, always thoughtful and sensitive to impression, felt the influence
+of the scene, and the feeling deepened as their mules struck hollow
+echoes in the vaulted passage of the hotel whose iron-studded gates,
+barred windows, yard-thick walls all bespoke a life which had not yet
+progressed beyond the era of sieges. A runway led down into a wide
+courtyard and to the stables which lay under a tiled gallery, the hotel
+proper, for the cell-like sleeping-rooms used by the better class opened
+upon it.</p>
+
+<p>But the real life of the place surged in the patio, or courtyard, below,
+and, after they had dined on rice, eggs, and beans, or frijoles, Billy
+and Seyd perched on the balustrade of the gallery to watch its ebb and
+flow. Into the great stone inclosure muleteers of Tepic, freighters of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>Guadalajara, potters of Cuernavaca and Taxco, pilgrims to the far
+shrines, and their first cousins in dirt and importunity, the beggars,
+had poured from three main lines of travel, and they were so crowded
+that it was difficult to find space among the mule panniers, crates, and
+bundles for their tiny cooking-fires. On occasion a face, plump and
+darkly pretty, would bloom out of the dusk as a woman fanned the
+charcoal under her clay cooking-pots. Again, a leaping flame would
+illumine a hawk face, deeply bronzed and heavily mustached, or lend a
+deeper dye to the scarlet of some sleeper&#8217;s serape. In its rich somber
+color the scene made a picture that would have been loved by Rembrandt.
+Just as it had done for centuries before the great master was born to
+his brush, the scene changed and mingled, ebbed and flowed, while its
+units passed among the fires, exchanging the gossip of the trails. The
+hum of it rose to the gallery like the low roar of a distant torrent,
+but out of it Seyd was able to catch and translate isolated scraps.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Take not thy <i>aguardiente</i> to El Quiss, <i>amigo</i>. The administrador&mdash;I
+tell it to my ruth, since I was well skinned by him&mdash;is a thief of the
+nether world. He would flay a flea for the hide and fat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Ola</i>, Carlos! The <i>jefe</i> [chief of police] of San Pedro is keeping an
+eye for thy return ever since he bought the last load of charcoal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The swine! Is it my fault that he expects good oak burning for the
+price of soft ceiba?&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p><p>One remark caused Seyd to prick his ears, for it was addressed to one of
+their own muleteers. &#8220;Where go the gringos, <i>amigo</i>? To Santa Gertrudis?
+And thou art driving for them? <i>Hombre</i>, hast thou so little regard for
+thy neck?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The answer was lost in the sudden braying of a burro in the stables
+underneath, but the voice of the questioner, a strident tenor, rose over
+all. &#8220;An order from Don Sebastien? <i>Carambar-r-r-r-a!</i> And you go by the
+old trail down the Barranca? But, <i>hombre</i>! It is&mdash;&#8221; The voice lowered
+so that Seyd could not hear.</p>
+
+<p>Imagining that the talk bore merely on the condition of the trail, he
+dismissed it from his mind and returned to his study of the crowd,
+permitting his gaze to wander here, there, wherever the incessant
+movement brought to the surface some bit of color or trait of life. In
+this he obeyed a natural instinct. Endowed with a temperament nicely
+balanced between the philosophical and the practical, he had taken an
+auxiliary course in &#8220;letters&#8221; along with his mining for the sole purpose
+of broadening his viewpoint and widening his touch with life. Indeed, he
+had bent his profession to the same end, using it as a means to travel
+and study, in which he differed altogether from Billy, who was the
+mining engineer in every dimension. Where Billy saw only the externals,
+humors, and absurdities, and the picturesqueness of that teeming life,
+Seyd&#8217;s subtle intelligence took hold of the primordial feeling <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>under it
+all. Contributing only an occasional answer to the other&#8217;s chatter, he
+bathed in the atmosphere and absorbed the wild medievalism of it while
+reviewing in thought the events of the day. The girl and her dog, her
+uncle the General, Don Sebastien the hacendado&mdash;the latter was in his
+mind when the sudden leaping of a fire at the far end of the patio
+revealed his face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Look!&#8221; But in the moment Seyd grasped Billy&#8217;s arm the blaze fell. &#8220;I
+thought I saw him&mdash;that fellow, Sebastien&mdash;talking to Carlos, our
+mule-driver.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, why not?&#8221; Billy answered. &#8220;I gathered that he lives far out. Like
+ourselves, probably too far to start out to-night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course.&#8221; Seyd nodded. &#8220;He just happened to be in my mind. Only why
+should he be in talk with our mule-driver?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Search me.&#8221; Billy shrugged. &#8220;But if he was, it is easy to prove it.
+There&#8217;s Carlos now. Call him up here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The muleteer, when questioned a minute later, shook his head. &#8220;No,
+se&ntilde;or, Don Sebastien is not here. He rode out at sunset, is now leagues
+away on the trail.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If he were lying, his brown stolid face gave no sign; and, having given
+him his orders for next day, Seyd returned to his study of the crowd. He
+had forgotten the incident by the time Billy dragged him away to bed. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<p style="float: left; font-size: 100%; line-height: 80%; margin-top: 0;">&#8220;</p><p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">I</span>f we are on the road at daybreak we shall reach the Barranca early in
+the afternoon,&#8221; Seyd had said, commenting on his order to the
+mule-driver. But, fagged out by the day&#8217;s hot travel, they did not
+awaken until a slender beam of light stole between the iron window bars
+and laid a golden finger across Billy&#8217;s eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We shall have to hustle now.&#8221; Seyd concluded a diatribe on the Mexican
+<i>mozo</i> in general while they were dressing. &#8220;For you must see the
+Barranca by daylight. Without its naked savagery it is as big and grand
+as the Colorado Ca&ntilde;on. Besides, if this trail is as dizzy a proposition
+as the one I went by on the last trip, I&#8217;d rather not tackle it after
+dark.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It would have been just as well, however, had they taken their time, for
+after breakfast came Carlos with a tale of cast-off shoes. It was Paz
+and Luz, the mules the se&ntilde;ors were riding! And having roundly cursed the
+memory of the fool wife who had been induced by an apparently innocent
+colthood to bestow names of beauty like Peace and Light upon such
+misbegotten devils, Carlos further informed them: </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Never were there such ungrateful brutes, se&ntilde;ors. Not content with the
+good barley I had just fed him, Paz it is that takes a piece out of
+Padre Celso&#8217;s arm one fine day and so gets me cursed with candle and
+Book. And the curse sticks, se&ntilde;ors, working itself out by means of this
+devil of a light who, within one week, chooses the fat belly of the
+<i>jefe</i> of Tehultepec as a cushion for his heels. A year&#8217;s earnings that
+trick cost me, not to mention the prettiest set of blue stripes that
+ever warmed a cold back. Neither is there a tree between San Blas and
+the Arroyo Grande that they have not used to scrape off a load. But this
+shall be the end. They shall feel the knife in their throats at the end
+of this trip.&#8221; In the mean time would the se&ntilde;ors be pleased to wait for
+an hour?</p>
+
+<p>There being no other choice, the se&ntilde;ors would, and, returning to their
+last night&#8217;s perch on the balustrade, they watched the patio disgorge
+its dark life upon the street. Shining in over the low-tiled roofs, the
+sunlight struck and was thrown back by the massive golden walls on the
+opposite side in a flood that set fire to brilliant serapes, illumined
+silver buttons, filled the whole place with light and cheer. Not to
+mention their interest in the saddling and packing of the loads&mdash;to
+which some refractory mule contributed an occasional humorous touch&mdash;a
+comedy was invariably enacted between the fat landlord and the departing
+travelers, for only after an altercation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>which always required the
+witness of all the saints to the reasonableness of his charges were the
+gates swung open. With much haggling and confusion of crackling oaths
+they went out, one by one, <i>cargadores</i> and peons, beggars and
+pilgrims, the tinkling mule trains with their quaint freights, and not
+until the last hoof struck on the cobbles did Seyd think to look at his
+watch.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nine o&#8217;clock. What has become of those&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately they arrived at that moment with Paz and Luz, the damned and
+foredoomed, and a quarter of an hour thereafter their bells tinkled
+pleasantly in the scrub oak and copal which first climbed with the trail
+up a ravine behind the town and then led on through fields where corn
+grew, by some green miracle thrusting stout green stalks between the
+stones.</p>
+
+<p>Though it was still quite early in the day, heat waves trembled all over
+the land. The somnolent hum of insect life, the whisper of a light wind
+in the corn, were alike conducive to sleep. Before they had been riding
+an hour both began to yawn. The sibilant hiss of the muleteers urging
+the mules grew fainter in Seyd&#8217;s ears, and, though he was conscious in a
+dim way that the trail had led out from the fields and was falling,
+falling, falling downhill through growths of cactus and mimosa into the
+copal woods, he drowsed on till an exclamation from Billy aroused him to
+a grisly sight&mdash;the dozen and odd mummies whose withered <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>limbs clicked
+in the breeze as they swung by the neck from the wide boughs of a
+banyan.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Bandidos</i>, se&ntilde;or, thieves and cutthroats.&#8221; The bigger of the two
+muleteers answered Seyd&#8217;s question. &#8220;They were hanged by Don Sebastien.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, that&#8217;s our friend back at the station.&#8221; Billy commented on Seyd&#8217;s
+translation. &#8220;I&#8217;m sure that was the name the agent gave him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, se&ntilde;or,&#8221; the mule-driver confirmed the impression. &#8220;And these are
+but the tithe of those that he hanged. For years the whole of this
+country was overrun with <i>bandidos</i> who took advantage of the absence of
+the principal men at the wars to rob and murder at will. They were
+levying regular tolls on the rancheros and hacendados when Don Sebastien
+returned from his schooling. Though only a lad of two and twenty, he
+began by hanging the bandits&#8217; messenger in the gates of his hacienda, an
+act that all thought would end by the wiping of the very memory of the
+place from the face of the earth. But instead of waiting to be attacked
+Don Sebastien took the stoutest of his peons and went out after the
+thieves. And he kept after them all that winter, the following summer,
+into the next year. No trail was too long, wet, or weary if he could
+mark its end with a brigand swinging under a tree. Here, there,
+everywhere within a hundred miles of his hacienda of El Quiss he hanged
+them by twos and threes and left them to swing in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>wind, and it
+speaks for the fear in which he came to be held that no man, father,
+mother, sister, or lover dared to cut one down. Scarce a cross trail in
+this country that lacks its warning, and through his rigor it came to
+pass that you, se&ntilde;ors, might now leave your purses on the open highway
+where a dozen years ago you would surely have left your lives. No man
+would dare touch&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;Except Don Sebastien,&#8221; Seyd put in, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>But the man returned only a stare. &#8220;What use would he have of purses,
+se&ntilde;or, that has so many of his own?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perhaps to give to the Church.&#8221; But he stopped laughing, surprised by
+the sudden cloud that spread on the man&#8217;s face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Never! Though he has a church on his own hacienda, Don Sebastien never
+crosses its threshold. And Mattias, here, can tell you of the talk he
+gives to the priest.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si! si!</i>&#8221; In his eagerness to share the limelight the fellow almost
+shook off his head. &#8220;It is, see you, that I am delivering a mule load of
+charcoal at El Quiss on the very day that Don Sebastien hires the
+priest. You are to see him, as I did, sitting on the gallery above the
+courtyard puffing his cigar in such wise&mdash;was there ever such
+irreverence!&mdash;that the smoke rises in the face of the padre who stands
+before him. And his voice comes ringing down to where Miguel, the
+steward, is trying to beat me down a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>peso on the price of the charcoal.
+&#8216;I have builded you a church, and for performing the offices I shall pay
+you one hundred silver pesos the month, for, though I did not feel,
+myself, any need of your mutterings, they serve to keep my people quiet.
+Over them you shall exercise the usual authorities, and you may come and
+go at will through the hacienda&mdash;all but one place. If after this hour I
+find that your foot has touched my threshold I&#8217;ll hang you in its
+gates.&#8217; Thus he spoke, se&ntilde;or, and he would have done it&mdash;to a priest
+quicker than a bandit, for of the two it is hard to tell that which he
+hates the most.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hum!&#8221; Billy coughed when Seyd had translated. Jerking his thumb at the
+grisly witnesses to the tale&#8217;s truth, he commented: &#8220;I now begin to
+understand the general respect for our friend. A man who does things
+like that is entitled to some consideration. Let us be thankful for pump
+guns and automatics. If this had been the day of the old muzzle-loader
+I&#8217;m darned if I&#8217;d have tackled your hunch.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the next hour the red-tiled colored adobe hamlets of the small
+farmers began to give place to the <i>jacals</i> of the country, flimsy huts
+with sides of cane stalks and grass-thatched. Then the trail passed out
+from the eternal succession of corn and <i>maguey</i> fields into wastes of
+volcanic scoria, where it began presently to climb mountains, for no
+apparent reason except to fall dizzily into shallow valleys which were
+sparsely <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>timbered with copal and other soft woods. In one valley they
+came upon an Aztec ruin. A huge parallelogram in shape, it was more than
+half buried and so overgrown with brush and creepers that they would
+have passed without notice if the trail had not happened to run along
+the face of one wall. Looking closely, Seyd first observed a monstrous
+squat figure in bas-relief, one of dozens which were interwoven into an
+intricate design; then, riding along, he saw frightfully distorted faces
+peering out from behind a green veil of creepers. Broad and fat, long
+and thin, some were stretched in a wide grin, others thrust out tongues
+in ribald mockery. Here the eyes of one were distorted in a painful
+squint. There a slant upturn of tight-drawn lids revealed the
+quintessence of priestly cruelty. Another was grossly lewd. Through
+anger, violence, lust, fear, the expressions ran the gamut of passion to
+its death in the cold face of the god whose enormous image formed the
+corner. The oblong ears, triangular eyes and nose, parallel lips, were
+such as a child loves to draw on a slate, yet on that enormous scale
+their mathematical lines somehow conveyed an impression of absolute
+force. The Sphynx-like calm of the face stirred Seyd&#8217;s imagination with
+pictures of captives led to the Aztec altars. Even practical Billy was
+moved to remark:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Those old chaps couldn&#8217;t have been very nice neighbors.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;No; and they are the lineal ancestors of the neighbors we shall have
+presently.&#8221; Later the thought was to recur under conditions that would
+lend it enormous force. He forgot it in the moment of utterance, saying,
+as he glanced at his watch: &#8220;We have been doing pretty well. At this
+rate we&#8217;ll make the Barranca quite early.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had failed to allow, however, for the demon which, usually content
+with the complete possession of Paz and Luz, suddenly entered into the
+burros and sent them flying downhill through a grove of trees. Entering
+on one side fully loaded, they emerged at the other naked, and by the
+time they were rounded up and reloaded Seyd had to recast his schedule.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll be lucky if we make it now in daylight. We may have to camp at
+the top.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Repeated in Spanish, the latter suggestion drew vigorous headshakes from
+both muleteers. Carlos made answer. &#8220;No, se&ntilde;or, at this time of the year
+one would perish of the cold, and there is an inn in the Barranca with
+the finest of accommodations. The trail? It is nothing! A peso for every
+time I have traveled it by night would buy me a rancho&mdash;and Paz and Luz,
+devils as they are, could travel it blindfold.&#8221; And whether, as Billy
+suggested, they were afraid of missing their usual communion with the
+fleas in the inn stables, both he and Mattias began to hustle the mules
+with oaths, hissings, whip-crackings. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>They kept after them so hard that
+the train trotted out of a forest of upland pi&ntilde;on upon the rim of a
+great valley a full half hour before sundown.</p>
+
+<p>Though prepared by Seyd&#8217;s descriptions for something unusually fine,
+Billy&#8217;s blue eyes opened to the limit, and he sat silent upon his mule,
+staring, altogether bereft of his usual loquacity. From their feet the
+land broke suddenly and fell into purple depths from which dark hills
+uplifted ruddy peaks into the blaze of the setting sun. The Barranca was
+so deep, so vast in scale, that he grew dizzy in following with his eye
+the tiny zigzag of the trail down, down, till it was lost in blue haze
+through which even the giant ceibas and tall cedars showed like
+microscopic plants. Across the valley, miles away, naked mountains
+tossed and tumbled, seamed, scarred, gashed by slide and quake, sterile
+and desolate, as on the far day that some world convulsion raised them
+out of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Drunk! drunk!&#8221; Billy breathed, at last. &#8220;Nature gone on a jag. Drunken
+mountains loose in a crazy world. The whole earth is turned on edge.
+Hold me, Bob, before I fall in. How deep do you call this bit of a
+hole?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;About five thousand feet down to the floor. It falls off a thousand and
+more in a few miles to the coast. You see, we are still in touch with
+the old Pacific. Can&#8217;t be more than thirty miles or so down to the sea.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;The dear old pond. Isn&#8217;t that pine on the other side?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sure. An American company is taking out millions of feet, a hundred or
+so miles farther up. That&#8217;s a great old tree, and quite particular about
+the company it keeps. Look how sharply it draws the line along the
+slope, lifting its skirts from the contamination of the tropics. That
+spark of green in the far distance is sugar cane&mdash;two thousand acres of
+it on the General&#8217;s hacienda of San Nicolas. And you see the gash over
+there, all yellow and green, about three thousand feet down from the
+top&mdash;that is us, se&ntilde;or, the <i>mina</i> Santa Gertrudis. And that reminds
+me&mdash;we&#8217;ll have to be moving if we are to make the inn before midnight.
+<i>Vaminos</i>, Carlos.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the muleteer shook his head. &#8220;After you, se&ntilde;or, for if these devils
+should take to running again, not in six months should we fish your
+baggage out of the ca&ntilde;ons.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Leading down the trail, which zigzagged along the faces of a V-shaped
+wall, Seyd perceived, as he thought, the soundness of the argument, for
+at the first turn a stone from his mule&#8217;s foot dropped five hundred feet
+plumb before rebounding into greater depths, and at no place did the
+width of the path allow an unnecessary inch for the swing of the packs.
+Deceived by the succession of stairways through which the trail dropped
+down to the thin thread that marked its course along the bottoms, Billy
+objected: </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Three hours, you say? Looks to me as though we could make it in one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Less than that&mdash;if your mule should happen to slip and take it
+sideways. Let me see&mdash;allowing a thousand feet to a bump, about fourteen
+seconds ought to distribute you nicely among the bottom trees. But if
+you elect to follow me around the eight or nine miles of trail you
+cannot see, it will take the full three hours.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Even while he was speaking the ruddy fires on the valley hills were
+suddenly extinguished, only the stark peaks on the other side lifted
+like yellow torches in the last blaze. One by one these also went out,
+and another hour found them journeying in gloom that was intensified
+rather than lightened by the section of moon which achieved a precarious
+balance on the rim above. In darkness and silence that was broken only
+by the scrape of hoofs and rattle of displaced stones they followed down
+and down and down, until Billy presently came under a singular
+hallucination. Repeatedly he put out his hand to repel the rock wall
+that seemed to be animated with a desire to crowd him off into the
+ca&ntilde;on, and because of this pardonable nervousness he endured a real
+trial that would have drawn a quick protest from Seyd&mdash;to wit, the
+senseless way in which the muleteers were driving their beasts on his
+heels. Twice he rapped a rough nose that tried to force its way in
+between him and the wall, and he breathed more easily when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>an easier
+grade permitted them to draw ahead on a gentle trot.</p>
+
+<p>Accustomed, on his part, to leave all to his beast, Seyd rode with a
+loose bridle, lost in thought, his mind busy with mining plans. And thus
+it was that when Paz suddenly stopped, snorting, at the end of a trot
+which had carried them well ahead of the train around a rock wall, he
+almost went over her head. Recovering quickly, he was about to drive in
+the spurs; and a man of slower intuitions would surely have done it.
+With him, however, action invariably preceded thought, from instincts
+almost as acute as those which had brought the mule to a stop.
+Dismounting, he stepped ahead. Then, to the horror of Billy, who heard
+the burros slipping and sliding as they came round the wall on a trot,
+his voice came back.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hold on, there! A slide has carried away the trail!&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">A</span>lthough he had always doubted the phenomenon, Billy&#8217;s hair stood on
+end, and when, in the face of Seyd&#8217;s shouts in Spanish to stop, the
+burros still came on he felt his cap move.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Billy!&#8221; Seyd&#8217;s command rang out sharply. &#8220;Dismount and lie down. It&#8217;s
+our only chance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In that tense moment, however, Mr. William Thornton, assayer and
+metallurgist, had done an amount of thinking that would have required
+many minutes of his leisure. He was already on the ground, and as he lay
+there, arms wrapped over the back of his head as a protection against
+the sharp hoofs that would presently grind his face in the dust,
+uncomfortable expectation gave birth to inspiration. As Seyd also braced
+himself for the shock there came the scratch of a match, and Billy&#8217;s red
+head flashed out in relief against the belly of the leading burro as it
+upreared in fright at the blaze. In the same moment a second blunt head
+shoved itself like a wedge between the first burro and the wall, and as
+the gray body shot off sideways into the chasm Seyd saw first the others
+sliding in a desperate effort to stop, and behind them the mule whips
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>swinging to drive them on. As under a flashlight it all flamed out and
+vanished.</p>
+
+<p>In the short time required for Billy to strike a second match Seyd&#8217;s
+mind registered an astonishing number of impressions. A hoarse yell, a
+sudden scurry of departing hoofs, and Billy&#8217;s hysterical profanity
+formed merely the background of a sequence that flashed back over the
+events of the day. The scraps of muleteers&#8217; talk the night before, the
+runaway, and other minor delays, the drivers&#8217; refusal to camp on the
+rim, their insistence that he and Billy should take the lead, all fused
+in a belief which he expressed as the second match flaring up showed the
+trail empty of life between themselves and the next turn.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a frame-up! They knew of the slide. They had it fixed to run us
+off in the dark.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But where are they now?&#8221; Billy gazed down into the dark void. &#8220;Surely
+they didn&#8217;t all go over.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No such luck. The burros bolted back on them, and they just legged it
+out of the way. Listen!&#8221; A scurry of hoofs sounded on the level above.
+&#8220;There they go, and it&#8217;s up to us to keep them going. Back your mule up
+and turn. If we don&#8217;t give them the run of their lives we&#8217;ll deserve all
+they tried to give us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And run they did. Overtaking the burros just as they began to slow down,
+Seyd slipped ahead, struck a match close to the tail of the last, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>so precipitated the cavalcade once more upon the sweating drivers.
+Whereafter, they took turns and kept the frightened beasts on a
+breathless trot up the heartbreaking grades. Under the flare of a match
+they sometimes caught a glimpse of the muleteers shuffling ahead on a
+tired run. Occasionally their sobbing breath rose over the scrape of the
+hoofs. But first one riding, then the other, they hustled them on
+without mercy till the train opened at last upon the plateau above.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, then! Run them down!&#8221; Seyd shouted; but as he swung his mule out
+to go by the burros he almost ran into a horseman who had just reined
+his beast to one side of the trail.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is you, se&ntilde;or?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here on the top the light of the stars helped out the weak moon, and,
+though the man&#8217;s face was in shadow, Seyd recognized the upright,
+graceful figure. &#8220;Come to see if the job is done.&#8221; He thought it while
+answering aloud, &#8220;As you perceive, se&ntilde;or.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not until long after you left did I hear of the break in the trail, and
+I have ridden hard&mdash;used up one horse and half killed this poor beast.
+But no matter so long as I am in time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hypocrite!&#8221; Seyd thought again. A little nonplussed, however, by the
+tone of assurance, he gave his thought lighter expression. &#8220;You would
+not have been if these fellows had had their way.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;<i>Caramba</i>, se&ntilde;or! Why?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If his surprise were assumed it was certainly remarkably well done.
+While Seyd was telling of their narrow escape he sat his horse, silent
+but attentive. With the last word he burst into a fury of action.
+Uttering a Spanish oath, he drove in the spurs and rode his rearing
+horse straight at the mule-drivers, who had turned on Billy with drawn
+knives, lashing them with his heavy quirt over face, head, shoulders.
+Five minutes later his whip was still cutting the air with a shrill
+whistle, and, richly as the fellows deserved it, Seyd and Billy
+shuddered at the pitiless flogging. Strangest to them of all, the men
+endured this without attempt at flight or resistance. They stood, their
+arms shielding their faces, whimpering like beaten hounds.</p>
+
+<p>It was their abject submissiveness that injected a touch of doubt into
+Billy&#8217;s comment. &#8220;It looks, after all, as though they had done it
+themselves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd shrugged. &#8220;Perhaps; in any case we have no proof.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, blind swine, that will serve for a while!&#8221; Sebastien&#8217;s cold voice
+broke in. &#8220;Off with you and build a fire, then stake out the mules.&#8221;
+Seyd&#8217;s suspicion gave a little more before his quiet assurance. &#8220;You
+will have to stay here till morning, se&ntilde;ors, for it is many miles along
+the rim to the other trail. Unfortunately, it was your supply mule that
+went into the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>ca&ntilde;on, so you must needs go hungry. However, we have a
+proverb, &#8216;A warm fire helps the empty belly,&#8217; and to-morrow you will be
+able to recover your goods.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Neither did his expression, as presently revealed by the fire, offer
+evidence for doubt. As he stood looking down at the blaze Seyd was
+vividly reminded of the Aztec god, for its cold stone face was not more
+inscrutable than this quiet brown mask. Its inscrutability provoked him
+to ask a sudden question.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Did I not see you at the hotel last night?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the sudden challenge produced only an indifferent shrug. &#8220;Perhaps. I
+was there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He did look up at Billy&#8217;s vigorous comment on his answer as translated
+by Seyd: &#8220;Then why didn&#8217;t he show himself this morning? Goodness knows
+we left late enough.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He even asked, &#8220;What does he say?&#8221; And the sense having been softened in
+translation to an expression of mild wonder at his non-appearance, he
+quietly replied, &#8220;I do not doubt that the se&ntilde;or&#8217;s departure was fraught
+with enormous significance for the country at large, but not being
+informed of it, there was no reason for me to cut my sleep.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though the smile which marked his appreciation of the blush that drowned
+out Billy&#8217;s freckles when Seyd translated was so slight as to be almost
+imperceptible, it yet increased his anger. &#8220;The dago!&#8221; he growled. &#8220;I&#8217;d
+punch his head for five <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>cents Mex. The gall of him! Standing there
+poking fun at us after we have just missed death at the hands of his
+brigands. And you really think that he planned it all?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Looks like it. He chose the men, the trail. Was seen last night at the
+hotel. Appears now at the psychological moment. Any jury would&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;Pronounce me guilty. They would be mistaken, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Utterly confounded at the interruption which was delivered in fluent
+English&mdash;so surprised, indeed, that Billy glanced around to make sure
+that nobody else had spoken&mdash;they stared at him across the fire in red
+confusion. When Seyd at last found his tongue he could only stammer the
+obvious question, &#8220;You speak English?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As you perceive, sir.&#8221; As he returned Seyd his phrase of a few minutes
+before not even a twinkle betrayed his knowledge of their ridiculous
+situation.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was one needed to increase Billy&#8217;s anger. &#8220;Then why don&#8217;t you speak
+it?&#8221; he roughly blurted.</p>
+
+<p>Ignoring the question, the man went on addressing Seyd. &#8220;In accordance
+with the foolish custom that aims to make poor foreigners out of good
+Mexicans I received my education at a boarding-school in the city of
+Manchester, England.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Manchester, England!</i> Center of the Lancashire cotton trade, inner
+shrine of commerce! <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>Commercial essence exuded from the very name; it
+smelled to heaven of tin and rosin. Imagination faltered, nay, refused
+even to attempt to establish a relation between its prosiness and this
+romantic figure with a face cast in the image of the stone gods! Above
+all, a Manchester boarding-school! Seyd almost gasped. For to his
+knowledge of &#8220;fags&#8221; and &#8220;bullies,&#8221; &#8220;form rows,&#8221; &#8220;cribs and crams,&#8221; and
+education by external application, gained by the perusal of <i>Tom Brown&#8217;s
+School Days</i>, he had added the later, savagely impish realism of
+Kipling&#8217;s <i>Stalky</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And he knew what a living hell the life must have been to a high-strung
+Mexican youth. &#8220;Well!&#8221; he breathed at last. &#8220;I don&#8217;t envy you the
+experience. I&#8217;m told that the English schoolboy isn&#8217;t particularly
+sensitive or nice in his&mdash;his treatment of&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;Half-castes. Don&#8217;t avoid the word. We Mexicans are proud of our Aztec
+blood. They did not love me, but I tell you, se&ntilde;or, that their dislike
+for me was as milk to fire compared with mine for them, and they left me
+alone after a couple had felt my knife. How I hated them&mdash;the conceited
+lackeys of masters as much as the bullocks of boys and their ox-like
+fathers. How they lectured me, the lackeys, for my &#8216;cowardice&#8217; in using
+a knife&mdash;the cowardice of one small boy pitted against a hundred impish
+devils. But they were never able to blind me with their fustian ideals.
+Even then I could see through <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>their sham morality, hypocritical
+humanity, insufferable conceit.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;England is the workshop of the world!&#8217; They dinned it into us. In
+furtherance of the ideal they fouled the air with coal smoke, herded
+their men and women from the open farms into slums and brothels, and as
+they have done by their own so would they like to do for the world&mdash;make
+it one huge factory set in a slum.&#8221; He had spoken all through with great
+heat. Glancing for the first time at Billy, he finished, more quietly,
+&#8220;That is why I do not speak English&mdash;because I hate both them and their
+tongue.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now Billy&#8217;s conception of John Bull and his island had been principally
+formed on the perfervid &#8220;tail-twisting&#8221; of the common-school histories,
+and Seyd, whose views had been corrected by wider reading, had to smile
+at his emphatic indorsement. &#8220;I&#8217;m with you. No English, please, in
+mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Even Sebastien smiled. &#8220;No, you are American&mdash;from our viewpoint, much
+worse. Just as sordid as the stupid English, you are quicker-witted,
+therefore more to be feared, and you stand forever at our gates, ready
+to force your commerce and ideas upon us. But much as we hate you, loath
+as we are to have you come among us, I would still have you to believe
+that this business was accidental. I, at least, did not plan your
+death.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then you do not speak for them?&#8221; Seyd <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>glanced at the muleteers, now
+crouching over a second small fire they had built for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Quien sabe?</i>&#8221; Sebastien shrugged his shoulders. &#8220;They would think
+little of it. But what can you do? You have no proof. And I will see to
+it that they play you no more tricks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Walking over, he kicked first one, then the other, in the small of the
+back. &#8220;Up, swine!&#8221; And while they stood shivering before them he gave
+them their orders&mdash;first to recover the baggage, then to convey the
+se&ntilde;ors in safety to their mine. &#8220;Fail me in one thing,&#8221; he concluded,
+with a frightful threat, &#8220;and I will pluck out your eyes and turn you
+out on the road.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Turning his back on them, he walked over to the horses, and had mounted
+before Seyd realized his intent. &#8220;You are not going?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, it is only five leagues back to the hacienda where I left my own
+horse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;First let me thank you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Not seeing the touch of the spur that had caused the beast to rear
+suddenly, he imagined it shied at his outstretched hand. While curbing
+its plungings the other answered: &#8220;It is nothing. You owe me nothing. I
+came to repair a mistake and arrived too late. <i>Adios!</i>&#8221; And swinging
+the fighting beast out of the firelight into the dusk he galloped off,
+leaving Seyd standing with hand outstretched.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to the fire, he passed close to the muleteers, whose faces,
+looking after him, expressed a curious mixture of dislike, suspicion,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>fear. Observing it, Billy laughed. &#8220;Our friend&#8217;s football practice over
+there rather inclines me to favor his theories. I&#8217;ve seen a few
+walking-delegates in my time that I&#8217;d like to place under him. I&#8217;ll bet
+you there are no labor troubles in his cosmos. Fancy a system that
+trains men to put your enemies away without so much as a wink. I call it
+ideal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221; Seyd laughed. &#8220;I have so much respect for it that I propose to
+keep watch and watch on the off chance of an attempt on our throats. If
+you&#8217;ll just settle down for a snooze I&#8217;ll take the first trick.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His laughter, however, covered feeling that had been deeply stirred by
+the events of the day. After Billy had curled up close to the fire his
+glance went over to the muleteers, who lay, heads muffled in their
+scarlet serapes, beside their own fire. Their very quiet stimulated
+thoughts which passed back through the medievalism of the &#8220;conquest&#8221; and
+the savagery of the Aztecs to the dim time that saw the erection of the
+temple they had passed that day. Stimulated by the distant roar of
+waters, the complaint of the wind in the trees, and the voices of night
+that rose out of the valley&#8217;s black void, his fancies grew and possessed
+him until he saw his own civilization as a flash in the dark space of
+the ages. So absorbed was he that Billy&#8217;s interruption came as a
+surprise.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve slept four hours. Time for your snooze.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<p style="float: left; font-size: 100%; line-height: 80%; margin-top: 0;">&#8220;</p><p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">P</span>he-ew!&#8221; Looking up from a treatise on bricklaying as applied to the
+building of furnaces, Billy pitched a stone at Seyd, who was
+experimenting with a batch of lime fresh drawn from a kiln of their own
+burning. &#8220;I&#8217;d always imagined bricklaying to be a mere matter of plumb
+and trowel, but this darned craft has more crinkles to it than the
+differential calculus. This fellow makes me dizzy with his talk of ties
+and courses, flues, draughts, cornering, slopes, and arches.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Leaning on his hoe, Seyd wiped his wet brow. &#8220;I&#8217;m finding out a few
+things myself. I&#8217;d always sort of envied a hod-carrier. But now I know
+that the humble &#8216;mort&#8217; puts more foot-pounds of energy into his work
+than the average horse. As a remedy for dizziness caused by overstudy,
+mixing mortar has no equal. Come and spell me with this hoe.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;And the last state of that man was worse than the first,&#8217;&#8221; Billy
+groaned. &#8220;<i>Can&#8217;t</i> we hire a single solitary peon, Seyd?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>More eloquently than words, Seyd&#8217;s shrug testified to the sullen boycott
+which had been maintained <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>against them for the past three weeks. On the
+morning of their arrival at the mine, while the fear of Sebastien Rocha
+still lay heavy upon him, Carlos had been half bullied, half persuaded
+into the sale of Paz and Luz at a price which raised him almost to the
+status of a ranchero. But that single transaction summed up their
+dealings with the natives. No man had answered their call for laborers
+at wages which must have appeared as wealth to a peon. The
+charcoal-burners who drove their burros past the mine every day returned
+to their greetings either muttered curses or black stares. They were as
+stubborn in their cold obstinacy as the face of the temple god. Indeed,
+in these days the stony face of the image had become inseparably
+associated in Seyd&#8217;s mind with the determined opposition that had routed
+his predecessors and now aimed to oust him. He saw it even in the soft,
+round faces of the children who peeped at him from the doorways of cane
+huts, a somber look, centuries old in its stubborn dullness.</p>
+
+<p>Not that he and Billy were in the least discouraged. Once convinced that
+labor was not to be obtained, they had stripped and pitched in. In one
+month they rebuilt the adobe dwelling which had been somewhat shattered
+by the Dutchman&#8217;s hurried exit, dug a lime kiln, and hauled the wood and
+stone for the first burning. They had completed the laying out of the
+smelter foundation, filling in odd moments by picking <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>for the first
+charge the choicest ore from the hundreds of tons that the Englishmen
+had unwisely mined before they ran head-on into the hostile combination
+of freights and prices.</p>
+
+<p>This last had been an inspiriting labor, for so rich were the values
+which the ore carried that after a trial assay Billy had danced all over
+the place beating an old pan. It is doubtful whether young men ever had
+better prospects; and so, knowing that Billy&#8217;s present pessimism arose
+from a strong disinclination for physical labor in the hot sun, Seyd
+merely grinned. Sitting down on a pile of brick, he mopped his face and
+stared out over the valley.</p>
+
+<p>Situated, as the mine was, on a wide bench which gave pause to the
+earth&#8217;s dizzy plunge from the rim three thousand feet above, Seyd sat at
+the meeting-place of temperate and tropic zones. A hundred feet
+below&mdash;just where they had climbed the stiff trail out of the jungle
+that flooded the valley with its fecund life&mdash;a group of cocoanut palms
+stood disputing the downward rush of the pine, and all along the bench
+pi&ntilde;on and copal, upland growths, shouldered cedars and ceibas, the
+tropical giants. While these battled above for light and room there
+came, writhing snake-like up from the tropics, creepers and climbers,
+vines and twining plants, to engage the ferns and bracken, the pine&#8217;s
+green allies. A plague of orchids here attacked the copal, wreathing
+trunk and limb in sickly flame. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>bracken there overswept the riotous
+tropical life. All along the borderland the battle raged, here following
+a charge of the pine down a cool ravine, there mounting with the tropic
+growths to a sunlit slope. But in the valley below the tropics ruled
+clear down to the brilliant green of the San Nicolas cane fields.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;By the way&#8221;&mdash;Seyd spoke as his eye fell on these&mdash;&#8220;Don Luis is back
+from Mexico City. The hunchbacked charcoal-burner told me as he went
+past this morning.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The deuce he did!&#8221; Of all the black looks that came their way that of
+the cripple was the most vindictive. &#8220;You must have him hypnotized.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You wouldn&#8217;t think so if you had heard his accent. &#8216;El General is again
+at San Nicolas,&#8217; just as though he were sentencing me to hang.
+Nevertheless, the news comes pat. I think it would be good policy for me
+to run down and pay the denunciation taxes before we begin work on the
+smelter. No, I don&#8217;t apprehend any trouble. Your Mexican hasn&#8217;t much
+stomach for litigation, and no doubt the old fellow feels quite safe in
+his pull with the metals companies and railroads. But while he is still
+in the mind we had better pay the money and complete title. If he once
+gets wind of the smelter&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just so.&#8221; Billy threw down the hoe. &#8220;While you dress I&#8217;ll saddle up a
+mule&mdash;if you will please say to which demon you prefer to intrust your
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>precious neck. Light began the day by kicking me through the side of
+the stable. She needs chastening. But then Peace dined on my arm
+yesterday. It&#8217;s Peace for yours, and I only hope you get it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hum!&#8221; he coughed when, half an hour later, Seyd emerged shaved, bathed,
+and clad in immaculate white. &#8220;Is this magnificence altogether for el
+General, or did Caliban drop some word of our niece? Really, old chap,
+you look fine. If I were the se&ntilde;orita I&#8217;d go for you myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though Seyd laughed, yet the instant he passed out of sight he fell into
+frowning thought which was evidently related to the letter he pulled out
+and reread while he rode down the steep grades. Written in a
+characterless round hand, it covered so many pages that he was halfway
+down before, after tearing it in shreds, he tossed it to the winds. Its
+destruction, however, did not seem to change his mood. He let Peace take
+her own way until, having slipped, slid, and tobogganed on tense
+haunches down the last grade, she felt able to assert her individuality
+by attempting to rub him off against a tree. Next she attempted the
+immolation of a fat brown baby that was rolling with a nest of young
+pigs in the dust outside a hut; and thereafter her performances were so
+varied that he was simply compelled to take some notice of the sights
+and sounds of the trail.</p>
+
+<p>Not the least remarkable were the frequent and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>familiar scowls of the
+people he met. Various in expression, they ranged between the copious
+curses of the fat se&ntilde;ora whose pacing-mule was driven by Peace off the
+trail, and the snarling malice of occasional muleteers; but,
+undisturbed, he pursued his inquiries for laborers at every chance.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, se&ntilde;or, we do not desire work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The stereotyped answer merely stimulated the quiet persistence which
+formed the basis of his character, and he continued to ask at the
+village which raised graceful palm roofs out of a jungle clearing, at
+the ranchos which now began to cover the valley with a green checker of
+maize fields, and at scattered huts, half hidden by the rich foliage of
+palms and bananas. It was while he was questioning a peon who was
+hulling rice with a wooden pole and churn arrangement that the subdued
+hostility broke out in open demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>The trail here ran between a fence of split poles, which inclosed the
+peon&#8217;s corn and frijoles, and the steep bank of a dry creek bed, so that
+only a few feet leeway was left for the train of burros which came
+trotting out of the jungle behind him. In single file they could have
+passed, but looking around he saw they were coming three abreast.</p>
+
+<p>Had he chosen, there was time to make the end of the fence. But he had
+seen behind the train the sparkling, beady eyes of Caliban, the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>hunchback, and the dark grins of two of his fellows. Flushing with
+quick anger, he backed Peace against the fence, leaned forward over her
+neck, and slashed with his whip at the leading beasts. Checked by this,
+they would have fallen back to single file but for the whips behind that
+bit out hair and hide and drove them on in a huddled mass.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed for a few seconds that he would be crushed. That he escaped
+injury was simply due to the hereditary hate between the mule and the
+ass which suddenly turned Peace into a raging fiend. While her chisel
+teeth slit ragged hides her other and busier end beat a devil&#8217;s tattoo
+on resounding ribs and filled the air with flying charcoal. Yet even her
+demoniac energies had their limitations. If she held the ground for
+herself and master she could not preserve the inviolability of his white
+trousers, which emerged sadly smudged from the fray. It is a pity she
+could not. Little things always cause the greatest trouble, and but for
+the smudges the incident would probably have closed with Seyd&#8217;s
+challenge:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Can&#8217;t you be content with half the road?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His patience even survived their insolent grins. Not until the hunchback
+in passing emitted a hoarse chuckle as he surveyed the smudges did
+Seyd&#8217;s temper burst its bonds. Swinging his whip then with all his
+might, he laid it across the crooked shoulders once, twice, thrice,
+before <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>the fellow sprang, snarling, out of reach. The others, who had
+already passed, came leaping back at his cry, knives flashing as they
+ran, and though they stopped under the sudden frown of a Colt&#8217;s
+automatic, they did not retire, but stood, fingering their knives,
+muttering curses.</p>
+
+<p>A little sorry on his part for the anger which had turned the sullen
+hostility into open feud, Seyd faced them, puzzled just what to do. It
+was too late to give way, for that would expose him to future insult.
+Yet if, taking the initiative, he should happen to kill a man, he knew
+enough of the quality of justice as dealt out by the Mexican courts to
+realize the danger.</p>
+
+<p>While he debated, the puzzle was almost solved by the peon rice-huller,
+who came stealing up from behind the fence. Not until the man had swung
+his heavy pestle and was tiptoeing to his blow did Seyd divine the
+reason for the glances that were passing behind him. Looking quickly, he
+caught the glint of polished hardwood in the tail of his eye; then,
+without a pause for thought, he dropped flat on the rump of the mule,
+and not a second too soon, for, raising the hair on his brow as it
+passed, the club smashed down through the top rail of the fence. In
+falling backward his weight on the bridle brought Peace scurrying a few
+paces to the rear. When he snapped upright again the fourth enemy was
+also under his gun. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p><p>But what to do? The puzzle still remained&mdash;to be solved by another, for
+just then came a sudden beat of hoofs, and from behind a bamboo thicket
+galloped first the Siberian wolf hound, then the girl he had met at the
+train. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">S</span>o silently did the girl come that the charcoal-burners were forced to
+jump aside, and, springing in the wrong direction, the hunchback was
+bowled over by the beast of the <i>mozo</i> who rode at her back.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, se&ntilde;or!&#8221; she exclaimed, reining in. Then taking in the knives,
+pistol, broken club, she asked, &#8220;They attacked you? Tomas!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her Spanish was too rapid for Seyd&#8217;s ear, but it was easy to gather its
+tenor from the results. With a certain complaisance Seyd looked on while
+his enemies scattered on a run that was diversified by uncouth leaps as
+the <i>mozo&#8217;s</i> whip bit on tender places.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He struck at you?&#8221; She broke in on the rice-huller&#8217;s voluble plea that
+never, <i>never</i> would he have raised a finger against the se&ntilde;or had he
+known him for a friend of hers! &#8220;Then he, too, shall be flogged.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I would not wish&mdash;&#8221; Seyd began.</p>
+
+<p>But she interrupted him: &#8220;You were going toward San Nicolas? Then I
+shall turn and ride with you.&#8221; Anticipating his protest, she added, &#8220;I
+had already ridden beyond my usual distance.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p><p>Very willingly he fell in at her side, and they rode on till they met
+the <i>mozo</i> returning, hot and flushed, from the pursuit. He was keen as
+a blooded hound; it required only her backward nod to send him darting
+along the trail, and just about the time they overtook the
+charcoal-burners a sudden yelling in their rear told that the account of
+the rice-huller was in course of settlement.</p>
+
+<p>Passing his late enemies, Seyd could not but wonder at their
+transformation. With the exception of the hunchback, in whose beady eyes
+still lurked subdued ferocity, all were sobbing, and even he broke into
+deprecatory whinings. Having read his Prescott, Seyd knew something of
+the rigid Aztec caste systems from which Mexican peonage was derived.
+Now, viewing their abjectness, he was able to apprehend, almost with the
+vividness of experience, the ages of unspeakable cruelty that had given
+birth to their fear. But that which astonished him still more was the
+indifference with which the girl had ordered the flogging.</p>
+
+<p>Such glimpses of her face as he was able to steal while they rode did
+not aid him much. It was impossible to imagine anything more typically
+modern than the delicately chiseled features lit with a vivid
+intelligence which seemed to pulse and glow in the soft shadow beneath
+her hat. And when from her face his glance fell to her smart riding-suit
+of tan linen he was completely at sea. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p><p>Curiosity dictated his comment: &#8220;Your justice is certainly swift. Really
+I am afraid that I was the aggressor. At least I struck first.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But not without cause.&#8221; She glanced at his smudged clothes. &#8220;Tell me
+about it.&#8221; And when he had finished she commented: &#8220;Just as I thought.
+And these are dangerous men. They would have killed you without a qualm.
+In the days that Don Sebastien was clearing the country of bandits he
+counted that hunchback one of his best men.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet he whined like a puppy under your man&#8217;s whip.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Smiling at his wonder, she went on to state the very terms of his
+puzzle. &#8220;You do not know them&mdash;the combination of ferocity and
+subservience that goes with their blood. In the old days he who raised
+his hand against the superior caste was put to death by torture, and,
+though, thank God, those wicked days are past, the effect remains. They
+are obedient, usually, as trained hounds, but just as dangerous to a
+stranger. If I had not ordered them flogged they would have taken it as
+license to kill you at their leisure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now I realize the depth of my obligation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He spoke a little dryly, and she leaped to his meaning with a quickness
+that greatly advanced her in his secret classification. &#8220;I have hurt
+your pride. You will pardon me. I had forgotten the unconquerable valor
+of the gringos.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Oh, come!&#8221; he pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>She stopped laughing. &#8220;Really, I did not doubt your courage. But do not
+imagine for one moment that they would attack you again in the open. A
+knife in the dark, a shot from a bush, that is their method, and if you
+should happen to kill one, even in self defense, gringos are not so well
+beloved in Guerrero but that some one would be found to swear it a
+murder. Be advised, and go carefully.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I surely will.&#8221; He was going on to thank her when she cut him off with
+the usual &#8220;It is nothing.&#8221; Whereupon, respect for her intuition was
+added to the classification which was beginning to bewilder him by its
+scope and variety.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, he could not look her way nor could she speak without some
+physical trait or mental quality being added to the catalogue. Now it
+was the quivering sensitiveness of her mouth, an unsuspected archness,
+the astonishing range of feeling revealed by her large dark eyes.
+Looking down upon the charcoal-burners, they had gleamed like black
+diamonds; in talking, their soft glow waxed and waned. Sometimes&mdash;but
+this was omitted from the classification because it only occurred when
+his head was turned&mdash;a merry twinkle illumined a furtive smile. Taken in
+all its play and sparkle, her face expressed a lively sensibility
+altogether foreign to his experience of women.</p>
+
+<p>After a short silence she took up the subject <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>again. &#8220;But I am giving
+you a terrible impression of our people. It is only in moments of
+passion that the old Aztec crops out. At other times they are kind,
+pleasant, generous. Neither are we the cruel taskmasters that some
+foreign books and papers portray us. You would not believe how angry
+they make me&mdash;the angrier because I have a strain of your blood in my
+own veins. My grandfather, you know, was Irish. It was from him I
+learned your speech.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The last bit of information was almost superfluous, for from no other
+source could she have obtained the pure lilting quality that makes the
+Dublin speech the finest English in the world. To it she had added an
+individual charm, the measured cadence and soft accent of her native
+Spanish, delivered in a low contralto that had in it a little break. Her
+laugh punctuated its flow as she came to her conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you will soon be able to see for yourself what terrible people we
+are.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He obtained one glimpse within the next mile. He had already noted the
+passing of the last wild jungle. From fields of maize which alternated
+with sunburned fields of <i>maguey</i> they now rode into an avenue that led
+on through green cane. Rising far above their heads, the cane marched
+with them for a half mile, then suddenly opened out around a primitive
+wooden sugar mill. Under the thatched roof of an open hut half-nude
+women were stirring boiling syrup in open pans, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>and at the sight of
+Francesca one of them came running out to the trail.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Her baby is to be christened next Sunday,&#8221; the girl told him as they
+rode on. &#8220;She was breaking her heart because she had no robe. But now
+she is happy, for I have promised to ask the good <i>mama</i> to lend her
+mine, which she has treasured all these years.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Soon afterward as they turned out of the cane into a new planting they
+almost ran down her uncle, who had come out to inspect the work. Only
+his quick use of the spur averted a collision, and as his own spirited
+roan sprang sideways Seyd noted with admiration that despite his bulk
+and age horse and man moved as one. If surprised at the sight of his
+niece in such company, the old man did not reveal it by so much as the
+lift of a brow. It was difficult even to perceive the twinkle in his
+eyes that lightened his chiding.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Ola</i>, Francesca! If there be no respect for thy own pretty neck, at
+least have pity on my old bones. It is you, se&ntilde;or? Welcome to San
+Nicolas.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Neither did Seyd&#8217;s explanation of his business abate his brown
+impassivity. If assumed, his ponderous effort at recollection was
+wonderfully realistic. &#8220;Ah, <i>si</i>! Santa Gertrudis? If I remember aright,
+it was denounced before. Yes, yes, by several&mdash;but they had no good
+fortune. Still, you may fare better. Paulo, the administrador, will
+attend to the business.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p><p>With a wave of the hand, courteous in its very indifference, he put the
+matter out of his province and displayed no further interest until the
+girl told of the attack on Seyd. Then he glanced up quickly from under
+frowning brows.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You had them whipped? <i>Bueno!</i> The rascals must be taught not to molest
+travelers. And now we shall ride on that the se&ntilde;or may break his fast.
+And thou, too, wicked one, will be late. As thou knowest, it is the only
+fault the good mother sees in thee.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Would that it totaled my sins,&#8221; she laughed. &#8220;To escape another black
+mark I shall have to gallop. <i>Ola!</i> for a race!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As from a light touch of the spur her beast launched out and away, the
+roan reared and tried to follow, and while he curbed it back to a walk
+the old man&#8217;s heavy face lit up with pleasure. &#8220;She rides well. I have
+not a vaquero with a better seat. But go thou, Tomas, lest she come to a
+harm. And you, se&ntilde;or, will follow?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With a vivid picture of the figure Peace would cut in a race occupying
+the forefront of his mind it did not take Seyd long to choose. After the
+girl had passed from sight behind a clump of tamarinds he took note, as
+they rode along, of the peons who were laying the field out in shallow
+ditches wherein others were planting long shoots of seed cane. To his
+practical engineer&#8217;s eye the hand-digging seemed so slow and laborious
+that he could not refrain from a comment. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;It seems to me that a good steel plow would do the work much cheaper.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Cheaper? Perhaps.&#8221; After a heavy pause, during which he took secret
+note of Seyd out of the corner of his eye, the old man went on: &#8220;To do a
+thing at less cost in labor and time seems to be the only thing that you
+Yankees consider. But cheapness is sometimes dearly purchased. Come!
+Suppose that I put myself under the seven devils of haste that
+continually drive you. What would become of these, my people? Who would
+employ them? It is true that theirs is not a great wage&mdash;perhaps, after
+all, totals less than the cost of your steel plow and a capable man to
+run it. We pay only three and a half cents for each ditch, in our
+currency, and a man must dig twelve a day. If he digs less he gets
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That does not seem just to you?&#8221; He read Seyd&#8217;s surprise. &#8220;It would if
+you knew them. Grown children without responsibility or sense of duty
+are they. If left free to come and go, they would dig one, two, three
+ditches, enough and no more than would supply them with <i>cigarros</i> and
+<i>aguardiente</i>, and our work would never be done. As it is, they dig the
+full twelve, and have money for other necessities.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The wage seems small?&#8221; Again he read Seyd&#8217;s mind. &#8220;Yet it is all that
+we can afford, nor does it have to cover the cost of living. Each man
+has his patch of maize and frijoles, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>a run for his chickens and
+pigs. Then the river teems with fish, the jungle with small game. His
+wage goes only for drink and <i>cigarros</i>, or, if there be sufficient left
+over, to buy a dress for his woman. They are perfectly content.&#8221;
+Slightly lifting his heavy brows, he finished, looking straight at Seyd:
+&#8220;I am an old Mexican hacendado, yet I have traveled in your country and
+Europe. Tell me, se&ntilde;or, can as much be said of your poor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now, in preparing a thesis for one of his social-science courses, Seyd
+had studied the wage scale of the cotton industry, and so knew that,
+ridiculously small as this peon wage appeared at the first glance, it
+actually exceeded that paid to women and children in Southern cotton
+factories. In their case, moreover, the pittance had to meet every
+expense.</p>
+
+<p>He did not hesitate to answer. &#8220;I should say that your peons were better
+off, providing the conditions, as you state them, are general.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And they are, se&ntilde;or, except in the south tropics, where any kind of
+labor is murder. But here? It is as you see; and why disturb it by the
+introduction of Yankee methods?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Pausing, he looked again at Seyd, and whether through secret pleasure at
+his concession or because he merely enjoyed the pleasure of speaking out
+that which would have been dangerous if let fall in the presence of a
+countryman, he presently went on: &#8220;Therefore it is that I do not stand
+with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>Porfirio Diaz in his commercial policies. He is a great man. Who
+should know it better than I that fought with or against him in a dozen
+campaigns. And he has given us peace&mdash;thirty years of slow, warm peace.
+Yet sometimes I question its value. In the old time, to be sure, we cut
+each other&#8217;s throats on occasion. In the mean time we were warmer
+friends. And war prevented the land from being swamped by the millions
+that overrun your older countries, the teeming millions that will
+presently swarm like the locusts over your own United States. As I say,
+se&ntilde;or, I am only an old Mexican hacendado, but I have looked upon it all
+and seen that where war breeds men, civilization produces only mice. If
+I be allowed my choice give me the bright sword of war in preference to
+the starvation and pestilence that thins out your poor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Concluding, he looked down, interrogatively, as though expecting a
+contradiction. But though, after all, his argument was merely a
+restatement of the time-worn Malthusianism, coming out of the mouth of
+one who had strenuously applied it during forty years of internecine
+war, it carried force. Maintaining silence, Seyd stole occasional
+glances at the massive brown face and the heavy figure moving in stately
+rhythm with the slow trot of his horse, while his memory flashed over
+tale after tale that Peters, the station agent, had told him when he was
+out the other day to the railroad&mdash;tales of bravery, hardy adventures,
+all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>performed amidst the inconceivable cruelties of the revolutionary
+wars. Even had he been certain that the eventual peopling of the earth&#8217;s
+vacant places would not force a return to at least a revised
+Malthusianism, it was not for his youth to match theories with age. When
+he did speak it was on another subject.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have been riding all morning on your land. I suppose it extends as
+far in the other direction?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A trifle.&#8221; A deprecatory wave of the strong brown hand lent emphasis to
+the phrase. &#8220;A trifle, se&ntilde;or, by comparison with the original grant to
+our ancestor from Cortes. &#8216;From the rim of the Barranca de Guerrero on
+both sides, and as far up and down from a given point as a man may ride
+in a day,&#8217; so the deed ran. Being shrewd as he was valiant, my
+forefather had his Indians blaze a trail in both directions before he
+essayed the running. A hundred and fifty miles he made of it when he
+started&mdash;not bad riding without a trail. But it is mostly gone by family
+division, or it has been forfeited by those who threw in their luck on
+the wrong side of a revolution. Now is there left only a paltry hundred
+or so thousands of acres&mdash;and this!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For the first time pronounced feeling made itself felt through his
+massive reserve, and looking over the view that had suddenly opened,
+Seyd did not wonder at the note of pride. After leaving the cane they
+had plunged through green skirts of willow to the river that split the
+wide <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>valley in equal halves, and from the shallow ford they now rode
+out on a grassy plateau that ran for miles along low lateral hills.
+Dotted with tamarinds, banyans, and the tall ceibas which held huge
+leafy umbrellas over panting cattle, it formed a perfect foreground for
+the hacienda, whose chrome-yellow buildings lay like a band of sunlight
+along the foot of the hill. The thick adobe walls that bound stables,
+cottages, and outbuildings into a great square gave the impression of a
+fortified town, castled by the house, which rose tier on tier up the
+face of the hill.</p>
+
+<p>When they rode through the great gateway of the lower courtyard the
+interior view proved equally arresting. Mounting after Don Luis up
+successive flights of stone steps, they came to the upper courtyard,
+wherein was concentrated every element of tropical beauty&mdash;wide
+corridors, massive chrome pillars, time-stained arches, luxurious
+foliage. From the tiled roof above a vine poured in cataracts of living
+green so dense that only vigorous pruning had kept it from shutting off
+all light from the rooms behind. Left alone, it would quickly have
+smothered out the palms, orchids, rare tropical plants that made of the
+courtyard a vivid garden.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They call it the <i>sin verguenza</i>.&#8221; While he was admiring the creeper
+Francesca had joined them from behind. &#8220;Shameless, you know, for it
+climbs &#8216;upstairs, downstairs,&#8217; nor respects even the privacy of &#8216;my
+lady&#8217;s chamber.&#8217; Thanks <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>to the good legs of my beast, I escaped a
+scolding. Sit here where the vines do not obstruct the view.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If Seyd had been told a few minutes before that anything could have
+become her more than the tan riding-suit he would have refused to
+believe. But now by the evidence of his own eyes he was forced to admit
+the added charm of a simple batiste, whose fluffy whiteness accentuated
+her girlishness. The mad gallop had toned her usual clear pallor with a
+touch of color, and as she looked down, pinning a flower on her breast,
+he noted the perfect curve of her head.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Room for a good brain there,&#8221; he thought, while answering her
+observation. &#8220;It is beautiful. But don&#8217;t you find it a little dull
+here&mdash;after Mexico City?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No.&#8221; She shook her head with vigor. &#8220;Of course, I like the balls and
+parties, yet I am always glad to return to my horses and dogs
+and&mdash;though it is wicked to put them in the same category&mdash;my babies.
+There are always at least three mothers impatiently awaiting my return
+to consult me upon names. I am godmother to no less than seven small
+Francescas.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I never should have thought it. You must have begun&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;Very young? Yes, I was only fifteen, so my first godchild is now
+seven. That reminds <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>me&mdash;she is waiting below to repeat her catechism.
+There is just time&mdash;if you would like it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I would be delighted. So the position is not without its duties?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I should think not.&#8221; Her eyes lit with a touch of indignation. &#8220;I hold
+the baby at the christening after helping to make the robe. When they
+are big enough I teach them their catechism. You could not imagine the
+weight of my responsibilities, and I believe that I am much more
+concerned for their behavior than their mothers. If any of them were to
+do anything really wicked&#8221;&mdash;her little shudder was genuine&mdash;&#8220;I should
+feel dreadfully ashamed. But they are really very good&mdash;as you shall
+judge for yourself. Francesca!&#8221; As, with a soft patter of chubby feet, a
+small girl emerged from a far corner, she added with archness that was
+chastened by real concern, &#8220;Now you must not dare to say that she isn&#8217;t
+perfect.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In one sense the caution was needed. After a brave answer to the
+question &#8220;Who is thy Creator, Francesca?&#8221; the child displayed a slight
+uncertainty as to the origin of light, added a week or two to the &#8220;days
+of creation,&#8221; and became hopelessly mixed as to the specific quantities
+of the &#8220;Trinity&#8221;&mdash;wherein, after all, she was no worse than the
+theologians who have burned each other up, in both senses, in furious
+disputes over the same question. But better, far better than letter
+perfection, was the simple <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>awe of the small brown face and the devotion
+of the lisping voice which followed the tutor&#8217;s gentle prompting.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fine! fine!&#8221; Seyd applauded a last valorous attack on the Ten
+Commandments, and the small scholar ran off clutching a silver coin,
+just so much the richer for his heretical presence. As he rose to follow
+his hostess inside he added, &#8220;If all the Francescas are equal to sample,
+the next generation of San Nicolas husbands will undoubtedly rise up and
+call you blessed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now you are laughing at me,&#8221; she protested. &#8220;Though that might be truly
+said of my mother. She is a saint for good works. But come, or I shall
+yet earn my scolding. And let me warn you to take care of your heart.
+All of the <i>caballeros</i> fall in love with mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was quite believable. While seated in the dining-room, a vaulted
+chamber cool as a crypt in spite of the sunblaze outside, a room which
+would have seated an army of retainers, he observed the se&ntilde;ora with the
+satisfaction that even a stranger may feel in the promise a handsome
+mother holds out to her girls. In addition to the sweetness of her eyes
+and her tenderly tranquil expression she had retained her youthful
+contour. She exhibited the miracle of middle age achieved without fat or
+stiffness. In her scarf and black lace she was maturely beautiful.
+Waving away his apologies for the intrusion, she was anxiously
+solicitous for his wants through the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>meal. Yet he noticed that in
+taking his leave an hour later she did not ask him to call again.</p>
+
+<p>Up to that moment there had been no further mention of his business. But
+as he stood hesitating, loath to introduce it, Don Luis relieved his
+embarrassment. &#8220;Now you would see the administrador? I am sorry, se&ntilde;or,
+but it seems that he is away at Chilpancin about the sale of cattle. But
+if you will intrust your moneys to Francesca she will see to the
+business and have the papers sent out to the mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Neither did Francesca, when saying good-by, ask him to return. But,
+conscious that with all their kind hospitality they still regarded him
+as an intruder, Seyd was neither offended nor surprised. He was even a
+little astonished when Don Luis stated his intention of riding with him
+as far as the cane.</p>
+
+<p>Until they came to the ford they rode in silence. Though only a few
+inches deep at this season, the river&#8217;s wide bed proclaimed it one of
+those torrential streams which rise from a trickle to a flood in very
+few hours, and when he remarked upon it Don Luis assented with his heavy
+nod.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, it is very treacherous. One night during the last rains it rose
+fifty feet and swept down the valley miles wide, bearing on its yellow
+bosom cattle, houses, sheep, and pigs, and it drowned not a few of our
+people. And each year the floods go higher. Why? Because of the cursed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>lust that would mint the whole world into dollars. Year by year your
+Yankee companies are stripping the pine from the upper valley, and,
+though I have spoken with Porfirio Diaz about it, he is mad for
+commerce. He would see the whole state of Guerrero submerged before he
+revoked one charter. And they even try to make me a party to it.
+&#8216;General, if you will grant us a concession to do this, that, the other?
+If you will only allow us to run a branch line into your pine we can
+make big money&mdash;guarantee you half a million pesos.&#8217; When I am in Mexico
+your Yankee promoters swarm round me like hungry dogs. But never have I
+listened, nor ever will!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He struck the pommel of his saddle a heavy blow, then looked his
+surprise as Seyd spoke. &#8220;I should not think that you would. I understand
+your feelings.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You do? <i>Caramba!</i> Then you are the first Yankee that ever did. In
+return for your sympathy let me offer you advice. You are not the first
+man to denounce on my land, nor is Santa Gertrudis the only location.
+Yankees, English, French, Germans, they have come, denounced claims here
+and there, but no man has ever held one. No man ever <i>will</i>. Already you
+have tasted the bitter hostility of my people, and were I to nod not
+even the American Ambassador could save you alive. And this is only the
+beginning. Let me return your money? <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>Mexico is one great mine. Anywhere
+you can kick the soil and uncover a fortune.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But none like the Santa Gertrudis.&#8221; Seyd smiled. &#8220;Of course, I feel
+it&#8217;s pretty raw for me to force in on your land; but, knowing that if I
+don&#8217;t some other will, I shall have to refuse. As for the
+opposition&mdash;that is all in the day&#8217;s work.&#8221; He finished, offering his
+hand. &#8220;But I hope this won&#8217;t prevent us from being good neighbors?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Shaking his massive head, Don Luis reined in his horse. &#8220;No, se&ntilde;or, we
+can never be that. But next to a good friend I count a hearty enemy, and
+you may depend upon me for that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With a courteous wave of the hand he rode off; and, watching him go at a
+stately canter, Seyd muttered, &#8220;Enemy or friend, you are a fine old
+chap.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+
+<p>&#8220;You are surely a fine old chap.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Retracing his path through the long succession of farm, jungle, and
+fields, Seyd repeated it, and as he rode along he saw things in a new
+light. As he passed through one village at sundown the entire population
+was filing into church, the peons in clean blankets, their women in
+decent black. The next hamlet was in the throes of a fiesta. Girls in
+white, garlanded with flaming flowers, were dancing the eternal jig of
+the country with their brown swains. And these two functions, church and
+<i>baile</i>, marked the bounds of their simple life. A plenty of rice and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>frijoles, a peso or two for clothing, were all that they asked or
+needed.</p>
+
+<p>While prospecting in the Sierra Madres Seyd had drawn many a comparison
+between the happy indolence of the peon and the worry, strain, strife to
+live up to a standard just beyond income that obtains in American life.
+Because the peon had time to think his simple thoughts, listen to bird
+song and the music of babbling streams, to watch the splendors of
+sunrise and sunset over purple valleys, Seyd&#8217;s suffrage had often gone
+to him. Observing this pastoral life in its tropical setting of palms
+and jungle, the opinion grew into a strong conviction.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The old fellow&#8217;s right!&#8221; he ejaculated, riding out of the last village
+into the jungle proper. &#8220;We have nothing to give his people, and we&#8217;d
+surely kill all they have.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though the profusion of foliage which made of the trail one long green
+tunnel prevented him from seeing it, he was now riding along at the foot
+of the Barranca wall. Its deep shadow already filled the jungle with a
+twilight that thickened into night as he rode. But, knowing that
+whatever her faults of temperament Peace could be trusted to fetch her
+own stable, he left her to take her own way while he pursued his
+thoughts. While the siren whistle of beetles, chatter of
+<i>chickicuillotes</i>&mdash;wild hens of the jungle&mdash;deafened his ears, he tried
+to bring the crowding impressions of the day into some kind of order&mdash;no
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>easy task when a fire-eating old general and a typical Mexican mother
+had to be reconciled in thought with a young girl who possessed the face
+of a Celt, eyes of a Spaniard, vivacity of a Frenchwoman, and American
+intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>Next he fell to speculating upon the causes which had kept her single at
+an age that, according to Mexican standards, placed her hopelessly upon
+the shelf, and he found the answer in the gossip of the American station
+agent on his last trip out to the railroad. &#8220;She could have had her
+cousin Sebastien any time, and there were others around these parts. But
+once let a high-strung girl like her get a glimpse of the outside world
+and no common hacendado can ever hope to tie her shoestring. They say
+she has had other chances&mdash;attach&eacute;s of foreign legations in Mexico City.
+But she turned &#8217;em down&mdash;I don&#8217;t know why, unless it&#8217;s ideals.&#8221; With a
+humorous twinkle the agent had added: &#8220;Bad things, ideals&mdash;always in the
+way. If you happen to have any in stock give &#8217;em to the first beggar you
+meet along the road. Hers are keeping San Nicolas and El Quiss from
+reuniting, but she don&#8217;t seem to care.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A fine girl&mdash;the man will be lucky that gets her.&#8221; Seyd now
+re-expressed the agent&#8217;s homely verdict. &#8220;If it wasn&#8217;t&mdash;&#8221; He stopped
+short, with a savage laugh. &#8220;You darned fool! mooning over a girl who
+would turn up her pretty nose at any gringo, much more one that has
+forced <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>himself in on her uncle&#8217;s land. Your business is to get a
+fortune out of the mine, and do it quick. And even if it wasn&#8217;t&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The thought was never finished, for the last few minutes had brought him
+out into the starlight at the foot of the Barranca wall, and as Peace
+gathered herself for the scramble upward the jungle lit up with a sudden
+flash. Before Seyd&#8217;s ears caught the report he felt his left shoulder
+clutched, as it were, by a red-hot hand. The next second he was almost
+thrown by the mule&#8217;s sudden plunge&mdash;fortunately, for otherwise the
+bullet that came out of a second flash would have smashed through his
+brain.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Muzzle-loaders!&#8221; In the moment he lay on the mule&#8217;s neck he divined it
+from the thick explosion. Then the thought, &#8220;It will take them a minute
+to reload,&#8221; followed a quick calculation, &#8220;They&#8217;ll catch me again on the
+first turn.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With him action always sprang of subconscious processes which were
+quicker than thought, and while he crouched on her neck and Peace took
+the turn on a scrambling gallop he turned loose with both of his Colts,
+aiming at the spot from which the flashes had come. And the sequel
+proved his judgment. This time a single flash announced the bullet which
+grazed the mule&#8217;s rump just as she shot into a patch of woodland.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Reckon I made one of you sick,&#8221; he interpreted the single shot. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p><p>The burning smart of his wound and the treachery of the attack had
+loosed within him a fury of anger. Reining in, he felt his shoulder. The
+bullet had plowed a furrow in the flesh of the upper arm, but, muttering
+&#8220;I guess it&#8217;s bled about all it&#8217;s going to,&#8221; he first tied the mule to a
+tree, then slid the &#8220;reloads&#8221; into his guns.</p>
+
+<p>It would have been foolish to expose himself in the open trail under the
+clear starlight. Resisting the savage impulse which urged him to close
+quarters, he crawled back to the edge of the timber and again turned
+loose his guns, searching the jungle below with a swinging muzzle. Time
+and again he did it, thanking his stars whenever he reloaded for the
+forethought which had caused Billy to slip an extra box of cartridges
+into the holsters, and not until only one charge was left did he pause
+to listen.</p>
+
+<p>Whether or no it was the firing that had frightened even the night birds
+into temporary quiet, not even a twig stirred in the darkness below. He
+caught only the distant whooping which told that Billy had heard, and as
+this drew nearer with astonishing quickness Seyd rose and went back to
+his mule.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Coming downhill hell for leather!&#8221; he muttered. &#8220;If I don&#8217;t hurry he&#8217;ll
+break his neck.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">O</span>ne afternoon about a week later Mr. William Thornton was to be seen
+mixing mortar for the bricks he was laying on the smelter foundation.
+Rising almost sheer from the edge of the bench behind him, the Barranca
+wall shut off the western breeze, and from its face the fierce sunblaze
+was reflected in quivering waves of heat. Coming out from an early lunch
+he had noted that the thermometer registered ninety in the shade, and he
+was now ready to swear that with one more degree he himself would be
+able to supply all the moisture required for the operation.</p>
+
+<p>While working he cast occasional glances toward the house; and when, the
+mortar being mixed, he began to lay brick he used the trowel with care
+lest its clink should awaken Seyd. For though the blood loss from a
+severed artery had left him quite weak, he had obstinately refused to
+stop work. To-day he had even balked at the suggestion of a siesta until
+Billy had lain down himself. As soon as Seyd fell asleep Billy had
+slipped out, and when he now paused to listen the concern in his look
+passed into sudden attention <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>as the clink of a shod hoof rose up from
+the trail below.</p>
+
+<p>Five minutes passed before he heard it again, and in the mean time his
+actions bespoke an intelligent appreciation of the needs of the case.
+Picking up a Winchester which leaned against a tree, he crouched behind
+his bricks, and while training it on the point where the trail emerged
+on the bench a ferocious scowl overshadowed his sunburn.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If we played it your way I&#8217;d brown you the second your nose shows,&#8221; he
+muttered as the hoofbeats grew louder. &#8220;Thank your musty old saints that
+we don&#8217;t. Ah! Eh? Well!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The interjections respectively fitted the wolf hound, her young
+mistress, and the <i>mozo</i>, as they appeared in the order named. As only
+Billy&#8217;s head showed over the bricks, and both were on the same color
+scheme, he was practically invisible; and, reining up her beast, the
+girl allowed her curious gaze to wander around the bench from the gaping
+hole where the drift ran into the vein over the adobe hut and
+foundation&mdash;just missing Billy&#8217;s head&mdash;to the blue-green piles of copper
+ore.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So this is the <i>mina</i>!&#8221; Her tone denoted disappointment. &#8220;Good heavens!
+Tomas, is this the wealth the gringos seek? What an ado over a pile of
+stones! I should think Don Luis would be thankful to have them carted
+away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had spoken in Spanish, but when, having <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>shed his arsenal under
+cover of the bricks, Billy rose and came forward, she addressed him in
+English. &#8220;Mr. Thornton, is it not? We have brought the papers from the
+administrador&mdash;at least, Tomas has. I am playing truant. Though it is
+only fifteen miles from here to San Nicolas, this is the first time that
+I have seen the place. Where is Mr. Seyd?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now than Billy, was there never a young man more naturally chivalrous.
+Usually a locomotive could not have dragged from him a single word
+calculated to shock or offend a girl. But in his confusion at finding an
+expected enemy changed into a charming friend he let slip the naked
+truth. &#8220;He was shot&mdash;returning from your place.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Se&ntilde;or! He&mdash;he is not&mdash;dead?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was no mistaking her concern. Sorry for his abruptness, Billy
+plunged to reassure her. &#8220;No! no! Only wounded.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is he&mdash;much hurt?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It occurred to Billy that a flesh wound was, after all, rather a small
+price for such solicitude. But where a touch of jealousy might have
+caused another to make light of Seyd&#8217;s wound, his natural unselfishness
+made him paint it in darker colors. &#8220;The bullet cut an artery, and he&#8217;s
+pretty weak from loss of blood. Yet he won&#8217;t lay off. I had to trick him
+into a siesta to-day. I&#8217;ll go call him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But she raised a protesting hand. &#8220;No! no! <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>Let him sleep. You can give
+him the papers. Tell him when he awakes that he will hear from us
+again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With a smile which caused Billy additional regret for his lack of wounds
+she rode off at a pace which filled him with anxiety for her neck. Until
+he caught a glimpse of her, foreshortened to a dot on the trail far
+below, he stood watching. Then, muttering &#8220;I&#8217;ll bet Seyd will raise Cain
+when he awakes,&#8221; he went back to his work.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was he mistaken, for when Seyd came out, yawning and stretching, an
+hour or so later, the last vestige of sleep was burned up by the sudden
+flash of his eyes. &#8220;You darned chump! Do we have visitors so often that
+you let me sleep on like a rotten log?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Neither was he appeased by Billy&#8217;s answer, delivered with an irritating
+grin: &#8220;Why should she wish to see you when I was around? A pallid wretch
+who has to make three tries to cast a shadow!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He has, has he?&#8221; Seyd growled. &#8220;Well, I&#8217;m solid enough to punch your
+fat head.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The atmosphere having thus been cleared, he commented: &#8220;Went off to tell
+the General, eh? I wonder how he&#8217;ll take it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shouldn&#8217;t imagine he&#8217;d shed any tears&mdash;unless at their poor shooting.
+Well, we&#8217;ll see!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And see they did, for as they sat at lunch on the second day thereafter
+a yell followed by the crack of a whip brought them out just in time to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>see Caliban, the charcoal-burner, and the peon rice-huller coming on a
+shuffling run ahead of Tomas. The bloody bandages which bound the head
+of one and the leg of the other testified to Seyd&#8217;s shooting, just as
+their glazed eyes and painful pantings told of the merciless run ahead
+of the <i>mozo</i>. It required only the hempen halter which each wore around
+his neck to complete the picture of misery.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;These be they that attacked you, se&ntilde;or?&#8221; While the rice-huller squirmed
+under a sudden cut of his whip the <i>mozo</i> went on: &#8220;This son of a devil
+was found nursing a wound in his hut, and he told on the other. Don Luis
+sends them with his compliments to be hanged at your leisure. If it
+please you to have it done now&mdash;there is an excellent tree.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Too surprised to answer, Seyd and Billy stood staring at each other
+until, taking silence for consent, the <i>mozo</i> began to herd his charges
+toward the said tree. &#8220;Here!&#8221; Seyd called him back. &#8220;This is kind of Don
+Luis, and you will please convey to him our thanks. It is very
+thoughtful of you to pick out such a fine tree, but, while we are sure
+that they would look very nice upon it, it is not the habit with our
+people to hang save for a killing, and I, as you see, am alive.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The <i>mozo&#8217;s</i> dark brows rose to the eaves of his hair. &#8220;But of what use,
+se&ntilde;or, to hang <i>after</i> the killing? Will the death of the murderer bring
+the murdered to life? But hang him in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>good season and you will have no
+murder. And this is a good tree, low, with strong, wide branches
+ordained for the purpose. See you! One throw of the rope, a pull, a
+knot&mdash;&#8217;tis done, easily as drinking, and they are out of your way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was good logic; but, while admitting it, Seyd still pleaded his
+foolish national custom.</p>
+
+<p>Though his bent brows still protested against such squeamishness, the
+<i>mozo</i> politely submitted. &#8221;<i>Bueno!</i> it is for you to say. I leave them
+at your will to cure or kill.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, what shall we do?&#8221; Seyd consulted Billy. &#8220;If we send them back the
+old Don will surely hang them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, what if he does? I&#8217;m sure that I don&#8217;t care a whoop&mdash;&#8221; He paused,
+then suddenly exclaimed: &#8220;Are we crazy? Here we have been chasing labor
+all over the valley, and now that it is offered us free we turn up
+noses. Keep them, you bet! Put it into Spanish as quickly as you can.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Smiling, the <i>mozo</i> nodded comprehension. &#8220;As you say, se&ntilde;or, a live
+slave is better than a dead thief. They are at your orders to kill by
+rope or work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though it was scarcely his thought, Seyd allowed it to go at that.
+Throwing the ends of the halters to Billy, the <i>mozo</i> concluded his
+mission. &#8220;It remains only to say that Don Luis will have you come to San
+Nicolas till your wound is cured.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Fine!&#8221; Billy enthusiastically commented, when the invitation was
+translated. &#8220;I&#8217;ve said all along that you ought to lay off. Go down for
+a week. By the time you come back I&#8217;ll have these chaps beautifully
+broken.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you unable to speak a word of Spanish&mdash;not to mention the risk to
+your throat?&#8221; Seyd shook his head. &#8220;Besides, the old fellow made no
+bones of his feelings the other day. The invitation is merely in
+reparation for what he considers a violation of his hospitality. If it
+wasn&#8217;t&mdash;My place is here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, the <i>mozo</i> carried back to San Nicolas a note which, if not
+penned in the best Spanish, yet caught its grave courtesy so cleverly
+that its perusal at the dinner table caused Francesca to pause and
+listen, drew an approving smile from the se&ntilde;ora, and produced from Don
+Luis his heavy nod.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The young man is a fine <i>caballero</i>. Your ordinary gringo would have
+saddled himself upon us for three months, and we should have been worn
+to skeletons by his parrot chatter. As he lets us off so easily, I must
+ride up to the mine and warn those rascals to play him no tricks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+
+<p>Meanwhile Seyd and Billy had been giving the disposition of the said
+rascals considerable thought. After the <i>mozo</i> left, Billy cut the
+halters from around their necks and brought them food and drink from the
+house. But whether or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>no they considered this fair front as being
+assumed to emphasize future tortures the two kept their sullen silence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If we have to stand guard all the time we&#8217;d be better without them,&#8221;
+Billy doubted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; Seyd acquiesced. &#8220;Unless we can find some incentive. I wonder if
+they have families.&#8221; When the two returned nods to his questions he
+continued, hopefully: &#8220;There we have it. Your Mexican peon takes
+homesickness worse than a Swiss. If we offer them a fair wage while the
+smelter is building I think they&#8217;ll prove faithful. At least we can
+try.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To an experienced eye&mdash;the <i>mozo&#8217;s</i>, for instance&mdash;the sudden
+brightening of the dark faces might have meant something else than
+relief. At first Caliban seemed to find the good news impossible. But
+presently, setting it down as another idiocy of the foolish gringos, his
+incredulity vanished. In one hour he and the rice-huller were
+transformed from sullen foes to eager servants. Indeed, what with their
+willing work that afternoon and next morning, the smelter foundation had
+risen a full yard by the time that Don Luis came riding up to the bench.</p>
+
+<p>Looking up from a blue print of the foundation, Seyd saw him coming at
+the heavy trot which combined military stiffness with vaquero ease, and
+noting the keen glance with which he swept the bench the thought flashed
+upon him, &#8220;Now the cat&#8217;s out of the bag!&#8221; He did not, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>however, try to
+smuggle the animal in again. When, greetings over, Don Luis turned a
+curious eye on the foundation he answered the unspoken question. &#8220;A
+smelter, se&ntilde;or.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A smelter?&#8221; For once the old fellow&#8217;s massive self possession showed
+slight disturbance. &#8220;I thought&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That it took a fortune to build one.&#8221; Seyd filled in his pause. &#8220;It
+does&mdash;to put in a modern plant.&#8221; While he went on explaining that this
+was merely an old-style Welch furnace of small capacity he felt the
+constraint under the old man&#8217;s quiet, and was thereby stimulated to a
+mischievous addition. &#8220;You see, the freight rates on crude ore from this
+point are prohibitive, but one can make good money by smelting it down
+into copper matte.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A good plan, se&ntilde;or.&#8221; Like a tremor on a brown pool, his disquiet
+passed. &#8220;And how long will it be in the building?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We had calculated on four months. But with the help you so kindly sent
+us we can do it now in two.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He could not altogether repress a mischievous twinkle. But Don Luis gave
+no sign. &#8220;<i>Bueno!</i> It was for this that I came&mdash;to read these rascals
+their lesson.&#8221; Menacing the peons with a weighty forefinger, he went on:
+&#8220;Now, listen, <i>hombres</i>! Since it has pleased the se&ntilde;or to save you
+alive, see that you repay his mercy with faithful labor. If there be any
+failure, tricks, or night <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>flittings, remember that there is never a
+rabbit hole in all Mexico but where Luis Garcia can find you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Emphasizing the threat with another shake of his finger, he turned and
+went on with quiet indifference to comment upon the scenery. &#8220;A
+beautiful spot. Once I had thought to build here, but one cannot live on
+the edge of a cliff, and San Nicolas has its charm. Is it true that we
+cannot tempt you to come down? The se&ntilde;ora begs that you reconsider.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But he nodded his appreciation of Seyd&#8217;s reasons. &#8220;<i>Si, si,</i> a man&#8217;s
+place is with his work&mdash;and I have stayed too long. There is business
+forward at Chilpancin, and even now I should be miles on the way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Will you not stay for lunch?&#8221; Seyd protested.</p>
+
+<p>But replying that he had already lunched at a ranch in the valley, the
+old man rode away on his usual heavy lope. &#8220;You see,&#8221; Seyd commented,
+watching him go, &#8220;it is all right for me to accept his invitation, but
+he will not eat of our bread.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, I don&#8217;t blame him,&#8221; Billy answered. &#8220;I&#8217;d feel sore myself if I
+were he. But, say, we&#8217;re getting quite gay up here. Regular social
+whirl. I wonder who&#8217;s next? We only need mamma to complete the family.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The remark was prophetic, for, while the se&ntilde;ora did not herself brave
+the Barranca steeps, only two days thereafter Francesca and the <i>mozo</i>
+reappeared driving before them a mule whose <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>panniers were crammed with
+eggs and cheese, butter and honey, fruit, both fresh and preserved, also
+a full stock of bandages, liniments, curative simples, and home-made
+cordials. While unpacking them on the table in their house the girl
+laughingly explained that if Seyd would not come to be cured the cures
+must needs come to him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is a wash for the wound.&#8221; She patted a large fat jug. &#8220;This other
+is to be taken every hour. Of this liquor you must take a glass at
+bed-time. Those pills must be swallowed when you rise. This&#8221;&mdash;noting
+Billy&#8217;s furtive grin, she finished with a laugh&mdash;&#8220;you will not have room
+for more. Give the rest to Mr. Thornton. But under pain of the good
+mamma&#8217;s severest displeasure I am to see you drink at least two cups of
+this soup.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You shall if you stay to lunch,&#8221; Seyd said. &#8220;Billy makes gorgeous
+biscuit, and they&#8217;ll go finely with the honey.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you can eat bacon&mdash;we have only that and a few canned things,&#8221; Billy
+added, a little dubiously, and would have extended the list of
+shortcomings only that she broke in:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just what I like. I&#8217;m tired of Mexican cooking, and I am dreadfully
+hungry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That this was no idle assertion she presently proved, and while she ate
+of their rough food with the appetite of perfect health their
+acquaintance progressed with the leaps and bounds natural to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>youth.
+Before the end of the meal she had drawn Billy completely out of his
+painful bashfulness, and he was telling her with great pride of his
+beautiful sister while she contemplated her photograph with head held
+delicately askew.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, she&#8217;s fair,&#8221; he told her, adding with great pride, &#8220;but not a bit
+like me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The most wonderful hair!&#8221; Seyd volunteered. &#8220;Darkest Titian above a
+skin of milk.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you make me envious!&#8221; she cried, with real feeling. &#8220;I love red
+hair. Luisa Zuluaga, my schoolmate in Brussels, had it combined with
+great black Spanish eyes. She got her colors from an Irish great
+grandfather who came over a century ago to coin pesos for the Mexican
+mint. Now, why couldn&#8217;t I have had them?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Observing the fine-spun cloud that flew like a dark mist around the
+ivory face, Seyd could not find it in his heart to blame her
+grandfather, and, if good taste debarred him from saying it, the belief
+was nevertheless expressed through the permitted language of the eyes.
+Perhaps this accounted for the suddenness with which her long dark
+lashes swept down over certain mischievous lights.</p>
+
+<p>Any but an expert in feminine psychology might indeed have found himself
+puzzled by certain phases of her manner. Its sympathy, addressing Billy,
+would give place to a slight reserve with Seyd, then this would melt and
+give place to unaffected friendliness. Occasionally, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>too, she offered
+all the witchery of her smiles, yet the hypothetical expert would never
+have suspected her of coquetry. The feeling was far too mischievous for
+the fencing of sex. Its key was to be found in the thought that passed
+in her mind. &#8220;&#8216;Almost pretty enough to marry,&#8217; you said. The trouble is
+that my girlish beauty is in inverse ratio to my future fatness. What a
+pity!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Yet this little touch of pique was never sufficiently pronounced to
+interfere with her real enjoyment. As for them&mdash;it was a golden
+occasion. If they ate little, they still feasted their eyes on the face
+that bloomed like a rich flower in the soft shadows of the adobe hut,
+their ears on her low laughter and soft woman&#8217;s speech. They found it
+hard to believe when she sprang up with a little cry: &#8220;I have been here
+two hours! Now I have earned my scolding. The <i>madre</i> only let me come
+under a solemn promise to be back before sunset.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Had they been unaware of the principal concomitant in the charm of the
+hour, knowledge would have been forced upon them when she rode away,
+for, though the birds still sang and the hot sun poured a flood of light
+and heat down on the bench, somehow things looked and felt cold and
+gray.</p>
+
+<p>And she? Going downgrade an afterglow of smiles lent force to her
+murmur: &#8220;Gringos or no, they are very nice.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">A</span> hard gallop of eight miles carried Francesca to the forks where the
+path to and from Santa Gertrudis joined the main valley trail, and she
+had traveled no more than a hundred yards beyond before she was roused
+from renewed musings by the thud of hoofs. Turning in her saddle, she
+saw Sebastien coming along the valley trail at a gallop. Passing the
+<i>mozo</i>, whose beast had lagged, the hacendado pulled his beast down to a
+trot, and as Tomas, answering a question, nodded backward toward the
+hills, vexation swept the girl&#8217;s face.</p>
+
+<p>It cleared, however, as quickly, and while waiting for Sebastien she
+measured him with a narrow glance. The straight, lithe figure, easy
+carriage, dark, quiet face could stand inspection, and she paid
+unconscious tribute. &#8220;If I hadn&#8217;t gone to Europe I suppose&mdash;&#8221; A decided
+shake of the head completed while dismissing the thought. In the next
+breath she murmured, &#8220;Now for a fight.&#8221; Yet her expression, saluting
+him, displayed no apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, I was at Santa Gertrudis.&#8221; She quietly answered his question. &#8220;Two
+of our people shot <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>one of the gringos as he was leaving our place, and
+the good <i>mama</i> would have it that it was our duty to cure him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah! the good mother?&#8221; He raised his brows. &#8220;And she chose you for her
+doctor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As you see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, I see. &#8216;No, Francesca, thou canst not go. It would not be right
+for a young girl&mdash;well, if you must&mdash;&#8217; I hear it as though I had been
+there, and wonder that the se&ntilde;ora, who was brought up in the letter of
+our conventions, should send her daughter to a gringo camp with only a
+<i>mozo</i> for escort. But Don Luis? Is he also mad?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, only wise.&#8221; She answered with irritating simplicity. &#8220;Take care
+that you do not put heavier strains on a slight kinship. Third, fifth,
+tenth, just what is the degree of our cousinship?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;God knows!&#8221; He shrugged. &#8220;The slighter the better. &#8217;Twill serve till
+replaced by a closer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Which will be never.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Only the gods say &#8216;never.&#8217;&#8221; He quoted the proverb. &#8220;But returning to
+your <i>amigos</i>, the gringos&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My <i>amigos</i>?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You have received and repaid their visits. But listen! It is not that I
+would set bounds for your freedom, but if you had stood, as I have, on a
+street corner in Ciudad, Mexico, and had heard the gringo tourists pass
+comments on our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>women&mdash;<i>Dios</i>! I choke at the thought! If you but
+realized their coxcombry, conceit, the contempt in which they hold us&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had flushed slightly, but with a toss of her head she broke in: &#8220;It
+is not necessary. I have heard young Mexican men comment on both our own
+and American women. If the gringos can teach them any <span style="white-space: nowrap;">lessons&mdash;&#8221;</span></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Apes!&#8221; he burst angrily in. &#8220;Fools! The degenerate apes who put on the
+vices of civilization with its collars!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perhaps. But, even so, it makes for the same point&mdash;there are gringos
+and gringos just as we have Mexicans <i>and</i> Mexicans.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And these, of course, are the other sort?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Exactly!&#8221; She robbed his sarcasm by her quiet. &#8220;If one judges, as one
+must, by their behavior. I am pleased to find you, for once, of my
+opinion.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of your opinion?&#8221; He regarded her with sudden sternness. &#8220;That is, to
+be friends with these men who have forced themselves in on your lands? I
+had never expected to hear it fall from the lips of a Garcia. Now
+listen! What if your people did wound this man? Is he the first? Will he
+be the last?&#8221; His face darkening under a rush of blood, he continued: &#8220;I
+had thought this pair would soon ruin themselves as did the other fools
+before them. But since they are working on a surer plan&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you mean?&#8221; She searched his face. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;So anxious?&#8221; he laughed bitterly. &#8220;What is it to you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Only that I would not have them murdered.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And would they be the first? Is there a foot of Mexican soil which has
+not been soaked with good Mexican blood that you should be so careful
+for a gringo?&#8221; Slanting through an opening in the trees overhead the sun
+shone on his face, transforming it into a red mask of hate. &#8220;As yet no
+one of them has secured himself in the Barranca de Guerrero! So long as
+a Rocha is left to do the duty that belongs to the Garcias no one of
+them ever will.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But now he had touched another string, and, straightening in her saddle,
+she gave him look for look. &#8220;When the Garcias need the Rochas to settle
+their quarrels it will be time for you to interfere. I should not advise
+you to speak thus to my uncle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless she flinched a little at his answer. &#8220;That is my
+intention&mdash;this very night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With that they rode on, in silence for a while, then speaking of other
+things. But when he left her in the upper courtyard an hour later she
+stood at her door, listening apprehensively to the jingle of his spurs
+along the gallery. When he took a chair beside Don Luis, who sat there
+smoking, she listened for a while. Then, flushing suddenly, she hastily
+went in.</p>
+
+<p>If she had remained there was nothing to hear, for during many minutes
+the conversation ran <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>altogether on the herds as they came winding in
+from distant pastures to the corrals in the square. Night had reduced
+everything to a dark blur before Sebastien commented on a yellow twinkle
+high up on the Barranca wall.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That will be the gringos&#8217; light at Santa Gertrudis.&#8221; After a long
+pause, &#8220;It is now a month past since they came, and&mdash;they are still
+here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Luis flicked the ash from his cigar. &#8220;What hurry?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But this new business? The smelter you spoke of the other day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, the smelter?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Sebastien gave his own interpretation to the other&#8217;s slow tone. &#8220;Then
+there is something forward?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What need? The gringo at the station tells me they have no money. A
+single mistake and they are done.&#8221; After a sententious pause he added,
+&#8220;It is the part of youth to make mistakes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The dusk did not conceal the other&#8217;s impatience. &#8220;But why this tender
+care? Are they so different from the others? A word from thee and&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes, a nod and it would have been done long ago. There speaks
+young blood&mdash;the hot blood that lost us Texas and Alta California. These
+lads are of good family, Sebastien, and there can be no disappearance
+without inquiry. Their death would be but one more thorn in the side of
+the rabid beast that requires small urging <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>to devour us. No, let them
+make their own end.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And Francesca? Is she to have the run of their camp?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Luis&#8217;s deep laugh rumbled through the courtyard. &#8220;At last from a
+long cast we come to the quarry. Francesca? She is a wild filly, the
+despair of every staid tabby in the countryside. Long ago I discovered
+that the one way to manage her was to let her have her head. Nor will it
+be the part of wisdom for thee to interfere.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Neither would I try&mdash;yet. Commands are for husbands; lovers must wait.
+That which I propose she will never know. It is&mdash;&#8221; Answering the other&#8217;s
+interrogative look, he leaned over, whispering in rapid Spanish.</p>
+
+<p>Don Luis emitted an amused chuckle. &#8220;Sebastien, thou art truly a devil.
+Had thy father possessed but the half of thy wit, some things had gone
+different in the last war. Yes, feet that are still spoiling good sod
+would now be rotten bones.&#8221; After a pause he went on: &#8220;It seems a scurvy
+trick, yet it depends on the men themselves. But&mdash;if they rise not at
+the bait?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If?&#8221; Sebastien repeated it with bitter scorn. &#8220;Was there ever a gringo
+that would not bite at such? They are kind as goats. I ask only that you
+go there with Francesca at the close of the week.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And thou?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I shall go there to-morrow.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">L</span>iving in the letter of his intention, Sebastien was up next morning and
+had covered ten miles of the trail before the sun rose over the Barranca
+wall. Early as it was, however, others were already abroad. The sudden
+increase in his family had obliged Seyd to make a journey out to the
+railroad for more provisions, and when Sebastien paused to breathe his
+beast halfway up the grade to the bench, a good glass would have shown
+him Light and Peace gingerly picking their way along the trail that had
+been built by Don Luis&#8217;s orders around the slide on the opposite wall.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, Sebastien&#8217;s approach was announced by the ring of hoofs, but,
+imagining it to be some charcoal-burner, Billy, who was already at his
+bricks, did not look up till warned by Caliban&#8217;s stealthy hiss. In his
+surprise he forgot to reply to Sebastien&#8217;s greeting, and simply answered
+the other&#8217;s question.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don Roberto? He is not here?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, gone out to the railroad. Won&#8217;t be back for three days.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Caramba!</i> After I had climbed these heights <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>to see him!&#8221; Though his
+eyebrows and hands both testified to Sebastien&#8217;s disappointment, a
+sharper eye than Billy&#8217;s might have discerned the underlying
+satisfaction. Moreover, if he appeared merely inquisitively friendly
+during the hour he stayed to chat, not one minute was wasted. From the
+first question to his final comment on Billy&#8217;s work, &#8220;You gringos are
+certainly a wonderful people,&#8221; all was directed to one end.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, we usually get there,&#8221; Billy modestly admitted, and his next words
+paved a lovely road for Sebastien to come to his purpose. &#8220;The building
+would go faster if I hadn&#8217;t so many things to do. After laying bricks
+all day I have to turn in and cook, and, though it&#8217;s pretty tough, there
+doesn&#8217;t seem to be any way out of it. We tried both of the peons at the
+cooking and nearly died of the hash they served up.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tut! tut!&#8221; Sebastien was there with ready sympathy. &#8220;This is too bad.
+Soon you will be completely worn out.&#8221; After a pause, during which he
+may be imagined as taking Billy&#8217;s mental temperature, he said: &#8220;<i>Bueno!</i>
+I have it! I shall send you a cook&mdash;one than whom there is no finer in
+all this country.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If he had harbored any suspicions, Billy&#8217;s beaming smile now wiped them
+out. &#8220;That&#8217;s awfully good of you. Seyd will be ever so glad. When can we
+expect your cook?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To-morrow afternoon.&#8221; Scenting hospitality <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>in Billy&#8217;s glance toward
+the hut, Sebastien hastily added, &#8220;That is, if I reach home to-night&mdash;to
+do which I shall have to be going.&#8221; And refusing the offer of lunch
+which justified his premonition, he rode away, leaving Billy puffed up
+with pride.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I rather think I turned that trick well,&#8221; he congratulated himself.
+&#8220;Seyd couldn&#8217;t have done it a bit better.&#8221; Occasional fat chuckles
+emitted during the afternoon testified to his increasing opinion of his
+own diplomacy. But his rising pride did not attain its meridian until,
+midway of the following afternoon, a pretty brown girl came driving a
+burro up the trail.</p>
+
+<p>Having anticipated a man cook, it required five minutes of vehement
+Spanish, helped out by a wealth of gesticulation, to convince Billy that
+the girl was not an estray from a neighboring hamlet, and while her dark
+eyes, white teeth, and shapely brown arms were engaged in explanation
+they wrought other work. By the time Billy was finally able to
+understand the fact he was hardly in condition to pass upon it.</p>
+
+<p>It is only right to state that he had little time for reflection, for
+from the very beginning the girl took the direction of affairs into her
+own hands. Driving her burro over to the stable she unpacked a stone
+<i>metate</i>, or grinding-stone, a pestle, and a quantity of soaked corn.
+She turned the beast out to graze, then dropped at once on her knees and
+began grinding paste for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>the supper tortillas, or cakes. When, toward
+evening, Billy dropped in for a drink he found her mantle spread on his
+bed and certain articles of feminine wear depending from the nails which
+had hitherto been sacred to his own clothing.</p>
+
+<p>Blushing furiously, he went out&mdash;without the drink. But, though his
+colors would have done credit to a girl, they were not to be weighed in
+the same balance with the green peppers stuffed with minced beef that
+she served at supper with the tortillas. While eating with an appetite
+born of a protracted canned diet it is to be feared that he fed just as
+ravenously on the atmosphere shed by her luxurious presence. When, after
+supper, he sat in the doorway and watched the blood-reds of the sunset
+flow through the valley he might, with his fiery stubble, have passed
+for some ancient Celt at the mouth of his cave. Not until he caught a
+second glimpse of the mantle while stealing a look at the girl washing
+up dishes did he return to his usual bashful self. Slipping quietly
+inside, he gathered up the blankets off Seyd&#8217;s bed and carried them out
+to make his own couch under a tree.</p>
+
+<p>This procedure on his part the girl watched with a certain astonishment
+which she vented on Caliban while giving him his breakfast next day. &#8220;I
+had thought differently of the gringos. Be they all like this one&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Give time, give time!&#8221; the hunchback advised. &#8220;Big fish are ever slow
+at the hook, but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>when they once rise&mdash;&#8221; The tortilla he used for
+illustration vanished at one gulp. &#8220;Wait till thou seest Don Roberto.
+There&#8217;s a man! Of his own strength he threw a burro off the trail into
+the Barranca and so turned the train that would otherwise have driven
+him and the &#8216;Red Head&#8217; into the ca&ntilde;on. &#8217;Tis so. The history of it was
+written by Don Sebastien&#8217;s whip on the shoulders of Mattias and Carlos.
+And what of the magic that turned my bullet fired at twenty yards, then
+found me and Calixto in black jungle and shot us down from the high
+cliff? Si, chief of the other is he, so waste not thy freshness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bah! am I a fool?&#8221; She elevated her nose.</p>
+
+<p>This conversation undoubtedly explains the staidness of her demeanor
+that day. Not that it was necessary to keep Billy at his distance.
+Leaving his painful modesty out of the question, in his ignorance of the
+Mexican peon folk he placed her in his imagination on the same plane as
+a white girl, and as the color of a skin cuts no figure in the
+calculations of the little god, providing that it be fitted smoothly
+over a pretty body, she found favor in his sight. At work both the next
+and the following days he kept always an eye open for the flash of her
+white garments in the doorway. When, with the earthen jar on her head,
+she went to draw water from the spring his glance followed the swaying
+rhythms of her figure. If not actually in love by the time Don Luis and
+Francesca put in their appearance next <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>morning, Billy was at least
+living a tropical idyl, one not a whit less beautiful because its object
+departed far from his ideal in all but her physical perfection.</p>
+
+<p>The visit had been skilfully timed to miss lunch, and Billy was already
+back at his work. Crossing the bench, Don Luis&#8217;s eye went instantly to
+the girl who had been drawn to the door by the sound of hoofbeats. But
+his expression gave no hint of his grim amusement. The keenest ear would
+have found it difficult to detect sarcasm in his remark.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see, se&ntilde;or, that you have added to your family.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Also it need not be said that Francesca&#8217;s woman&#8217;s eye had summed at a
+glance the smooth oval face, rounded arms, shapely figure; yet their
+undeniable comeliness brought no pleasure to her expression. If Billy
+had overlooked Don Luis&#8217;s sarcasm it was impossible to miss her scorn.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A capable housekeeper&mdash;if one may judge from her looks&mdash;and quite at
+home. You are to be congratulated, Mr. Thornton.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Looking up in quick surprise, Billy noticed the absence of the sympathy
+that she had shown him during her last visit. Feeling the cold anger
+behind, and sadly puzzled, he was not sorry when, after a few minutes of
+strained talk, Don Luis asked to be shown the vein. Judging by his
+backward glance from the mouth of the tunnel, it would appear that he
+had coined the request <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>to pave the way for that which happened the
+instant they disappeared. For, walking her beast over to the house,
+Francesca spoke to the girl.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thy name?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Carmelita, se&ntilde;orita.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of what village?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Chilpancin&mdash;I am the daughter to Candelario, the maker of hair ropes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though she answered with the glib obsequiousness of her class, the
+appraising glance which swept Francesca from head to heel carried a mute
+challenge and conveyed her full knowledge that a battle was pitched such
+as women fight all the world over. Neither could Francesca&#8217;s patrician
+feeling smother equal recognition. It was revealed in her next question.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How long hast thou been in this employment?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The girl paused. Then, whether it was due to Sebastien&#8217;s tutoring or her
+own malice, she gave answer. &#8220;Eight days, se&ntilde;orita.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who hired thee?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Downcast lashes hid the sudden sparkle of cunning. &#8220;Don Roberto.&#8221; But
+they lifted in time for her to catch the sudden hardening of Francesca&#8217;s
+face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then see that thou renderest good service, for these be friends of
+ours.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As beforesaid, neither the cold patronage of the one nor the sullen
+obsequiousness of the other <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>could hide the issue from either.
+Francesca&#8217;s calm, as she turned her beast, did not deceive. Malicious
+understanding flashed out as the girl called after, &#8220;<i>Si</i>, he shall have
+the best of service.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Returning to the smelter, Francesca began to talk to Caliban, yet while
+questioning him concerning his new employment she could not be
+unconscious of Carmelita lolling in the doorway, hands on shapely hips,
+an attitude gracefully indolent and powerfully suggestive of possession.
+Perhaps it was her acute consciousness of it which injected an extra
+chill a few minutes later into her refusal of Billy&#8217;s invitation to
+dismount and rest. His suggestion that Seyd was likely to arrive any
+moment drew a still more decided shake of the head. Moreover meeting
+Seyd as they rode downgrade she passed with the slightest nods, nor even
+looked back to see if her uncle were following.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless because he felt that he could well afford it, Don Luis did
+stop, and before riding on he once more threatened Calixto, the
+rice-huller, who was with Seyd. &#8220;This fellow&mdash;he still gives good
+service?&#8221; His courtesy, however, did not remove the chill of Francesca&#8217;s
+snub. Hurt and wondering, Seyd passed on up to the bench&mdash;to have his
+eyes opened the instant that he saw the girl in the doorway. When, after
+dismounting, he walked across to where Billy was at work on the
+foundation, her big dark eyes took him in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>from tip to toe in a flashing
+embrace. She studied him while he stood there talking.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is <i>she</i> doing here?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He cut off Billy&#8217;s welcome with the sharp question, and while listening
+to explanations his gray eyes drew into points of black. In the middle
+of it he burst out, &#8220;You don&#8217;t mean to say that you fell for it as
+easily as that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fell for what?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Billy&#8217;s round eyes merely added to his irritation. &#8220;You chump! didn&#8217;t
+you see the trap?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The trap?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, trap! <i>T-r-a-p,</i> trap! Got it into your fat head? Don&#8217;t you see
+that you have catalogued us with the San Nicolas people as a pair of
+blackguards forever? Oh, you fat head!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That was not all. While he stormed on, saying things that he would
+willingly have taken back a minute later, every bit of its usual
+mercurial humor drained out of Billy&#8217;s face. Over Seyd&#8217;s shoulder he
+could see the girl in the doorway. A certain dark expectancy in her
+glance told that she knew herself to be the bone of contention. As a doe
+might watch the conflict of two bucks in the forest, she looked on, and,
+meeting Billy&#8217;s eye, her glance touched off his anger.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Stop that!&#8221; he suddenly yelled. &#8220;Stop it or I&#8217;ll hand you one! I will,
+for sure! What do I care for your San Nicolas people? I didn&#8217;t come down
+here to do a social stunt, and why should the opinions of a lot of
+greasers cut any ice? <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>Let &#8217;em go hang. The girl looks all right to me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All right! You innocent!&#8221; Shaking with anger, Seyd turned and spoke to
+Caliban, who was mixing mortar close by. &#8220;As I thought! If half he says
+is true her reputation would hang a cat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But Billy&#8217;s jaw only set the harder. While he might easily have been
+persuaded out of his idyl, he was not to be driven. Out of pure
+obstinacy he growled: &#8220;What of it? I reckon her morals won&#8217;t spoil the
+food. She&#8217;s proved she can cook, and that is all I want. She&#8217;s going to
+stay.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s not.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For a pause they eyed each other. Though their friendship had survived,
+nay, had been cemented by many a quarrel, never before had a
+disagreement gone such lengths.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Look here, Billy.&#8221; Seyd spoke more mildly. &#8220;This won&#8217;t do. She&#8217;s got to
+go.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not till you&#8217;ve shown me&mdash;not now,&#8221; he hastily added, as Seyd began to
+strip. &#8220;I&#8217;d hate to hit a cripple, and&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come on.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But, ducking a swing, Billy gave ground, genuine concern on his face.
+&#8220;No, no, old man! You are still weak. Let it go for another week. That
+left fin of yours&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Landing at that precise moment on his ear, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>however, the member in
+question proved its convalescence and ended the argument by toppling him
+sideways. Up in a second, he closed, and for the next ten minutes they
+went at it, clinching and breaking, jabbing and hooking, with an energy
+and science that would have filled the respective souls of a moralist
+and a prize-fighter with disgust and delight. Avoiding both of these
+extreme viewpoints, the account may very well be given in the terms used
+by Caliban in describing the affair next day to one of his <i>compa&ntilde;eros</i>,
+a charcoal-burner.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Like mad bulls they go at it, grappling and tearing, each striking the
+other so that the thud of their blows raise the echoes. It is in the
+very beginning that the Red Cabeza fells Don Roberto, but instead of
+splitting his head with the spade that stands close by&mdash;was ever such
+folly!&mdash;he helps him up from the ground. I then think it the finish, but
+no, they go at it again, hailing blows in the face hard as the kick of a
+mule, and so it continues for a time with only pauses to catch their
+breath. I am beginning to wonder will it ever come to an end
+when&mdash;crack! sharp as the snap of thy whip and so swift that I do not
+see the blow, it comes. The Red Cabeza lies there quietly on the ground.
+Believe it or not, Pedro, he is knocked senseless by a blow of the
+hand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The immediate consequences may also be left to Caliban. &#8220;Their quarrel,
+as I have said, is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>over Carmelita, the dove of Chilpancin, and I now
+expect to see Don Roberto take her for his own. That she is of the same
+mind is proven when she comes running with her knife for him to finish
+up the Red Cabeza. But again, no! who shall understand these
+gringos?&mdash;he gives her the sharpest of looks.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;<i>Vamos!</i>&#8217; He shouts it with such anger that she stumbles and falls,
+running back to the house. Also she makes such a quick packing that she
+is driving her burro out to the trail before the Red Cabeza comes to his
+senses.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Billy&#8217;s eyes, indeed, opened on the departing flash of her garments.
+&#8220;You didn&#8217;t lose much time,&#8221; he commented, with a quizzical glance
+upward. &#8220;Well, to the victor the spoils&mdash;or the rejection thereof. That
+was a peach of a punch&mdash;the bum left, too, wasn&#8217;t it?&#8221; The old merry
+look flashing out again from the blood and bruises, he asked: &#8220;How&#8217;ll
+you trade? In exchange for one admission from you I&#8217;m willing to grant
+you&#8217;re right.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Shoot!&#8221; Seyd grinned.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Would you have been as careful of the proprieties if the se&ntilde;orita were
+out of the case?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Smiling, Seyd raised doubtful shoulders. &#8220;<i>Quien sabe</i>, se&ntilde;or?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ahem!&#8221; Billy coughed. &#8220;Now you justify the continuance of my wretched
+existence. All the same, while it may be correct in theory your darned
+morality is mighty uncomfortable practice. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>That girl could cook. The
+next time you fall in love please&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8221;<i>Now</i>, what are you talking about?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What have I done?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Before his look of hopeless surprise Seyd&#8217;s anger faded. &#8220;I beg your
+pardon. Of course you didn&#8217;t know, but&mdash;I&#8217;m already married.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Me.&#8221; With grim sarcasm he added, &#8220;And you know that it is against the
+law of both God and man for a married man to fall in love.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Feeling dimly that something was expected of him, but debarred from
+congratulations by the other&#8217;s irony, Billy floundered, bringing several
+attempts at speech to a lame conclusion. &#8220;When&mdash;when did it&mdash;happen?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Happen? That&#8217;s it.&#8221; Seyd jumped at the word. &#8220;It <i>happened</i> in New
+Mexico three years ago when I was down there &#8216;experting&#8217; the Calumet
+group. She was the daughter of a mine foreman, pretty and neat as a
+grouse in the fall, but of the hopelessly common type. I don&#8217;t have to
+describe her. You&#8217;ve seen them, in pairs, swinging their skirts along
+the boardwalks of any small town, their eyes on every man and a burst of
+giggles always on tap. I should never have paid her any serious
+attention if several of her admirers hadn&#8217;t done me the honor of getting
+jealous. Until one big lout warned me to leave her alone under penalty
+of broken bones it was never more than a mild flirtation, but after that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>I went deeper&mdash;so deep that it was soon impossible for me to withdraw.
+At least, I thought it was then, though I have since come to regard my
+marriage with her almost as a crime. You see, I thought it would break
+her heart, but in less than a week after the marriage I discovered that
+she was nothing but a bundle of small vanities bound up in a pretty
+skin, that she hadn&#8217;t a thought above the money and position she
+expected to gain through me. And how she changed! As a girl she was
+soft, fluffy, and innocent as a kitten, but one by one her small
+vanities and frivolities developed into appetites and passions, and I
+awoke to the fact that she was altogether animal&mdash;a beautiful animal,
+prettier than ever in her young wifehood, but without the slightest
+capacity for intellectual or spiritual development.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If that had been all&mdash;one can love a handsome horse or a dog, and I
+have seen women of as low a type to be lifted out of themselves by the
+strength of their love. But she was absolutely selfish&mdash;loved only
+herself. What made it even more unbearable, she was conceited with the
+supreme conceit of absolute ignorance that scorns all that is unknown to
+itself. She would try to impose her own inch-and-a-half notions of
+things upon me, and she did not hesitate to pit the scraps of knowledge
+she had picked up around the mines against my professional training. She
+was bound to remold me on her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>own crude model. Actual wickedness would
+have been easier to bear, and I can assure you that the third month of
+our married life found me absolutely miserable. Fortunately, I received
+a commission just then to &#8216;expert&#8217; a group of Mexican mines, and, as she
+preferred civilization as it goes in New Mexico to the hardships of a
+trip through the Sonora desert, I left her behind. Later I came south on
+a prospecting trip through the Sierra Madres, and have never seen her
+since.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>All through he had spoken with the furious vehemence of a man easing a
+load off his mind. Thrusting a letter into Billy&#8217;s hand, he finished,
+walking away: &#8220;Read that&mdash;I got it at the station yesterday. It reveals
+more than I could tell you in the next twenty-four hours.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And it surely did. The stiff round hand, as much as the bald statement
+of want and desires, revealed a nature blind to all but its own ends.
+Every phrase was a cry or complaint. He had no business to go off and
+leave her alone! All her friends agreed that it was a &#8220;shame and a
+disgrace.&#8221; But he needn&#8217;t think that she would stand such treatment
+forever! He had better come home, and that at once! So far she hadn&#8217;t
+tried to &#8220;better herself.&#8221; But it wasn&#8217;t for lack of the chance! There
+was a gentleman&mdash;no fresh dude or college guy, but a rich mining man,
+eminently respectable, who had shown a decided interest! He <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>(Seyd) had
+better look out. Thus and so did the awkward hand run over many pages,
+and, while Billy&#8217;s eye followed, his expression gradually settled in
+complete disgust.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hopelessly common! You poor chap,&#8221; he muttered, looking after Seyd, who
+was now helping Caliban to arrange the goods as he carried them from the
+mules into the adobe. &#8220;To think that you have had this on your mind all
+this time!&#8221; After a moment&#8217;s reflection he added, &#8220;But&mdash;married or
+unmarried, you are still in love.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Unaware of this frank opinion, Seyd went on arranging the stores. While
+working, the eager vehemence of his manner settled into heavy brooding,
+and it was not for some time that a cheerful flash indicated his arrival
+at some conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve got it!&#8221; he murmured. And turning so suddenly that Caliban dropped
+the package he was carrying in, he asked, &#8220;Hast thou any acquaintance at
+San Nicolas?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Reassured that the strange gringo madness was not to be vented on him,
+the hunchback nodded. &#8220;One of the kitchen women is daughter to my
+sister.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He nodded again in answer to a second question as to whether his niece
+could convey certain information to the se&ntilde;orita Francesca&#8217;s ear?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, there is always gossip moving among the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>women. It could be
+passed through Rosa, her maid.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For a man who had just taken offense at the very suggestion that he was
+in love Seyd&#8217;s face expressed a surprising amount of satisfaction. A
+little sheepishly he now went on: &#8220;It must be that thou wouldst care to
+see thy relative? To-morrow is Sunday, and, as thy service has been
+good, it shall be a holiday, and thou shalt have a mule to ride to San
+Nicolas.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To tell the truth, the hunchback did not seem overjoyed at the prospect,
+at least not until Seyd tossed a silver peso on the table. &#8220;This is to
+buy thee meat and drink by the way, and if it be that thy niece can
+whisper&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His beady eyes glittering with comprehension, the hunchback broke in,
+&#8220;That the dove flew at thy coming. She shall know it, se&ntilde;or&mdash;also from
+whose hand she came hither.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The quickness with which the fellow leaped to his meaning was rather
+disconcerting, and Seyd blushed. But, commanding his guilty colors, he
+brazened it out. &#8220;But see! She is not to know that it proceeds from me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, se&ntilde;or.&#8221; The man&#8217;s quick grin indicated an unearthly
+comprehension. &#8220;It will be a bit of gossip from the mouth of a
+muleteer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was at this juncture that Billy, who had just returned to work after
+washing the blood from his face, heard a cheerful whistling inside.
+When, an hour later, he went in to help with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>supper he found Seyd his
+usual cheerful self. Next morning his spirits were still higher, but did
+not attain their meridian until Caliban departed for San Nicolas,
+bravely attired in a gaudy suit which he had dug from some obscure
+corner of the stable. Toward evening, however, a touch of anxiety
+dampened his mood. It might almost have been regarded as premonitory of
+the news Caliban delivered in the dusk outside.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The se&ntilde;orita Francesca has gone to visit her mother&#8217;s people at
+Cuernavaca. It is not known when she will return.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very well; thou hast done thy share,&#8221; Seyd answered.</p>
+
+<p>His quiet tone, however, did not deceive the hunchback. &#8220;Did I not say
+these gringos were a mad people?&#8221; he demanded of Calixto, showing two
+pesos by the light of the stable lantern. &#8220;He pays me a peso to bring
+him good news, and gives me two when I return with bad&mdash;and to think
+that I was minded to feed him lies. Truly, there is no knowing when to
+have them! &#8217;Tis the truth serves best with fools and gringos.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<p style="float: left; font-size: 100%; line-height: 80%; margin-top: 0;">&#8220;</p><p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">D</span>one&mdash;at last!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Sprawled on the flat of his back, with his curly head propped on his
+hands and his lime-eaten boots spread at a comfortable angle, Billy
+gazed upon their completed labor. The &#8220;well&#8221;&mdash;into which the liquid
+copper matte would presently be flowing&mdash;crucible, slag spout, blast
+pipes, or tuyeres, and canvas blowers, even the inclined way that led up
+to the platform over the loading trap, all were finished, and from the
+solid bed to the tip top of the brick chimney shaft Billy&#8217;s vision
+embraced it all. Including the tons of charcoal that Caliban had burned
+and brought in from the woods, and the piles of ore which Seyd and
+Calixto had broken into smelting size with &#8220;spalling&#8221; hammers, all stood
+ready for the match that Seyd scratched while echoing Billy&#8217;s
+observation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Done&mdash;at last!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When the shavings and wood were fairly started under the mixed charge of
+charcoal and ore Seyd also lay down to watch the first smoke. Under the
+vigorous blast it quickly appeared&mdash;a thin blue spiral which waxed in
+volume and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>blackness. In thirty minutes it laid a sooty finger halfway
+across the Barranca above the hills, a sinister portent to the rancheros
+and peons, one that found a dark reflection in Don Luis&#8217;s frown as he
+looked out from the upper patio of San Nicolas, far away.</p>
+
+<p>Unconscious, however, of alien observation, Seyd watched the
+fluctuations of the black smoke with lazy enjoyment. He permitted his
+fancy to float with the waving pennon out over the valley down the
+river, where it set him aboard a log raft with his first shipment of
+copper matte and set him drifting down to the coast, where he could
+either sell to the United Metals Company or ship by sea to California
+smelters. There was nothing impractical about his musings. Independent
+of the gold values it carried, one smelting would transmute their
+thirty-dollar ore into copper matte worth a hundred and twenty dollars a
+ton. At a liberal estimate the extra twenty would pay expenses, and with
+a profit of a hundred dollars on an output of sixty or seventy a week
+during the two months before the rains, there was a small fortune in it.
+Next year they could both import their labor and put in a regular plant.
+Thereafter they would be in a position to deliver &#8220;blister&#8221; copper
+instead of matte to the market. Why, flaming under the breath of this
+first success, fancy leaped out to all sorts of possibilities, raised
+wharves, bunkers, storehouses in the jungle below, set a fleet of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>flat-bottomed sternwheelers on the river. And never was there such a
+river! He was traveling its long reaches in thought when fancy suddenly
+steered his argosy of dreams into the San Nicolas landing.</p>
+
+<p>The next second he was sitting again in the shaded gallery of the upper
+patio, its flowers and bird song, sunshine and fountain splash in his
+eyes and ears. As on the other day, he watched Francesca bending over
+her godchild, and while he was contrasting her air of tender solicitude
+with the cold hauteur of her face a month ago he thought she looked up
+with a smile. He was answering it when the smiling eyes were wiped out
+by the intrusion of some unpleasant thought.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You fool!&#8221; he chided himself. Then, sitting suddenly up, he smote Billy
+on the thigh with force that drew a yell of anguish. &#8220;It&#8217;s a mint, boy!
+A blooming mint! I wouldn&#8217;t trade my share for the best gold mine in
+Tonopah. Next year we&#8217;ll put in a big plant&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Reverberatories with water jackets!&#8221; Billy enthusiastically took up the
+tale.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sure, and we&#8217;ll build down on the flat by the river and deliver the ore
+by&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Gravity. Aerial cable&mdash;self-dumping buckets&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll refine our own matte&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Market our own copper and gold.&#8221; His blue eyes shining, Billy ran on:
+&#8220;In five years we&#8217;ll be rich, then for a rest and a trip. New York,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>London, Paris, with Nice and Monte Carlo thrown in. Europe in a
+touring-car, by golly! Egypt and the Pyramids! A steam yacht and a trip
+around the world! Hurray for us!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the mean time&#8221;&mdash;Seyd led him gently back to earth&mdash;&#8220;remember,
+please, that this is your trick. Go and stoke up, or there&#8217;ll be no
+Paris in yours.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And surely their days of ease lay a long way off. Long and hard as they
+had labored, the completion of the smelter merely marked the beginning
+of still more strenuous tasks. Upon them and the two peons would rest
+the entire weight of running the smelter at its full capacity. Besides
+the breaking of the ore, tapping of the slag, continuous firing, they
+would have to burn their own charcoal after the first supply ran out.
+Though they had spread the strain by dividing day and night into shifts,
+it would have been work enough for four times their number.</p>
+
+<p>Seyd&#8217;s first shift ended at twelve that night, but, though he sent
+Caliban off to his sleep, he himself sat up to wait for the first matte,
+which was due to come trickling from the spouts at any moment. Reclining
+his head, propped on his hand, he watched Billy and Calixto, both now of
+one color, each at his task, one working the blowers while the other
+dumped fresh ore and charcoal into the loading trap. At such times the
+blast would send a burst of flame high over the chimney top, lighting
+the house, stables, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>green ore mounds, showing ghostly trees beyond as
+under a calcium glare. Though the roar of the blast fell like a lullaby
+on his tired ears, excitement kept him awake till the first matte flowed
+in a red stream out of the tap.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;ll go a hundred and fifty to the ton!&#8221; Billy exclaimed, after a
+careful examination of a cooled sample. Then, waving his hand at the
+huge ore mounds, he groaned: &#8220;What a shame that we hadn&#8217;t enough labor
+and capital. We could have run it all through before the rains.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pig! Hog!&#8221; Seyd found a vent for his own surplus feelings by punching
+Billy in the chest. &#8220;Think how much worse off we should have been if we
+had had to mine it. Go down on your American knee bones and thank your
+lucky stars for the English Johnnies.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Still smiling, he lay again to watch the glowing matte as Billy ladled
+it out of the well. It was the culmination of their long labor, but he
+was too tired even to think, and, giving himself up to a dim luxurious
+feeling, he insensibly passed into sleep.</p>
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+
+<p>&#8220;Wake up, Bob, and go to bed. You still have four hours.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Only half aroused, he arose and stumbled across to the adobe, threw
+himself down on the bunk without waiting to remove even his boots, and
+fell into slumber at once so dead and dreamless that it seemed as if his
+head had no more than <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>touched the pillow before Billy&#8217;s voice again
+rang in his ear.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Seven o&#8217;clock, Bob. I gave you an extra hour.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, quit your joshing.&#8221; He murmured it, rolling over, and was again
+almost asleep when a sudden report, louder than thunder, but with a
+peculiar vibrant note, brought him swiftly to his feet. A second later
+the door banged to and stuck, but not before they had caught a glimpse
+of a huge cloud plume, densely yellow, shooting upward above the
+smelter.</p>
+
+<p>During the moment required to wrench the door from its frame the adobe
+rocked under the concussion and scattered mud bricks, and there was a
+rain of stores from the shelves to the floor. It did not require
+Caliban&#8217;s frightened yell on the outside, &#8220;<i>Explosion! Una explosion</i>,
+se&ntilde;ores!&#8221; to tell them what had happened. The first glance, as they
+rushed out over the broken door, merely filled in the details of the
+vivid mental picture each had formed for himself. Hundreds of feet in
+mid air, the explosion cloud floated like a yellow balloon above the
+stump of a stack, the half-fused bricks of which were scattered over the
+bench. A cavity had been torn downward through the solid brick bed to
+the clay beneath, and, looking down into it, Seyd read the sign.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dynamite! What was the last thing you did?&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Stoked up and sent Calixto to call Caliban while I came for you.
+Luckily for him that I did.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The charcoal piles were also leveled and spread over half an acre, and,
+walking to and fro, Seyd began to pick up and break the larger pieces.
+And it was only a few minutes before he called out: &#8220;Look here! Stick
+dynamite, broken in two and gummed over with charcoal dust&mdash;a bushel of
+it right here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you suppose&mdash;&#8221; Billy glanced toward the peons, who stood close by.</p>
+
+<p>Seyd shook his head. &#8220;No, they had nothing to gain by it, and everything
+to lose. It was the easiest thing in the world for anybody to steal into
+the woods at night and slip a ton of this into the charcoal piles.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Man, why didn&#8217;t we think of it?&#8221; Billy groaned.</p>
+
+<p>In moments of stress no two natures will express themselves in quite the
+same way. As they stood looking gloomily over the wreck big tears slowly
+forced themselves out of Billy&#8217;s inflamed eyes and washed white runnels
+down the soot. Heartbroken, he looked up in sudden fright as Seyd burst
+out laughing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bob! Bob!&#8221; he pleaded. &#8220;Have you gone crazy? Get a grip on yourself,
+there&#8217;s a good fellow!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But his pathetic anxiety merely caused Seyd to laugh the more. It was
+not that he was hysterical. Somehow the thought of the pain <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>and
+travail, trouble, anxiety, and discomforts they had endured during the
+past three months touched his sense of humor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We have to allow that they made a pretty clean job,&#8221; he said, wiping
+his eyes. &#8220;Let&#8217;s be thankful that you were out of the way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where are you going?&#8221; Billy called out, as he began to walk away.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To finish my sleep and catch up a few hours on all that I have lost in
+the last three months. Take a nap yourself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I couldn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He undoubtedly thought so, yet when Seyd came out again, having slept
+the clock round, it was to find Billy curled up and snoring hard under
+the shade of the palm mat that Caliban had stretched between him and the
+sun. &#8220;Quit your fooling,&#8221; he broke in severely on Seyd&#8217;s chaffing.
+&#8220;Don&#8217;t you know that we are down to our last dollar?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thirty-three dollars and sixty cents Mex,&#8221; Seyd gravely corrected.
+Kicking a chunk of cooled matte, he added: &#8220;But we now have this. It
+ought to stake us for a new start.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Billy, however, was not to be so easily separated from his grief. &#8220;Where
+are you going to raise capital,&#8221; he demanded, &#8220;with every spare dollar
+in California locked up in the Nevada gold fields? If this had happened
+a year ago, before the Tonopah rush, we might have done it. But now?&#8221; He
+shook a doleful head. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Well&mdash;New York?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Worse and more of it. The New Yorkers want all the bacon for killing
+the pig. Might as well give them the mine at once. No, Bob, it&#8217;s all
+off. We&#8217;re done&mdash;cooked a lovely brown in our own grease. Why <i>didn&#8217;t</i>
+we guard those piles! Who do you suppose did it? Don Luis?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd shrugged. &#8220;<i>Quien sabe?</i> Doesn&#8217;t look like his style. Of one thing,
+however, we can be certain. Your common peon doesn&#8217;t habitually walk
+around with dynamite in his jeans. If I was going to lay any money, I&#8217;d
+place it on your friend Sebastien. But we haven&#8217;t any time to fool on
+detective work. The question is&mdash;what&#8217;s to be done?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was no light problem. As Billy had said, every dollar of Western
+mining capital was invested in Nevada, and Mexican projects, however
+good, would have to wait till the new gold fields were completely
+exploited. A canvass of moneyed friends yielded no results, for, while
+the wreck lay there under their eyes to emphasize the possibility of
+similar future troubles, they could not but feel it to be a hazardous
+venture for any person of limited means. Night brought no conclusion.
+But, having slept on it again, they arose and began once more,
+unconscious of the fact that while they lay in the heavy shade of a wild
+fig tree, proposing, debating, rejecting various plans, the solution was
+fast approaching upon its own legs. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p><p>Obviously, neither of them recognized the solution in the person of Don
+Luis when, about the middle of the forenoon, his horse lifted him up
+over the edge of the grade. On the contrary, it is doubtful whether
+smiling fortune was ever met with a blacker scowl than Billy&#8217;s.
+Growling, &#8220;He&#8217;s come up for a huge gloat,&#8221; he would undoubtedly have
+returned some insult to the old man&#8217;s greeting but for Seyd&#8217;s stealthy
+kick on the shins.</p>
+
+<p>Prepared as he was by the reports that charcoal-burners had brought to
+San Nicolas, Don Luis&#8217;s face expressed his utter astonishment at the
+extent of the ruin. &#8220;We but heard of it last night,&#8221; he told them. &#8220;It
+was, I suppose, accidental? I understand that these furnaces&mdash;dynamite?
+<i>Se&ntilde;or?</i>&#8221; He glanced with an interrogative frown at the peons asleep in
+the shade of the adobe. &#8220;It was not they?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Reassured on that point, he nodded in confirmation of Seyd&#8217;s statement
+that it would be foolish to hunt for the culprit. &#8220;As well try to single
+out a flea on a peon&#8217;s dog. I warned you, se&ntilde;or, to expect an enemy in
+every stone of the Barranca. It would have been well had you listened.
+But&#8221;&mdash;his eyes, hands, and shoulders expressed his acceptance of
+fate&mdash;&#8220;it is done. And now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We shall rebuild&mdash;as soon as we can raise the money.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Turning to survey the destruction, Don Luis <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>hid a sudden gleam that was
+evenly compounded of admiration and irritation. When he spoke again,
+shrewd calculation peered from his half-closed eyes. &#8220;This time you will
+build a larger&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;Plant?&#8221; Seyd supplied the word. &#8220;No.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I am told, se&ntilde;or, that the larger the plant the greater the
+profits.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd raised comical brows. &#8220;Fifty thousand dollars, se&ntilde;or&mdash;gold?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A small sum to your rich American capitalists.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But we are not capitalists. No, we shall have to get along with a small
+furnace.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The calculation deepened in the old man&#8217;s brown eyes. After a pause, to
+their utter astonishment, it took form in words. &#8220;But if you could raise
+the money?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the use of talking; we can&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If I were to lend it to you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>You!</i>&#8221; It was Billy who expressed their wonder. Seyd added, after a
+pause, &#8220;But we have no security to offer&mdash;that is, nothing but the
+mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And if we ran away?&#8221; Billy suggested, grinning. &#8220;Took your money and
+never came back?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For the first time in their acquaintance a touch of humor lightened the
+heavy bronzed face. &#8220;There are some in this valley, se&ntilde;or, who might not
+count it too high a price. But as you say&#8221;&mdash;he bowed to Seyd&mdash;&#8220;the mine
+is security enough. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>Now that you have shown how, I might even work it
+myself. To put in a complete&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;Plant.&#8221; Billy supplied the strange word.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How long?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Between six and nine months. We should then require a little time to
+smelt some ore and realize. We could not&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si, si!</i>&#8221; In his impatience Don Luis relapsed into Spanish. &#8220;<i>Si</i>, one
+would not expect immediate repayment. Perhaps five thousand pesos at the
+end of a year&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, we could do better than that. Ten thousand of a first payment,
+fifteen for the second, the remainder at a third with interest&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Interest? I had not thought of that.&#8221; But he yielded to their
+insistence. &#8220;Very well, if you will have it! Shall we say five per-cent.?
+<i>Bueno!</i> You will, of course, have to make a trip to the United
+States to buy your material. If you will call at San Nicolas on your way
+the administrador will have letters prepared to my bankers in Ciudad,
+Mexico.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With a shrug that expressed relief at the conclusion he changed the
+subject. Riding forward to obtain a closer view of the furnace, he again
+clucked his surprise at the complete destruction, wagged a grave head
+over the half bushel of dynamite that the peons had picked out of the
+charcoal, curiously examined a piece of copper matte, lifting heavy
+brows over the statement of its values, then rode quietly away, leaving
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>Seyd and Billy to recover as best they could from this fortunate
+stroke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Am I dreaming?&#8221; Billy&#8217;s exclamation defined their mental condition.
+&#8220;Hit me, Bob. I want to make sure that I&#8217;m awake.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Convinced, he gasped with his first breath: &#8220;Fifty thousand dollars! By
+golly! Why, we can put in a complete outfit.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Reverberatories with water jackets.&#8221; Seyd took up the tale again.
+&#8220;We&#8217;ll build down in the valley.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Aerial cable&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;With iron self-dumping buckets&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;A flat-bottomed sternwheeler to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;Take our copper down to the coast.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Blinded by the sudden light that had flashed out of their black despair
+they stood for some time looking out over the Barranca with shining eyes
+which saw a small mining town rising out of the jungle&#8217;s tangles. It was
+fully ten minutes before Seyd came back to earth.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wonder what is behind all this? Seems rather funny that the old chap
+should come to our help?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not knowing, can&#8217;t say and don&#8217;t care a darn! So far as I am concerned,
+at fifty thousand a throw he can be just as inconsistent as he jolly
+well likes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nevertheless,&#8221; Seyd mused, &#8220;I&#8217;d give three cents to know.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p><p>Meanwhile, Don Luis pursued his quiet way, now at a heavy canter, again
+on a stately trot, through the jungle out to the first village beyond
+the forks of the trail. As he passed the little <i>fonda</i> Sebastien Rocha
+rode out from a group of rancheros who stood drinking at the rough bar.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They told me of the passing,&#8221; he said, nodding backward. &#8220;And I waited.
+What news? Did the gringos go up with their furnace? No? Still they will
+now have their bellies full of Guerrero?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But his face dropped at Don Luis&#8217;s answer. &#8220;No, they are to build
+again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I thought&mdash;was it not the agent at the station who said they had no
+money?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Neither had they.&#8221; It was always difficult to read the massive face,
+but now it expressed just a shade of malicious amusement. &#8220;I have lent
+them fifty thousand pesos.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Thou!</i>&#8221; For once the man&#8217;s usual cynical calm was completely
+disrupted. In his vast astonishment he whispered it: &#8220;<i>Thou? Fifty
+thousand pesos?</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Yo.</i>&#8221; Smiling slightly, he went on: &#8220;Now listen, Sebastien. Not to
+mention thy little attempt on their virtue, this is the third on their
+lives, and all badly bungled. So do not wonder that I thought it time to
+take them into my own hand. Now that they are there, let there be no
+mistake&mdash;the meddling finger is likely to be badly pinched. From this
+time&mdash;they are <i>mine</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;But&mdash;why give them money?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To forestall others.&#8221; Had he been there to hear, the following words
+would fully have answered Seyd&#8217;s question. &#8220;The elder of these lads is
+no common man. By hook or by crook he would have raised a company&mdash;if he
+had to rope and tie down his men on the run. Then, instead of these two,
+we should have a dozen gringos, with Porfirio and his rurales to back up
+their charter. But do not fear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>From the cleared fields through which they were riding it was possible
+to see Santa Gertrudis, and, turning in his saddle, he extended his
+quirt toward its green scar.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do not fear.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">I</span>t was in the middle of the rainy season. Stepping out of his office,
+where he had just added a few drops of Scotch to the water he was
+absorbing at every pore, the station agent came face to face with the
+engineer of the down train.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nine hours late?&#8221; The engineer gruffly repeated the other&#8217;s comment.
+&#8220;We are lucky to be here at all. Besides being sopping wet, the wood
+we&#8217;re burning is that dosey it&#8217;d make a fireproof curtain for hell. This
+kind of railroading don&#8217;t suit my book, and I&#8217;m telling you that if they
+don&#8217;t serve us out something pretty soon that smells like wood I know
+one fat engineer that will be missing on this line.&#8221; Jerking his thumb
+at the lone passenger who had descended at the station, he added: &#8220;But
+for that chap we&#8217;d never have got through. When the track went out from
+under us at La Puente he pitched in and showed us no end of wrinkles. If
+you&#8217;ve got anything inside just give him a nip for me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hullo, Mr. Seyd!&#8221; Coming face to face with the passenger after the
+train had gone on, the agent thrust out his hand. &#8220;What a pity you
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>weren&#8217;t on the other train. She was twenty hours late&mdash;in fact, only
+pulled out a couple of hours ago. Miss Francesca was aboard, and she
+just left.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not alone?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The agent laughed. &#8220;Sure! She don&#8217;t care. Three weeks ago she came
+galloping in through one of the heaviest rains and took the up train.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So she has been home since I left?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let me see&mdash;that&#8217;s nigh on three months, isn&#8217;t it? Sure, she came home
+just after you left.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With this bit of information lingering in the forefront of his mind
+Seyd, a little later, rode out from the station. Not that it engrossed,
+by any means, the whole of his thought. Even had he been free, the hard
+work and bitter disappointment of the first venture, and the equally
+hard thought and careful planning for the second during his long absence
+in the States, would have been sufficient to keep her in the background.
+If he had never happened to see Francesca again she would probably have
+lingered as an unusually pretty face in the gallery of his mind. While
+it was only natural that he should wonder if the news that he sent in by
+Caliban had ever reached her ear, it was merely a passing thought. His
+mind soon turned again to his plans. Up to the moment that, four hours
+later, he came slipping and sliding downhill upon her she was altogether
+out of his thought. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p><p>For that very reason his fresh senses leaped to take the picture she
+made standing in the gray sheeting rain beside her fallen horse, and
+through its very difference from either the tan riding habit or virginal
+batiste of his memory her loose waterproof with its capote hood helped
+to stamp this figure upon his brain. Before she said a word he had gone
+back to the feelings of four months ago.</p>
+
+<p>The pelting rain had washed all but a few clay streaks off her coat.
+Touching them, she explained: &#8220;The poor beast fell under me. I fear it
+has broken a leg.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While speaking she offered her hand; and if that had not been
+sufficient, her friendly smile more than answered his speculation.
+Caliban&#8217;s niece had certainly done her duty! Indeed, while he was
+stooping over the fallen animal a quick glance upward would have given
+him a look evenly compounded of mischief and remorse. It gave place to
+sudden sorrow when he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is broken, all right. There is only one thing to be done. If you
+will lead my horse around the shoulder of the hill I will put the poor
+thing out of its pain.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her life had been cast too much in the open for her to be ignorant of
+the needs of the case. Nevertheless, he saw that her eyes were brimming
+as she led his horse away; and, remembering their black fire on the day
+that she had ordered the charcoal-burners flogged, he wondered. It
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>would have been even harder to reconcile the two impressions had he
+seen the tears rolling down her cheeks when the muffled report of his
+pistol followed her around the hill. But she had wiped them away before
+he rejoined her. If the sensitive red mouth trembled, her voice was
+under control.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, I had not waited long,&#8221; she answered his question. &#8220;You see, the
+poor creature lost a shoe earlier in the day, and I had to ride back to
+have it replaced. It would have been better had I stayed there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For the moment he was puzzled. An hour ago he had ridden past the last
+habitation, a flimsy hut already overcrowded with the peon, his wife,
+their children, chickens, and pigs. All around them stretched wide
+wastes of volcanic rock and scrub. They were, as he knew, on the
+hacienda San Angel, but the buildings lay five leagues to the north.
+With hard riding he had expected to make the inn at the foot of the
+Barranca wall that night. She might do it by taking his horse. But if
+anything went wrong? She would be alone&mdash;all night&mdash;in the rain! He felt
+easier when she refused the offer of his beast.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And leave you to walk? No, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A second offer to walk by her side not only ran counter to the prejudice
+of a race of riders, but also aroused her sympathies. &#8220;I could never
+think of it!&#8221; After a moment of thought she propounded her own solution.
+&#8220;Your beast is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>strong. I have ridden double on an animal half his size.
+We will both ride.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now, though Seyd had long ago grown to the sight of rancheros on their
+way to market in the embrace of their buxom brown wives, the suddenness
+of it made him gasp. But by a quick mounting he succeeded in hiding the
+rush of blood to his face. Also he managed to control his voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fine idea! Give me your hand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Just touching his foot, she rose like a bird to the croup. When, as the
+horse moved on, she slid an arm around his waist his demoralization was
+full and complete. If he glanced down it was to see her fingers resting
+like small white butterflies on his raincoat. Did he look up, then a
+faint perfume of damp hair would come floating over his shoulder. He
+thrilled when her clasp tightened as the horse broke into a gentle trot,
+and was altogether in a bad way when her merry laugh restored order
+among his senses.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now we can play Rosa and Rosario on their way to market. It will be for
+you to grumble at prices while I rail at the government tax that puts
+woolens beyond the purse of a peon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I prefer to ask what brought you out in such weather.&#8221; He returned her
+laugh. &#8220;A pretty pickle you would have been in if I had not come along.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He felt the vigorous shake of her head. &#8220;I should have walked back to
+the last hut, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>an oxcart would have taken me in to the station.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But then you would have been out all night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I should have loved it.&#8221; Though he did not see the sudden blooming
+under her hood, he felt the unconscious squeeze which testified to the
+sincerity of her feeling. &#8220;I love them&mdash;the roar of the wind, black
+darkness, the beat of the rain in my face. Mother would have had me stay
+in Mexico till the rains were over, but when Don Luis wrote that the
+river was at flood nothing could hold me.&#8221; He had thrilled under her
+unconscious pressure, but her conclusion proved an excellent corrective.
+&#8220;I am afraid that the site for your new buildings must be under water.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How can that be?&#8221; He spoke quickly. &#8220;We are building well back from
+last year&#8217;s mark, and Don Luis said that it was the highest known.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But this year it has gone even higher&mdash;and all because of the Yankee
+companies that are stripping the upper valley of timber. There were
+great fires, too, last year which broke away from their servants and
+burned hundreds of miles of woods.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her quiet answer went far to allay his sudden suspicion, but not his
+anxiety. He spoke of Billy. &#8220;It is over a month since he came out to the
+station for stores, and the agent told me that none of your people had
+seen him for weeks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he has with him Angelo&#8221;&mdash;she gave <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>Caliban his correct name&mdash;&#8220;and
+he, as I once told you, was counted Sebastien&#8217;s best man in his war
+against the brigands. Though he may not show it to you, he is not
+ungrateful for the gift of his life. If food is to be had in the
+country, Mr. Thornton will not go lacking.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He spoke more cheerfully. &#8220;Then I don&#8217;t care; though if the site <i>is</i>
+flooded we shall be thrown back at least three months with our work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what is three months?&#8221; she added, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>To him it was a great deal. Before paying over the loan Don Luis&#8217;s
+lawyers had taken Seyd&#8217;s signatures upon certain instruments which
+exhibited the General in the new light of a shrewd and conservative
+business man. Withal, having still plenty of time, he answered quite
+cheerfully when she turned the conversation with a question concerning
+his plans. Under the stimulation of her curiosity, which surprised him
+by its intelligence, he went into details, talking and answering her
+questions while the horse trudged steadily on into the darkening rain.
+If the trail had not suddenly faded out, night would have caught them
+unnoticed.</p>
+
+<p>In that volcanic country, where for long stretches a hoof left no
+impression, the loss of a trail was a common experience, and, trusting
+to the instinct of the beast, Seyd gave it the rein. Left to its own
+devices, however, it gradually swerved from the beating rain and
+presently <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>turned on to a cattle track which swung away into gum copal
+trees and scrub oak at an imperceptible angle. Had he been alone Seyd
+would have soon noticed the absence of the Aztec ruin. As it was, but
+not until an hour later, Francesca was the first to speak.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s so,&#8221; he agreed, when she drew his attention. &#8220;We ought to have
+passed it long ago. The animal evidently picked up a wrong track coming
+out from the rocks.&#8221; After a moment&#8217;s reflection he said: &#8220;It would be
+worse than foolish to try to go back. We could never find the trail in
+this black rain. Better follow on and see where it will bring us.&#8221; With
+a sudden remembrance of what it might mean to her, a young girl brought
+up in the rigid conventions of the country, he repentantly added: &#8220;I&#8217;m
+awfully sorry for you. I ought to be kicked for my carelessness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, I have traveled this trail much oftener than you,&#8221; she quietly
+protested. &#8220;If any one is blamed I should be the one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Sitting there in black darkness, lost in those lonely volcanic hills,
+with the rain dashing in his face and the roar of the wind in his ears,
+he was prepared to appreciate her quiet answer. &#8220;You are a brick!&#8221; he
+exclaimed. &#8220;Nevertheless, I feel my guilt.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then you need not.&#8221; She gave a little laugh. &#8220;Did I not say that I
+enjoyed being out at night in the rain?&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;And now the gods have called your bluff.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Bluff?</i>&#8221; She laughed again at the meaning of that rank Americanism.
+&#8220;It was no bluff, as you will presently see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And see he did&mdash;during the long hour they spent splashing along in black
+darkness, up hill, down dale, fording swollen arroyos, through chaparral
+which tore at them with myriad claws and wet woods whose boughs lashed
+their faces. Up to the moment that the roof of a hut suddenly loomed out
+against the dim, dark sky she uttered no doubt or complaint. When,
+having tied his horse under the wide eaves, he lit a match inside, its
+flare revealed her face, quiet and serene.</p>
+
+<p>Also it showed that which, while not nearly so interesting, had its
+immediate uses&mdash;a candle stuck in a <i>tequila</i> bottle; and its steadier
+flare presently helped them to another find&mdash;a chemisette and other
+garments of feminine wear, spotlessly clean and smoothly ironed,
+arranged on a string that ran over a bunk in one corner.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The fiesta wear of our hostess,&#8221; Francesca remarked. &#8220;How lucky! for I
+am drenched.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And look at that pile of dry wood!&#8221; he exclaimed. &#8220;The gods are with
+us. I&#8217;ll build a fire, then while I rub down the horse you can change.
+What&#8217;s this?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a rough sketch done with charcoal on the table. Two
+parallelograms with sticks for legs were in furious pursuit of certain
+horned <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>squares which, in their turn, were in full flight toward a
+doll&#8217;s house in the far corner.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I know!&#8221; the girl cried, after a moment of study. &#8220;Here, in the
+wild country where they never see man, are raised the fighting bulls for
+the rings of Mexico. This hut belongs to a vaquero of San Angel, and
+this is an order, left in his absence, to drive the bulls into the
+hacienda.&#8221; Laying her finger on a triangle which had evidently been
+added later, she continued, laughing: &#8220;This shows that his woman has
+gone with him. They were evidently called away unexpectedly, for she had
+already set the corn to soak in this <i>olla</i> for the supper tortillas.
+And the saints be praised! Here are dried beef, salt, and chilis. Now
+hurry the fire, and you shall see what a cook I am.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While he was building it in the center of the mud floor she made other
+finds&mdash;a cube of brown sugar, coffee, a cake of goat&#8217;s cheese; and her
+little delighted exclamations over each discovery both amused him and
+proved how sincere was her acceptance of the situation. &#8220;She&#8217;s a brick!&#8221;
+he told the horse, rubbing him down, outside, with wisps pulled out from
+the under side of the thatch. &#8220;Thoroughbred in blood and bone.&#8221; As the
+animal had already experimented with the thatch and found it quite to
+its liking, the question of provender was settled. But in order that
+Francesca might have ample time to change, Seyd rubbed and rubbed and
+rubbed till a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>rattle of clay pots inside gave him leave to come in.</p>
+
+<p>At the door he paused to admire the picture she made in the red glow of
+the fire. In place of the slender girl of the stylish raincoat a pretty
+peona raised velvet eyes from the stone <i>metate</i> on which she was
+vigorously rubbing soaked corn for the supper tortillas. By emphasizing
+some features and softening others strange attire always gives a new
+view of a woman. The sleeveless garment showed the round white arms and
+foreshortened and filled out her slender lines.</p>
+
+<p>Glancing down at her arms, she confessed, with an uneasy wriggle: &#8220;I
+don&#8217;t like it, though I wear d&eacute;collet&eacute; every evening when we are in the
+city. But I shall soon get used to it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Conscious of his admiring eyes, she found them employment in watching
+the tortillas. But, having grown accustomed to the new dress by the time
+supper was ready, she left him free to watch the white arms and small
+hands which hovered like butterflies over the clay pot. In the lack of
+all other utensils, they used bits of tortilla for spoons, dipping
+alternately into the pot which she had set between them; nor did he find
+the chili any the worse for its contact with the tortilla which had just
+taken an impression of her small teeth. It required only an after-dinner
+pipe, to which she graciously consented, to seal his content.</p>
+
+<p>After the wet and fatigue of the trail the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>warmth and cheer of food and
+fire were extremely grateful, but not conducive to talk. While he sat
+watching the tobacco smoke curl up into the blackened peak of the roof
+she leaned, chin in her hands, elbows on crossed knees, studying the
+fire. Leaping out of red coal, an occasional flame set its reflection in
+her deep eyes, and as his gaze wandered from her around the rough
+<i>jacal</i> Seyd found it difficult to realize that it was indeed he, Robert
+Seyd, mining engineer of San Francisco, who sat there sharing food and
+fire with a girl, on the one hand scion of the Mexican aristocracy,
+descendant on the other of a line which ran back into the dim time of
+the Aztecs. The thought stirred the romance within him and helped to
+prolong his silence. It would have held him still longer if his musings
+had not been suddenly interrupted by her merry laugh.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si?</i>&#8221; he inquired, looking suddenly up.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was thinking what they would say&mdash;my mother, Don Luis, the
+neighbors?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Horrible!&#8221; he agreed. &#8220;Your mother? What would she say?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As the white hands flew up in a horrified gesture it was the se&ntilde;ora
+herself. &#8220;<i>Santa Maria Marissima!</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And Don Luis?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her expression changed from laughter into sudden mischievous demureness.
+&#8220;His remarks, se&ntilde;or, are not for me to repeat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well&mdash;the neighbors?&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p><p>Once more her hands went up. &#8220;&#8216;Was it not that we always said it of that
+mad girl! Maria, thou shalt not speak with her again.&#8217;&#8221; Smiling, she
+added, &#8220;For you must know, se&ntilde;or, that I have been held as a horrible
+example of the things a girl should not do since the days of my
+childhood.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Like the devil in the old New England theology,&#8221; he suggested, smiling,
+&#8220;you make more converts than the preacher?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had to explain before she understood. Then she laughed merrily. &#8220;Just
+so. What they would do were I to marry, die, or reform, I really cannot
+tell. It would leave a gap almost equal to the loss of the catechism.&#8221;
+She finished with a mock sigh, &#8220;They will never appreciate me till I&#8217;m
+dead.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Any present danger?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The smiling mouth pursed demurely under his whimsical glance. &#8220;I am
+afraid not. You saw my performance at supper. I am the despair of my
+mother, who would have me more delicate and refined.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Marriage?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No one wants me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don Sebastien?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It slipped out, and he was immediately sorry, but she only laughed.
+&#8220;Tut! tut! A cousin?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Surveying him from under drooping lashes, a glance soft and warm as
+velvet, she added: &#8220;I will confess. There <i>were</i> others. Some too fat,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>some too thin, all too stupid, here at home. In Mexico they were
+triflers&mdash;or worse. But on the honor of a lone maid, se&ntilde;or, never a man
+among them.&#8221; With a sudden relapse into seriousness she repeated, &#8220;Among
+<i>all</i> of them&mdash;never a man.&#8221; Though she was looking directly at him, her
+glance seemed to go on, fly to some further vision which, for one
+second, set its reflection in her eyes. Then her long silky lashes wiped
+it out. When they rose again it was over mischievous lights. &#8220;Never a
+<i>man</i>,&#8221; with a change of accent.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he will come&mdash;some day,&#8221; he teased.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And go&mdash;after the fashion of dream men.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And dream women.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For a while she studied him curiously. &#8220;Then she has not come?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; he answered, with sudden impulse. &#8220;But&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She softly filled the pause. &#8220;&#8216;But&#8217; and &#8216;because&#8217; are woman&#8217;s reasons.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Unhappily, sometimes man&#8217;s,&#8221; he gravely answered; and, feeling,
+perhaps, that the conversation was drifting into unsafe latitudes, he
+rose and began to pull dry grass from the under side of the thatch. &#8220;For
+you,&#8221; he exclaimed, with a glance at the bunk. &#8220;I knew you wouldn&#8217;t care
+to sleep there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Having arranged a thick layer at a safe distance from the fire, he
+gathered another armful, and was going outside when she called him back.
+&#8220;To make my bed,&#8221; he answered her question. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;In the wet?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, it isn&#8217;t so bad&mdash;here under the eaves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Only an inch of water,&#8221; she answered him, with pretty sarcasm; and,
+indicating certain small trickles that were coming through the cane
+siding, she gave him his orders. &#8220;You will sleep here&mdash;inside.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But&mdash;&#8221; he began.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Se&ntilde;or, I said that you would sleep <i>inside</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, the &#8220;prospect&#8221; outside was not inviting, and his
+acquiescence lowered the quick colors his previous obstinacy had raised.
+She had already settled down on one elbow; and when, having arranged a
+bed on the opposite side of the fire, he lit a second pipe, she studied
+him through the smoke, wondering what pictures were responsible for his
+earnest gaze. But warmth and comfort presently produced their natural
+effect, and she began to nod. After a few shy, sleepy glances that
+showed him still staring moodily into the fire her head sank upon the
+white fullness of her doubled arm.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, it was his wife&#8217;s face that returned his steady
+gaze from a nest of red coal. Absorbed in bitter musings, he received
+the first intimation of Francesca&#8217;s sleep from a sigh which caused him
+to start as though at the report of a gun. Then while the warm blood
+streamed through his drumming pulses, every sense vividly alive, he
+looked down upon her. With all the timid awe that Adam must have
+displayed when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>he awoke to the sight of Eve he studied this greatest of
+masculine experiences, a woman clad in the soft armor of sleep.</p>
+
+<p>For some time his senses dwelt only on the fact, and gave him merely the
+soft sigh of her sleep, the play of firelight over the unconscious
+figure. But presently his mind began to work, to compare the broad
+forehead, oval contours, fine-cut nostrils, delicate chiseling of her
+features, with the common prettiness of his wife. Even the little foot
+and slender ankle, freed by relaxation from the jealous skirt, helped to
+emphasize differences wide as those between a hummingbird and a pouter
+pigeon. It had required the rigid selection of a thousand generations,
+the pre-eminence in strength and brains of a line of fighters to produce
+the one, just as the slacker choice of a commoner breed had created the
+other; and Seyd, whose own blood had come down through the clean
+channels of good Colonial stock, recognized the fact. As never before he
+was impressed with the fatuity of his chivalric rashness. While the
+firelight rose and fell he strained at the ties which stretched over
+mountains, desert, plains, binding him to the coarse woman in
+Albuquerque.</p>
+
+<p>His sudden jerk forward was the physical equivalent of his mental
+strain. Though homely, even slangy, his mutter, &#8220;Your cake is baked,
+son. The sooner you let this girl know it the better,&#8221; was none the less
+tragic. The thought was the last in his waking mind. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p><p>Before going to sleep he performed one last service. Noticing that she
+shivered under the wet breath of the night, he took off his coat,
+tiptoed across, and, after laying it softly across her shoulders,
+returned with equal caution. She did not stir or even change the slow
+rhythm of her breath, but he had no more than lain down before her eyes
+slowly opened. When his deep respirations told that he was fast asleep
+she rose on one elbow and looked at him across the fire.</p>
+
+<p>In her turn, with glances shyly curious as those with which Eve, newly
+formed, may have eyed Adam still in &#8220;deep sleep,&#8221; she noted the
+wide-spaced, deep-set eyes, strong nose, the ideality of the brows, the
+humorous puckers at the corners of his mouth. Though she did not analyze
+their individual meanings, the totality made a strong appeal to instinct
+and intuitions formed by the vast experience of the race. Her impression
+phrased itself in her murmur, &#8220;A wholesome face.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Only the cleft chin seemed to carry a special meaning. Surveying it, a
+gleam of mischief shot through the soft satisfaction of her look, and
+she murmured beneath her breath in Spanish, &#8220;Oh, fickle! fickle! Thy
+wife will need the sharpest of eyes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The thought brought a little laugh, and for a minute thereafter she sat,
+a finger upon her lip, listening for a break in his breathing. When it
+did not come she rose slowly, stole like a mouse <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>across the floor, and
+laid his coat, light as a feather, over his unprotected shoulders. Back
+again on her own couch, she looked across at him again; a glance na&iuml;ve
+in its enjoyment of the romantic impropriety of the entire proceeding.
+Then, curling up under her raincoat, she fell fast asleep. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">T</span>horoughly fagged out by six weary nights on the train, Seyd slept like
+the dead, and did not awaken until a sudden clatter of pots aroused him
+to knowledge of a golden cobweb of light streaming in between the flimsy
+siding of the hut. Through the open doorway he obtained a glimpse of a
+bejeweled world, resonant with the song of birds. After informing him of
+these facts, his eyes reintroduced him to the young lady in the tan
+riding habit who had ousted the pretty peona of last night from her
+command over fire and dishes. The satisfying odor of hot coffee
+completed the verdict of his senses.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Breakfast all ready? I must have slept like a log.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You did.&#8221; She laughed. &#8220;I rattled the dishes in vain. I was just about
+to throw something at you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now, his last waking thought had outlined a purpose to inform her at
+once of his marriage, and while they were eating breakfast it recurred
+again. But not with the same force. That which, when imbued with the
+sentimental values of firelight and silence, appeared necessary and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>right somehow appeared almost absurd when viewed in broad day. Checking
+sentiment, too, by its very friendliness, her manner did not invite
+confession.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It would be impertinent,&#8221; he concluded. &#8220;She has no personal interest
+in me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If he had observed her only an hour earlier re-entering the <i>jacal</i>
+after a shivering exchange outside with the peona he might not have been
+quite so sure. Once or twice she had indulged in softer thought, whose
+key was to be found in her murmur just before she tried to awake him:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Adios</i>, Rosario.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Also the morning had brought its own problem to fill his mind. He could
+not but see that their appearance at the inn in the Barranca so early in
+the day would be a confession of their breach of the most rigid of
+Spanish conventions. But how to broach the subject without offense?
+Though he racked his brains while saddling the horse and, later, when it
+was carrying them double upon their way, he had come to no conclusion up
+to the moment that she settled it herself with a little cry.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now I know where I am.&#8221; She was indicating an outcropping of rock on a
+sterile hillside. &#8220;We strayed miles away from our trail. We shall soon
+come to a path that leads past a rancho where I can borrow a horse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Almost as they spoke the cattle track they had been following joined a
+trail, and shortly after <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>she spoke again, laughing. &#8220;And now, Se&ntilde;or
+Rosario, I must bid you good-by. This good beast has done nobly, but we
+shall gain time if one rides forward to the rancho and sends back a
+horse. Which shall it be?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But he was already on the ground, hat in hand. &#8220;Rosa, <i>adios</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Laughing, she rode on while he sat down on an outcropping of rock to
+wait, for he was not minded to wade through the wet grass and brush of
+some woods at the foot of the hill. Until she passed from sight he sat
+watching, then, feeling a little lazy, he fitted his angles into a sort
+of natural couch in the rock and fell to musing, reviewing again the
+incidents of the night. He had not intended to sleep. But what with the
+warmth and stillness, he presently passed quietly away, was still
+unconscious when the stroke of a hoof on a rock awoke him to the sight
+of two horsemen with a led beast.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;For me,&#8221; he thought. Then, as he recognized Sebastien Rocha in the
+second horseman, he whistled his consternation. If the hacendado had not
+actually met Francesca he must surely have pumped the <i>mozo</i> dry, and
+now the sight of him, Seyd, would fully reveal their case!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now for a big fat row,&#8221; he told himself. But, greatly to his surprise,
+Sebastien passed on with a nod, and presently turned from the trail,
+following their fresh hoof tracks over the hill. The <i>mozo</i> had already
+gone on to retrieve <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>Francesca&#8217;s saddle from the dead horse, and,
+irritated and alarmed, Seyd mounted the led beast and rode on at a
+gallop. But, quickly realizing that his further company was not likely
+to improve the girl&#8217;s case, he presently pulled the beast back to a
+walk. Lost in frowning thought, he rode on slowly until, an hour later,
+there came a beat of galloping hoofs, and Sebastien rode up from behind.</p>
+
+<p>His reiteration of the thought &#8220;Now for the row!&#8221; was colored by the way
+in which the hacendado&#8217;s hand went to his holster. But Seyd&#8217;s hand,
+which moved as quickly to his own gun, dropped, and he blushed crimson
+as the other held out his brier pipe.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Merely <i>this</i>, se&ntilde;or.&#8221; He glanced meaningly at Seyd&#8217;s gun. &#8220;For <i>that</i>
+you would have been too late. I could have shot you through the back.
+After this do not let your foolish Yankee pride stop you from looking
+behind.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though both angry and alarmed, the cold impudence of it made Seyd laugh.
+&#8220;Yes? How did you resist the temptation?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was a temptation.&#8221; He gravely approved the word. &#8220;Your back made
+such a fine smooth mark. I could see the bullet splash in the center.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then why didn&#8217;t you? Since you are so frank I don&#8217;t mind saying that I
+believe that you already had a hand in at least one of three attempts on
+my life! Is it that you would prefer to have me blown up?&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Like your predecessor, the Hollander?&#8221; Sebastien&#8217;s shrug might have
+meant anything. &#8220;I have, of course, my preferences, and some day I shall
+have to decide in just which way I would wish you put to death. In
+passing the opportunity now you ought to feel complimented, for let me
+tell you that I would never leave any Mexican lips free to tell of your
+experiences last night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The man&#8217;s tone of quiet certainty robbed the words of extravagance; and,
+accustomed now to a life that out-melodramaed melodrama, Seyd knew
+better than to take them for jest. &#8220;That&#8217;s very nice of you,&#8221; he quietly
+answered, and as just then the trail narrowed to pass through a copal
+grove he added: &#8220;Forewarned is forearmed. Just to keep you out of
+temptation&mdash;will you please to go first?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With pleasure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Faint though it was, the smile that loosened the firm mouth made it
+easier for Seyd to continue when they were riding once more side by
+side. &#8220;For the young lady&#8217;s sake I am glad to have you take such a
+sensible view of an unavoidable situation. I take it that you were going
+the other way. If you can trust me&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Trust no one and you will never be deceived. If I had my way of it
+there would be an end to the girl&#8217;s wild tricks. But since she <i>will</i> be
+abroad, what better escort could she have than her kinsman?&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;None,&#8221; Seyd agreed. &#8220;I overtook her by accident, cared for her the best
+that I could; now she is in your hands.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Sebastien shook his head. &#8220;Not so swiftly. She would hardly thank me for
+your dismissal.&#8221; While the shadow of a smile lifted the corner of his
+thin lips he added: &#8220;The last time I mixed in her affairs she refused to
+speak with me for over a year, and I have no mind to repeat the
+experience. We are all going to San Nicolas. It would be foolish to ride
+apart.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very well,&#8221; Seyd agreed, not, however, with any great degree of
+pleasure. Apart from the strain involved by a day&#8217;s travel with a man
+who had just confessed to a permanent intention of killing him he felt
+more disappointment than he would have cared to admit at the spoiling of
+the t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te with the girl. In fact, the feeling was so acute that he
+found it necessary to justify it in his own thought. &#8220;It was only for a
+day,&#8221; he mused, slightly changing his previous conclusion to fit the
+case, &#8220;and I&#8217;d like to have seen it out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So! so! The storm proved a little too much for this one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They had just ridden into copal woods, and, looking up, Seyd saw that he
+was pointing at a pile of bones and wet tatters of clothing that lay
+under a swinging fray of rope. If possible, it was more grisly of
+appearance than a second mummy which still swung, clicking its miserable
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>bones in the wind. Whether or no he noticed Seyd&#8217;s shiver of disgust
+Sebastien ran easily on:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He was a stout rogue, this fellow, with a keen eye for a pretty woman
+and small scruples as to how he got her. It was, indeed, through this
+little weakness that we caught him, using a girl to bait the trap. But
+he died game&mdash;with a joke on his lips. &#8216;Se&ntilde;or,&#8217; he said, as the mule
+went from under him, &#8216;if but one-half of my brats walk in my steps thou
+wilt have need of an army to finish us up.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He had humor, too. He it was that stole the altar service from the
+church of San Anselmo to pay the priest of Guadaloupe to say a thousand
+masses for the repose of his soul. He was dead and the masses said
+before the service was traced by a pilgrim to the Guadaloupe shrine, and
+ever since the priests have been at war&mdash;both over the return of the
+service and to decide the burning question as to whether it is possible
+to nullify a heavenly title obtained through fraud. It makes a pretty
+point in theology, and the battle still rages. Being debarred from
+physical expression, the brute in a priest exercises itself through the
+tongue, and they will not leave such a choice morsel till the last shred
+of meat has been gnawed from the bones.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In presence of those dumb witnesses to its truth, the grim banter
+sounded even grimmer. During the long white nights that followed hard
+days at work on the smelter nothing had suited Caliban <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>more than to be
+drawn on to talk of the war against the brigands. Under the red light of
+a camp fire, with the vast night of the Barranca yawning below, the
+tales had been spun&mdash;tales that had outdone the dime novels of Seyd&#8217;s
+youth. Of them all, that which had ended with the hanging of the last
+bandit in this very glade had outdone all in sheer desperation.</p>
+
+<p>Kindling to the romance of it all, he took stealthy note, as they rode
+on, of the lithe muscular figure, which was as extraordinary in its
+balanced strength as the calm power of the quiet brown face. When memory
+drew a vivid contrast between Sebastien and his early training in the
+sober atmosphere of the English commercial boarding-school Seyd
+wondered, and finally put his wonder into words.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Didn&#8217;t you find the transition from Manchester rather sudden? It must
+have been like plunging head first into a romance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Romance?&#8221; For the first time that morning, for matter of that, in all
+their intercourse, Sebastien laughed outright. &#8220;Oh, you Anglo-Saxons!
+Romance is a creature of your own dreamy idealism. We do not know it. We
+are passionate, nervous, hysterical, gross, materialistic, but for all
+our heat we see life more clearly than you. It would be better for us if
+we did not. For where in the mirror of your imaginings you see your
+strength enormously magnified our clearer perceptions show our
+weaknesses. Even <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>at the point of death you neither see nor accept
+defeat. But we, cowering before it, are swept the quicker away.&#8221; Just as
+on that other occasion when he stood talking beside their fire on the
+rim of the Barranca, this came out of his quiet with volcanic heat.
+Dropping as quickly into his usual calm, he finished, &#8220;No, I did not
+find it romantic&mdash;merely amusing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Nettled a little by his amused contempt, Seyd quickly retorted: &#8220;I fail
+to see how you can claim to have no ideals? You who are striving with
+all your might against the American invasion?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Sebastien shrugged. &#8220;Racial aversion&mdash;backed up by the instinct of
+self-preservation. Even cattle will band together against the wolves.
+But remove the danger and the bulls fall at once fighting for command of
+the herd. Before Diaz we had sixty-five rulers in sixty years, very few
+of whom died in their beds. Once remove his iron hand from our throats
+and we shall go at it again, revolution upon revolution, for the sole
+purpose of satisfying some man&#8217;s personal ambition, lust, or individual
+greed. No, se&ntilde;or, we are individualists in the extreme. We have nothing
+in our make-up to correspond to the racial ideal that makes you Northmen
+subordinate personal interest to the general good. And because of our
+lack you will eventually rule us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet you strive against it?&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;For the one reason, as I told you, that the weaker wolf declines to be
+eaten. Individually, I find it amusing. I would much prefer shooting
+gringo soldiery to hanging Mexican bandits.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And the General&mdash;Don Luis?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Once again Sebastien laughed. &#8220;That old revolutionist? He would deny all
+I have said as rank heresy, though he himself is its most startling
+example. He would say that he was for Mexico, but Mexico, to him, is
+Mexico with a Garcia for president. Selfish to the backbone, every one
+of us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In a phrase he had described Don Luis, and, while he could not but smile
+at its truth, Seyd was just a little startled by the keen intelligence
+and flashing intuition. Even after allowing for advantages of travel and
+education the man&#8217;s sharp reasoning and originality were remarkable.
+Like a clear black pool his mind sharply reflected all that passed over
+it, and always the conception stood out as under a lightning flash.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, se&ntilde;or,&#8221; he went on, after a pause, &#8220;we are individualists, and as
+such can only obtain happiness by following our own bent. If we are held
+back for a while by Porfirio, be sure that sooner or later we shall
+return with greater zest to our ancient pastime of cutting each other&#8217;s
+throats.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His uncanny intelligence, too, threw sinister lights on everything they
+passed. &#8220;I told you we were gross,&#8221; he said, indicating a youth and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>a
+brown girl who were flirting through the barred windows of an adobe
+ranch house. &#8220;The proof&mdash;the bars. With us love is a passion; the ideal
+exists only in our songs.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Shortly thereafter they rode out on the rim overlooking the Barranca,
+and the necessity of riding in single file down the zigzag staircases
+brought an end to their talk. Neither did he begin it again as they
+crossed the bottom flat to the inn. Coming after a long silence, the
+invitation which he delivered at last, as they rode into the patio, came
+as a greater surprise.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I feel certain, se&ntilde;or, that my cousin will wish you to lunch with us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Because another trait in Sebastien&#8217;s nature was not revealed until, a
+few minutes later, he knocked at Francesca&#8217;s door, Seyd failed to see
+that which, after all, was perhaps even more surprising. As he entered
+in response to her call she rose and stood, one hand resting on the
+small altar where burned a tiny taper; and as he stood looking at her
+across the length of the room the inquiry in her wide eyes became
+touched with fear.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is you?&#8221; she broke the silence. &#8220;They told me that you spent last
+night here. How was it that I did not meet you on the way?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Simply because I had happened to turn in at the Rancho del Rio to look
+at some cattle. But I overtook the <i>mozo</i> you sent back with the horse
+for the gringo. Also I called in at the <i>jacal</i> of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>Miguel, the vaquero
+of San Angel, where I found Maria, his woman, just returned. She was
+rejoicing over a supernatural visitation. It seems that while she and
+Miguel were away the Virgin Guadaloupe abode in their house, and even
+honored Maria by putting on her best fiesta clothes. In proof thereof
+she showed me a silver peso that the Virgin left tied up in one corner
+of her chemisette. It was truly remarkable, and I was well on my way to
+a healthy conversion when I happened to stumble on the gringo&#8217;s pipe&mdash;at
+least, he claimed it on sight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you immediately turned about to tattle this to me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He merely smiled under her bright scorn. &#8220;To see you home.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where you will proceed to make my mother eternally miserable, and
+uncle&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;Infernally angry? On the contrary, I am prepared to back up with
+pistol and knife the tale of Maria&#8217;s visitation. Why should I wish to
+bring suffering to the good mother? It was a hap of the trail, and, much
+as I hate all gringos, it was far better that you should have been in
+this man&#8217;s hands. Some day I may have to kill him, and I shall do it
+with greater pleasure because of this!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If the attempt does not fail as miserably as that which you made on his
+soul.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Put it morals, cousin, just to bring it within the bounds of my
+comprehension. You know my beliefs as to souls.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;In any case it was a mean trick.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tricks are tricks only when they fail. Successful, they rise to the
+dignity of strategems. And he ought not to complain. Did he not come out
+of the ordeal unscathed, tricked out in the flowers of virtue? He&#8217;s
+really in my debt. But returning to my point, some day I shall kill him;
+but in the mean time I have asked him to lunch with us. As he looked
+hungry, I should suggest a little haste.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am ready now.&#8221; Going toward him, she spoke, hesitantly: &#8220;Let
+me&mdash;thank you. Were you always thus, Sebastien, we should be better
+friends.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Gracias</i>, anything but that.&#8221; Bowing, he stood aside to permit her to
+pass. &#8220;The half liking that you deal out to Anton, Javier, and other
+fat-jowled hacendados, your admirers, would never do for me. I prefer
+your&mdash;fear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I am not afraid of you.&#8221; She looked straight in his eyes passing
+out.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will be&mdash;some day.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">C</span>oming out from luncheon&mdash;at which Sebastien had presided with a grave
+courtesy which lifted the inn&#8217;s humble fare of eggs, tortillas, and rice
+to epicurean heights&mdash;Seyd and Francesca came face to face with Tomas,
+her <i>mozo</i>, who had just ridden into the patio. At sight of his mistress
+the <i>mozo&#8217;s</i> teeth flashed in the golden dusk under his sombrero, but he
+shook his head when she reached for the letter which he took out of his
+saddle bags.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is for the gringo se&ntilde;or. The <i>jefe</i> did not know of your coming.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was, of course, from Don Luis. Couched in terms massively dignified
+as his own reserve, it apologized for the floods as for some personal
+fault, and finished by placing hacienda San Nicolas at Seyd&#8217;s service.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So you will ride on with us,&#8221; Francesca commented upon its content.</p>
+
+<p>As Sebastien had gone to order fresh horses, there was no one but Seyd
+to observe her evident pleasure. But if he thrilled, yet he persisted,
+pleading that he intended to establish headquarters there at the inn and
+would be head over <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>heels in business, freighting machinery and supplies
+in from the station.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at her further objection that he would hardly find the
+accommodations of the inn to his liking. &#8220;They are better than at the
+mine. If they prove too bad I shall run down to San Nicolas to beg a
+meal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very well, se&ntilde;or, we shall expect you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her little backward nod, riding away with Sebastien a few minutes later,
+reaffirmed it, but while Seyd bowed in acknowledgment his thought ran
+oppositely. Unaware how quickly circumstances would compel the visit, he
+formulated a hardy resolution. &#8220;Now, young man, no more sentimental
+fooling. It&#8217;s you for work. The first thing is to get across to Billy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When, however, he took counsel with his fat brown host concerning the
+hire of a dugout the latter held up pudgy hands in horror. <i>Santissimo
+Trinidad!</i> The very idea was madness! With the river running a mile wide
+at its narrowest? Not a peon would venture upon it! And under the
+inspiration of his belief that a live customer was to be preferred to
+even a drowned gringo he worked privately against Seyd&#8217;s suicidal
+intention. So well did he scatter his pessimistic seed that when Seyd
+succeeded in finding a dugout he had to buy it outright; nor could he
+persuade a single peon to dare the flood.</p>
+
+<p>It was while returning to the inn late in the day that he obtained his
+first glimpse of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>river from a knoll which lifted him above the
+drowned jungle. Around wooded islands, which were usually dry hills, a
+waste of waters, thick and brown as chocolate, swept madly. Along the
+edge of the jungle it boiled in fat eddies which sucked and licked the
+trailing greenery. Farther out it was whipped into a yellow cream by the
+thrashing branches of uprooted trees, ceibas and cedars, huge as a
+church, which rolled and tumbled as their submerged limbs caught on the
+bottom. Everywhere it was studded with debris, trees and brush, whole
+acres of water lilies which here massed like a garden around a floating
+hut, there wreathed the carcass of some drowned beast.</p>
+
+<p>In all the world there is nothing more melancholy than the voice of a
+flood. Its resurgent dirge stirs vague forebodings which root in the
+calamitous experience of the race. Standing there alone, with the call
+of rushing waters, patter of rain, and sough of a sad wind in his ears,
+Seyd was able to understand the peons&#8217; superstitious fear. Yet he
+remained undeterred. The water being far too deep for poling, he made a
+pair of oars and fitted wooden thole pins in the dugout that evening,
+and next morning put off by himself on the tangled breast of the flood
+with such food as he had been able to buy.</p>
+
+<p>Once afloat, he found navigation even more precarious than the direst
+prophecy of his host. Now backwatering until an opening showed in a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>bristle of brush and water lilies, he would next almost crack his back
+in a supreme effort to cross the currents which ran like millraces
+between wooded islands. Once a quick spurt saved him from disastrous
+collision with a derelict log; and, dodging or running, he was kept so
+busy that Billy&#8217;s sudden hail came as a surprise.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hello, Seyd! Got any decent grub? We&#8217;ve lived on frijoles straight for
+the last thirty days.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The monotonous diet, however, did not seem to have impaired Billy&#8217;s
+customary cheerfulness. At the sight of eggs, honey, chickens, and
+bananas in the stern of the boat his freckles loomed like brown spots on
+a shining sun. Neither had misfortune affected his industry. Though&mdash;as
+Francesca feared&mdash;ten feet of water now covered the new foundation, he
+had immediately started another on a bench which rose fifty feet above
+the flood. And, now munching a tortilla rolled in honey, he led the way
+to where Calixto and Caliban, with half a dozen others, were hard at
+work. It was their first meeting since Seyd left for the States, and
+there was, of course, no end to the things each had to tell. Then, in
+reviewing the new work and planning for more, the day slipped rapidly
+away.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, afternoon was drawing on before Seyd pushed off again. He had
+intended to land as close as possible to the inn and have the dugout
+carried back upstream the following day. But he could not, of course,
+foresee the event <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>which, a third of the way across, caused him to stop
+rowing and stare with all his eyes. For as he backwatered to avoid a
+huge ceiba that bore down upon him with a slow, leisurely roll he spied
+a patch of white amidst the branches, and as it drew closer this
+presently resolved into a drenched chemisette which clung to the limbs
+of a young girl.</p>
+
+<p>A slim brown thing under thirteen, terror had drained away every
+particle of her natural color, leaving her big dark eyes looming dead
+black in the pale gold mask of her face. Though she had seen Seyd first,
+the inborn humility of her subject race deterred her from making any
+outcry. She just sat perfectly still astride the thatched peak of a
+submerged hut which, caught in the branches, acted as an outrigger to
+keep the great tree on an even keel. Only her eyes expressed the pitiful
+appeal whose utter hopelessness was emphasized by flash of wonder when
+Seyd drove the dugout in among the branches.</p>
+
+<p>Rising, then, she leaped into the bows, and, whether because the mass
+rode in a balance too delicate to endure the sudden change of weight or
+that a submerged branch happened to catch just then on some obstruction,
+the tree rolled heavily upon the dugout while Seyd was pulling his oars.
+Fortunately, the one heavy stroke had carried them out from under all
+but the thinner branches, and, though the dugout was capsized and forced
+under, it rose instantly, with Seyd and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>the girl clinging at each end.
+The hut on which she had been floating also emerged, and, working
+alongside, Seyd was able to right his craft and bale it out with his
+Stetson sombrero. A few yards away he recovered one oar, and, using it
+as a paddle, he tried to work across the flood.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he had gained half the way, however, he was miles below the
+inn, and dusk found him floating on the wide lake which now covered the
+San Nicolas cane fields. Here, where the water ran more slowly, he made
+way faster toward the shore, and through a leaden dusk he presently made
+out red twinkles which grew, in another half hour, into the lights and
+fires of the hacienda. Soon his oar struck bottom, and, using it as a
+pole, he drove rapidly into a landing.</p>
+
+<p>The night rains had already set in and they came down in sheets which
+soaked him to the skin and made of the girl, who had fallen asleep in
+the bows, a dim white nude. She had given him her simple history&mdash;how,
+of the five who were asleep in the hut when it was swept away by a
+cloudburst, she alone had survived. Utterly tired and exhausted, she did
+not awaken when he picked her up, and she lay quietly in his arms during
+the long sloppy tramp across the upland pastures. She was still asleep
+when, aroused by the baying of his dogs, Don Luis peered down from the
+upper patio upon their draggled figures.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Hombres! hombres!</i>&#8221; Looking up as his heavy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>bass boomed through the
+hacienda calling the <i>mozos</i>, Seyd caught a glimpse under the portal
+lantern of Francesca&#8217;s face in its frame of dark hair through a
+glittering mist of rain. The next moment she came flying down the great
+stone stairs, followed by an irruption of brown maids.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The <i>ni&ntilde;a</i>! Oh, the poor <i>ni&ntilde;a</i>!&#8221; Though she was wearing an evening
+dress of delicate white, she gathered the soaked child into her bosom,
+and, a center of flying skirts and soft womanish exclamations, hurried
+her away to the upper regions.</p>
+
+<p>In the longer time required for him to descend, Don Luis subdued his
+first astonishment, but it broke bonds again when Seyd explained his
+plight. &#8220;You crossed and recrossed the flood? <i>Por Dios mio!</i> I would
+never have dreamed that man could do it and live! You are wet to the
+skin. Come up at once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I had not expected&mdash;&#8221; Seyd began.</p>
+
+<p>But the old man cut him off at once. &#8220;You gringos are difficult folk to
+please. Surely a dry bed in San Nicolas is to be preferred to a wet
+night on the river.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless he was not displeased. Conferring with Francesca concerning
+a change of clothes after Seyd was safely bestowed in a bedroom, he
+expressed his secret admiration. &#8220;See you, an enormous ceiba rolls over
+and sends him and the <i>canoa</i> to the bottom, yet he speaks of it with
+shamed laughter as though of a fault. Also he would have borrowed a
+<i>mozo</i> and horse to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>travel back to the inn. What a man he would have
+made for the old wars!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A <i>charro</i> suit, so close to Seyd&#8217;s size as to be almost a fit, was the
+best that Francesca, after a voluble consultation with her maids, could
+offer in the way of change, and, though he experienced modest qualms at
+the sight of himself in tight trousers and short bolero jacket of soft
+leather gorgeously embroidered with silver, they undoubtedly brought out
+qualities of limb which were altogether lost in his usual clothing. If
+he could have seen the touch of admiration that softened the mischief in
+Francesca&#8217;s dark eyes when he entered the living-room, his misgivings
+might have vanished. But the phenomenon occurred behind his back, and
+his recent vow against &#8220;sentimental fooling&#8221; did not prevent him from
+coloring at her whispered remark:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You remind me of one Se&ntilde;or Rosario.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Later, he was to spend considerable time trying to appease conscience
+with plausible explanations of his feeling, to set it down to relief
+that their adventure had brought her no trouble. But while relief may
+have entered in, it was principally due to the fact that she had chosen
+to retie the thread of their acquaintance just where it had been severed
+by Sebastien&#8217;s intrusion. Yet, whatsoever its constituents, his pleasant
+embarrassment did not paralyze his tongue.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I cannot return the compliment.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Neither could he. With Rosa, the pretty <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>peona, this young lady in foamy
+white had nothing in common, and Rosa would have certainly felt out of
+place amidst the luxurious appointments of the room. Ample in all its
+dimensions, the furnishings had evidently been selected from the
+garnered treasures of several generations, with such taste, however,
+that the unmatched pieces made a harmonious whole. The old hangings
+which excluded the damp night, the old rugs on the mahogany floor, and
+old furniture lent each other countenance, melted into a rich design.
+Even the grand piano, undoubtedly the latest addition, was taking the
+tone of age. Only the bookcases which flanked the great fireplace
+displayed a modern note, for in them fine editions of English classics
+crowded the novels and plays of Cervantes and Lope Felix de Vega,
+Daudet, Flaubert, Anatole France, De Maupassant, competed for room with
+Spanish and English translations of the modern Russians.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Her taste,&#8221; Seyd had summed the room. &#8220;Your books?&#8221; he asked, with a
+nod at these astonishing shelves.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, no one else reads them.&#8221; She added, with smiling directness: &#8220;Or
+could understand. If the dear mother read French, oh, what a bonfire we
+should have!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you like them&mdash;the Frenchmen?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Some&mdash;in some things.&#8221; Her brows arching in the effort for clear
+expression, she went on: &#8220;They know life, and one cannot but enjoy their
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>beautiful style. But&#8221;&mdash;the delicate penciling drew even finer&mdash;&#8220;they
+see only with the eye. They are brilliant&mdash;as diamonds, and just as
+hard, cold. They analyze, dissect, probe life, take it apart, then
+forget to put it together. Love they see only as passion devoid of
+sympathy, affection, friendship. Their art is of the senses, their
+refinement&mdash;of manner. Under the veneer they are gross and hard.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To his astonishment she had expressed his own feeling for French
+literature, and, intensely curious, he went on probing her with
+questions, in his interest forgetting both his clothes and hunger till
+Don Luis interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lindita, the se&ntilde;or cannot live on words. The girls are calling dinner.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But after the meal&mdash;which was set out with silver, glass, napery, all of
+the finest, and served by brown maids who moved in and out with the soft
+stealth of bare feet&mdash;they went at their talk again, gleaning in fields
+of common knowledge while Don Luis alternately smoked and dozed by the
+fire.</p>
+
+<p>It was a revelation for Seyd, and while he watched the play of feeling
+over her face, the flow of her soft color, the swift moods of the arched
+brows, and the lighting and lowering of dark eyes in unison with the
+change of her talk, his hardy resolution of yesterday&mdash;already sapped by
+his present luxurious comfort&mdash;underwent further disintegration. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;After all,&#8221; he thought, &#8220;why shouldn&#8217;t I run down and see them
+occasionally?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Following Don Luis to his bedroom, he arrived at this conclusion, and in
+his argument with Conscience he reaffirmed it with even greater force.
+&#8220;After all the old man&#8217;s kindness it would be blackly ungrateful to
+flout his hospitality.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No reason why you should,&#8221; Conscience conceded, but added the
+unpleasant rider, &#8220;providing you don&#8217;t sail under false colors.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course!&#8221; Seyd here grew quite huffy with Conscience. &#8220;I always
+intended to let her know I was married&mdash;not that it is necessary. I&#8217;m
+not so conceited as to think that she feels the slightest personal
+interest in me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If it were really sincere his belief might have been shaken, could he
+have reviewed a little scene that was being enacted at that very moment
+across the patio. After the waif from the floods had been bathed and fed
+she was put to bed on a couch in Francesca&#8217;s own room, and, aroused by
+the brilliant sheen of wax candles on the dresser, she lay and watched
+with eyes of awe the young lady at her toilet. In her simple sight the
+dresser, with its big French mirror and gleaming silver appointments,
+doubtless appeared as the altar before which was being accomplished the
+marvelous transmutation of a woman into the exact semblance of those
+angels of light pictured on the stained windows of the church of
+Chilpancin. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>From the plaiting of the dark cloud of hair into a thick
+cable, to the final assumption of filmy white, she remained quiet as a
+mouse. Francesca had risen to blow out the candles before a small voice
+rose behind her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He said you were beautiful. Could he but see thee now!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After a sudden start Francesca moved over to the couch and collapsed
+beside it in a white heap.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Awake, <i>ni&ntilde;a</i>? What is this? He said I was beautiful? Who?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The gringo se&ntilde;or. When I began to cry for my mother and little Pedro
+that was drowned with her in the flood he said for me to take comfort,
+that he was going to place me with the most beautiful se&ntilde;orita in all
+Guerrero&mdash;one that would be kinder to me than my mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And that I will be.&#8221; Drawing her close, Francesca kissed the small gold
+face. &#8220;But did he really say&mdash;No, you shall tell me all about it from
+the very beginning.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While the tale was proceeding in soft lisping Spanish Francesca&#8217;s eyes
+eloquently illustrated its varied course. But their wide horror, moist
+pity at the drowning of the poor brown mother, suspense until Seyd and
+the child had climbed back into the dugout, merged in a soft glow at the
+repetition of his promise. &#8220;&#8216;The most beautiful se&ntilde;orita in all
+Guerrero?&#8217; Then he could not have meant me.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;<i>Si.</i>&#8221; The girl emphatically nodded. &#8220;Also he said you would take me
+into your service.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And so I will. I shall have thee trained for my own little maid. I
+shall call thee Roberta, after him, and every night it will be thy duty
+to speak for him in thy prayers. Are they said?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, se&ntilde;orita. I said them to the big girl, Rosa, but I will say one
+now for him&mdash;with thee.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Could Seyd have heard the soft voice following Francesca&#8217;s gentle
+promptings he would undoubtedly have suffered another onslaught from
+Conscience. As it was, just to prove his disinterestedness he rose at
+dawn. Leaving a note of thanks on the table, he went out on a hunt for
+peons and mules to haul the dugout back to the inn, and, having found
+them, went sternly on about his business. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">F</span>or two weeks thereafter Seyd held fast to his work, suppressing with
+iron firmness successive vagrant impulses which urged a second visit to
+San Nicolas. Then having proved to himself his perfect indifference
+toward Francesca, he rode down one day&mdash;strictly on business&mdash;to ask Don
+Luis&#8217;s assistance in obtaining more men and mules.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I shall return this evening,&#8221; he arranged with Conscience, starting
+out.</p>
+
+<p>He had forgotten, however, to make allowance for the probable action of,
+in legal verbiage, the party of the second part, for upon his arrival he
+received from Francesca as stiff a lecture on his folly in leaving the
+other day in half-dried clothes as ever fell from the lips of an anxious
+mother. Upon it, too, Don Luis set the stamp of his heavy approval.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One may do it in the high altitudes, se&ntilde;or, but here in the tropics
+such carelessness leads to the fever. This time we shall not let you
+forth till properly fed and dried.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now while a girl&#8217;s acceptance of flowers, candy, and other favors may
+mean anything or nothing, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>no sooner does she begin to concern herself
+with a man&#8217;s health and clothes than the affair becomes serious, for it
+clearly proves that she has been touched in the mother instinct, which
+forms the basis of woman&#8217;s love. In his masculine ignorance of this
+fundamental truth, however, Seyd gave her solicitude a sisterly
+interpretation, and congratulated himself upon the fact that their
+acquaintance was established at last on such solid ground. Agreeing with
+himself that it would be the worst of taste for him to disturb a purely
+friendly relation with any reference to the squalid tragedy of his
+marriage, he continued silent.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be feared, also, that several subsequent visits were based upon
+rather frivolous excuses. In the next month he carried down to San
+Nicolas the news of at least a dozen cases of destitution through the
+floods, and when, for some inexplicable cause, deliveries of his
+material at the railroad suddenly ceased he plunged head over heels into
+the relief work which had been instituted under Don Luis&#8217;s direction.
+Sometimes alone, more often with Francesca and Tomas, he rode up and
+down the valley hunting out the sufferers. And it was on one of these
+journeys that the fates which dog insincerity laid bare his pretense.</p>
+
+<p>It came&mdash;his awakening&mdash;a week or so after a sudden fall of the floods
+foretold the end of the rains. Though the river still ran wide of its
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>banks, most of the ranches with intervening patches of jungle had come
+again to the surface; and, riding through one of the latter on his way
+to San Nicolas, Seyd overtook Francesca and Tomas.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is it not good to see the fields again?&#8221; she greeted him. &#8220;The crops
+will be late this year, but Don Luis says that the yield will be all the
+richer because of the flood. But the jungle! The poor jungle! It has
+been swept clean of shrubs and flowers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It did look most forlorn. Shorn of its luxuriance, the orchids and wild
+flowers, and all the tide of vegetation which usually flowed everywhere
+in waves that rose and tossed a froth of green creepers into the tops of
+the tallest trees, the jungle was now a fat black marsh littered with
+bejucos which lay in twisted masses like drowned snakes. Edged with
+draggled grass, still others hung down from the trees, writhing darkly
+in the wind that had sprung up in the last hour. Taken in all, it was
+weird, gruesome, a fit setting for the tragedy that lay waiting for them
+amid the roots of a dead ceiba just ahead. Twisted back and forth by the
+storms of the last month, the tree now stood in a hole of mud, ripe and
+ready for the gust that snapped the rotten tap root just as Francesca
+was riding by.</p>
+
+<p>Without noise the tree inclined, reaching out huge arms above her head.
+So silently it fell that Francesca never saw it at all, and Seyd, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>who
+was riding just behind her, received first warning from the sudden swing
+of a bejuco across his eyes. Leaning over his horse&#8217;s neck, he lashed
+her beast across the quarters. Almost unseated by the wild forward
+plunge of her beast, the girl recovered her seat and looked back just in
+time to see him knocked out of the saddle. Had he been struck by one of
+the main branches, thick as a barrel, both he and his horse had surely
+been crushed down into the mud beyond need of other burial. But though
+he had gained almost from under, even a twig strikes a shrewd blow after
+describing a three-hundred-foot arc, and he lay in the mud under her
+eyes, white and still, with an ugly bruise showing across his brow.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tomas! Tomas! Ride thou for help!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Crying it, she leaped from her horse, sank beside Seyd in the mud, and
+lifted his head into her lap. With water from a pool which was soaking
+her skirt she laved the bruise with one hand, intently studying his
+face; and when, some minutes later, he gave no sign of life, her dark
+anxious eyes blazed with a sudden passion of fear. Gathering his head in
+against her bosom, she rocked back and forth with passionate murmurs:
+&#8220;Oh, he is dead! He is killed&mdash;for me!&#8221; But though, if told of it, he
+would have sworn that such treatment would really have brought him back
+from the dead, he neither felt, saw, nor heard the soft cradling arms,
+burning black eyes, the broken murmurs in English and Spanish. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p><p>He did feel her lips when, stooping suddenly, she kissed the bruise,
+because it happened just as her lowered face hid the first quiver of his
+eyelids. Also he felt the unconscious embrace and saw the deep blush
+which told that she knew he had felt her kiss. But she did not try to
+avoid his gaze. From the midst of her blushes she answered it with the
+bravery of love, discovered and unafraid.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Querido</i>, I had thought thee dead.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the wonder of it, the foolish, tender wonder, Seyd, on his part,
+forgot all else. Perhaps the delicate brain plexuses which govern memory
+were still stunned, leaving his mind clean as a new slate till some
+stimulus should presently rewrite upon it the pretty, common face of his
+wife. Conscious only of this new bursting love, he reached up at her
+murmur and pulled her face down to his. Then it came, the stimulus. With
+the powerful association of some other kiss, the moist clinging of her
+lips started the wheels of memory, but, remembering, he did not desist.
+For simultaneously there had burst upon him a vision of love, rounded
+and complete, with the perfect fullness which satisfies every instinct
+and need. Already he had felt that at every point her personality met
+and complemented his, and in the fullness of the realization his whole
+being rose in rebellion against that other tie. He was kissing her with
+furious abandon when she suddenly broke away. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Oh, I wonder if he saw us?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Looking quickly up, he saw Tomas returning through the trees. &#8220;I don&#8217;t
+know,&#8221; he reassured her, &#8220;but I&#8217;ll find out. If he did&mdash;just leave him
+to me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After Tomas, but at a safe distance, came three peons whom he had called
+from the nearest rancho, also a <i>mozo</i> who had been sent out from the
+<i>meson</i> to overtake and deliver a letter to Seyd.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you&#8217;ll permit me?&#8221; he asked. But his head still swam; and when he
+tried to read it the angular chirography danced under his eyes,
+describing such curious antics that he was driven at last to ask her
+aid.</p>
+
+<p>It was from Peters, the station agent, and announced the arrival of a
+consignment of American provisions; and, as Billy had been condemned to
+straight Mexican diet for the last two weeks, the news called for Seyd&#8217;s
+instant return. While the soft voice was reciting its content he
+oscillated between mixed feelings of chagrin and relief, for after its
+long sleep outraged Conscience was now working overtime. He felt like a
+hypocrite when she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are still weak. You must not go.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m afraid that I shall have to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But suppose that you are taken ill on the way?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The <i>mozo</i> will be with me&mdash;anyway, I&#8217;m all right.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p><p>Though she looked disappointed, she gave way when he explained Billy&#8217;s
+need; the more readily, perhaps, because she felt within her the
+stirrings of the feminine instinct to hide and brood over her new
+happiness all alone. The feeling even formed her speech. &#8220;The poor se&ntilde;or
+Thornton! He must be very lonely over there all by himself, and he must
+be fed. I shall not mind&mdash;for a few days. You have given me&mdash;so much to
+think about. But then&mdash;you will come?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He groaned inwardly at the thought of that which their next meeting
+entailed, and had it been possible he would have preferred to make open
+confession there and then. As it was not, he let her ride away with her
+own clear happiness undimmed, unconscious of the stab inflicted by her
+last tender whisper.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Surely I shall come,&#8221; he had answered; and, after mounting his horse,
+he sat and watched her ride away among the trees. When, with a parting
+wave, she disappeared, his sun went out, yet through his bitter feeling
+he remembered his promise.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tomas!&#8221; He called the <i>mozo</i> back. Ignorant of just how much the fellow
+had seen, he tried him out with the Spanish proverb, &#8220;&#8216;The saints are
+good to the blind.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At the sight of the five-peso note in Seyd&#8217;s hand the <i>mozo&#8217;s</i> white
+teeth flashed in a knowing grin. &#8220;<i>Si</i>, se&ntilde;or,&#8221; he answered in kind,
+&#8220;neither do flies enter a closed mouth.&#8221; And, pocketing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>the note, he
+galloped after his mistress, leaving Seyd to go his own way.</p>
+
+<p>It was not pleasant, either, the path that Seyd pursued the next few
+days. Going back to the inn, following the mules out to and back from
+the railroad, crossing and recrossing the river with Billy&#8217;s supplies,
+fits of rebellion alternated with moods of black self reproach.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you had declared yourself in the beginning she would never have
+given you a second thought.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Up to the moment when he turned his horse&#8217;s head once more toward San
+Nicolas, a few days later, this formed the text of his musings; and if
+he winced when the gold of the hacienda walls broke along the green
+foothills it was not in pity for himself. If it would have freed her
+from pain he would have hugged his own with the savage exultance of a
+flagellant. But too well he knew that in these things there is no
+vicarious atonement, and the face that he carried into the San Nicolas
+patio was so grim and sad that it provoked Don Luis&#8217;s comment.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Se&ntilde;or, you are sick? Before she left Francesca told us of the accident.
+&#8217;Tis plain that you are not yet recovered.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Before she&mdash;left?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Out of feeling in which surprise and relief struggled with bitter
+disappointment Seyd&#8217;s question issued. At Don Luis&#8217;s answer despair
+rolled over all. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, se&ntilde;or. She is gone to Europe&mdash;for a year.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Through his amazement and despair Seyd felt the justice of the stroke.
+As yet, however, the smart was too keen for submission. In open mutiny
+once more against the scheme of things, he repeated the phrase, &#8220;Gone?
+To Europe?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>,&#8221; Don Luis nodded. &#8220;Our kinswoman, the se&ntilde;ora Rocha, mother of
+Sebastien, has been ailing for a great while, and now goes to Europe for
+special doctoring. As she speaks only our own tongue, she could not
+journey alone, and, like the good girl that she is, Francesca consented
+to accompany her.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">A</span>s a matter of fact, Don Luis knew even less than Seyd of the real
+reason behind his niece&#8217;s departure. Like many another and much more
+important event, it was brought about by the simplest of causes, which
+went back to the afternoon when, on her arrival at San Nicolas,
+Francesca found Sebastien waiting there with the news of his mother&#8217;s
+illness.</p>
+
+<p>First in the sequence of cause and effect which sent her away stands
+Seyd&#8217;s five-peso note; next, Pancho, Sebastien&#8217;s <i>mozo</i>, for the
+conjunction of these two gave birth to the event. Ordinarily, that is,
+when in full possession of his simple wits, Tomas, Francesca&#8217;s <i>mozo</i>,
+would have suffered crucifixion in her cause, and had he chosen any
+other than Pancho to assist in the transmutation of Seyd&#8217;s note into
+alcohol at the San Nicolas wine shop the process would have been
+accomplished without damage to aught but his own head. But when in the
+cause of their tipplings Pancho began to enlarge on the benefits that
+would follow to all from the blending of their respective houses by
+marriage Tomas began to writhe under the itch of secret and superior
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>knowledge. From knowing winks he progressed to mysterious hints, and
+finally ended with a clean confession of all he had seen that afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But this is not to be spoken of, <i>hombre</i>,&#8221; he warned Pancho, with
+solemn hiccoughs, at the close. &#8220;By the grave of thy father, let not
+even a whisper forth.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As being less difficult to find in a country where parenthood is more
+easily traced on the feminine side, Pancho swore to it by the grave of
+his mother. But, though he added thereto those of his aunts,
+grandmother, and entire female line, the combined weight still failed to
+balance such astonishing news. Inflamed by thoughts of the prestige he
+would gain in his master&#8217;s sight, he moderated his potations. After he
+had seen Tomas comfortably bestowed under the <i>cantina</i> table he carried
+the tale straight to Sebastien&#8217;s room.</p>
+
+<p>In this, however, he showed more zeal than discretion, for in lieu of
+the expected prestige he got a blow in the mouth which laid him out in a
+manner convenient for the quirting of his life. Not until Sebastien&#8217;s
+arm tired did he gain permission to retire, whimpering, to his straw in
+the stable; and next morning both he and Tomas trembled for their lives
+when Sebastien arraigned them before him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Listen, dogs!&#8221; He struck them with his whip across their faces. &#8220;For
+this piece of lying <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>the tongues of you both should be pulled out by the
+roots. If I spare you it is because until now you have both been
+faithful servants. But remember!&#8221; He swore to it with an oath so
+frightfully sacrilegious that both shrank in anticipation of a bolt from
+the skies. &#8220;But remember! If ever, drunk or sober, there proceeds out of
+either of you one further word &#8217;twill surely be done.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Leaving them shaking, he passed out and on upstairs to the patio where
+Francesca was sitting, with Roberta at her knees, in the shade of the
+<i>corredor&#8217;s</i> green arches. The drone of hummers, fluting of birds in the
+patio garden set her soft musings to pleasant music, and she looked up
+with sudden vexation at the jangle of his spurs.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So this is the child that we have renamed in his honor?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Last night they had parted better friends than usual, for out of the
+pity bred of her own realized love she had done her best to please him.
+Love had also sharpened her naturally sensitive perceptions. Divining
+his knowledge from the concentrated anger of his look, she rose,
+instinctively nerving herself for the encounter.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just so.&#8221; He divined, in turn, her feeling. &#8220;Between those who
+understand words are wasted. Send the child away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As he said &#8220;understand&#8221; a surge of passion wiped out the weary lines
+left by a night of hate. But while the child was passing along the
+corridor he controlled it and became his usual sardonic <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>self. He was
+beginning &#8220;Thanks to the excellent Tomas&mdash;&#8221; when she interrupted with an
+angry gesture.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then it <i>was</i> he! I&#8217;ll have him&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Caramba!</i>&#8221; He shrugged. &#8220;What a heat! But easy&mdash;do not blame Tomas for
+your gringo&#8217;s fault. What else could you expect from a peon that found
+himself enriched at a stroke? The wonder is that he did not proclaim his
+news from your topmost wall. Be content that he will never whisper one
+word again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You didn&#8217;t&mdash;&#8221; she began, alarmed now for her servant.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No. Pancho, to whom he told it, I flogged for the liar he now thinks
+Tomas, and Tomas&mdash;is trembling for his tongue. Except between us the
+matter is dead. Yet Tomas served his purpose. Thanks to him, we may now
+pass words and come to terms.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Terms?&#8221; She faltered it after a silence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Terms!&#8221; he repeated, gravely. &#8220;That is, if you would save your gringo
+alive. Supposing this were to escape to the good uncle? Soft as he has
+been with these gringos of late, supposing that he were to hear of both
+this and that other night in the hut, how long, think you, would the man
+last?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes told. After a pause her mouth opened with a small gasp.
+&#8220;You&mdash;oh! you will not?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not if you obey. Now see you, Francesca.&#8221; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>He dropped into a tone of
+grave confidence which was really winning. &#8220;If I had not known that his
+death at my hands would place you forever beyond me the man had never
+seen the dawn of another day. Whether he sees its setting depends on
+you. If you will go with my mother to Europe&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>&mdash;if&mdash;I&mdash;go?&#8221; It issued between pauses of pain after a long
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He lives. I will even protect him till he arrives at the end of his
+fool&#8217;s rope.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And&mdash;then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There will be no &#8216;then.&#8217; I know these gringos. They will disappear like
+their vanishing gold.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her slight flush indicated defiant unbelief. But knowing that this was
+in deadly earnest, that Seyd&#8217;s life hung by a hair, she let him go on.
+&#8220;Let there be no misunderstanding. I shall require your promise, on the
+word of a Garcia, not to attempt communication.&#8221; He added, turning away,
+perhaps in pity for the misery of her face: &#8220;There is no hurry. Take
+time to think it over&mdash;an hour, two if you wish.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He could easily afford, too, the concession, for her love was playing
+into his hands. None knew better than she that a contrary answer would
+make of Seyd an Ishmaelite with every man&#8217;s hand raised against his
+life. He could never escape. With that dread fact staring her in the
+face she could give but one answer; and while, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>later, she spent hours
+pacing her bedroom in restless strivings to find a way out, she reached
+her decision before he gained the end of the gallery.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I will go.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<p style="float: left; font-size: 100%; line-height: 80%; margin-top: 0;">&#8220;</p><p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">R</span>eally, I don&#8217;t know what to make of it. That last car load of
+machinery rusted for a month in the damp heat of the Tehuantepec tropics
+before we got it traced. It has happened so often now that I&#8217;m almost
+tempted to suspect a design.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd&#8217;s complaint to Peters, the agent, nearly a year later summed the
+exasperating experiences which had retarded the building of the new
+smelter. Beginning before the end of the last flood, the failure in
+deliveries had multiplied as the work of construction proceeded, until
+it seemed to Seyd that his material had been distributed on a thousand
+side tracks by an impartial hand. While two high-priced American
+mechanics had spent their expensive leisure shooting and fishing he had
+spent most of his own time tracing the shipments, and now, with the
+rains almost due again, another month would be required to finish the
+work.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You have sure had your share of bad luck.&#8221; While sympathizing with him,
+Peters discouraged the idea of premeditation. &#8220;You don&#8217;t know these
+Mexican roads. Our charter calls for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>employment of sixty-five per
+cent. of Mexican help, and, if you&#8217;ll believe me, that means six hundred
+per-cent. of inefficiency. Take this <i>mozo</i> of mine. He&#8217;s been with me
+six years. But, though I show him the correct way to do a thing a
+thousand times, the moment my back is turned he&#8217;ll go at it in some fool
+wrong-headed way of his own. The wonder to me is not, that your freight
+goes wrong, but that it ever arrives. Nevertheless, you&#8217;ve had, as I
+say, your fill of bad luck. If I were you I&#8217;d just jump the up
+train&mdash;she&#8217;s due in twenty minutes&mdash;and call on the general traffic
+manager in Mexico City. He can do more for you in five minutes than I
+can in ten days.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was sound advice. Quick always to perceive advantage, Seyd answered,
+&#8220;Give me a ticket.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Because of his isolation, the agent&#8217;s wells of speech were always
+brimming, and while waiting for the train he delivered himself of
+several pieces of news. &#8220;By the way, Don Luis went up yesterday to lodge
+a protest with the government against the dam a gringo company is
+building across the valley fifty miles north of San Nicolas. It is
+located just below the Barranca de Tigres, a ca&ntilde;on that drains all the
+watershed west of the volcano. They have cloudbursts up there, and when
+one lets go&mdash;well, old Noah&#8217;s deluge isn&#8217;t in it. When I was hunting
+jaguar in the ca&ntilde;on a couple of years ago I saw watermarks a hundred
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>and fifty feet up the mountainside. Boulders big as churches were piled
+up in the bed of the stream like pebbles, and if that dam was built of
+solid concrete instead of clay they&#8217;d go through it like it was dough.
+Though I&#8217;d be the last man to go back on my own folks, I&#8217;m bound to
+confess that we do carry some things with a bit too high a hand. If that
+dam ever breaks, the wave will sweep the barranca clean between its
+walls. But, Lordy! that won&#8217;t cut any figure with the paint-eaters that
+hedge in Diaz. To secure a rake-off they&#8217;d see all Guerrero drown, and
+I&#8217;m doubting that the General&#8217;s kick will do any good.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd nodded. &#8220;No, the times are against him&mdash;both in this and his other
+efforts to hold back civilization. So far, he and Sebastien have
+succeeded pretty well in checking it here in Guerrero. But it is
+creeping in around them&mdash;some day will flow over their heads. They might
+as well stand in the path of a barranca flood.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The naming of Sebastien brought the second piece of news. &#8220;That reminds
+me&mdash;you almost had him for a fellow traveler. I forwarded a cable
+message last night that his mother had died in France. I rather thought
+that he&#8217;d be in for this train.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then she is coming back?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd meant Francesca. But Peters misunderstood. &#8220;Yes, they&#8217;ve shipped
+her by a German line that runs to Havana and Vera Cruz. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>By mistake the
+cable was sent to another Rocha somewhere up in Sinaloa, and, being a
+Mexican, he slept on it a week before replying that his mother was
+there, quite lively and frisky at home. So it arrived here ten days
+late&mdash;long enough to put Miss Francesca and her mother into Vera Cruz.
+Yes, the se&ntilde;ora was there&mdash;had just joined them&mdash;luckily, for death is
+too grim a thing for a young girl to face by herself.&#8221; Just then the
+train drew into the station, and as Seyd climbed on, he added: &#8220;If you
+could find time to pass the word on to Don Luis he&#8217;d surely appreciate
+it. He puts up at the Iturbide.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd&#8217;s nod was purely automatic, for the news had loosed once more
+bitter tides which had lain dormant these last few months under the
+weight of his business cares. Unconscious, too, of the import that
+events would presently give to such apparently trivial consent, he
+nodded again when Peters asked permission to look through a batch of
+American papers which had come for him by yesterday&#8217;s mail.</p>
+
+<p>For that matter, it would have been difficult to discern anything
+unusual or alarming in the spectacle of Peters as he sat in his office
+after the departure of the train, heels on the table and chair
+comfortably tilted, while he slit, one after the other, the covers of
+Seyd&#8217;s papers. Yet while he smoked and read his way down through the
+pile he unconsciously but surely prepared the way for the event which
+was approaching <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>at the top speed of Sebastien&#8217;s horse. Had he read, or
+Sebastien ridden, a little faster or slower things had gone differently.
+But, just as though it had been predoomed and destined, eyes and hoofs
+kept perfect time. Just as Peters opened Seyd&#8217;s Albuquerque paper
+Sebastien walked in.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Left&mdash;an hour ago.&#8221; Yawning, Peters laid down the Albuquerque paper on
+top of the pile, and as the train usually ran from two to twelve hours
+late three hundred and sixty-five days in the year he lent a sympathetic
+ear to Sebastien&#8217;s vitriolic curses.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I can wire for a special,&#8221; he suggested. &#8220;They could send an engine and
+car down from Cuernavaca in little more than an hour.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you will be so kind, se&ntilde;or.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In all Guerrero, Peters was the one gringo with whom Sebastien was on
+speaking terms, and he now accepted both a cigar and a paper to while
+away the time. After one glance had shown it to be a gringo sheet he
+would have cast it aside, but the one word &#8220;Mexico!&#8221; in scare heads
+caught his eye. Setting forth the international complications that were
+likely to come from the lynching of a Mexican in Arizona, it held his
+interest. He not only read it to the bottom of the column, but followed
+over to the next page, upon which heavy ink lines had been scored around
+a local article.</p>
+
+<p>As the heading caught his eye he started, looked again, then bent over
+the paper and read <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>to the end. For a few seconds thereafter he sat
+thinking. A stealthy glance showed Peters at the key clicking off the
+call for the special. Quietly folding the paper, he slid it beneath his
+coat. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">W</span>ith Seyd and his cargo of reflections aboard, the train meanwhile
+puffed steadily up the four-per-cent. grades which carry the railway
+eleven thousand feet high to the shoulder of the old giant volcano,
+Ajuasoa. While he stared out of the window the vivid panorama of the hot
+country, the green seas of corn or cane which surged around white-walled
+haciendas, the chocolate peons behind their wooden plows, and the pretty
+brown girls at the stations gradually gave place to volcanic lava fields
+and gloomy woods of pi&ntilde;on, and these again merged into the innumerable
+hamlets which spread brown adobe skirts around Mexico City unseen by
+him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She is coming back! She is coming back!&#8221; It ran all the while in his
+mind, and formed the undertone of his conversation with Don Luis in the
+patio of the Iturbide that evening. When the old man stated his
+intention of taking the night train down to the Gulf it was only by a
+powerful effort that Seyd avoided the lunacy of offering to accompany
+him. All that night he burned in a flame of feeling, and as a
+consequence he rose tired out and presented such a picture of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>meekness
+when ushered into the office of the general manager, one so opposite to
+the usual fiery mien of the wronged shipper, that the stony heart of the
+official was melted within him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You certainly have a kick coming,&#8221; he admitted. &#8220;A big one, at that.
+I&#8217;ll look into this myself, and if you&#8217;ll please return at four I hope
+to have news of your freight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In their passage down through the departments, however, his inquiries
+soon came to a stop. &#8220;So this is the fellow who has been bucking old
+General Garcia in the Barranca de Guerrero?&#8221; he commented to his third
+assistant; and his further remarks were equally enlightening. &#8220;Well,
+politics are politics, but this has gone far enough. I like the boy&#8217;s
+looks, and this railroad isn&#8217;t going to be used to fight the General&#8217;s
+battles any longer. After this, Mr. Chauvez, see that Mr. Seyd gets his
+freight. Where is that last car?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The third assistant&#8217;s shoulders executed the Latin equivalent of &#8220;Search
+me!&#8221; At last news, peon &#8220;brakies&#8221; on the Nacional had been using it as a
+roller coaster on the mountain grades going down to Monterey. If
+Providence had intervened before it ran off into the sea Mr. Chauvez
+opined that it would most likely be found on that city&#8217;s wharves. All of
+which, after some clicking and humming of wires, culminated in the
+manager&#8217;s report to Seyd at four.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It seems that your freight was switched by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>mistake over to Monterey.
+If you leave it to us&#8221;&mdash;his stern eye loosed a twinkle&mdash;&#8220;you&#8217;ll probably
+get it sometime in the next six months. But if you&#8217;ll take these passes
+for the evening train and hunt it up yourself you can have it tagged
+onto the train that leaves to-morrow night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though the vicissitudes of thirty years&#8217; railroading had almost
+petrified his heart, the organ stirred faintly as Seyd returned hearty
+thanks. Watching him go out, he even muttered: &#8220;It&#8217;s a damned shame! But
+I&#8217;ll take care that he&#8217;s bothered no more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>More grateful on his part than he had any legal right to be, Seyd would
+have been better pleased had the passes read to Vera Cruz. Knowing that
+Francesca must pass through Mexico City on her way home, he would have
+preferred even to stay where he was. But the thought of Billy fretting
+himself thin at the mine reinforced his naturally strong sense of duty,
+and he took the train out that night. And his steadfastness made for his
+good. During his three days&#8217; absence the flame of feeling which was
+consuming his resolution and blinding his thought burned itself out. The
+morning after he had seen his car billed through to his own station he
+rose with his mind clear and a renewed purpose to do the right thing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At the first favorable opportunity I shall tell her,&#8221; he told himself,
+in the coach going down to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>the station. With the thought strong in his
+mind he stepped on the train and&mdash;came face to face with Francesca
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! it is <i>you</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&mdash;I&mdash;thought you were already gone!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While he blushed and stammered confusedly his senses, nevertheless, took
+cognizance of the fluttering rush of her hands, the happy eyes in the
+midst of her flushes, other things that answered, without words, several
+questions which had greatly perplexed him. Whatever the cause behind her
+long silence, it was neither the resurrection of her racial pride nor,
+as he had sometimes suspected, her discovery of his marriage. Indeed,
+her very next words gave him an inkling.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You must have wondered why I did not write? But I&mdash;could not help it.&#8221;
+She glanced at her mother, who, with eloquent hands, was telegraphing
+him welcome from the other end of the car. &#8220;I will tell you later&mdash;all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In his surprise and gladness his mind still clung to his resolve, and,
+nearly as possible, he kept his pact with himself. &#8220;I also have
+something to tell.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She looked up quickly. But his eyes indicated no diminution of the old
+feeling. Satisfied, she asked, with a little sigh: &#8220;The mine? Something
+gone wrong? You will tell us&mdash;now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The se&ntilde;ora, who had caught the last sentence, added her word. &#8220;<i>Si</i>, for
+we, you know, are your friends.&#8221; Making room for him by her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>side, she
+punctuated his tale of the summer&#8217;s mishaps with pitiful exclamations,
+and comforted him at the end with maternal solicitude. &#8220;<i>Si</i>, at the
+first glance I saw it, that you had suffered. But, courage, <i>amigo</i>, it
+will make for your greater enjoyment in the end.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Francesca had taken the seat opposite, and, catching her eye just then,
+Seyd saw, along with the sympathy and understanding, a gleam of
+exultation. &#8220;You suffered, <i>si</i>, but I&#8217;m glad for&mdash;&#8217;twas for me.&#8221; Her
+glance said it plainly as words, and he ached to answer it; but, in
+accordance with the honest course he had laid out for himself, he
+refrained, and went on talking to her mother.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don Luis,&#8221; she answered his question, &#8220;is in the front car with
+Sebastien&mdash;in attendance on our dear friend, his mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He knew that he had no part in their grief, and, tentatively, he began,
+&#8220;If I can be of any help&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Divining his feeling from the pause, she answered at once: &#8220;You are very
+kind. Francesca, poor <i>ni&ntilde;a</i>, has been under a great strain. &#8217;Twill be a
+mercy if you will stay here and talk.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now that her first blushes had died, he could see it for himself. Her
+smile added the soft confession, &#8220;You did not suffer alone.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Under her look Seyd felt his resolution weaken; to save it he looked out
+of the window, whereupon it gained strength from the thought of his
+impending <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>confession. But it relaxed again the next time their glances
+met; and, as love is an anarchist who scoffs alike at law and death,
+their communications proceeded with alternate thawings and freezings,
+while, in reverse order, the black lava fields and gloomy pi&ntilde;on gave
+place to the painted hamlets, pink churches, and villages of huts in
+green seas of corn. Yet, if a little worse for wear, his resolution
+held. Indeed, it found definite expression when the train stopped at
+last at their station.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I must see you soon!&#8221; he said, as they went out. &#8220;I have something very
+serious to say.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Once more she looked up quickly. &#8220;We shall be at El Quiss, Sebastien&#8217;s
+place, for three days. After that you will find me at home. But do not
+come alone!&#8221; The hasty addition threw more light on the causes behind
+her sudden departure. &#8220;As you value your life&mdash;nay, you were always
+careless of that&mdash;promise, for my sake, that you will not come alone?
+When you go out anywhere take with you at least one man.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is it so serious as that?&#8221; But he stopped laughing when he saw she was
+hurt. &#8220;There! I promise!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She paid him, alighting, with a clasp of her hand that left its soft
+clinging pressure tingling after she disappeared in the crowd of
+rancheros and hacendados, Sebastien&#8217;s retainers and friends, who filled
+the station. His sharp gray eye had already singled out his car on a
+side <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>track, and while he waited for the agent Sebastien and Don Luis
+passed, walking behind the coffin.</p>
+
+<p>He was seen, moreover, by them, and after they had mounted and were
+riding side by side at the head of the funeral procession Sebastien
+spoke. &#8220;Your gringo was at the station.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Luis nodded. &#8220;<i>Si</i>, he came down on the train.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After a silence Sebastien spoke again. &#8220;It seems that he has been having
+trouble with his freight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ignoring the subtle suggestion conveyed by the accent, Don Luis
+laconically answered, &#8220;He is not the first.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But will be the last. Ernestino Chauvez, my second cousin, is in the
+department of freights. Yesterday he told me that, by special order,
+there are to be no more miscarriages of this man&#8217;s freight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The heavy brown mask refused even a sign. &#8220;This had better happened a
+year ago.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then he is near the end of his rope?&#8221; Sebastien leaped to the
+conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His first note of hand to me is due next month.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Don Luis&#8217;s massive shoulders rose. &#8220;How should I know, <i>amigo</i>, what
+money he has?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But if he pay not?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again Don Luis shrugged. &#8220;Sebastien, how <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>often am I to tell it&mdash;that no
+gringo shall force in on my lands.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+
+<p>In happy ignorance as yet of the significance implied in their
+conversation, Seyd at that moment was reading and rereading, with
+incredulous joy, a newspaper clipping which had been forwarded by a
+friend in Albuquerque.</p>
+
+<p class="center">MRS. ROBERT SEYD, WIFE OF PROMINENT<br />
+MINING ENGINEER, GRANTED DIVORCE </p>
+
+<p>The content below ran as is usual when feminine enthusiasm over its
+wrongs has been unchecked by fear of a reply, and in handing down his
+decision the local Dogberry&mdash;who was unaware that the notice of the
+plaintiff&#8217;s remarriage would appear in the same issue with his
+remarks&mdash;had pronounced it the most heartless case of desertion in all
+his experience upon the bench. Reading a second clipping which set forth
+the marriage, Seyd indulged in a grin. But this quickly faded. Pity and
+sympathy colored his remark.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Poor thing! I hope she&#8217;ll be happy.&#8221; Self reproach vibrated in the
+addition, &#8220;She was not, never could have been, with me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With that she passed out of his thought just as she had already gone
+from his life. His mind leaped to review the consequences. Free! Free!
+In the first flush of his joy he exulted over <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>the fact that his
+intended confession was now unnecessary. But later and more sober
+reflections caused him to shake his head.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No!&#8221; He laid down the law peremptorily for himself. &#8220;There&#8217;s been
+enough and to spare of shilly-shallying. You will go to her and tell
+her&mdash;all! And if she refuses you there&#8217;ll be no one to blame but
+yourself.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">I</span>n the calendar of love days count as weeks, months as years; but,
+though the following week conformed to this universal law, Seyd managed
+to extract from its laggard hours his modicum of joy. Following the
+mules on two trips between the mine and station he lived in a glow of
+feeling, the natural reaction of his late despair. By turns relief, joy,
+hope governed his reflections, finally uniting in optimism that drowned
+his customary caution. Whereas only a week ago he had begun to plan for
+a trip home to California to raise money to meet their first note he now
+determined to put it off until he should have seen Don Luis, and then,
+if necessary, send Billy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll call on him immediately after the funeral,&#8221; he said, talking it
+over with Billy. &#8220;If he demands his pound of flesh there&#8217;ll still be
+time for you to go north.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This settled, he had gone about his business in happier mood than he had
+known for many a year. It seemed to him as if the tangled run of his
+life was beginning to unfold straight and plain. But while he worked,
+the evil fates which had made such a ravel in his personal skein were
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>equally busy inventing fresh tangles. On the day that saw at once the
+delivery of the last piece of machinery and the arrival of the first
+seasonal rain Sebastien and Francesca joined battle at the El Quiss
+hacienda.</p>
+
+<p>Until, the morning after the funeral, Sebastien called her aside to
+thank her for her care of his mother she had shown him only the sympathy
+due his sorrow. But under it resentment still smoldered, and it was
+fanned to a flame by his accidental expression.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was the kinder because I had forced you away. If I can make any
+return&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You can.&#8221; She filled his pause. &#8220;During the last six months I had time
+for reflection, and the more I thought of it the more I wondered at
+myself for my easy yielding to your will. It is not that I was unwilling
+to do that or more for your mother. But to be sent away like a naughty
+school girl under a solemn vow against correspondence&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The price of your consent, you remember, was the gringo&#8217;s life?&#8221; His
+eye lit with the old saturnine sparkle. &#8220;As you see, he still cumbers
+good Mexican earth.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You dared not have harmed him in any case.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No.&#8221; She met without flinching his look of sarcastic interrogation.
+&#8220;Porfirio Diaz will not stand for the killing of <i>Americanos</i>. As you
+well <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>know, Sebastien, he would surely have hunted you down.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If there had been any to tell? Even your folly would hardly have arisen
+to that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;Twould not have been necessary. If I had warned him, placed your
+threat on record with his friends, &#8217;twere sufficient. If not, there is
+still another argument that would have held you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The sure knowledge that I would hate you forever.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good reasons, both of them.&#8221; He shrugged. &#8220;But you overlook the fact,
+my cousin, that a whisper in the ear of the good uncle would have taken
+the matter out of my hands.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That would not have cleared you&mdash;with me. Now listen, Sebastien. I
+yielded because at the time it seemed the only way, and after I realized
+my folly I still lived up to my promise. But now I give you warning.
+Henceforth I shall not permit your interference in my affairs.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your love affairs?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Bueno!</i>&#8221; Looking him straight in the eye, she accepted the correction.
+&#8220;My <i>love</i> affairs.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It will not be necessary.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Instead of the violent outburst she expected he stood looking at her, in
+his eyes a peculiar light half of pity, half vindictive. A trifle
+nonplussed, she returned his gaze. Perhaps, with feminine inconsistency,
+she was not altogether <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>pleased by his tame acceptance, for her color
+rose and one small foot tapped the polished floor tiles. &#8220;I am glad you
+take it so reasonably.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again he failed with the expected outburst, and her uneasiness grew in
+correspondence with the pity in his glance. &#8220;You mistake me. I said it
+would be unnecessary. Read!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He turned and went out, a mercy she appreciated when, after a puzzled
+glance at the paper he had stolen from Peters, her eye was guided by the
+heavy ink scorings to the article that set forth Seyd&#8217;s divorce. At
+first she hardly realized its import. But when she did&mdash;surely the hand
+that guided the pen had achieved revenge far beyond its owner&#8217;s blackest
+hope! Going out, Sebastien heard the paper crackle. Looking back, he saw
+her standing frozen, eyes wide and black in her mute white face; and,
+stricken with sudden pity, he softly closed the door.</p>
+
+<p>But he did not go away. He knew her too well. Given her wild Irish blood
+plus her Spanish pride there could come but one result, and while she
+struggled toward it within he paced the <i>corredor</i> without. When at last
+she opened the door and came on him there he knew that he had won by the
+scorn that set her soft mouth in straight red lines. In the dusk of the
+<i>corredor</i> her face loomed, pale and drawn, the eyes red and swollen.
+But when she saw the deep pity in his stern eyes her own lost something
+of their hardness. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;You were always kind&mdash;and wise.&#8221; Her mouth quivering, she gave him both
+hands. &#8220;&#8217;Twould have made for my good had I listened to you more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For him it was a perilous moment. The touch of her hands aroused an
+intense desire to seize and comfort her with kisses. Had he given way to
+it she would have surely been shocked out of the resolution that had
+been born of her anger and shame. But the habit of years enabled him to
+keep the impulse under restraint. She went quietly to the end.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am very grateful&mdash;I would like to make some return. If we had not
+grown up together I should no doubt have loved you from the beginning in
+the way you wished, for you are closer to the man of my girlish dreams
+than any other I have ever known.&#8221; She smiled wanly. &#8220;He does not exist,
+my dream man, or, if he did, what use could he have for such a wild,
+naughty girl as I? So, if you still want me&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Want you!&#8221; He would have drawn her to him, but she pulled back.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not yet! I like you, have always loved you&mdash;in a sisterly way. I must
+have time to change my viewpoint. Give me a month?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And then&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you still wish it I will be your wife.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">A</span>s before said, the last piece of machinery and the first rain arrived
+simultaneously at Santa Gertrudis. The break in the summer heat came
+with a south wind which herded mountainous vapors in from the warm
+Pacific. All night the rain fell in sheets that set the thirsty arroyos
+running bank-high and raised the river ten feet. Then, after the
+pleasant tropical fashion, the downpour ceased, and day broke with a
+blaze of sunlight over the Barranca.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sinbad&#8217;s valley of diamonds!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was Billy&#8217;s metaphor when he came out with Seyd from breakfast, and,
+trite as the comparison might be, nothing else could better describe the
+millions of wet jewels that flashed in the dark mantle of pine above and
+embroidered the green cloak of the jungle beneath. Yesterday had seen
+the last touches put on the aerial cable which would be soon dropping
+buckets of ore into the red jaws of the furnace two thousand feet below.
+From the edge of the plateau it ran, a streak of silver fringed with
+glittering rain drops, down and out to the smelter; and when, in the
+pride of his heart, Billy loosed the brakes the first vibration threw
+off a cloud of prismatic spray. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Balanced to a hair! You see, the weight of one full bucket is
+sufficient to start the chain.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Fine!&#8221; Seyd echoed. &#8220;Runs like a clock. Another week and we&#8217;ll be
+running steady.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Standing there, watching the buckets sail up and down like great iron
+birds, they gave themselves up to the joy of accomplishment; as once
+before, permitted fancy to run amuck through the golden future. And
+after their hard labors and prolonged anxieties a little
+self-congratulation was quite in order. If, one way or another, they
+succeeded in meeting their first note they really could be counted in
+splendid shape, for their shipments of copper matte would be on the
+market before the second fell due.</p>
+
+<p>Billy nodded assent when Seyd spoke. &#8220;Francesca said they would be home
+to-day. I think I&#8217;ll run down there and tackle Don Luis.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Between them were no secrets, and when Seyd rode away an hour later with
+Caliban at his heels Billy called after him: &#8220;And say, old man, have it
+out with the girl. If she has half the brains I have always allowed her
+she&#8217;ll easily see the accidental way in which it all came about.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though the advice merely restated his own intention, Seyd found it
+inspiring. Riding down the Barranca staircases, he whistled and sang.
+While following the trail through the long succession of ranchos,
+jungle, hamlets, he lived over again that first ride with Francesca.
+Very plainly he now perceived that it dated his love, that in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>the
+pauses of his stealthy study she had ensnared him with her rich
+personality.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She got you then,&#8221; he mused, adding, with a burst of feeling that
+astonished himself, &#8220;And now I&#8217;ll get her&mdash;if I have to take her by
+force.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Planning and dreaming, he rode along until the sight of the river,
+flowing swiftly and deep over the San Nicolas ford, broke up his
+reverie. Only a mile away, on the other side, the hacienda lay in full
+view, yet it appeared at first as if they would have to turn back. But
+after nosing up and down the banks Caliban presently flushed a peon and
+a dugout. With the horses swimming behind, they were ferried over, and
+rode across the tree-studded pastures, which were still clad in summer
+brown.</p>
+
+<p>At the sight of the amber walls in their setting of low brown hills
+Seyd&#8217;s pulses had quickened, and, interpreting everything by his own
+feeling, it seemed to him that the dark women who peeped from their
+doorways, the swart vaqueros, and the slender girls that passed to and
+fro with <i>ollas</i> balanced ahead, all turned faces of welcome. But when
+at last he reined in before the shut gates of the <i>casa</i> he experienced
+a sudden, cold revulsion. Like so many eyes, the iron studs stared from
+the oaken face of the door, until the sudden sliding of a hatch revealed
+the wrinkled visage of Paulo, the Spanish administrador.</p>
+
+<p>With his employer&#8217;s toleration of the gringo the administrador had no
+sympathy. Malice <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>sparkled in his small brown eyes while he answered
+Seyd&#8217;s question. &#8220;As you see, se&ntilde;or, the <i>casa</i> is empty. The se&ntilde;ora and
+the <i>ni&ntilde;a</i>&#8221;&mdash;he used the family diminutive for Francesca&mdash;&#8220;are still at
+hacienda El Quiss. Don Luis? He has gone again to Ciudad, Mexico, to
+talk with Porfirio Diaz himself about the gringo dam. I do not know when
+he will return,&#8221; he replied, further, &#8220;nor the se&ntilde;ora.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His high spirits dashed to the ground, Seyd sat his horse, oppressed
+with heavy forebodings, for the disappointment raised vivid memories of
+the suddenness with which the girl had been snatched out of his life on
+two other occasions. Sick at heart, he refused for himself the
+refreshment that the house&#8217;s tradition compelled Paulo to offer, and
+spent the hour required for the beasts&#8217; feeding in heavy brooding.</p>
+
+<p>From this, however, he roused himself presently to a lighter mood.
+&#8220;After all, the week is only up to-day,&#8221; he urged. &#8220;She might easily be
+detained beyond her expectations.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At first he thought of leaving a note. But, realizing the formal terms
+in which it would have to be couched might make an unfavorable
+impression, he left, instead, verbal regrets. That settled, he had time
+to think of Don Luis, and, being now on practical ground, came to a
+quick conclusion. Forgetting all about his promise not to travel alone,
+he sent Caliban back to the mine while he went himself straight out to
+the station. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p><p>On his arrival there, however&mdash;so late that he had to call Peters out of
+his bed&mdash;he was not a little surprised to find that nothing had been
+seen of Don Luis. It was, of course, easily possible that he had boarded
+the train at a flag station ten miles up the line that was nearer to El
+Quiss. But when, next evening, a thorough search of his usual haunts in
+Mexico City failed to yield sight or sign of Don Luis, Seyd began to
+grow suspicious. Suspicion developed into a certainty when on his return
+two days later Peters informed him that Don Luis had taken the up train
+that very morning.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He came from San Nicolas, too,&#8221; Peters added. &#8220;I shouldn&#8217;t wonder if he
+was there all the time. Looks to me like he&#8217;s trying to dodge you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Intentional or not, it left Seyd in a serious plight. A second trip to
+Mexico City would take three days. Adding two more to get Billy away in
+the event of Don Luis&#8217;s refusal of further time, less than three weeks
+would be left of their month of grace. It was not to be thought of; and,
+though the afternoon rains were draping the mountains with heavy gray
+sheets, he rode out to the inn that night. Crossing the river early next
+morning, he sent Billy away at once.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll have to spend twelve hours in Mexico City anyway,&#8221; he instructed
+him, concerning Don Luis, &#8220;so you might as well try to find him. If you
+succeed, no trifling! Get his fist on a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>written extension. If he
+doesn&#8217;t come through&mdash;and I have my doubts&mdash;chase right on home to
+California. With the photos of the prospect and plant you ought not to
+have much trouble in raising enough to cover the note. And the minute
+you get it wire me credits on Mexico City.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Hardly expecting it, he was not surprised when Billy wired, two days
+later, that he was leaving that evening for the States. Under the
+message Peters had scribbled, &#8220;Don Luis came in to-day on Number Nine.
+Go right down and see him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Half an hour after receipt of the message Seyd and Caliban were again on
+their way.</p>
+
+<p>For nearly a week now it had rained heavily night and day, and here and
+there on the bottoms small inundations gave early warning of coming
+floods. Though the river still ran in its banks opposite San Nicolas,
+the dugout in which they crossed was swept with the swimming horses half
+a mile downstream before they made a landing, and it was easily to be
+seen that another week&#8217;s rain would cut off travel on that side of the
+stream.</p>
+
+<p>Riding in to the great square, Seyd&#8217;s pulses beat a lively accompaniment
+to the thought: &#8220;It is now the end of the second week. She is sure to be
+home.&#8221; Yet in the moment of its riotous birth the hope gave place to
+black misgivings at the sight of the shut house. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p><p>His spirits touched zero when the sliding hatch left Paulo&#8217;s wrinkled
+visage framed again in the blank oaken face of the door. &#8220;Don Luis is
+still in Mexico, se&ntilde;or.&#8221; He anticipated Seyd&#8217;s question.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he returned&mdash;was seen the day before yesterday at the station.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At the station, se&ntilde;or? How could that be?&#8221; His brown beads of eyes
+blinked in uneasy surprise; then in an instant the wrinkled mask fell
+into an expression of simple cunning. &#8220;Or, if so, then it must be that
+he has gone to join the se&ntilde;ora and the <i>ni&ntilde;a</i>, who are still at El
+Quiss.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She was not there! For the third time he found himself confronted by
+silence, mysterious and complete as that which had attended her previous
+disappearances. But, though oppressed by a weight of care, he tried to
+hide his bitter disappointment from the administrador&#8217;s inquisition.
+Once again he spent a black hour while the beasts were feeding. His
+broodings, riding homeward, shed no light on the enigma. A night of dark
+thought left him baffled, furious, in good fettle for the news that
+Caliban gleaned from a passing charcoal-burner.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don Luis must have been there, se&ntilde;or, for Benito saw him ride forth
+this morning. He has gone north to see for himself the gringo dam.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, he has, has he!&#8221; Seyd ground the words out between his teeth. &#8220;The
+old fox! But now I&#8217;ll chase him into his earth.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p><p>In this, however, he had forgotten to allow for the rains which, driving
+down the Barranca in great wet sheets, caused Don Luis to put in at El
+Quiss, there to wait in the leisurely fashion of the country until the
+weather should break and Sebastien have time to accompany him. Arriving
+at the power plant after two days&#8217; wallowing on jungle trails, Seyd
+found himself foiled once more in their little game of hide and seek.</p>
+
+<p>The trip, however, was not altogether wasted, for the pert young
+Chicagoan in charge gave him uproarious welcome. &#8220;So you&#8217;re the fellow
+that has been bucking the whole state of Guerrero! I&#8217;m awfully glad to
+know you, Mr. Seyd, though I&#8217;m puzzled yet as to how you managed to hold
+out. It took a whole regiment of Diaz&#8217;s <i>rurales</i> to establish us here,
+and if they were withdrawn even now we wouldn&#8217;t last long.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Also it was worth the labor to see the dam. A huge earthen structure,
+nearly a hundred feet high, it spanned the Barranca just where the
+valley nipped in from a wide angle to a passage a quarter mile wide.
+Behind it a muddy lake stretched as far as the eye could reach, and
+while standing in the center Seyd recalled and quoted Peters&#8217;s
+prediction.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Boulders big as churches were piled up in the bed of the stream like
+pebbles, and if that dam was built of solid concrete instead of clay
+they&#8217;d go through it like it was dough.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Chicagoan, however, laughed at the quotation. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>&#8220;If the devil himself
+was bowling them I&#8217;d defy him to knock off a single chip. She&#8217;s solid,
+and the sluiceways allow ample flood escape. Nothing but an earthquake
+could touch it&mdash;a jim dandy, at that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, while that enormous volume of water hung suspended, as it
+were, over the valley, Seyd felt nervous. Traveling homeward the next
+day, he measured with a careful eye the valley floor, and, using last
+year&#8217;s high-water mark as a base for his calculations, concluded that
+only San Nicolas, the smelter, and one or two haciendas that stood on
+higher ground would escape destruction if the dam should happen to
+burst. Approaching El Quiss, he noted, in particular, that, standing on
+level ground, it would surely be inundated.</p>
+
+<p>For some fifteen miles his trail ran through Sebastien&#8217;s lands, and,
+climbing in one place over a knoll, it afforded a view of the hacienda
+buildings across the rain-swept pastures. As, reining in, Seyd watched
+the faint pink of the walls flash out and fade in the shifting vapors he
+was seized with a mad impulse to ride in. But his native good sense
+quickly reasserted itself, for a moment&#8217;s reflection showed that the
+intrusion could only result in humiliation for Francesca and himself.
+The knowledge, however, did not render her proximity less maddening. He
+was sitting there restlessly chafing when Caliban&#8217;s voice suddenly rose
+behind. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;If it were desired to leave a message there is one I know that could
+place it in her own hands.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Startled, Seyd swung in the saddle. He had known long ago that kindly
+usage had transformed the hunchback into a faithful friend, but he was
+not prepared either for the sympathy that softened his glittering beads
+of eyes or his uncanny divination.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si.</i>&#8221; The hunchback nodded. &#8220;A cousin of my woman is in Don
+Sebastien&#8217;s household service. &#8217;Twould be easy to pass a paper by the
+little maid you picked out of the river. The se&ntilde;orita keeps her always
+close to her own body.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Before he finished Seyd had cut a pencil and was writing on the back of
+an envelope under cover of his raincoat. At first he gave free vent to
+his feelings, but, remembering the danger of interception, he tore it up
+and wrote instead a humorous protest against her continued absence.
+Then, after instructing Caliban to take all the time necessary to
+procure an answer, he journeyed on alone.</p>
+
+<p>It was well, too, that he gave the hunchback free rein, for three days
+elapsed before he returned to the mine soaked to the marrow by the
+continuous rains that had raised the floods almost to last year&#8217;s mark.
+&#8220;With Don Sebastien one goes slowly,&#8221; he explained. &#8220;If the sharp eye of
+him had once touched me &#8217;twould have been a short shrift under the
+nearest tree. For two <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>days I lay close in the <i>jacal</i> of my woman&#8217;s
+cousin before she brought me this.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a considerable package, and Seyd rather wondered at its size
+while tearing away the dried corn leaves in which Caliban had wrapped
+it. When the last leaf fell off he stared at first in surprise, then, as
+his eye fell on the ink scores, in utter consternation at the
+Albuquerque <i>Times</i>. Minutes passed before he could command words to
+send the hunchback away, then, sitting down by the table, he leaned his
+head on his hand and remained for some time plunged in black reflection.</p>
+
+<p>From a long distance in time and space his first insincerity had come
+home to roost. But, while he saw himself as the designer of his own
+undoing, he was by no means resigned. Presently hard, mutinous lights
+broke in his gloomy eyes. The stubborn fighter awoke. Throwing the
+traitorous sheet across the room, he picked up a pen and began to write.</p>
+
+<p>Wasting no time in wonder at the fortuitous chance that had placed the
+paper in Francesca&#8217;s hands, he wrote steadily on the story of his love
+from the first doubtful beginnings to its actual consummation. Very
+clearly he explained his first natural dislike to intrude his personal
+affairs upon people for whom he had no reason to suppose they would have
+the slightest interest, the later honorable intention that had always
+been frustrated by unfavorable circumstances. And he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>finished with a
+statement that is never unwelcome in a woman&#8217;s ear:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No matter what comes I shall always love you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Steady rain all that day and night had given the floods another lift and
+sent the river roaming wide through the jungle. Once again the valley
+opposite the mine was converted into a great lake dotted with wooded
+islands between which swift currents hurtled floating debris. Profiting
+by last year&#8217;s lesson, Seyd had had two roomy dugouts fitted with oars
+and rowlocks, and early the next morning he rowed Caliban across
+himself. Returning, he was to send a smoke signal to call the boat, and
+when, on the afternoon of the fourth day, Seyd spied the thin blue
+spiral through a break in the drifting rain he almost cracked his back
+rowing across the flood.</p>
+
+<p>But his glowing hope died at the shake of the hunchback&#8217;s head. &#8220;The
+se&ntilde;orita is gone with her mother and Don Luis to San Nicolas, se&ntilde;or. But
+she is to return to El Quiss in a few days. The cousin of my woman had
+it from Roberta, the little maid. She is still there, and will deliver
+the letter when the se&ntilde;orita returns.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The news was not altogether bad, for Francesca, at least, was now at San
+Nicolas. Within the hour Seyd crossed the river to the inn&mdash;where a
+horse was to be had for hire&mdash;and his purpose gained strength from a
+wire that he found waiting there from Billy. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p><div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;San Francisco burned to the ground. Not a cent to be raised in
+California. Am going east.&#8221; </p></div>
+
+<p>In view of the aforesaid game of hide and seek he had been playing with
+Don Luis the situation looked very dark. But, serious as it was, when,
+halfway to San Nicolas, he met Paulo riding at the head of a mule train
+loaded with fagots it was wiped altogether out of his mind.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We go to build beacons along the rim of the Barranca to give warning
+against the bursting of the gringo dam,&#8221; he answered Seyd. &#8220;<i>Si</i>, Don
+Luis and the se&ntilde;ora are at the <i>casa</i>. The se&ntilde;orita?&#8221; His creases drew
+into a malevolent grin. &#8220;The se&ntilde;ora, you mean. She was married two hours
+ago to Don Sebastien.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<p style="float: left; font-size: 100%; line-height: 80%; margin-top: 0;">&#8220;</p><p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">W</span>hat!&#8221; In the language of the good old romances, Seyd roared the word.</p>
+
+<p>In the main, Paulo was not a bad old chap. To further the interests of a
+Garcia he would cheerfully have surrendered his old bones to be boiled
+in oil, and in his joy at the event he allowed his natural garrulity to
+dominate his prejudice against the gringo.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, se&ntilde;or, they were married at the hacienda by the priest of
+Chilpancin. On account of the death of Don Sebastien&#8217;s mother Don Luis
+and the se&ntilde;ora only were present, and immediately afterward the young
+couple went home alone to El Quiss. A sensible practice, say I! When
+young hot blood mixes it should be left to cool and settle. Over there
+at El Quiss the fur will be flying before the end of a week, and put me
+down as a liar if Francesca do not keep him busy. She has run too long
+single not to kick at double harness. But she&#8217;ll settle to it, and like
+the fine wench she is, there is to be no European travel or such
+kickshaws as now are common with our rich young folk. No, in the good
+old Mexican fashion she goes from the church straight to her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>man&#8217;s
+home, there to stay till the first babe makes us all completely happy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Over and above his real joy in the event the old fellow was undoubtedly
+aware of its effect on Seyd. While speaking, his small red eyes searched
+his victim&#8217;s face for the pain beneath its confusion. But even under the
+spur of race hatred his imagination could not divine a tithe of the
+torture he was inflicting. Like all lovers, Seyd had dreamed long moving
+pictures of himself and Francesca as husband and wife, and now, with the
+speed of light, the reels spun backward, exhibiting her with another in
+the thousand and one intimacies of married life. Through all, his stiff
+Anglo-Saxon reserve persisted, and, finding egress at his heels, the
+pain that he tried to hide brought the situation to a ludicrous close.
+Springing from the unconscious pressure of his spurs, his horse, a
+mettled little beast, collided with Paulo and knocked him flat on his
+back.</p>
+
+<p>More hurt in his pride than body, the old fellow scrambled up and stood
+shaking his fist and cursing. But Seyd rode on without attempt to check
+the animal, whose top speed ran slower than his own hot thought. Indeed,
+when, from sheer fatigue, it slowed he laid on with quirt and spur, and
+kept on at a gallop till violent exercise had withdrawn the blood from
+his swelling brain.</p>
+
+<p>In place of pulsing waves of confused pain <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>came the tortures of clear
+thought. In turn he was ruled by anger, despair, unbelief. The thought
+of Francesca as he had seen her on the train, quiet, lovely,
+sympathetic, inspired the last. It was not possible! Then up would rise
+the blank ink scores round the divorce notice to provide the motive and
+plunge him back into deep despair. Lastly came anger, blind and
+unreasoning, in furious gusts.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally through his welter of feeling there flashed a glimmer of
+reason. &#8220;She&#8217;s married now! She&#8217;s married! That ends it&mdash;for you!&#8221; But
+instead of despair the thought produced furious reactions. &#8220;I don&#8217;t
+care! She&#8217;s mine! I&#8217;ll have her&mdash;I have to take her by force!&#8221; It rose
+again and again, his cry on the trail of the other day.</p>
+
+<p>By instinct rather than conscious thought he had turned his horse into a
+path which presently curved at a sharp angle into one that led from San
+Nicolas up to the rim of the Barranca where at this season ran the only
+passable trail. At the forks he came on the fresh tracks of shod horses
+that led up the zigzag staircases.</p>
+
+<p>Overlapping each other on the narrow trail, they might have been made by
+two or a half dozen, and not until he saw two sets clearly imprinted
+side by side crossing a small plateau did he think of the riders. If
+proof were required it was presently furnished by the little
+handkerchief <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>that hung, fluttering in the rain and wind, on a
+&#8220;crucifixion thorn.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As, reining in, he examined the corner initial a whiff of violets rose
+in his nostrils. Under the sudden crush of his hand it shed a rain of
+tears. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">F</span>ifteen miles away along the rim Francesca and Sebastien had just reined
+in. On a bare knoll close to the trail which led down to El Quiss three
+peons were building a beacon of dry wood around a core of hay, and while
+Sebastien talked with them the girl looked out over the valley.</p>
+
+<p>Ever since, in a burst of anger at Seyd&#8217;s message, she confirmed her
+conditional promise she had lived in a fever of feeling which precluded
+clear thought. In the same way that a sufferer from toothache
+anticipates with almost revengeful pleasure the wrench of the extraction
+she had looked forward to marriage as though it were to bring the end of
+her pain. Not until the words that made her a wife fell like a chill on
+her fever did she perceive the illusion. Riding along the trail, the
+consequences had presented themselves, and they grew with every mile
+until they filled her mind with horror. She had shrunk in fear and
+revulsion when Sebastien offered the ordinary courtesies of the road.
+When he buttoned his own big rain capote around her she trembled under
+his hands. Again, when her beast slipped <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>and he threw his arm round her
+to lift her out of the saddle, she uttered a nervous cry, and, though he
+released her at once, she shuddered under her cloak. Yet, with all her
+pain, when she gazed out over the storm-beaten valley her old passion
+for nature asserted itself through her agony.</p>
+
+<p>Along the Barranca the south wind herded great fleecy clouds. There they
+piled themselves up in shadowy hills, there they rolled and tumbled like
+thistledown in a breeze, and again cascaded down to lower levels to
+dissolve with muttering thunder in slaty sheets of rain. One minute the
+vapors filled the Barranca, flowing, a ghostly river, between the
+towering walls. The next a sudden rent in the veil permitted a fleeting
+glimpse of the trail falling like a yellow snake with myriad writhings
+into the treetops thousands of feet below. Enormous in scale, the scene
+was rendered more impressive by the roll of low thunders and flash of
+pale lightnings amidst leaden writhing shapes. Watching it, Francesca
+was forgetful until, through a sudden rift, she caught the distant pink
+flash of the El Quiss walls. Then she shivered, and she was still
+trembling when, turning from the peons, Sebastien spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is one of a chain of beacons they are building up and down the
+valley to warn the people if the gringo dam should burst.&#8221; Noticing her
+shiver, he added: &#8220;You are cold, <i>querida</i>? Let us ride on.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p><p>His usual stern gravity had given place in the last few hours to a look
+soft, pleasant, and very human. If she had looked into his eyes she
+might have read there both sympathy and understanding. But softness in
+him just then merely added to her fear. Following downhill, too, she
+watched him closely with dark, frightened eyes. In the past his strong
+face and lithe figure had aroused in her a certain admiration, but now
+they inspired revulsion. A lost spirit descending into Hades could not
+have battled more fiercely than did she descending the interminable
+staircases, and the struggle left her so pale and exhausted that
+Sebastien remarked upon it when they rode out at last on the valley
+floor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are tired? We shall soon be there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That started her again upon a conflict which continued all the way
+across the pastures to the hacienda gates and reached its climax when
+she entered her room&mdash;not the one she had occupied before, but that
+which had chambered before her the line of wives and mothers which began
+with the Aztec bride of Flores Rocha, the conquistador. In that long
+line the room may have harbored a bride fully as unhappy, but none more
+mutinous than its present occupant.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The se&ntilde;ora is fatigued. She will have the meal served in her room.&#8221;
+Sebastien&#8217;s quiet order had dispersed the brown maids who flocked about
+her like cooing pigeons with greetings and offers of service. Unaware
+that he would observe <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>it himself, she sprang out of her chair and ran a
+few steps toward the barred window when a tap sounded upon her door. In
+her relief when it proved to be only Roberta, she pulled the child in to
+her bosom.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is thee, <i>ni&ntilde;a</i>! Oh! I had thought&mdash;what is this?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her sudden flush betrayed her recognition of Seyd&#8217;s writing on the
+package the girl held out. In the few seconds she stood hesitating her
+changing expression revealed the struggle between her misery and her
+sense of wifely honor. The issue was not long in doubt, for, suddenly
+murmuring &#8220;&#8217;Twill do no harm to read it,&#8221; she ripped off the cover.</p>
+
+<p>While she read the blush faded. At the end her low distressed cry,
+&#8220;Francesca, see what thy hasty pride has done! A little patience would
+have saved thy happiness and his!&#8221; told of the deep impression. Sinking
+into a chair, she was beginning to read it again when the door trembled
+under a heavier rap.</p>
+
+<p>Thrusting the letter into her bosom, she leaped up, under the urge of
+the same wild instinct to escape, retreated toward the window, and so
+stood, with Roberta tightly held against her skirts. Seconds passed
+before she managed a tremulous &#8220;Enter!&#8221; and the face she turned to
+Sebastien presented such a passion of fear, revulsion, and despair that
+he stopped and stood gazing at her from the door. If surprised, his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>look, however, was still kind. He even smiled. Not until, retreating as
+he came forward, she stopped only with her back against the wall,
+Roberta still between them, did his smile give way to sudden dark
+offense.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Are you ill?&#8221; He spoke sharply. &#8220;Or is this the usual way of a bride?
+If I were a tiger and you alone in the jungle &#8217;twould be impossible to
+show more fear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wish you were!&#8221; The confession burst out of her miserable fear.
+&#8220;&#8217;Twere preferable a thousand times! Oh, why did I do it&mdash;commit this
+great wrong? Love is, can be, the only cause for marriage, but in my
+hasty pride I sought only revenge&mdash;on him. Oh, &#8217;twas a sin&mdash;a sin
+against you, Sebastien, who have always been so kind. Somewhere there
+must have been a woman who would have borne you children out of her
+love. And now&mdash;I have not only sealed my own misery, but also yours.
+For, though I do not, never <i>can</i> love you, I am&mdash;your wife.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To repeat, it came out of her in a wild burst, without consideration.
+But with the last word she looked her apprehension. He, however, took it
+quietly. Already the flash of offense had faded. Only the measured tone
+betrayed restraint.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is so&mdash;we are husband and wife. But do not let that fact disturb
+you. Did you think me so much of a beast as to believe that I would take
+you stone-cold! Neither need you grieve over <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>your sin in marrying
+without love, for I took you on those terms. I knew very well that you
+were falling to me through anger. My only fear was that it might cool
+before you were placed forever beyond the gringo&#8217;s reach. But now that
+is accomplished, have no fear, we stand as we were. You are still
+Francesca, to be wooed with a larger license, but still to be wooed and
+won to my love.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you are&mdash;as always&mdash;kind!&#8221; A little of the terror had died out of
+her face, and if she had never received Seyd&#8217;s letter, had lacked the
+reassurance that lay warm in her breast, his generosity might have
+prevailed. Pitifully, she was going on, &#8220;I am sorry&mdash;&#8221; but he
+interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let us have none of that. Pity is the last thing I ask of you. The
+issue between us lies clearly&mdash;can be settled only one way.&#8221; His dark
+eyes lighting, he went on after a pause: &#8220;It needs not for me to remind
+you of the birth of my love, for it reaches back beyond your memory.
+When you were still a lovely child I gleaned a fallen eyelash from your
+dress and carried it for years&mdash;ay, until it was displaced by a stolen
+curl clipped while you slept by the maid I bribed. With you my love
+grew&mdash;grew with you from that lovely girl into a beautiful woman. The
+place which your foot had trod was, for me, the only holy ground. You
+were my church, the only one I ever believed in, the only one that
+gained my prayers. For me you and you alone held the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>keys of heaven,
+and be sure that now that they have passed through your own act into my
+hands I shall never rest till they have opened for me the doors.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will always have my liking and respect&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He cut her off again. &#8220;Idle words&mdash;they are not enough. And you owe me
+one thing&mdash;your willingness to help. I shall try hard, harder than I
+have ever done, to win you, but without that my efforts will be in vain.
+And remember&mdash;for your own sake&mdash;if you do not help me it may be that
+you yourself will reap the pain. The immortality of love is the wild
+talk of poets. One cannot love a statue. The eye tires at last of the
+most beautiful marble, goes roving after warm flesh. So take care that
+you do not awake too late to find yourself unloved, pining for the
+affection you once rejected.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Through all he had maintained his dark calm, speaking quietly with a
+touch of sadness. Yet, the stronger for its suppression, vibrant feeling
+pulsed in the appeal. Had Francesca still been smarting under the lash
+of hurt pride he might have caught her on a second reaction. For she was
+moved. Pity and distress governed her answer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I feel wretchedly ungrateful. But what can I do? I cannot&mdash;oh, give
+me time?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All that you need, <i>querida</i>. You are to have your own time and terms.
+Now listen! I am going away.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p><p>He smiled a little grimly at her start of relief. &#8220;So <i>very</i> glad? Then
+I am sorry it will not be for longer. I shall be back in a few days.
+Word came to the administrador yesterday that the gringo dam is greatly
+endangered by warm rains that have added the volcano&#8217;s snows to the
+flood. A hundred feet deep, the waters are pouring down the Barranca de
+Tigres, and if they once top it the dam will go.&#8221; He uttered a bitter
+oath. &#8220;A curse on it! If it were not that the wave would sweep the
+valley clean I would send one to hasten the end with a charge of powder.
+But that must wait for the dry season. I go now with every man and mule
+I can muster to raise and strengthen it. Signal beacons such as we saw
+at the trail head have been built all along the rim, and, if the dam
+goes, smoke by day or fire by night will flash timely warning. But if
+you are timid&mdash;San Nicolas stands on higher ground. If you would prefer
+to return&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No! no!&#8221; Her fervent gratitude prompted her to attempt some return. &#8220;I
+shall stay here&mdash;to care for our people.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at the &#8220;our.&#8221; &#8220;Spoken like a Rocha. You never lacked courage,
+Francesca, but be careful. At the first signal leave everything, fly
+with the people up to the hills. If it should happen that the place is
+spared you can come back again. If not, follow the upper trail down to
+San Nicolas.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p><p>Her fright had now altogether faded. While he was giving a few last
+instructions a touch of anxiety diluted her brimming thankfulness. But
+when he went out without having attempted anything more intimate than
+his usual bow, this vanished. And his restraint gained him more ground.
+Walking to the window which overlooked the patio, which was now thronged
+with a motley mixture of peons, mule-drivers, and serving women, she
+watched him mount and ride away at the head of the mule train. Looking
+backward from the great gates, he saw and answered the wave of her hand.
+But it was too far for him to catch either her wistful expression or
+pitiful murmur &#8220;If it had not been&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Inside her bodice Seyd&#8217;s letter crackled under her hand. The blush with
+which she withdrew it indicated a doubt that his letter had a right to
+further tenancy in that warm nest. Roberta had followed Sebastien out to
+watch his departure. After placing the letter on the table she sat, one
+oval cheek propped on her hand, her dark head drooping over it like a
+tired flower. Once she made to pick it up, then snatched back her hand
+as though from a flame.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No! no! It would be wrong&mdash;after his kindness.&#8221; After a few minutes&#8217;
+further musing she added: &#8220;&#8217;Tis now of the past. By your hand was it put
+there, Francesca. Now remains only to make a finish.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Taking a match from a tray at her elbow, she <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>lit the letter and threw
+it, all flaming, to the center of the tiled floor. While its pages
+withered her face quivered in sympathy, and when suddenly a single line
+stood blackly out in the expiring glow&mdash;&#8220;I love you&mdash;shall always love
+you!&#8221;&mdash;her breath came in a sudden sob.</p>
+
+<p>Rising, she gathered the ashes into a small tray, carried them across
+the room to the little altar that stood against the wall&mdash;an action
+significant as it was conscious. Kneeling, she bowed her head in her
+hands. She remained there a full hour, and when she rose no one of the
+ten generations of women whose soft knees had worn a depression in the
+tiles was ever animated by a more honest sense of duty. The face she
+turned to little Roberta, who came bursting in a few minutes later, was
+quiet and serene.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, se&ntilde;orita!&#8221; In her excitement the child gave her the maiden title.
+&#8220;Pancho, the administrador, will have you come at once. Smoke is rising
+northward along the rim. Also there comes a horseman at full speed.&#8221;
+Lowering her voice, she added: &#8220;Pancho showed him to me through Don
+Sebastien&#8217;s far-seeing glasses. It is the se&ntilde;or Seyd.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">R</span>iding at a hard gallop, Seyd had cut down Sebastien&#8217;s lead by a full
+hour in the run along the rim. At the sight of the beacon&mdash;which the
+peons were now thatching with grass&mdash;he, also, reined in. But, having
+learned from them that Sebastien and Francesca had passed two hours ago,
+he rode on down the staircases at a pace which showed little respect for
+his neck.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly an hour later he stopped again on the very knoll from which he
+had overlooked El Quiss. If he had looked northward it would have been
+possible to see Sebastien at the head of the mule train which was
+wriggling like a mottled brown snake across the wet green pastures. But
+during the quarter hour that Seyd remained there his gaze never left the
+distant pink of the hacienda walls.</p>
+
+<p>Somehow their solid realism cooled his fever and brought order to his
+rioting senses. &#8220;Well, you are here! Now what are you going to do? What
+<i>can</i> you do?&#8221; The still small voice of Reason rose above the storm.
+&#8220;These, you know, are not the days of chivalry. It is no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>longer the
+fashion for a jilted lover to snatch his bride from the horns of the
+altar. And if it were&#8221;&mdash;Reason here observed a deadly pause&mdash;&#8220;what
+chance would you have against Sebastien and his retainers?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I must see her! I <i>will</i> see her!&#8221; The still small voice was
+drowned in a gush of passion. &#8220;There have been too many accidents
+already. Not till I hear from her own lips that she has done this of her
+free will shall I quit.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sounds good.&#8221; Reason agreed only to differ. &#8220;But it has one
+drawback&mdash;she might not care to be interviewed in her bridal chamber.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The suggestion was ill-timed, for it started a new riot among his
+senses. &#8220;I&#8217;ll see her! I <i>will</i> have speech with her!&#8221; It went roaring
+through his brain.</p>
+
+<p>But how to compass it? Had he known the name of Caliban&#8217;s woman&#8217;s cousin
+it would have been difficult enough! Not knowing it, the thing was
+almost impossible. He was tossing on successive waves of feeling that
+now urged him forward, again carried him back in the undertow of
+despair, when there came a patter of nude feet behind him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Se&ntilde;or! se&ntilde;or! <i>Mira!</i> The beacons! The beacons!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was one of the peons whom he had left above. &#8220;Ride, se&ntilde;or! Ride and
+give warning lest they have not seen it at El Quiss! I go to my woman
+and children!&#8221; Shouting it, he swung <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>at right angles and flew down the
+valley at top speed.</p>
+
+<p>Almost as quickly Seyd galloped off. One glance had shown the tall smoke
+plumes which were rising like ghostly sentinels above the black edge of
+the pine, and with it there burst upon him a vivid picture of the muddy
+sea behind the great dam. Crossing the river that morning, he had
+noticed that the floods were running above last year&#8217;s highest mark, and
+almost as plainly as by actual sight his imagination pictured the wave
+which had just leaped, like a huge yellow hound, over the broken dam. A
+solid wall of water, he saw it sweeping down the valley, lapping up
+villages, ranches, <i>jacals</i>, with greedy tongues. Roweling the flanks of
+his tired beast, he drove on. Yet, despite his apprehension, the phrase
+rang in his mind like a clashing bell:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I shall see her! Now I shall see her!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While he was still half a mile away he saw two mounted men dash out of
+the patio gates and ride off at right angles, north and south. After
+them came a crowd on foot, and as they opened to let him through Seyd
+noted with wonder that all were women. His surprise deepened when,
+driving in through the gates, he almost rode over Francesca, who stood
+with Roberta against her skirts in the deserted patio. While, breathing
+hard after his wild ride, he sat looking down upon her she returned his
+gaze with big mournful eyes. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;You are&mdash;alone?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221; Hesitating, she went on, &#8220;Don Sebastien left an hour
+ago&mdash;immediately after our arrival&mdash;with the men to work on the dam.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He almost shouted. It was inconceivable, except on a supposition that
+filled him with sudden hope. &#8220;Then it isn&#8217;t true? If it were, he would
+not have left you. He lied! Paulo lied! All day I have ridden hard on
+your trail to disprove it! He lied! Tell me that Paulo lied!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was not necessary to reply in words. The slender weaving fingers, her
+quivering distress, the pity and grief of her eyes, made answer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, how could you?&#8221; But his natural sense of justice instantly asserted
+itself. &#8220;But no! I have only myself to blame. I played the fool all
+through. Yet, I meant well&mdash;but I explained that in my letter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I only received it two hours ago. Oh, why didn&#8217;t you send it sooner?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I did&mdash;wrote the instant I got the paper. It lay here four days.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Now, only twenty miles away, at speed swifter than bird flight, the wave
+was leaping over the jungle with plumage of tangled debris streaming out
+behind. Even then they might have caught its distant roar. But, blind to
+all but the fortuitous chance that had dogged their love to this unhappy
+conclusion, they stood gazing at each other in distress and despair.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We have been unfortunate, you and I.&#8221; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>She spoke, mournfully, at last.
+&#8220;And this is the end.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He would not accept it. In thought he was storming the barrier her act
+had placed between them when her sorrowful voice answered the mute
+appeal of his eyes. &#8220;<i>Si</i>, the end. If Sebastien had not been so kind!
+He took advantage of my anger to place bars between you and me, but
+there he rests. His consideration deserves some return, and the least I
+can offer is the outward semblance of good wifehood. You must go!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What! Leave you&mdash;now?&#8221; Recalled to a sudden realization of their
+imminent danger, he pleaded, &#8220;First let me place you in safety?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No.&#8221; She nodded toward a saddled horse under the gateway. &#8220;In a few
+minutes I can overtake the people. With you will go my&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While they talked Roberta had wandered over to the gates. Now she
+suddenly cried: &#8220;Oh, se&ntilde;ora! Don Sebastien!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd&#8217;s view of the trail was limited by a swing to the south that cut
+off all but a couple of hundred yards. As he made, instinctively, to
+move forward Francesca caught his bridle. &#8220;No! no! He must not see you!
+If he finds you here&mdash;with me&mdash;oh, has there not been trouble enough?&#8221;
+Her distracted glance circled the courtyard. &#8220;See, the old guardhouse!
+Dismount&mdash;quickly! Lead in your horse, then I will ride with the child
+to meet him!&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p><p>As a matter of fact, he felt like anything but hiding. His eye lit with
+a hard gray gleam. But in these premises that he had forced upon her it
+was not for him to pick and choose. He yielded to her pleading, &#8220;For my
+sake?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dismounting, he led his horse in through the arched doorway, and as she
+closed the door upon him Francesca added a last hurried instruction. &#8220;He
+will undoubtedly turn with me. Give us time to gain cover under the
+oaks, then take you the trail to the south. It reaches high ground
+quickly. And ride hard&#8221;&mdash;her voice broke in a sob&mdash;&#8220;for if you should be
+overtaken by the water what in this miserable world would be left for
+me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And this is the end?&#8221; He caught her hand between the closing doors.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The end&mdash;for thy sake.&#8221; She dropped into the tender second person of
+the Spanish. &#8220;<i>Si</i>, if you wish it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, Seyd stood listening, the soft touch of her lips thrilling
+upon his. In the guardhouse, used now for a storeroom, all but one
+window was blocked by piles of sacked maize, but as his eyes grew
+accustomed to the half gloom he made out the massive beams which held up
+the heavy roof. The wall from which the one window looked out formed
+part of the hacienda&#8217;s southern face, and, remembering that the trail
+inclined in that direction, he moved over to it when he caught the
+clatter of departing hoofs. Deeply recessed in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>the thick wall, the low
+sill afforded standing room, and by peering obliquely through the bars
+he caught first the flutter of her skirt, then gradually she forged into
+full view. About three hundred yards away the trail ran in among shade
+oaks, cedars, and great spreading banyans, that were strewn in clumps
+all over the pastures. But just before she rode in among them Sebastien
+and Pancho, his <i>mozo</i>, galloped out from among the trees.</p>
+
+<p>Even if the wind had not been dashing the sheeting rain in his face it
+would have been impossible for Seyd to have caught a distant murmur of
+voices. But he saw the <i>mozo</i> lift Roberta from Francesca&#8217;s beast, and
+lead off, with his mistress following. Then Sebastien came galloping on
+toward the gates.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Coming for something&mdash;money or papers,&#8221; Seyd thought. &#8220;Just for fear he
+looks in&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At the far end of the room a pile of sacked beans formed a natural
+stall, and he had no more than gotten his horse behind it when the
+clatter of hoofs broke in the court. He could not, of course, see
+Sebastien dismount. But, faint as they were, his highly keyed senses
+recorded the vibrations of the other&#8217;s footsteps as he followed the
+muddy horse tracks across to the guardhouse.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the door Sebastien stopped. In the tense pause that followed
+Seyd&#8217;s hand went to his gun. At first the act was due to the natural
+instinct of self protection, but in the very moment <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>of its inception
+that gave place to a second, more powerful impulse that dyed his face
+and neck with a dark flush. Drawing the weapon, he trained it across a
+sack at the door, and at that moment no primitive man in hiding at the
+mouth of his enemy&#8217;s cave was ever obsessed by a fiercer lust to kill.
+All of his trials and long travail, despair, seemed in his disordered
+fancy to materialize just then in Sebastien&#8217;s person. And it would be so
+easy! A slight pressure of his finger the instant he showed in the
+doorway, then&mdash;the flood!</p>
+
+<p>In a flash the pros and cons of it passed through his mind. If the
+circumstances were reversed he knew exactly the course that Sebastien
+would take. And almost as he thought it came proof&mdash;first the grating of
+the key in the lock of the inner door, next the groaning complaint of
+rusty hinges as Sebastien swung to the iron outer doors which had not
+been used for a score of years, finally the wooden crash of the oaken
+bars falling into their staples.</p>
+
+<p>It was all over before Seyd really understood. With knowledge there
+flashed upon him the thought of the flood. Rushing across the floor, he
+leaped and threw all of his weight against the inner door. It hardly
+shook, and the recoil threw him flat on the floor. As he rose came the
+clatter of Sebastien&#8217;s departing hoofs, and running across to the window
+he was just in time to see him come in view. On the skirts of the timber
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>he reined suddenly in and sat his beast, listening. Then, after a quick
+glance northward, he galloped on.</p>
+
+<p>And Seyd, at the window, also heard.</p>
+
+<p>Above the sough of the wind which drove the sheeting rain into his face
+he caught the roar of the oncoming flood. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">I</span>n the few minutes that passed before she met Sebastien Francesca had
+regained self control. To his reproof, &#8220;This was foolish; why did you
+linger?&#8221; she calmly replied, &#8220;I wished to make sure that all the people
+were out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He nodded approval. &#8220;Then no one is left?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Bueno!</i> We have no more than time to make the hills. Pancho&#8217;s beast is
+stronger than yours. Give him the child.&#8221; She had begun to hope, but it
+died within her as he went on: &#8220;In my rooms are valuable papers. &#8217;Twill
+take but a moment to get them. Ride on, you. My horse goes two paces to
+your one. I can catch you halfway to the hills.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She almost fainted when he rode off, for just as surely as though she
+had seen him questioning the fugitive women she knew now that he was
+aware of Seyd&#8217;s presence. She reined her animal around to follow, then
+checked it sharply under a sudden inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why do you wait, Pancho?&#8221; she asked, sharply. &#8220;While you sleep the
+flood will be on us. Ride! Ride your hardest! I will follow.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p><p>The <i>mozo</i>, to tell the truth, was damning with inward tremblings the
+luck that had placed him in such jeopardy. Only the fear of Sebastien
+had kept him from bolting, and now, without even a backward glance, he
+laid on with quirt and spurs and galloped off with Roberta, leaving
+Francesca free to carry out her plan.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite simple. In this, the rainy season, the shade trees were
+draped from crown to foot with green lace of morning glories, and on the
+outer edge of the nearest clump a banyan had been converted into a huge
+tent which would have stabled a hundred horses. Parting the lacework of
+leaves with one hand, after she had ridden under it, Francesca obtained,
+through the gateway, an oblique view of the guardhouse at the moment
+Sebastien closed the iron doors. The crash of the bars carried to her
+tree, and had he looked that way he might have seen the curtain of
+leaves swing under the forward move of her beast. But, controlling the
+impulse, she reined it back again. When Sebastien raced past a couple of
+minutes later she dropped her hand and shrank in sudden fear.</p>
+
+<p>It was, however, impossible for him to see her. Moreover, the
+intervening clumps prevented him from discovering that she was not with
+Pancho until he came bursting out on his heels in open pasture half a
+mile ahead.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Tonto!</i> where is thy mistress?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The <i>mozo&#8217;s</i> look of frightened surprise proclaimed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>at once his
+ignorance and fear. Both had reined in, and under the other&#8217;s deadly
+look Pancho cowered behind his bent arm. Sickly green patches stained
+his dull chocolate. When Sebastien pulled a pistol from his holster he
+bowed down to the saddle horn, his face in his hands. Leaning over,
+Sebastien placed the muzzle against the fellow&#8217;s head. His finger even
+had tightened. Then, checking the impulse, came Roberta&#8217;s whimper,
+&#8220;Se&ntilde;or! oh, se&ntilde;or!&#8221; Above it rose a distant thunderous roar, and,
+glancing northward, he saw in the far distance a writhing movement in
+the jungle beyond the pastures.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Off, fool! Save the child!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Striking the man&#8217;s shoulders with the pistol, he wheeled his horse and
+shot away, heading back to the hacienda. Riding, he kept one eye on the
+green wave that was moving with the speed of the wind over the jungle.
+As he passed in among the shade trees it boiled over the far edge of the
+pastures, and from beneath the swaying trees emerged a muddy wall
+crowned with bristling black. Traveling more swiftly in the open, it
+came on at an acute angle which had its point in the flooded lands along
+the river, its base in the jungle close to the hills, and when Sebastien
+dashed out of the timber the point had passed the hacienda.</p>
+
+<p>Even then he must have known it for hopeless. The thunderous diapason
+had risen into a furious crescendo which was spaced by the tear and
+crash <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>of uprooted trees, and, higher than his head, the liquid wall was
+coming on under the pressure of the yellow frothing sea that stretched
+behind to the limit of sight. Yet, laying on quirt and spurs, he raced
+down its front in a desperate spurt for the gates.</p>
+
+<p>While he was still a hundred yards away the wave struck the northern
+wall of the compound that fenced the buildings. Built solidly of stone,
+it melted, vanished without a premonitory shiver, and in its overthrow
+accomplished good. Catching root and branch in the debris, the grinding
+welter of fallen trees hesitated, then piled in a huge tangled bar upon
+the line of cottages and stables which intervened between the wall and
+house.</p>
+
+<p>To Sebastien, however, this brought no respite. Shooting along the
+eastern wall, the wave outraced him and beat him to the gate by a long
+fifty yards.</p>
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+
+<p>While Francesca was still under the banyan she had heard the roaring
+diapason of the flood. Clothed in dripping lacery of leaves and flowers
+torn away by the beast&#8217;s leap from the spur, she galloped into the
+patio, and when she dismounted the vines still twined around her limbs.
+Without waiting to tear them off she threw all of her strength into a
+vain effort to swing the bars of the guardhouse doors, but, swollen by
+the rain, they were fast in the staples. </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;Oh, <i>what</i> shall I do?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her cry carried through to Seyd. After a fruitless attempt on the door
+he was just about to attack the window bars with an oaken club he had
+found in one corner. Now, tearing away the sacks of maize that blocked
+the one small square window on her side, he thrust it between the bars.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Knock them up with this!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But after the bars yielded the rusty doors defied her strength. &#8220;They
+will not budge! Oh, I cannot move them!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again his practical sense served. &#8220;Slip a stirrup over the staple, then
+start your horse gently. Fine!&#8221; He heard the groan of the moving door.
+&#8220;Key gone! Never mind, I can shoot out the lock. Stand away&mdash;off to one
+side.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Above the roar of the flood Sebastien heard the shots. A few seconds
+later he saw Seyd look out of the gateway, then rush back in. Behind the
+gates an iron ladder led up to a lookout post on top of the guardhouse,
+and, racing down the front of the wave, Sebastien saw Seyd rise above
+the low parapet and lift Francesca to his side.</p>
+
+<p>At the same moment they saw him. In Francesca&#8217;s outstretched hands
+Sebastien saw her impulse to save. In the sudden covering of her eyes he
+read his fate. The fifty yards that lay between him and the gates might
+just as well have been a thousand, for, less than half the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>distance
+away, the great yellow comber rose high over his head.</p>
+
+<p>Before it broke, however, he did two things&mdash;reined his horse to face
+it, then, just before he went under the grinding welter, with the same
+easy courtesy which he would have shown to a kinsman or a friend, he
+turned in the saddle and waved his hand. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">F</span>rom the time Seyd rode into the hacienda up to that moment less than
+twenty minutes had passed, but events had leaped to a conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>The barrier of debris across the outer buildings had diminished the
+force of the blow upon the house, and had the water gained instant
+access to the interior and equalized the pressure it might have stood.
+As the wave raced past, level with the high wall, the patio presented
+for an instant a curious resemblance to a square vessel pressed down
+till its edges just rose above the water. The next, its stout walls fell
+inward, and over them a yellow wave leaped at the house. Reinforced by
+its partition walls, it withstood for a few seconds the enormous
+pressure. Then above the cracking and grinding of debris and the mingled
+roar of the flood rose the boom of doors and windows blown out of their
+frames.</p>
+
+<p>Because of its length the guardhouse went first. Feeling it tremble
+under his feet, Seyd lifted Francesca and held her face in against his
+breast. Not that he was in the least resigned. Never in all his life had
+he felt a keener desire to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>live. His glance darted hither and thither,
+and when, freed by the fall of the stone lintels, a patio gate sprang
+out of the yellow cauldron almost at his feet he snatched up Francesca,
+leaped, and landed in its very center. Falling under her, he was, for an
+instant, breathless. But in the few seconds that he lay there gasping
+circumstances worked in their favor. Thrust by the impact into the
+recoil of the wave from the house wall, the gate was heaved out of the
+patio, and passed the guardhouse just before the heavy tiled roof
+collapsed with the walls.</p>
+
+<p>Almost in an instant the house crumbled and melted with scarcely a
+splash. Sitting up a few seconds later, Seyd looked back on all that was
+left of El Quiss, the barrier of debris rising, a black reef, out of a
+yellow sea. A mile ahead the wave roared on, its furious crescendo again
+reduced to a booming diapason. While the gate was being carried with
+incredible swiftness across the El Quiss pastures the roar sank to a
+distant hum, and presently died altogether, leaving only the quiet
+lapping of the waters in the falling dusk.</p>
+
+<p>So quickly had it all passed that Seyd found it hard to believe they
+were floating in comparative safety. The gate, which was ten feet by
+twelve in size and four inches thick, floated evenly, and if an
+occasional wave ran across it the tepid rain water of the tropics caused
+no discomfort. Neither were they in danger from the debris, logs, and
+uprooted trees which floated at equal <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>speed on currents that were
+setting back to the river. With a pole that he picked up Seyd was able
+to keep out of the way of the few that rolled and tumbled when their
+branches caught on the bottom, and when at last they drifted on the
+deeper, slower currents of the river he turned to Francesca, who had
+remained a huddled, sobbing heap just where she fell.</p>
+
+<p>She looked up when he touched her shoulder. &#8220;Oh, I feel wicked!&#8221; she
+cried, remorsefully. &#8220;If I had only waited for a few more days, given
+you time to explain, he would still be alive.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was perfectly natural,&#8221; Seyd comforted her. &#8220;He would absolve you
+from all blame were he here, for with all his faults he was big and
+brave.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You really think that he would?&#8221; She looked up with tearful anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m sure of it. How could he do otherwise?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he was&mdash;my husband. And I left him&mdash;for you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yet I do not think that he held you in blame.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Kneeling beside her, with one arm around her shoulders, he gave his
+reason&mdash;Sebastien&#8217;s last salute. Even if this started her tears anew
+she, nevertheless, felt comforted. When a black shape forged out of the
+dusk alongside, and he had to return to his pole, her natural spirit
+reasserted itself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here am I, crying like a child instead of helping. What can I do?&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p><p>There was really nothing. But to keep her from brooding he placed her on
+watch. &#8220;If you&#8217;ll keep a lookout I&#8217;ll take a shove at everything that
+floats in reach. The current is setting across the river, and we have
+nearly twenty miles to work in. With any old luck we ought to be able to
+land at Santa Gertrudis.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thick dusk presently merged into night, but they were helped by a full
+moon which shed a dew of light through the falling rain. Not that they
+voyaged without hazard. Twice they were almost swamped by trees which
+rolled over under the thrust of Seyd&#8217;s pole. Farther down they narrowly
+escaped shipwreck on wooded islands. Yet, thrusting and hauling, he
+worked steadily with the favoring current, and they had gained almost
+across when, rounding a bend, they sighted a distant light.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Caliban&#8217;s, for sure! Only another hour to food and fire!&#8221; Seyd cheered
+her.</p>
+
+<p>He had, however, his own misgivings. As they drew into the shadow of the
+Barranca wall the moonlight grew fainter, and, drifting later over the
+submerged jungle, they were hard put to avoid the treetops which
+upreared like huge mushrooms above the flood. More than once they were
+almost swept off the raft by bejucos, vegetable cables, which stretched
+from top to top, and as these grew thicker Seyd saw that disaster was
+merely a question of time. He was hoping desperately that their
+capsizing would not entail <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>too long a swim, when out of the obscurity
+rose a huge black shape.</p>
+
+<p>With a shock that threw them both down, the raft grounded in shallow
+water.</p>
+
+<p>It was the plateau on which the new smelter stood. But, changed as it
+was in the new geography of the flood, Seyd did not recognize it until,
+scrambling ashore with Francesca, he saw above the dark mass of the
+buildings the cable and iron ore buckets in dim outline against the sky.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, it&#8217;s the smelter!&#8221; he shouted, in glad surprise. &#8220;Ever since the
+explosion we have kept a man here on guard. <i>Ola!</i> Calixto! <i>Ola! Ola!</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While he was calling a yellow oblong broke out of the building&#8217;s mass,
+framing the black silhouette of a man. &#8220;It is the <i>jefe</i>!&#8221; They heard
+his comment to his woman inside, then, uttering a volley of surprised
+&#8220;<i>Caramba&#8217;s!</i>&#8221; he came rushing down the bank with his lantern.</p>
+
+<p>When Francesca&#8217;s pale wet face shone under its sudden glow he dropped
+the lantern, which, fortunately, did not go out. Picking it up again, he
+lighted their way to the adobe that had served Billy for house and
+office while the smelter was building.</p>
+
+<p>For use during the rains, a chimney and wide hearth had been installed
+in the adobe, and while Calixto was building a roaring fire Seyd
+directed a piratical raid on Billy&#8217;s trunks. At first his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>search
+returned only muddy overalls and soiled clothing of various sorts, but
+at the very bottom&mdash;just as they had been placed by the hands of a
+careful mother&mdash;a new suit of flannel pajamas and a voluminous woolen
+bathrobe appeared. When, with some misgivings, and confused, he
+suggested a change, a touch of the girl&#8217;s old archness flashed out. Her
+smile was almost mischievous as she returned thanks.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m sorry there&#8217;s nothing better to offer.&#8221; The smile emboldened him to
+add: &#8220;But they will serve till we have something to eat. Then you may
+have the fire all to yourself to dry your own things.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She smiled again when, returning with food and coffee prepared by
+Calixto&#8217;s woman, he exclaimed, &#8220;You look like the Queen of Sheba!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With the brown-black hair swinging almost to her knees and the
+bathrobe&mdash;a gorgeous affair in pink chosen with an eye to Billy&#8217;s vivid
+taste&mdash;belted in to her waist and pajamas ballooning beneath over small
+bare feet, she did look Oriental. When the coffee and food had relit her
+eyes and restored her usual faint color he was sure that she had never
+looked so distractingly pretty. The effect was not diminished either by
+her small vexed frowns at the revelations of smooth whiteness caused by
+the persistent slipping of the wide sleeves. When, as they sat by the
+fire after the meal, warmth and fatigue moved her to a yawn and he
+caught the full redness of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>her mouth before she could cover it the
+intimacy of it all sent the blood drumming through his pulses. If her
+serious eyes restrained him, they did not repress his thought.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have you&mdash;now! I have you at last, and I&#8217;ll never let you go again!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly she furnished the inspiration which kindled a sudden light
+in his eyes. &#8220;Why not?&#8221; he urged against the one objection that occurred
+in his thought. &#8220;It&#8217;s an awful smash at the conventions, but&mdash;it&#8217;s the
+only way. He locked me in to drown&mdash;and do you suppose that he&#8217;d
+hesitate if he were here now in my shoes? I guess not. And if he would,
+I won&#8217;t. By the Lord, I&#8217;ll do it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He rose soon after reaching his conclusion. &#8220;You must be very tired, so
+I&#8217;ll go now and leave you to dry your things. You know, we start early
+in the morning.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Start early?&#8221; She opened her sleepy eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Listen!&#8221; He took her gently by both shoulders. &#8220;We have been held apart
+so far by all sorts of accidents and misunderstandings. You know how
+closely we came to utter shipwreck?&#8221; Her shiver answering, he went on,
+&#8220;Now, will you trust&mdash;leave all to me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had been no woman if she had not divined the restraint behind his
+quiet during the last warm hour, and, rising suddenly upon small bare
+toes, she paid him for his consideration. &#8220;I will do anything you say.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">B</span>reaking through the stream of ocean vapors, the morning sun showed the
+jungle raising a languid head above the ruins of the flood. Long rents
+in its green mantle, bare patches of yellow mud, dark bruises where
+acres of debris had been piled in twisted masses, testified to the force
+of the wave. But, overlooking the wreckage from the smelter, Seyd took
+notice principally of a fact that suited his purpose&mdash;the river had been
+swept clean of driftwood. Not since the beginning of the rains had it
+shown such open stretches.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good!&#8221; he muttered. &#8220;The sooner we get away the better. I&#8217;ll call her
+at once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When, however, he knocked at the office door Francesca answered &#8220;Come!&#8221;
+When he entered she smiled at his surprise. &#8220;You said that we were to
+start early. Here I am, dressed and dried.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not before breakfast,&#8221; he laughed. &#8220;It is ready. I&#8217;ll have it brought
+right in.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>All through the meal her eyes questioned, but, denying her curiosity, he
+talked of anything and everything but that which filled her mind. Even
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>when, clothed in his waterproof, she took her seat opposite him in the
+stern of the dugout he denied their eloquent appeal. While sending the
+boat with vigorous strokes flying downstream he drew her attention to
+this and that phase of devastation and commented on the beauty of the
+morning, but not a word as to his purpose. It was cruel, and her eyes
+said so. But, remorseless, he held on till, about midway of the morning,
+they sighted San Nicolas. All the way down he had hugged the Santa
+Gertrudis side, and she received the first inkling when he replied to
+her question if it were not time to pull across.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We are not going there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not going there?&#8221; she repeated, surprised.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, we shall keep right on&mdash;down to sea.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The sea?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The sea.&#8221; He nodded firmly. &#8220;And the minute we land there we&#8217;re going
+to be married.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The idea was altogether too radical to be absorbed at once. No doubt she
+thought he was joking, for a smile broke around her mouth. Not until
+they were almost opposite San Nicolas did it give place to puzzled
+alarm.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, se&ntilde;or&mdash;Rob&mdash;Roberto.&#8221; She changed it in answer to his quick look.
+&#8220;But, Roberto&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Might as well make it Bob,&#8221; he cut in, crisply. &#8220;It may seem strange at
+first, but seeing that we&#8217;re to be married you might as well begin to
+get used to it now.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span></p><p>The San Nicolas walls now lay, a long, warm band, across their beam.
+From them her glance returned to the pendulum swing of his body.
+Finality centered in his steady stroke. It told that he had settled down
+for the day. Had he calculated its effect beforehand he could not have
+done better. Accustomed to Spanish deference, she was nonplussed by his
+authoritative air, yet its very unusualness invested it with a certain
+charm.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But&mdash;Bob?&#8221; Somehow the curt appellation acquired grace and softness
+from her Spanish lisp. It fell so prettily that he made her repeat it.
+But, though she added to its attraction an appealing glance, he remained
+grimly obdurate.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Give me time to think?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All you want. At this speed&#8221;&mdash;the oars creaked under his stroke&mdash;&#8220;you
+will have about twenty-four hours.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him, frightened. &#8220;<i>Please?</i> At least let us talk it over.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The cheerful roll of oars in the rowlocks returned wooden answer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Won&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stopped rowing and sat regarding her sternly. &#8220;I&#8217;m allowing you more
+time than you gave me. If&#8221;&mdash;he paused, then, judging it necessary,
+relentlessly continued&mdash;&#8220;if <i>he</i> were here in my place do you suppose&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, he would! He did! After he had insured me against&mdash;&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;&mdash;Me,&#8221; he supplied, with a dogged shake of the head, then went on,
+&#8220;Well, even if he would, I won&#8217;t.&#8221; As he bent again to the oars the
+touch of admiration that leavened her undoubted fright paid tribute to
+his stubborn logic. Settling to his stroke, he began again: &#8220;Supposing
+that I complied and put you ashore at San Nicolas? Do you think that Don
+Luis would be any more favorably inclined toward me? You know that he
+wouldn&#8217;t. I should do well to escape with my life. But if you go back as
+my wife&mdash;well, the most they can do is to turn us out. Of course I can
+understand your feeling. It will be a frightful breach of the
+conventions&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, it is not that,&#8221; she interrupted him. &#8220;My friends will be
+scandalized, <i>si</i>, but they are long ago broken to that. They would be
+dreadfully disappointed if I did not fulfil their predictions by making
+a shameful end. And it isn&#8217;t&mdash;he. It is wicked to acknowledge it, but I
+know&mdash;I know now that no matter how hard I tried to school myself I
+should sooner or later have run away to you. They&#8217;ll think it
+shocking&mdash;my friends, my mother&mdash;but I can endure it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And that can be avoided. I&#8217;ll take you away&mdash;throw up everything
+here&mdash;make a new start somewhere else.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No! no!&#8221; She shook her head. &#8220;Your work is here, and I am just as proud
+of it as you could be. Let them chatter. No, it isn&#8217;t even that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then what is it?&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;You wouldn&#8217;t understand. It is silly, just a woman&#8217;s reason. No, you
+would not understand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll try.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is <i>so</i> foolish.&#8221; Nevertheless, encouraged by his sympathy, she
+continued: &#8220;Do you know that since the first kiss passed between us a
+year ago we have had speech together only for a few minutes in the
+presence of others? And her courtship is of such supreme importance in a
+girl&#8217;s life. It is her love time, and she loves to lengthen and draw out
+its lingering sweetness. And ours has been so short.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was the poignant cry of her girl&#8217;s heart expressing the yearning of
+her starved love, and, coming from such spirited lips, it moved him
+deeply. Slipping the oars, he seized her two hands and pulled her
+forward into his arms. Then, while her dark head lay pillowed upon his
+shoulder, he continued the argument to better advantage.</p>
+
+<p>The walls of San Nicolas had dwindled to a golden streak before she
+looked up in his face. &#8220;Supposing that I had refused?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;d have carried you off in spite of yourself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And, whether she believed him or not, she clung the closer in that
+embrace. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">T</span>he new day opened a new and fertile country before Seyd&#8217;s sleepy eyes,
+a country wonderfully beautiful with variegated foliage of coffee,
+rubber, palm, and banana plantations.</p>
+
+<p>During the night the Barranca walls had, while growing lower, closed in
+to a long gorge through which the river ran like a millrace. For two
+hours their ears were dinned and deafened by the roar and thunder of mad
+waters, but, as the boulders of the one rapid were buried thirty feet
+deep, they sustained nothing worse than a slight deafness and natural
+apprehension at the hair-raising speed with which they were catapulted
+onward. Excepting those two hours when he had to use both oars to hold
+the dugout&#8217;s head in the center of the current, Francesca had slept in
+his arms, and, nestling upon his shoulder the moment they emerged upon
+quieter waters, she had fallen asleep once more, nor did she move till
+the sun pointed a golden finger down between two clouds.</p>
+
+<p>Awakening, she uttered a small cry and lay for a few seconds looking up
+into Seyd&#8217;s face, her eyes blank with bewildered terror. Then,
+recognizing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>him, she gave a sob of relief. &#8220;Oh, I was dreaming&mdash;that I
+was at El Quiss&mdash;to stay there&mdash;forever!&#8221; She paused and sat for a
+moment looking into his tired face, then burst out: &#8220;Oh, little animal!
+All night I slept while you kept watch. Now you shall sleep.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Taking his place in the stern, she forced him, with pretty authority, to
+cushion his head in her lap. &#8220;<i>Si</i>, I will awaken you before we reach
+the harbor, but do not dare to open an eye till then.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The command was unnecessary, for, completely fagged, he had no more than
+lain down when he was fast asleep. Until sure of the fact she sat
+perfectly still. Then, with a rueful glance at her soiled and shrunken
+garments, she murmured, &#8220;Nevertheless, we must try to look our best.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After a second shy study of his sleeping face she let down her hair and
+began to comb it out with her slender fingers. Because of the length and
+thickness of the dark masses this proved a long task. The dugout had
+drifted miles before she finished the coiffure with small feminine pats.
+Reassured that he still slept, she dipped her handkerchief overside and
+washed her face and neck.</p>
+
+<p>Her own toilet completed, she next essayed his. After warming the wet
+handkerchief against her own cheek she cleansed his face with delicate
+touches, then, with the same soft white comb&mdash;her fingers&mdash;smoothed his
+hair. Discovering, in the process, a few gray hairs, she murmured: &#8220;Oh,
+<i>pobre</i>! See what I have cost thee!&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span></p><p>Very gently she began to trace and smooth out the lines of worry upon
+his face, and, rediscovering his cleft chin, she repeated, with a soft
+laugh, her comment made that night in the shepherd&#8217;s hut. &#8220;Oh, fickle!
+fickle! I said thy wife would need the sharpest of eyes, but they will
+needs have nimble fingers that steal thee from me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her face at that moment formed a playground for all that was arch, but
+presently it took the shadow of sadder thoughts. Brimming over, a big
+tear rolled down her cheek. Yet, while sincerely sorry for Sebastien,
+she was perfectly frank with herself in thought. &#8220;I would not, if I
+could, bring him back. &#8217;Twould mean only more trouble&mdash;for all of us.
+Now, at least, he is at peace.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They will think me hard and cruel.&#8221; Her musings continued. &#8220;The whole
+Barranca will throw up hands of horror&mdash;the hands that applauded the
+greater sin when I gave myself without love in marriage. <i>Bueno!</i>&#8221; She
+scornfully tossed her head. &#8220;Wicked or not, I will do it&mdash;for thee.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She squeezed his face so hard, murmuring it, that he stirred, and for
+fully a minute thereafter she sat holding her breath. But he slept on.
+During the last hour the river had widened, and along its banks tufted
+cocoa palms were woven with the brighter foliage of bananas into the
+rich green damask of the bordering jungle. Also the sun had prevailed
+for a few hours in the daily <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>battle with the mists, and under the
+golden spell of light and warmth the girl&#8217;s musings grew happier as they
+floated on. When she awoke him to the sight of the blue harbor opening
+up from behind a long bend, Seyd looked up at a smiling face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the American consulate.&#8221; After rubbing the sleep out of his eyes
+he pointed out a white stone building which perched, like a gull, on a
+terrace above the flaming rose and gold of the adobe town. &#8220;We&#8217;ll go
+there. The consul is a fine old fellow. He&#8217;ll help us all he can.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>First, however, they were destined to encounter the unexpected, for
+when, an hour later, Seyd pulled the dugout into a ragged wooden pier an
+officer in the silver and gray of the Mexican rurales pushed through the
+peon laborers who thronged the wharf.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are from up river, se&ntilde;or? Then you can tell us of the flood in the
+Barranca. A cousin of mine, Don Sebastien&mdash;<i>Caramba!</i>&#8221; At the sight of
+Francesca he broke suddenly off. &#8220;It is surely the se&ntilde;orita Garcia? You
+will remember me, Eduardo Gallardo, upon the occasion that I visited, at
+San Nicolas, your uncle, the excellent General Garcia, with my wife, who
+is of your kinsfolk?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Recognizing him while he was still in the crowd, Francesca had gained
+time to prepare. His use of her maiden name proved that here at the port
+they had heard nothing as yet of her marriage, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>so, after briefly
+describing Sebastien&#8217;s death and the destruction of El Quiss, she
+concluded: &#8220;I was saved by the se&ntilde;or, here, who rode in to warn us. But
+for him I also should have drowned.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And Seyd availed himself of the opening. &#8220;As the se&ntilde;orita is completely
+exhausted, se&ntilde;or, you will please to excuse us. We go to the American
+consulate.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why the consulate, se&ntilde;or,&#8221; the rurale politely objected, &#8220;when she
+owns here the house of her kinswoman? The se&ntilde;ora, my wife&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, I have heard of her&mdash;nothing that is not lovely.&#8221; Drawing him a
+little aside, Francesca proceeded to heal, with winning smiles, the
+wound in his pride. &#8220;You shall give her my love, cousin. Tell her that I
+should prefer to visit her, but, having taken my life from the hand of
+this se&ntilde;or, I cannot do otherwise than fall in with his plans.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Deferring with Latin politeness to her wish, his pride was none the less
+hurt, and while they climbed the hill to the consulate he hurried home
+to his wife, whose feminine intuitions placed the whole matter in an
+entirely new light.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A gringo, sayest thou? Then it will be he for whose sake she was sent
+away to Europe. Medium tall, is he, with a straight nose, hollow cheeks,
+quick gray eyes? The very man that Paulo, the administrador, described
+to me on his last visit to the port. <i>Caramba!</i> Here&#8217;s fine bread for
+the baking! &#8217;Tis told all over the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>Barranca that she has this man in
+her blood, and count me for a liar if she comes with him this far for
+any purpose but marriage. &#8217;Twill never do to have Don Luis knocking at
+our door to ask why we let her go before our very eyes. He is a power,
+<i>hombrecita</i>, with the government, thy master, and, fail or win, we lose
+nothing by trying to trip her run. And &#8217;twill be easy! A word in the ear
+of the <i>jefe</i>, judge, and priest, and &#8217;tis done. And do not sleep on it.
+Away with you&mdash;at once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In his cool white salon on the hill above, the consul&mdash;a portly old
+fellow with a clean, good-natured face&mdash;was counseling Seyd at that
+moment in almost the same terms.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;As you say, this is no time to stand on conventions&mdash;especially after
+the man had locked you in and left you to drown. After seeing the young
+lady&#8221;&mdash;his smiling glance went to the door through which Francesca had
+just gone with his wife&mdash;&#8220;I should feel less than ever like protracted
+mourning. Besides, it is now or never. If you don&#8217;t marry her at once
+the chance may never come again. If Eduardo Gallardo hadn&#8217;t seen you it
+would have been quite simple. I could have fixed it up for you all
+right. But he is counted something of a sneak, and if he once sniffs the
+wind&mdash;well, you can be sure he won&#8217;t let such a chance slip to better
+himself with General Garcia. You&#8217;ve simply got to beat him to it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After a pause of thought he went on: &#8220;In <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>their usual course, both the
+legal and ecclesiastical procedures are very slow. It takes about a week
+for the lawyers to coin the bridegroom&#8217;s natural impatience into ready
+money, and after they are through the Church holds out its hand for
+what&#8217;s left. It&#8217;s an awful graft, but has its advantages, for if the
+wheels are well greased they spin like lightning. Shut up! I don&#8217;t have
+to be told that you emerged from the flood with empty pockets. I&#8217;ll
+attend to that, and you can settle with me any old time. All you have to
+do&#8221;&mdash;taking Seyd by the shoulders, he marched him into his own
+bedroom&mdash;&#8220;is to take a shave and bath and make yourself look as much as
+you can like a happy bridegroom.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With a last order, &#8220;Help yourself from my clothes,&#8221; he went out
+laughing. But when he returned an hour later his smile was obscured by a
+vexed cloud. &#8220;Eduardo wins,&#8221; he reported to Seyd, who had just come out
+on the veranda. &#8220;He must have gone right to it, for when I arrived at
+the <i>edificio municipal</i> they were already primed. The judge and
+<i>jefe-politico</i> both count themselves of mine, but they wouldn&#8217;t do a
+thing. Really you can&#8217;t blame them. <i>El general</i> Garcia is a name to
+conjure with down here, and they are all afraid of their official heads.
+&#8216;Much as we would like to serve you,&#8217; and so forth, &#8216;but in the case of
+a young lady of such high family we dare not proceed without her
+guardian&#8217;s written consent.&#8217; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;And the <i>jefe</i> gave me good advice. <i>El capitan</i>, Eduardo, it seems, is
+not only ambitious, but not a bit too scrupulous about the way by which
+he gains his ends. So you must not go out alone. It would be quite easy
+to trump up some charge, arrest, and then shoot you as an escaping
+prisoner under the law of <i>El Fuga</i>. You wouldn&#8217;t be the first to be
+shot inside the prison and then thrown outside, and, though I should
+most certainly hold an inquiry and kick up an awful row, that wouldn&#8217;t
+bring you back to life. Also we shall have to look out that they don&#8217;t
+kidnap your girl.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While the consul was thus easing his bosom of its load of doubt Seyd had
+stared out over the blue harbor at a steamer that was taking cargo from
+a dozen lighters. Suddenly he asked, &#8220;What ship is that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The <i>Cura&ccedil;ao</i>, of San Francisco.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;American, then. When does she sail?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To-morrow morning at five.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How far outside the harbor does Mexican jurisdiction extend?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The usual three miles beyond the headlands.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seyd came to his point. &#8220;Then what is to prevent her skipper from
+marrying us?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Bueno!</i>&#8221; The consul slapped him on the back. &#8220;He&#8217;ll do it sure, for
+he&#8217;s a friend of mine. Bravo! Trust your lover to find a way.&#8221; </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">I</span>nstead of the steps of a church, which form the natural way to their
+new estate for the great majority of brides, Francesca stepped into hers
+from the companion ladder of the <i>Cura&ccedil;ao</i>. But there had been various
+happenings&mdash;the visit of the Do&ntilde;a Gracio de Gallardo y Garcio to urge,
+in her own stout black person, Francesca&#8217;s acceptance of her house and
+contents, her husband&#8217;s equally hospitable offer of horses and escort
+for her safe conduct to San Nicolas, also his subsequent espionage and
+the means by which they evaded it. And now she was stepping from the
+companionway into the launch which was to take the newly married pair.</p>
+
+<p>Just as the consul had done his best for Seyd, so, with a woman&#8217;s
+natural enthusiasm for a wedding, his wife had dressed the girl. By
+means of a few pins plus a basting needle a pretty dress had been pulled
+into a perfect fit, and out of its foam her shapely head now rose like a
+delicate dark flower. In the dusk of a crushed panama her clear-cut face
+glowed with unusual color. Swaying there on Seyd&#8217;s arm, she made a
+picture which drew the admiration of the men and the tender sympathy of
+the women passengers who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>looked down upon them from the rail. While
+Seyd was handing her into the launch a storm of rice broke overhead and
+fell softly into the water, and when, leaving them dancing in its wake,
+the big hulk of the ship moved on, a hearty cheer floated back to them.</p>
+
+<p>If not so boisterous, the congratulations of the consul at the pier were
+equally hearty. &#8220;You didn&#8217;t do it a bit too soon,&#8221; he informed them.
+&#8220;Just after you left friend Eduardo notified me that it had been decided
+in a family council that your wife should go at once to the house of her
+relative. Without actually saying it he gave me to understand that a
+charge of kidnapping lay behind the demand. Just for the fun of it I let
+him wander along, and when I sprang it, and told him that by this time
+you were undoubtedly married, you should have seen his face. He won&#8217;t
+trouble you again&mdash;neither will he furnish you horses.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That doesn&#8217;t matter,&#8221; his wife put in. &#8220;I have that all arranged.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What?&#8221; The consul looked his surprise. &#8220;What&#8217;s this? A conspiracy? I
+expected that you would stay with us at least a week?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No.&#8221; His wife took the answer into her own hands. &#8220;You know,
+Francesca&#8217;s mother and uncle are grieving in the belief that she is
+drowned. And she has other reasons of her own&mdash;and yours,&#8221; she added for
+Seyd. &#8220;Though you are not to bother her with questions.&#8221; </p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span></p><p>At the consulate breakfast was waiting, and in the cheer of the
+following hour and bustle of departure, Seyd forgot his momentary
+wonder. It did not revive until, early that afternoon, they reined in to
+rest their horses on the crest of the first hill in the chain that led
+in giant steps up to the plateau above the Barranca. As they rode on,
+after a last look at the harbor, which lay like a huge turquoise within
+its setting of hills, he looked inquiringly at Francesca.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Can you not guess?&#8221; she asked. When he shook his head she rallied him
+with a happy laugh upon his dullness. &#8220;I think your memory is very poor,
+Se&ntilde;or Rosario.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&mdash;Rosa!&#8221; For instantly there flashed up a picture of her wet face
+looking at him from under her capote hood on the day that he found her
+standing in the rain beside her fallen horse.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So you recognize me at last?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t mean to say&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si</i>, se&ntilde;or, my husband&#8221;&mdash;contradicting her laugh, a deep thrill
+inhered in the words&mdash;&#8220;it is even so. In the days before the railroad,
+when there was great travel between San Nicolas and the port, Don Luis
+maintained houses a day&#8217;s journey apart. Though none of our family has
+visited them in the last two years, they were in good condition when
+Paulo passed this way at the beginning of the rains. So to-night,
+Rosario, we bide in our own house.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again did her accent on the &#8220;our&#8221; move and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>thrill him. Always
+undemonstrative, however, he merely caught her hand, and so, linked like
+children, they rode on side by side. At first they observed a happy
+silence, but presently the trail took on such remarkable likeness to the
+one they had traveled that other day, proceeding from the stretches of
+black volcanic rock through copal and scrub oak to sparsely grassed
+barrens, that the strength of the associations forced them into talk.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s where your horse fell,&#8221; he began it. When she agreed, he asked,
+&#8220;I wonder if you had any conception of the risks you were running when
+you rode behind me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though she knew very well what he meant, she pretended ignorance and
+made him explain in detail his feelings at the sight of her hands
+resting like white butterflies on the front of his coat, his sudden
+emotion when the scent of her wet hair floated over his shoulder, utter
+intoxication whenever a slip of his horse caused her to tighten her hold
+on his waist.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You hid it very cleverly,&#8221; was her comment upon these revelations.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you never knew it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course I did.&#8221; To which she added the brazen confession, &#8220;Or I would
+not have done it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Shooting over a hill not long thereafter, the trail suddenly fell
+through copal and oak woods into a sheltered valley where, with a
+suddenness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>that drew an exclamation of admiration from Seyd, they came
+in sight of the house. A small adobe, washed with gold with pale-violet
+borders, it stood under a great banyan tree within the embrace of a
+grove of tall palms. Almost across its doorway a bright arroyo ran
+swiftly, to disappear in the dark shade of clump tamarinds. All the
+afternoon the sun had pursued a futile struggle with the ocean mists,
+and now, completing the beauty of the place, it shot a last coppery
+shaft between two clouds.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A happy augury,&#8221; was Francesca&#8217;s greeting to the pathway of light. &#8220;Now
+let it rain.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The door was unlocked, and, entering with her, he found the interior
+equally to his taste. The solid walls were cream-tinted, and after he
+had lit the wood which was ready on the open hearth they reflected a
+comfortable glow on massive tables and chairs of plain oak, wide
+settees, and roomy lounges. His satisfaction was complete when she told
+him that it stood alone. The knowledge that they would be barred by
+leagues of distance, shut in by the rainy night from the rest of the
+world, filled him with deep content. From a survey, conscious of warmth
+and comfort, his satisfied gaze returned to the fingers which were
+fluttering like white butterflies from button to button down her
+raincoat.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lazy one!&#8221; She spoke with a pretty assumption of wifely authority.
+&#8220;Stable the horses&mdash;but first bring in the bundle from my crupper.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>While you are out I shall prepare our meal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What! Do we really eat? How thoughtful! It had never occurred to me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A pretty beginning,&#8221; she made demure answer, &#8220;for a wife to starve her
+husband.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Neither could there be any complaint of the meal that faced him on his
+return, for it represented the best that could be bought or borrowed by
+the consul&#8217;s wife. Afterward Seyd would have washed the dishes, but,
+taking him by the shoulders, Francesca marched him back to the fire.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, I shall do it myself. Please?&#8221; She headed off the mutiny betrayed
+by his eyes. &#8220;If you knew how often I have peeped into our work-folks&#8217;
+adobes at night to watch, with envy, some little peona preparing her
+man&#8217;s meal, you would understand.&#8221; So, smoking by the fire, he watched
+with huge comfort the play of dimples in her arms and the fluttering of
+the small hands which seemed so hopelessly at odds with their task.</p>
+
+<p>While working she chattered happily, but after the last dish was ranged
+in the plate rack on the wall she came to him and sank in a graceful
+heap beside his chair. Head pillowed on one white arm spread across his
+knee, she gazed thoughtfully into the fire; and, looking down upon her,
+Seyd&#8217;s thought reverted once more to the shepherd&#8217;s hut. Again he had
+difficulty in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>realizing that it was indeed he, Robert Seyd, mining
+engineer, who was sharing food and fire with this, his wife, daughter on
+one side of a proud Spanish house and on the other of descent that ran
+back into the dim time of the Aztecs.</p>
+
+<p>Her voice called him out of his wonder, and while the fire leaped and
+crackled in defiance of the wind and rain without they talked of this
+and that, their trials and travail, absent thoughts, hopes; and in the
+telling of it they obtained surcease from the smart of past
+misunderstandings. Also there were confessions. Each told&mdash;she with a
+blush&mdash;how they had overlooked each other&#8217;s sleep in the shepherd&#8217;s hut.
+Because opportunity for such communion had been altogether lacking, they
+talked late. Their murmurs died with the last light of the fire. </p>
+
+<hr class="large" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+
+<p class="n"><span style="float:left;font-size:40px;line-height:25px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:1px;">A</span>t high noon two days thereafter Seyd and Francesca drew rein on the rim
+of the Barranca above San Nicolas.</p>
+
+<p>During the moment that the horses rested their thoughts reverted to the
+last occasion when they had overlooked the great void, and if the
+thought of Sebastien brought a touch of sadness into the girl&#8217;s
+reflections it caused no bitterness. She turned with a low laugh when
+Seyd produced from an inner pocket the handkerchief he had picked up
+that day on the trail.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It did,&#8221; she said, when he told how it seemed to drip tears. &#8220;I had
+cried all the way up the trail to the rim.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After the usual nightly downpour the sun had come out, and under a flood
+of golden light the valley floor stood out in relief, with its wooded
+hills and hollows diminished to toy proportions by the awful depth. In
+the center the <i>casa</i> of San Nicolas sat like a gold cup in the wide
+green saucer of surrounding pastures. Beyond, the river lay, a band of
+fretted silver, splitting the valley; and, following its course upward,
+the girl&#8217;s eye paused at the yellow scar, high on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>the opposite wall,
+which marked Santa Gertrudis.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My beacon on many a dark day.&#8221; She pointed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And that reminds me that it is in great danger of being extinguished,&#8221;
+Seyd answered. &#8220;Our first payment was due the day before yesterday.
+Unless Billy has returned in my absence with the money&mdash;and I haven&#8217;t
+the slightest hope&mdash;the property is forfeited to your uncle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he will not claim it.&#8221; Out of her simple woman&#8217;s faith she went on:
+&#8220;He is too good and kind to advantage himself by your misfortune. In
+spite of his hate for the gringos, he likes you personally. Now that you
+are&mdash;my husband, he will not attempt your harm.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In view of his present clear view of Don Luis&#8217;s machinations, Seyd was
+not so sure. Unwilling to hurt her, he conceded: &#8220;Well, we shall see.
+Let us ride on down.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not together, dear.&#8221; Leaning over, she caught his arm. &#8220;I must see him
+first alone. He will be furiously angry, of course. But the angrier the
+better, for just so much sooner will follow the calm.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he may try&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;To take me from you?&#8221; She took the words out of his mouth. &#8220;He
+cannot. In a day, a week, a month, sooner or later, I should escape.
+They could not forever keep me locked up. But he will not try. You know,
+he stole <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>his own wife, snatched her away while she was going to church
+to marry another, and he comes of a race that gained wives as often as
+not by the sword. He cannot blame you without condemning himself, and I
+am sure that he will not try. If you give me a little time to conquer
+him and soothe my poor scandalized mother it will come out all right. So
+you must go on to Santa Gertrudis now and see if there be any news of
+Se&ntilde;or Thornton. And to-morrow&mdash;you may come.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you have the slightest doubt&#8221;&mdash;loath to let her out of his hands, he
+hesitated&mdash;&#8220;I would ride on to the station. Beautiful as is this place,
+and much as I have come to love it, I would rather abandon all than
+incur the risk.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But there is none, husband mine.&#8221; She looked up in his face, tenderly
+smiling. &#8220;He will rage and roar like an old lion, but that is all. I
+should be only half a woman to have come to my age without learning to
+manage him. Remember, for the second time you have saved my life, and,
+being already married, he cannot deny us. So go in peace, and&#8221;&mdash;she put
+up her mouth&mdash;&#8220;love.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In spite of her reassurance, he watched her go with apprehension that
+took a blacker tinge when, arriving at the inn late in the afternoon, he
+found no word from Billy. Though the inn&#8217;s meager accommodations had not
+been improved by a slap from the wing tip of the wave, he remained there
+all night in preference to crossing and recrossing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>the river. With so
+much at stake, Santa Gertrudis could take care of itself for another
+day. Sleeping with anxiety for a bedfellow, he rose and was on the road
+at daybreak&mdash;but not a bit earlier than Francesca, who met him halfway.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I knew you would be anxious,&#8221; she explained, &#8220;so I saddled a horse and
+stole away while all of San Nicolas was still asleep. But not for
+nothing are you to have my news. <i>Si</i>, it is good!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;Twas as I said,&#8221; she went on, having received her reward. &#8220;The <i>madre</i>
+had already cried herself beyond further tears, and was glad to have me
+on any terms. The good uncle, of course, stormed. Never was there such a
+battle since the French wars, and had you been there &#8217;twould not have
+lacked its killed and wounded. Until midnight we fought; then, after
+cursing the blood of the Irishman that has always led me astray, he gave
+in. &#8216;&#8217;Tis not for an old soldier to cross tongues with a woman,&#8217; he
+growled. &#8216;To-morrow bring me thy man.&#8217; But he knew that he was beaten,&#8221;
+she finished, confidently, &#8220;for when I kissed him he laughed in his
+throat and patted my hair.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again Seyd refused to dash her hope, but he was not quite convinced, and
+when they entered the big living-room where Don Luis stood with Paulo in
+waiting his dark gravity cast its shadow over the girl&#8217;s glad face. His
+immobility afforded no clue to the feeling that lay behind the
+stereotyped greeting, &#8220;The house, se&ntilde;or, is yours.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;I am the more pleased to see you,&#8221; he went on, &#8220;because Paulo reminded
+me an hour ago of a matter of business that lies between us. Such things
+stick not in my memory. But I believe it concerns some money.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Se&ntilde;or!&#8221; Her face flaming with the scarlet of shame, Francesca was
+moving forward.</p>
+
+<p>He stopped her with a shake of his heavy head. &#8220;This is between me
+and&mdash;your husband. The papers, Paulo. Hand them to the se&ntilde;or.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a legal process, signed and sealed according to Mexican law, and
+before opening it Seyd knew it for the end. More out of curiosity than
+for information, he rapidly scanned the terms which had taken Santa
+Gertrudis and its mined riches forever out of his hands. While he read,
+Don Luis studied his face. If he looked for signs of deep hurt there
+were none to be seen, for in the long game between them Seyd was
+confronted for the first time by the expected. He looked up, squaring
+his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The victory is yours, se&ntilde;or.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To Francesca&#8217;s anxious eyes it seemed that the old man&#8217;s gravity
+lightened by a shade. &#8220;You will concede, se&ntilde;or, that I warned you&mdash;that
+no gringo would ever force himself in on my lands?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, and I did my best to disprove it. For my partner&#8217;s sake I am
+sorry. For my own&#8221;&mdash;he looked at his wife&mdash;&#8220;I am glad.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well spoken, se&ntilde;or.&#8221; The shadow of a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>smile illumined the old man&#8217;s
+dark reserve. &#8220;But if I warned you, it does not follow that I have not
+watched with some sympathy your struggle. In watching, too, my old eyes
+have been opened upon truths that I had refused to see, though they lay
+under my nose. We are an old people, se&ntilde;or, we Mexicans. The old blood
+of Spain added no effervescence to the Aztec strains that were grown
+stagnant long before Cortez landed, and when a people ages nature
+removes it to make way for younger stock. <i>Si</i>, though I refused to
+acknowledge it, I have known many years that just as the Moors overran
+Spain, and the Spanish overran the Aztecs, so will your people overrun
+Mexico from the Northern Sierras to the Gulf.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Once I had thought to stay it. But time cools the hottest blood, and
+the one I had counted upon to uphold my old hands is gone to his place
+forever. Also I have seen that no man can dam the tide or shut the gates
+that Porfirio Diaz opened. As it went with Texas and Alta California so
+will it go with all our states. Against your Yankee our softer people
+can never stand. In the time to come only those of us that mix blood
+with shrewder strains will be able to withstand the flood, and thus it
+is I, who would have killed once the man that said I should ever take a
+gringo for kinsman, accept you with resignation. Perhaps it is the
+easier because one such mixture gave us this bright girl. And if you
+took time <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>by the forelock &#8217;tis not for me to grumble. One word more&mdash;&#8221;
+He threw one arm around Francesca, who had crossed to his side. &#8220;It has
+never been the habit of the Garcias to overlook a good dower to one of
+the house, and the fact that my niece has given you herself in exchange
+for her life does not cancel <i>my</i> debt. Give me the papers. The others,
+Paulo&mdash;to the se&ntilde;or.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>While Seyd gazed at the title deeds to Santa Gertrudis, made out to
+himself and Billy, the old man slowly tore up the forfeiture. Applying a
+match to the pieces, he threw them on the hearth, and, blazing up, they
+added warmth to the grim smile that accompanied his words.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I told you, se&ntilde;or, that no gringo should ever <i>force</i> himself in on my
+land.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Transcriber&#8217;s Notes:</span></h3>
+
+<p>1. Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters&#8217; errors; otherwise,
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author&#8217;s words and intent.</p>
+
+<p>2. The original of this e-text did not have a Table of Contents; one has been
+added for the reader&#8217;s convenience.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of The Barranca, by Herman Whitaker
+
+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 Mystery of The Barranca
+
+Author: Herman Whitaker
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2011 [EBook #36198]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D Alexander and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE MYSTERY OF
+ THE BARRANCA
+
+ BY
+
+ HERMAN WHITAKER
+
+ AUTHOR OF
+ "THE PLANTER" AND
+ "THE SETTLER"
+
+ NEW YORK AND LONDON
+ HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+ MCMXIII
+
+
+
+
+ COPYRIGHT 1913 BY HARPER & BROTHERS
+
+ PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+ PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 1913
+
+
+
+
+ [Illustration: [See page 248
+ SEYD LIFTED FRANCESCA AND LEAPED]
+
+
+
+
+"_To Vera, my daughter and gentle collaborator, whose nimble fingers
+lightened the load of many labors, this book is lovingly dedicated._"
+
+
+
+
+THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+"Oh Bob, just look at them!"
+
+Leaning down from his perch on the sacked mining tools which formed the
+apex of their baggage, Billy Thornton punched his companion in the back
+to call his attention to a scene which had spread a blaze of humor over
+his own rich crop of freckles.
+
+As a matter of fact, the spectacle of two men fondly embracing can
+always be depended on to stir the crude Anglo-Saxon sense of humor. In
+this case it was rendered still more ridiculous by age and portliness,
+but two years' wandering through interior Mexico had accustomed
+Thornton's comrade, Robert Seyd, to the sight. After a careless glance
+he resumed his contemplation of the crowd that thronged the little
+station. Exhibiting every variety of Mexican costume, from the plain
+white blanket of the peons to the leather suits of the rancheros and
+the hacendados, or owners of estates, it was as picturesque and
+brilliant in color and movement as anything in a musical extravaganza.
+The European clothing of a young girl who presently stepped out of the
+ticket office emphasized the theatrical flavor by its vivid contrast.
+She might easily have been the captive heroine among bandits, and the
+thought actually occurred to Billy. While she paused to call her dog, a
+huge Siberian wolf hound, she was hidden from Seyd's view by the stout
+embracers. Therefore it was to the dog that he applied Billy's remark at
+first.
+
+"Isn't she a peach?"
+
+She seemed the finest of her race that he had ever seen, and Seyd was
+just about to say that she carried herself like a "perfect lady" when
+the dissolution of the aforesaid embrace brought the girl into view. He
+stopped--with a small gasp that testified to his astonishment at her
+unusual type.
+
+Although slender for her years--about two and twenty--her throat and
+bust were rounded in perfect development. The clear olive complexion
+was undoubtedly Spanish, yet her face lacked the firm line that hardens
+with the years. Perhaps some strain of Aztec blood--from which the
+Spanish-Mexican is never free--had helped to soften her features,
+but this would not account for their pleasing irregularity. A bit
+_retrousee_, the small nose with its well-defined nostrils patterned
+after the Celtic. Had Seyd known it, the face in its entirety--colors
+and soft contours--is to be found to this day among the descendants of
+the sailors who escaped from the wreck of the Spanish Armada on the west
+coast of Ireland. Pretty and unusual as she was, her greatest charm
+centered in the large black eyes that shone amid her clear pallor,
+conveying in broad day the tantalizing mystery of a face seen for an
+instant through a warm gloaming. In the moment that he caught their
+velvet glance Seyd received an impression of vivacious intelligence
+altogether foreign in his experience of Mexican women.
+
+As she was standing only a few feet away, he knew that she must have
+heard Billy's remark; but, counting on her probable ignorance of
+English, he did not hesitate to answer. "Pretty? Well, I should
+say--pretty enough to marry. The trouble is that in this country the
+ugliness of the grown woman seems to be in inverse ratio to her girlish
+beauty. Bet you the fattest hacendado is her father. And she'll give him
+pounds at half his age."
+
+"Maybe," Billy answered. "Yet I'd be almost willing to take the chance."
+
+As the girl had turned just then to look at the approaching train
+neither of them caught the sudden dark flash, supreme disdain, that drew
+an otherwise quite tender red mouth into a scarlet line. But for the dog
+they would never have been a whit the wiser. For as the engine came
+hissing along the platform the brute sprang and crouched on the tracks,
+furiously snarling, ready for a spring at the headlight, which it
+evidently took for the Adam's apple of the strange monster. The train
+still being under way, the poor beast's faith would have cost it its
+life but for Seyd's quickness. In the moment that the girl's cry rang
+out, and in less time than it took Billy to slide from his perch, Seyd
+leaped down, threw the dog aside, and saved himself by a spring to the
+cow-catcher.
+
+"Oh, you fool! You crazy idiot!" While thumping him soundly, Billy ran
+on, "To risk your life for a dog--a Mexican's, at that!"
+
+But he stopped dead, blushed till his freckles were extinguished, as the
+girl's voice broke in from behind.
+
+"And the Mexican thanks you, sir. It was foolhardy, yes, and dearly as I
+love the dog I would not have had you take such a risk. But now that it
+is done--accept my thanks." As the stouter of the embracers now came
+bustling up, she added in Spanish, "My uncle, senor."
+
+At close range she was even prettier; but, though gratitude had wiped
+out the flash of disdain, a vivid memory of his late remarks caused Seyd
+to turn with relief to the hacendado. During the delivery of effusive
+thanks he had time to cancel a first impression--gained from a rear view
+of a gaudy jacket--of a fat tenor in a Spanish opera, for the man's
+head and features were cast in a massive mold. His big fleshy nose
+jutted out from under heavy brows that overshadowed wide, sagacious
+eyes, Indian-brown in color. If the wind and weather of sixty years had
+tanned him dark as a peon, it went excellently with his grizzled
+mustache. Despite his stoutness and the costume, every fat inch of him
+expressed the soldier.
+
+"My cousin, senor."
+
+Having been placed, metaphorically, in possession of all the hacendado's
+earthly possessions, Seyd turned to exchange bows with a young man who
+had just emerged from the baggage-room--at least he seemed young at the
+first glance. A second look showed that the impression was largely due
+to a certain trimness of figure which was accentuated by the perfect fit
+of a suit of soft-dressed leather. When he raised his felt sombrero the
+hair showed thin on his temples. Neither were his poise and
+imperturbable manner attributes of youth.
+
+"It was very clever of you, senor."
+
+A slight peculiarity of intonation made Seyd look up. "Jealous," he
+thought, yet he was conscious of something else--some feeling too
+elusively subtle to be analyzed on the spur of the moment. Suggesting,
+as it did, that he had made a "gallery play," the remark roused in him
+quick irritation. But had it been possible to frame an answer there was
+no time, for just then the familiar cry, "_Vaminos!_" rang out, and the
+American conductor hustled uncle, niece, and her dog into the nearest
+car.
+
+The entire incident had occupied little more than a moment, and as, a
+little bewildered by its rush, Seyd stood looking after the train he
+found himself automatically raising his cap in reply to a fluttering
+handkerchief.
+
+"You Yankees are certainly very enterprising."
+
+Turning quickly, Seyd met again the glance of subtle hostility. But,
+though he felt certain that the remark had been called forth by his
+salute, he had no option but to apply it to the mining kit toward which
+the other was pointing.
+
+"You are for the mines, senor? In return for your service to my cousin
+it is, perhaps, that I can be of assistance--in the hiring of men and
+mules?"
+
+While equally quiet and subtle, the patronage in his manner was easier
+to meet. Undisturbed, however, when Seyd declined his offer, he
+sauntered quietly away.
+
+"_Bueno!_ As you wish."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+"I'll be with you in a minute, folks."
+
+To appreciate the accent which the American station agent laid on
+"folks" it is necessary that one should have been marooned for a couple
+of years in a ramshackle Mexican station with only a chocolate-skinned
+henchman, or _mozo_, for companion. It asserted at once welcome and
+patriotic feeling.
+
+"You know this isn't the old United States," he added, hurrying by.
+"These greasers are the limit. Close one eye for half a minute and when
+you open it again it's a cinch you'll find the other gone. If they'd
+just swipe each other's baggage it wouldn't be so bad. But they steal
+their own, then sue the company for the loss. Here, you sons of burros,
+drop that!" with which he dived headlong into the midst of the free
+fight that a crowd of _cargadores_, or porters, were waging over the
+up train baggage.
+
+Taking warning, the two returned to their own baggage. As they waited,
+talking, these two closest of friends offered a fairly startling
+contrast. In the case of Seyd, a graduate in mining of California
+University, years of study and strain had tooled his face till his
+aggressive nose stood boldly out above hollowed cheeks and black-gray
+eyes. A trifle over medium height, the hundred and sixty pounds he ought
+to have carried had been reduced a good ten pounds by years of
+prospecting in Mexico and Arizona. This loss of flesh, however, had been
+more than made up by a corresponding gain in muscle. Moving a few paces
+around the baggage, he exhibited the easy, steady movement that comes
+from the perfect co-ordination of nerve and muscle. His feet seemed
+first to feel, then to take hold of the ground. In fact, his entire
+appearance conveyed the impression of force under perfect control, ready
+to be turned loose in any direction.
+
+Shorter than Seyd by nearly half a foot, Billy Thornton, on the other
+hand, was red where the other was dark, loquacious instead of
+thoughtful. From his fiery shock of red hair and undergrowths of red
+stubble to his slangy college utterance he proved the theory of the
+attraction of opposites. Bosom friends at college, it had always been
+understood between them that when either got his "hunch" the other
+should be called in to share it. And as the luck--in the shape of a rich
+copper mine--had come first to Seyd, he had immediately wired for Billy.
+They were talking it over, as they so often before had done, when the
+agent returned.
+
+"Why--you're the fellow that was down here last fall, ain't you?" he
+asked, offering his hand. "Didn't recognize you at first. You don't mean
+to say that you have denounced--"
+
+"--The Santa Gertrudis prospect?" Seyd nodded. "He means the opposition
+I told you we might expect." He answered Billy's look of inquiry.
+
+"Opposition!" The agent spluttered. "That's one word for it. But since
+you're so consarnedly cool about it, mister, let me tell you that this
+makes the eleventh time that mine has been denounced, and so far nobody
+has succeeded in holding it." Looking at Billy, probably as being the
+more impressionable, he ran on: "The first five were Mex and as there
+were no pesky foreign consuls to complicate the case with bothersome
+inquiries, they simply vanished. One by one they came, hit the trail out
+there in a cloud of dust, and were never seen again.
+
+"After them came the Dutchman, a big fat fellow, obstinate as one of his
+own mules, and a scrapper. For a while it looked as though he'd make
+good--might have, perhaps, if he hadn't taken to using his dynamite box
+for a pillow. You see, his peons used to steal the sticks to fish, and
+so many of them blew themselves into kingdom come that he was always
+running shy on labor. So, as I say, he used the box for a pillow till it
+went off one night and distributed him all over the Barranca de
+Guerrero. Just how it came about of course nobody knew, nor cared, and
+they never did find a piece big enough to warrant an inquest. It just
+went as accidental, and he'd scarcely, so to say, stopped raining before
+a Frenchman jumped the claim. But he only lasted for a couple of days,
+landed back here within a week, and jumped the up train without a word.
+
+"Last came the English Johnnies, two of 'em, the real 'haw, haw' boys;
+no end of style to them and their outfit. As they had hosts of friends
+up Mexico City, it would never have done to use harsh measures. But if
+the Johnnies had influence of one sort, Don Luis--he's the landowner,
+you know--had it to burn of another. Not only did he gain a general's
+commission during the revolutionary wars, but he's also a member of
+the Mexican Congress, so close to the government that he needs only
+to wink to get what he wants. So just about the time the Johnnies had
+finished development work and begun to deliver ore out here at the
+railroad--presto! freights went up, prices went down, till they'd wiped
+out the last cent of profit. Out go the Johnnies--enter you." With real
+earnestness he concluded: "Of course, there's nothing I'd like better
+than to have you for neighbors. It ain't so damn lively here. But I'd
+hate to see you killed. Take my advice, and quit."
+
+He had addressed himself principally to Billy. But instead of
+discouragement, impish delight illumined the latter's freckles.
+
+"A full-sized general with the whole Mexican government behind him?
+Bully! I never expected anything half so good. But, say! If the mine is
+so rich why don't the old cock work it himself instead of leaving it to
+be denounced by any old tramp?"
+
+"Because he don't have to. He has more money now than he ever can use.
+He is worth half a million in cattle alone. And he's your old-fashioned
+sort that hate the very thought of change. By the way, he just left on
+the up train, him and his niece."
+
+"What, the girl with the dog?" Billy yelled it. "Didn't you see--no, you
+were in the baggage-room. Well, he's our dearest friend--presented Seyd
+here with all of his horses, cattle, lands, and friends. A bit of a
+mining claim ought not to cut much ice in an order like that."
+
+"You met them?" The agent shook his head, however, after he had heard
+the particulars. "Don't count much on Spanish courtesies. They go no
+deeper than the skin. Nice girl, the niece, more like us than Mex,
+and she ain't full-blood, for matter of that. Her grandfather was
+Irish, a free lance that fought with Diaz during the French war. His
+son by a Mexican wife married Don Luis's sister, and when he died she
+and her daughter came to keep the old fellow's house, for he's been
+a widower these twenty years. Like most of the sprigs of the best
+Mexican families, she was educated in Europe, so she speaks three
+languages--English, French, and Spanish. Yes, they're nice people from
+the old Don down, but lordy! how he hates us gringos. He'll repay you
+for the life of the dog--perhaps by saving you alive for a month? But
+after that--take my advice, and git."
+
+While he was talking, Seyd had listened with quiet interest. Now he put
+in, "We will--just as quickly as we can hire men and burros to pack our
+stuff out to the mine."
+
+"Well, if you will--you will." Having thus divested himself of
+responsibility, the agent continued: "And here's where your troubles
+begin. Though donkey-drivers are as thick as fleas in this town, I doubt
+whether you can hire one to go to Santa Gertrudis."
+
+"But the Englishmen?" Seyd questioned. "They must have had help."
+
+"Brought their entire outfit down with them from Mexico City."
+
+After Seyd's rejection of his offer the hacendado had entered into
+conversation with a ranchero at the other end of the platform, and,
+glancing a little regretfully in his direction, Seyd asked, "Do you
+know him?"
+
+The agent nodded. "Sebastien Rocha? Yes, he's a nephew to the General."
+
+"He offered to get me mules."
+
+"He did! Why, man alive! he hates gringos worse than--worse than I hate
+Mexicans. _He_ offered you help? I doubt he'll do it when he knows
+where you're going." In a last attempt at dissuasion he added, "But if
+he doesn't I can't see how you can win out with rates and prices at the
+same mark that wiped out the Johnnies."
+
+"That's our business." Seyd laughed. Then, warmed by the honest fellow's
+undoubted anxiety, he said, "Do you remember any consignment of brick
+that ever came to this station?"
+
+"Sure, three car loads, billed to the Dutchman. But what has that to
+do--"
+
+"Just this--that the man had the right idea. Though the mine is the
+richest copper proposition I have ever seen--besides carrying gold
+values sufficient to cover smelting expenses--it would never pay, as you
+say, to ship it out at present prices. But once smelted down into copper
+matte there's a fortune in it, as the Dutchman knew. He had already laid
+out the foundation of an old-style Welsh smelter, and, though it isn't
+very big, we propose to make it stake us to a modern plant."
+
+"So that's your game!" The agent whistled.
+
+"That's our game," Billy confirmed. "If dear cousin over there can only
+be persuaded to furnish the mules we will do the rest. Go ask him, Bob."
+
+Seyd hesitated. "I'm afraid that I turned him down rather roughly. Let's
+try first ourselves."
+
+For the last half hour their baggage had formed a center of interest
+for the porters, mule-drivers, and hackmen who formed the bulk of the
+crowd, and the snap of the agent's fingers brought a score of them
+running. Each tried to make his calling and election sure by seizing a
+piece of baggage. In ten seconds the pile was dissolved and was flowing
+off in as many different directions when Seyd's answer to a question
+brought all to a sudden halt.
+
+"To the _mina_ Santa Gertrudis."
+
+Crash! the kit of mining tools dropped from the shoulder of the muleteer
+who had asked the question, and it had no more than touched earth before
+it was buried under the other pieces.
+
+"I told you so," the agent commented, and was going on when a voice
+spoke in from their rear.
+
+"What is the trouble, senors?"
+
+The hacendado had approached unnoticed, and, turning quickly, Seyd met
+for the third time the equivocal look, now lightened by a touch of
+amusement. Suppressing a recurrence of irritation he answered, quietly:
+"We wish to go to the hacienda San Nicolas, senor, upon which we have
+denounced the mining claim known as the Santa Gertrudis. For some reason
+no one of these men will hire. Perhaps you can tell why?"
+
+"Now your fat's in the fire," the agent muttered.
+
+Whether or no he had overheard Seyd's answer to the muleteer, the man's
+dark face gave no sign. "_Quien sabe?_ Ask their blood brother, the
+burro. One would have little to do and time to waste if he attempted to
+plumb a mule-driver's superstitions. _Ola_, Carlos."
+
+While he was talking the crowd had continued to back away, but it
+stopped now and stood staring, for all the world like a herd of
+frightened cattle. The big muleteer who had led the retreat returned on
+a shuffling run, and as he stood before the hacendado, sombrero in hand,
+Seyd saw the fear in his face.
+
+"This fellow sometimes works for me. You will need"--he paused,
+overlooking the baggage--"three burros and two riding-mules. He has only
+two. _Ola_, Mattias!" When a second muleteer had come with the same
+breathless haste he gave the quiet order, "You will take these senors to
+Santa Gertrudis."
+
+Bowing slightly, he had walked away before Seyd could lay hands on
+enough Spanish to state his obligation, and as, pausing, he then looked
+back his face once more changed, expressing knowledge and sarcastic
+amusement at the mixed feelings behind Seyd's halting thanks. His bow,
+returning the customary answer, was more than half shrug.
+
+"It is nothing."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"One moment, senor!"
+
+The burrors having departed with their loads, Seyd and Billy were
+mounting to follow when the hacendado called to them from the platform.
+"To-night, of course, you will stay in Chilpancin. But to-morrow? By
+which trail do you travel?" When Seyd answered he added a word of
+counsel: "I thought so. Most strangers take that way. But there is a
+shorter by many miles. Instruct your drivers to take the old trail down
+the Barranca."
+
+Thanking him, they rode on.
+
+In accordance with the mysterious and immutable law which places all
+Mexican cities at least a mile from the railroad, they traveled nearly
+half an hour before sighting, across a barranca, the town cuddled in a
+hollow beneath the opposite hills. Under the rich light of the waning
+sun the variegated color of its walls, houses, churches, merged in warm
+gold, glowed like a topaz in the setting of the dark hills. Paved with
+river cobbles and crooked as a dog's hind leg, a street fell steeply
+down into the barranca from whose black depths uprose the low roar of
+rushing waters. Entering upon it, while still within sound of a freight
+engine puffing upgrade to the station, they dropped back four hundred
+years into the midst of a life that differed but little from that of the
+Aztecs under the Montezumas.
+
+On both sides of the street one-story adobes flamed in all the colors of
+the rainbow--roses, purples, umber, greens--a vivid alternation which
+was toned only by the weathered gray of heavy doors and massive oaken
+grills across the windows. At the tinkle of their bells there would come
+a flash of Spanish eyes in the cool dusk behind the windows, and a
+pretty face would emerge from deep shadow to fade again before Billy's
+smile. The peons and hooded women on the narrow causeways were equally
+reserved. They either passed without according them notice or returned
+to their glances a stolid stare. Theirs were the dark, impenetrable
+faces of old Mexico.
+
+While they were climbing at a snail's pace the opposite hill, dusk fell
+over the town, but presently, riding out of a black alley into the main
+plaza, they emerged on a scene that caused even the matter-of-fact Billy
+to exclaim in wonder. On all four sides hundreds of torches blossomed in
+the dusk, toning with soft rich lights the vivid adobes, tinting the
+cold white blankets and garments of the hucksters who squatted by their
+displays--guavas and pineapples, cocoanuts, mangoes, alligator pears,
+and other fruits of the tropics which shared the same straw mat with
+cabbage, squash, onions, and other familiar produce of the cold North.
+In accordance with the shrewd policy that has always kept the Roman
+Church in close touch with its world, the booths extended to the very
+doors of a stone church which occupied one side of the square, and the
+heavy odors of fried garlic mingled with the breath of incense that
+floated out through the wide doors.
+
+A religious fiesta was in full blast, and they had to turn the mules to
+avoid the stream of worshipers who shuffled across the square, up the
+stone steps, and the length of the paved aisles to the great altar which
+blazed with the light of a thousand candles. Looking, as they rode past,
+they saw a peon--whose spotless blanket shone whiter by contrast with
+the scarlet serape which had fallen backward across his calves--erect
+on his knees, arms extended in a rigid cross, a figure of deathless
+adoration before the Virgin. It required only the brazen storm of bells
+that just then broke overhead to complete the atmosphere of savage
+medievalism. The worshipers might easily have been the first Aztec
+converts crawling before the superior altars of the Spanish conquerors'
+God.
+
+Seyd, always thoughtful and sensitive to impression, felt the influence
+of the scene, and the feeling deepened as their mules struck hollow
+echoes in the vaulted passage of the hotel whose iron-studded gates,
+barred windows, yard-thick walls all bespoke a life which had not yet
+progressed beyond the era of sieges. A runway led down into a wide
+courtyard and to the stables which lay under a tiled gallery, the hotel
+proper, for the cell-like sleeping-rooms used by the better class opened
+upon it.
+
+But the real life of the place surged in the patio, or courtyard, below,
+and, after they had dined on rice, eggs, and beans, or frijoles, Billy
+and Seyd perched on the balustrade of the gallery to watch its ebb and
+flow. Into the great stone inclosure muleteers of Tepic, freighters of
+Guadalajara, potters of Cuernavaca and Taxco, pilgrims to the far
+shrines, and their first cousins in dirt and importunity, the beggars,
+had poured from three main lines of travel, and they were so crowded
+that it was difficult to find space among the mule panniers, crates,
+and bundles for their tiny cooking-fires. On occasion a face, plump
+and darkly pretty, would bloom out of the dusk as a woman fanned the
+charcoal under her clay cooking-pots. Again, a leaping flame would
+illumine a hawk face, deeply bronzed and heavily mustached, or lend a
+deeper dye to the scarlet of some sleeper's serape. In its rich somber
+color the scene made a picture that would have been loved by Rembrandt.
+Just as it had done for centuries before the great master was born to
+his brush, the scene changed and mingled, ebbed and flowed, while its
+units passed among the fires, exchanging the gossip of the trails. The
+hum of it rose to the gallery like the low roar of a distant torrent,
+but out of it Seyd was able to catch and translate isolated scraps.
+
+"Take not thy _aguardiente_ to El Quiss, _amigo_. The administrador--I
+tell it to my ruth, since I was well skinned by him--is a thief of the
+nether world. He would flay a flea for the hide and fat."
+
+"_Ola_, Carlos! The _jefe_ [chief of police] of San Pedro is keeping an
+eye for thy return ever since he bought the last load of charcoal."
+
+"The swine! Is it my fault that he expects good oak burning for the
+price of soft ceiba?"
+
+One remark caused Seyd to prick his ears, for it was addressed to one of
+their own muleteers. "Where go the gringos, _amigo_? To Santa Gertrudis?
+And thou art driving for them? _Hombre_, hast thou so little regard for
+thy neck?"
+
+The answer was lost in the sudden braying of a burro in the stables
+underneath, but the voice of the questioner, a strident tenor, rose over
+all. "An order from Don Sebastien? _Carambar-r-r-r-a!_ And you go by the
+old trail down the Barranca? But, _hombre_! It is--" The voice lowered
+so that Seyd could not hear.
+
+Imagining that the talk bore merely on the condition of the trail, he
+dismissed it from his mind and returned to his study of the crowd,
+permitting his gaze to wander here, there, wherever the incessant
+movement brought to the surface some bit of color or trait of life. In
+this he obeyed a natural instinct. Endowed with a temperament nicely
+balanced between the philosophical and the practical, he had taken an
+auxiliary course in "letters" along with his mining for the sole purpose
+of broadening his viewpoint and widening his touch with life. Indeed, he
+had bent his profession to the same end, using it as a means to travel
+and study, in which he differed altogether from Billy, who was the
+mining engineer in every dimension. Where Billy saw only the externals,
+humors, and absurdities, and the picturesqueness of that teeming life,
+Seyd's subtle intelligence took hold of the primordial feeling under it
+all. Contributing only an occasional answer to the other's chatter, he
+bathed in the atmosphere and absorbed the wild medievalism of it while
+reviewing in thought the events of the day. The girl and her dog, her
+uncle the General, Don Sebastien the hacendado--the latter was in his
+mind when the sudden leaping of a fire at the far end of the patio
+revealed his face.
+
+"Look!" But in the moment Seyd grasped Billy's arm the blaze fell. "I
+thought I saw him--that fellow, Sebastien--talking to Carlos, our
+mule-driver."
+
+"Well, why not?" Billy answered. "I gathered that he lives far out. Like
+ourselves, probably too far to start out to-night."
+
+"Of course." Seyd nodded. "He just happened to be in my mind. Only why
+should he be in talk with our mule-driver?"
+
+"Search me." Billy shrugged. "But if he was, it is easy to prove it.
+There's Carlos now. Call him up here."
+
+The muleteer, when questioned a minute later, shook his head. "No,
+senor, Don Sebastien is not here. He rode out at sunset, is now leagues
+away on the trail."
+
+If he were lying, his brown stolid face gave no sign; and, having given
+him his orders for next day, Seyd returned to his study of the crowd. He
+had forgotten the incident by the time Billy dragged him away to bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+"If we are on the road at daybreak we shall reach the Barranca early
+in the afternoon," Seyd had said, commenting on his order to the
+mule-driver. But, fagged out by the day's hot travel, they did not
+awaken until a slender beam of light stole between the iron window bars
+and laid a golden finger across Billy's eyes.
+
+"We shall have to hustle now." Seyd concluded a diatribe on the Mexican
+_mozo_ in general while they were dressing. "For you must see the
+Barranca by daylight. Without its naked savagery it is as big and grand
+as the Colorado Canon. Besides, if this trail is as dizzy a proposition
+as the one I went by on the last trip, I'd rather not tackle it after
+dark."
+
+It would have been just as well, however, had they taken their time, for
+after breakfast came Carlos with a tale of cast-off shoes. It was Paz
+and Luz, the mules the senors were riding! And having roundly cursed the
+memory of the fool wife who had been induced by an apparently innocent
+colthood to bestow names of beauty like Peace and Light upon such
+misbegotten devils, Carlos further informed them:
+
+"Never were there such ungrateful brutes, senors. Not content with the
+good barley I had just fed him, Paz it is that takes a piece out of
+Padre Celso's arm one fine day and so gets me cursed with candle and
+Book. And the curse sticks, senors, working itself out by means of this
+devil of a light who, within one week, chooses the fat belly of the
+_jefe_ of Tehultepec as a cushion for his heels. A year's earnings that
+trick cost me, not to mention the prettiest set of blue stripes that
+ever warmed a cold back. Neither is there a tree between San Blas and
+the Arroyo Grande that they have not used to scrape off a load. But this
+shall be the end. They shall feel the knife in their throats at the end
+of this trip." In the mean time would the senors be pleased to wait for
+an hour?
+
+There being no other choice, the senors would, and, returning to their
+last night's perch on the balustrade, they watched the patio disgorge
+its dark life upon the street. Shining in over the low-tiled roofs, the
+sunlight struck and was thrown back by the massive golden walls on the
+opposite side in a flood that set fire to brilliant serapes, illumined
+silver buttons, filled the whole place with light and cheer. Not to
+mention their interest in the saddling and packing of the loads--to
+which some refractory mule contributed an occasional humorous touch--a
+comedy was invariably enacted between the fat landlord and the departing
+travelers, for only after an altercation which always required the
+witness of all the saints to the reasonableness of his charges were the
+gates swung open. With much haggling and confusion of crackling oaths
+they went out, one by one, _cargadores_ __and peons, beggars and
+pilgrims, the tinkling mule trains with their quaint freights, and not
+until the last hoof struck on the cobbles did Seyd think to look at his
+watch.
+
+"Nine o'clock. What has become of those--"
+
+Fortunately they arrived at that moment with Paz and Luz, the damned and
+foredoomed, and a quarter of an hour thereafter their bells tinkled
+pleasantly in the scrub oak and copal which first climbed with the trail
+up a ravine behind the town and then led on through fields where corn
+grew, by some green miracle thrusting stout green stalks between the
+stones.
+
+Though it was still quite early in the day, heat waves trembled all over
+the land. The somnolent hum of insect life, the whisper of a light wind
+in the corn, were alike conducive to sleep. Before they had been riding
+an hour both began to yawn. The sibilant hiss of the muleteers urging
+the mules grew fainter in Seyd's ears, and, though he was conscious in
+a dim way that the trail had led out from the fields and was falling,
+falling, falling downhill through growths of cactus and mimosa into the
+copal woods, he drowsed on till an exclamation from Billy aroused him to
+a grisly sight--the dozen and odd mummies whose withered limbs clicked
+in the breeze as they swung by the neck from the wide boughs of a
+banyan.
+
+"_Bandidos_, senor, thieves and cutthroats." The bigger of the two
+muleteers answered Seyd's question. "They were hanged by Don Sebastien."
+
+"Why, that's our friend back at the station." Billy commented on Seyd's
+translation. "I'm sure that was the name the agent gave him."
+
+"_Si_, senor," the mule-driver confirmed the impression. "And these are
+but the tithe of those that he hanged. For years the whole of this
+country was overrun with _bandidos_ who took advantage of the absence of
+the principal men at the wars to rob and murder at will. They were
+levying regular tolls on the rancheros and hacendados when Don Sebastien
+returned from his schooling. Though only a lad of two and twenty, he
+began by hanging the bandits' messenger in the gates of his hacienda, an
+act that all thought would end by the wiping of the very memory of the
+place from the face of the earth. But instead of waiting to be attacked
+Don Sebastien took the stoutest of his peons and went out after the
+thieves. And he kept after them all that winter, the following summer,
+into the next year. No trail was too long, wet, or weary if he could
+mark its end with a brigand swinging under a tree. Here, there,
+everywhere within a hundred miles of his hacienda of El Quiss he hanged
+them by twos and threes and left them to swing in the wind, and it
+speaks for the fear in which he came to be held that no man, father,
+mother, sister, or lover dared to cut one down. Scarce a cross trail in
+this country that lacks its warning, and through his rigor it came to
+pass that you, senors, might now leave your purses on the open highway
+where a dozen years ago you would surely have left your lives. No man
+would dare touch--"
+
+"--Except Don Sebastien," Seyd put in, laughing.
+
+But the man returned only a stare. "What use would he have of purses,
+senor, that has so many of his own?"
+
+"Perhaps to give to the Church." But he stopped laughing, surprised by
+the sudden cloud that spread on the man's face.
+
+"Never! Though he has a church on his own hacienda, Don Sebastien never
+crosses its threshold. And Mattias, here, can tell you of the talk he
+gives to the priest."
+
+"_Si! si!_" In his eagerness to share the limelight the fellow almost
+shook off his head. "It is, see you, that I am delivering a mule load
+of charcoal at El Quiss on the very day that Don Sebastien hires the
+priest. You are to see him, as I did, sitting on the gallery above
+the courtyard puffing his cigar in such wise--was there ever such
+irreverence!--that the smoke rises in the face of the padre who stands
+before him. And his voice comes ringing down to where Miguel, the
+steward, is trying to beat me down a peso on the price of the charcoal.
+'I have builded you a church, and for performing the offices I shall pay
+you one hundred silver pesos the month, for, though I did not feel,
+myself, any need of your mutterings, they serve to keep my people quiet.
+Over them you shall exercise the usual authorities, and you may come and
+go at will through the hacienda--all but one place. If after this hour
+I find that your foot has touched my threshold I'll hang you in its
+gates.' Thus he spoke, senor, and he would have done it--to a priest
+quicker than a bandit, for of the two it is hard to tell that which he
+hates the most."
+
+"Hum!" Billy coughed when Seyd had translated. Jerking his thumb at the
+grisly witnesses to the tale's truth, he commented: "I now begin to
+understand the general respect for our friend. A man who does things
+like that is entitled to some consideration. Let us be thankful for pump
+guns and automatics. If this had been the day of the old muzzle-loader
+I'm darned if I'd have tackled your hunch."
+
+In the next hour the red-tiled colored adobe hamlets of the small
+farmers began to give place to the _jacals_ of the country, flimsy huts
+with sides of cane stalks and grass-thatched. Then the trail passed out
+from the eternal succession of corn and _maguey_ fields into wastes of
+volcanic scoria, where it began presently to climb mountains, for no
+apparent reason except to fall dizzily into shallow valleys which were
+sparsely timbered with copal and other soft woods. In one valley they
+came upon an Aztec ruin. A huge parallelogram in shape, it was more than
+half buried and so overgrown with brush and creepers that they would
+have passed without notice if the trail had not happened to run along
+the face of one wall. Looking closely, Seyd first observed a monstrous
+squat figure in bas-relief, one of dozens which were interwoven into
+an intricate design; then, riding along, he saw frightfully distorted
+faces peering out from behind a green veil of creepers. Broad and fat,
+long and thin, some were stretched in a wide grin, others thrust out
+tongues in ribald mockery. Here the eyes of one were distorted in a
+painful squint. There a slant upturn of tight-drawn lids revealed the
+quintessence of priestly cruelty. Another was grossly lewd. Through
+anger, violence, lust, fear, the expressions ran the gamut of passion to
+its death in the cold face of the god whose enormous image formed the
+corner. The oblong ears, triangular eyes and nose, parallel lips, were
+such as a child loves to draw on a slate, yet on that enormous scale
+their mathematical lines somehow conveyed an impression of absolute
+force. The Sphynx-like calm of the face stirred Seyd's imagination with
+pictures of captives led to the Aztec altars. Even practical Billy was
+moved to remark:
+
+"Those old chaps couldn't have been very nice neighbors."
+
+"No; and they are the lineal ancestors of the neighbors we shall have
+presently." Later the thought was to recur under conditions that would
+lend it enormous force. He forgot it in the moment of utterance, saying,
+as he glanced at his watch: "We have been doing pretty well. At this
+rate we'll make the Barranca quite early."
+
+He had failed to allow, however, for the demon which, usually content
+with the complete possession of Paz and Luz, suddenly entered into the
+burros and sent them flying downhill through a grove of trees. Entering
+on one side fully loaded, they emerged at the other naked, and by the
+time they were rounded up and reloaded Seyd had to recast his schedule.
+
+"We'll be lucky if we make it now in daylight. We may have to camp at
+the top."
+
+Repeated in Spanish, the latter suggestion drew vigorous headshakes from
+both muleteers. Carlos made answer. "No, senor, at this time of the year
+one would perish of the cold, and there is an inn in the Barranca with
+the finest of accommodations. The trail? It is nothing! A peso for every
+time I have traveled it by night would buy me a rancho--and Paz and Luz,
+devils as they are, could travel it blindfold." And whether, as Billy
+suggested, they were afraid of missing their usual communion with the
+fleas in the inn stables, both he and Mattias began to hustle the mules
+with oaths, hissings, whip-crackings. They kept after them so hard that
+the train trotted out of a forest of upland pinon upon the rim of a
+great valley a full half hour before sundown.
+
+Though prepared by Seyd's descriptions for something unusually fine,
+Billy's blue eyes opened to the limit, and he sat silent upon his mule,
+staring, altogether bereft of his usual loquacity. From their feet the
+land broke suddenly and fell into purple depths from which dark hills
+uplifted ruddy peaks into the blaze of the setting sun. The Barranca
+was so deep, so vast in scale, that he grew dizzy in following with his
+eye the tiny zigzag of the trail down, down, till it was lost in blue
+haze through which even the giant ceibas and tall cedars showed like
+microscopic plants. Across the valley, miles away, naked mountains
+tossed and tumbled, seamed, scarred, gashed by slide and quake, sterile
+and desolate, as on the far day that some world convulsion raised them
+out of the sea.
+
+"Drunk! drunk!" Billy breathed, at last. "Nature gone on a jag. Drunken
+mountains loose in a crazy world. The whole earth is turned on edge.
+Hold me, Bob, before I fall in. How deep do you call this bit of a
+hole?"
+
+"About five thousand feet down to the floor. It falls off a thousand and
+more in a few miles to the coast. You see, we are still in touch with
+the old Pacific. Can't be more than thirty miles or so down to the sea."
+
+"The dear old pond. Isn't that pine on the other side?"
+
+"Sure. An American company is taking out millions of feet, a hundred or
+so miles farther up. That's a great old tree, and quite particular about
+the company it keeps. Look how sharply it draws the line along the
+slope, lifting its skirts from the contamination of the tropics. That
+spark of green in the far distance is sugar cane--two thousand acres of
+it on the General's hacienda of San Nicolas. And you see the gash over
+there, all yellow and green, about three thousand feet down from the
+top--that is us, senor, the _mina_ Santa Gertrudis. And that reminds
+me--we'll have to be moving if we are to make the inn before midnight.
+_Vaminos_, Carlos."
+
+But the muleteer shook his head. "After you, senor, for if these devils
+should take to running again, not in six months should we fish your
+baggage out of the canons."
+
+Leading down the trail, which zigzagged along the faces of a V-shaped
+wall, Seyd perceived, as he thought, the soundness of the argument, for
+at the first turn a stone from his mule's foot dropped five hundred feet
+plumb before rebounding into greater depths, and at no place did the
+width of the path allow an unnecessary inch for the swing of the packs.
+Deceived by the succession of stairways through which the trail dropped
+down to the thin thread that marked its course along the bottoms, Billy
+objected:
+
+"Three hours, you say? Looks to me as though we could make it in one."
+
+"Less than that--if your mule should happen to slip and take it
+sideways. Let me see--allowing a thousand feet to a bump, about fourteen
+seconds ought to distribute you nicely among the bottom trees. But if
+you elect to follow me around the eight or nine miles of trail you
+cannot see, it will take the full three hours."
+
+Even while he was speaking the ruddy fires on the valley hills were
+suddenly extinguished, only the stark peaks on the other side lifted
+like yellow torches in the last blaze. One by one these also went out,
+and another hour found them journeying in gloom that was intensified
+rather than lightened by the section of moon which achieved a precarious
+balance on the rim above. In darkness and silence that was broken only
+by the scrape of hoofs and rattle of displaced stones they followed
+down and down and down, until Billy presently came under a singular
+hallucination. Repeatedly he put out his hand to repel the rock wall
+that seemed to be animated with a desire to crowd him off into the
+canon, and because of this pardonable nervousness he endured a real
+trial that would have drawn a quick protest from Seyd--to wit, the
+senseless way in which the muleteers were driving their beasts on his
+heels. Twice he rapped a rough nose that tried to force its way in
+between him and the wall, and he breathed more easily when an easier
+grade permitted them to draw ahead on a gentle trot.
+
+Accustomed, on his part, to leave all to his beast, Seyd rode with a
+loose bridle, lost in thought, his mind busy with mining plans. And thus
+it was that when Paz suddenly stopped, snorting, at the end of a trot
+which had carried them well ahead of the train around a rock wall, he
+almost went over her head. Recovering quickly, he was about to drive in
+the spurs; and a man of slower intuitions would surely have done it.
+With him, however, action invariably preceded thought, from instincts
+almost as acute as those which had brought the mule to a stop.
+Dismounting, he stepped ahead. Then, to the horror of Billy, who heard
+the burros slipping and sliding as they came round the wall on a trot,
+his voice came back.
+
+"Hold on, there! A slide has carried away the trail!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Although he had always doubted the phenomenon, Billy's hair stood on
+end, and when, in the face of Seyd's shouts in Spanish to stop, the
+burros still came on he felt his cap move.
+
+"Billy!" Seyd's command rang out sharply. "Dismount and lie down. It's
+our only chance."
+
+In that tense moment, however, Mr. William Thornton, assayer and
+metallurgist, had done an amount of thinking that would have required
+many minutes of his leisure. He was already on the ground, and as he lay
+there, arms wrapped over the back of his head as a protection against
+the sharp hoofs that would presently grind his face in the dust,
+uncomfortable expectation gave birth to inspiration. As Seyd also braced
+himself for the shock there came the scratch of a match, and Billy's red
+head flashed out in relief against the belly of the leading burro as it
+upreared in fright at the blaze. In the same moment a second blunt head
+shoved itself like a wedge between the first burro and the wall, and as
+the gray body shot off sideways into the chasm Seyd saw first the others
+sliding in a desperate effort to stop, and behind them the mule whips
+swinging to drive them on. As under a flashlight it all flamed out and
+vanished.
+
+In the short time required for Billy to strike a second match Seyd's
+mind registered an astonishing number of impressions. A hoarse yell,
+a sudden scurry of departing hoofs, and Billy's hysterical profanity
+formed merely the background of a sequence that flashed back over the
+events of the day. The scraps of muleteers' talk the night before, the
+runaway, and other minor delays, the drivers' refusal to camp on the
+rim, their insistence that he and Billy should take the lead, all fused
+in a belief which he expressed as the second match flaring up showed the
+trail empty of life between themselves and the next turn.
+
+"It's a frame-up! They knew of the slide. They had it fixed to run us
+off in the dark."
+
+"But where are they now?" Billy gazed down into the dark void. "Surely
+they didn't all go over."
+
+"No such luck. The burros bolted back on them, and they just legged it
+out of the way. Listen!" A scurry of hoofs sounded on the level above.
+"There they go, and it's up to us to keep them going. Back your mule up
+and turn. If we don't give them the run of their lives we'll deserve all
+they tried to give us."
+
+And run they did. Overtaking the burros just as they began to slow down,
+Seyd slipped ahead, struck a match close to the tail of the last, and
+so precipitated the cavalcade once more upon the sweating drivers.
+Whereafter, they took turns and kept the frightened beasts on a
+breathless trot up the heartbreaking grades. Under the flare of a match
+they sometimes caught a glimpse of the muleteers shuffling ahead on a
+tired run. Occasionally their sobbing breath rose over the scrape of the
+hoofs. But first one riding, then the other, they hustled them on
+without mercy till the train opened at last upon the plateau above.
+
+"Now, then! Run them down!" Seyd shouted; but as he swung his mule out
+to go by the burros he almost ran into a horseman who had just reined
+his beast to one side of the trail.
+
+"It is you, senor?"
+
+Here on the top the light of the stars helped out the weak moon, and,
+though the man's face was in shadow, Seyd recognized the upright,
+graceful figure. "Come to see if the job is done." He thought it while
+answering aloud, "As you perceive, senor."
+
+"Not until long after you left did I hear of the break in the trail, and
+I have ridden hard--used up one horse and half killed this poor beast.
+But no matter so long as I am in time."
+
+"Hypocrite!" Seyd thought again. A little nonplussed, however, by the
+tone of assurance, he gave his thought lighter expression. "You would
+not have been if these fellows had had their way."
+
+"_Caramba_, senor! Why?"
+
+If his surprise were assumed it was certainly remarkably well done.
+While Seyd was telling of their narrow escape he sat his horse, silent
+but attentive. With the last word he burst into a fury of action.
+Uttering a Spanish oath, he drove in the spurs and rode his rearing
+horse straight at the mule-drivers, who had turned on Billy with drawn
+knives, lashing them with his heavy quirt over face, head, shoulders.
+Five minutes later his whip was still cutting the air with a shrill
+whistle, and, richly as the fellows deserved it, Seyd and Billy
+shuddered at the pitiless flogging. Strangest to them of all, the men
+endured this without attempt at flight or resistance. They stood, their
+arms shielding their faces, whimpering like beaten hounds.
+
+It was their abject submissiveness that injected a touch of doubt into
+Billy's comment. "It looks, after all, as though they had done it
+themselves."
+
+Seyd shrugged. "Perhaps; in any case we have no proof."
+
+"Now, blind swine, that will serve for a while!" Sebastien's cold voice
+broke in. "Off with you and build a fire, then stake out the mules."
+Seyd's suspicion gave a little more before his quiet assurance. "You
+will have to stay here till morning, senors, for it is many miles along
+the rim to the other trail. Unfortunately, it was your supply mule that
+went into the canon, so you must needs go hungry. However, we have a
+proverb, 'A warm fire helps the empty belly,' and to-morrow you will be
+able to recover your goods."
+
+Neither did his expression, as presently revealed by the fire, offer
+evidence for doubt. As he stood looking down at the blaze Seyd was
+vividly reminded of the Aztec god, for its cold stone face was not more
+inscrutable than this quiet brown mask. Its inscrutability provoked him
+to ask a sudden question.
+
+"Did I not see you at the hotel last night?"
+
+But the sudden challenge produced only an indifferent shrug. "Perhaps. I
+was there."
+
+He did look up at Billy's vigorous comment on his answer as translated
+by Seyd: "Then why didn't he show himself this morning? Goodness knows
+we left late enough."
+
+He even asked, "What does he say?" And the sense having been softened in
+translation to an expression of mild wonder at his non-appearance, he
+quietly replied, "I do not doubt that the senor's departure was fraught
+with enormous significance for the country at large, but not being
+informed of it, there was no reason for me to cut my sleep."
+
+Though the smile which marked his appreciation of the blush that drowned
+out Billy's freckles when Seyd translated was so slight as to be almost
+imperceptible, it yet increased his anger. "The dago!" he growled. "I'd
+punch his head for five cents Mex. The gall of him! Standing there
+poking fun at us after we have just missed death at the hands of his
+brigands. And you really think that he planned it all?"
+
+"Looks like it. He chose the men, the trail. Was seen last night at the
+hotel. Appears now at the psychological moment. Any jury would--"
+
+"--Pronounce me guilty. They would be mistaken, sir."
+
+Utterly confounded at the interruption which was delivered in fluent
+English--so surprised, indeed, that Billy glanced around to make sure
+that nobody else had spoken--they stared at him across the fire in red
+confusion. When Seyd at last found his tongue he could only stammer the
+obvious question, "You speak English?"
+
+"As you perceive, sir." As he returned Seyd his phrase of a few minutes
+before not even a twinkle betrayed his knowledge of their ridiculous
+situation.
+
+Nor was one needed to increase Billy's anger. "Then why don't you speak
+it?" he roughly blurted.
+
+Ignoring the question, the man went on addressing Seyd. "In accordance
+with the foolish custom that aims to make poor foreigners out of good
+Mexicans I received my education at a boarding-school in the city of
+Manchester, England."
+
+_Manchester, England!_ Center of the Lancashire cotton trade, inner
+shrine of commerce! Commercial essence exuded from the very name; it
+smelled to heaven of tin and rosin. Imagination faltered, nay, refused
+even to attempt to establish a relation between its prosiness and this
+romantic figure with a face cast in the image of the stone gods! Above
+all, a Manchester boarding-school! Seyd almost gasped. For to his
+knowledge of "fags" and "bullies," "form rows," "cribs and crams," and
+education by external application, gained by the perusal of _Tom Brown's
+School Days_, he had added the later, savagely impish realism of
+Kipling's _Stalky_.
+
+And he knew what a living hell the life must have been to a high-strung
+Mexican youth. "Well!" he breathed at last. "I don't envy you the
+experience. I'm told that the English schoolboy isn't particularly
+sensitive or nice in his--his treatment of--"
+
+"--Half-castes. Don't avoid the word. We Mexicans are proud of our Aztec
+blood. They did not love me, but I tell you, senor, that their dislike
+for me was as milk to fire compared with mine for them, and they left me
+alone after a couple had felt my knife. How I hated them--the conceited
+lackeys of masters as much as the bullocks of boys and their ox-like
+fathers. How they lectured me, the lackeys, for my 'cowardice' in using
+a knife--the cowardice of one small boy pitted against a hundred impish
+devils. But they were never able to blind me with their fustian ideals.
+Even then I could see through their sham morality, hypocritical
+humanity, insufferable conceit.
+
+"'England is the workshop of the world!' They dinned it into us. In
+furtherance of the ideal they fouled the air with coal smoke, herded
+their men and women from the open farms into slums and brothels, and as
+they have done by their own so would they like to do for the world--make
+it one huge factory set in a slum." He had spoken all through with great
+heat. Glancing for the first time at Billy, he finished, more quietly,
+"That is why I do not speak English--because I hate both them and their
+tongue."
+
+Now Billy's conception of John Bull and his island had been principally
+formed on the perfervid "tail-twisting" of the common-school histories,
+and Seyd, whose views had been corrected by wider reading, had to smile
+at his emphatic indorsement. "I'm with you. No English, please, in
+mine."
+
+Even Sebastien smiled. "No, you are American--from our viewpoint, much
+worse. Just as sordid as the stupid English, you are quicker-witted,
+therefore more to be feared, and you stand forever at our gates, ready
+to force your commerce and ideas upon us. But much as we hate you, loath
+as we are to have you come among us, I would still have you to believe
+that this business was accidental. I, at least, did not plan your
+death."
+
+"Then you do not speak for them?" Seyd glanced at the muleteers, now
+crouching over a second small fire they had built for themselves.
+
+"_Quien sabe?_" Sebastien shrugged his shoulders. "They would think
+little of it. But what can you do? You have no proof. And I will see to
+it that they play you no more tricks."
+
+Walking over, he kicked first one, then the other, in the small of the
+back. "Up, swine!" And while they stood shivering before them he gave
+them their orders--first to recover the baggage, then to convey the
+senors in safety to their mine. "Fail me in one thing," he concluded,
+with a frightful threat, "and I will pluck out your eyes and turn you
+out on the road."
+
+Turning his back on them, he walked over to the horses, and had mounted
+before Seyd realized his intent. "You are not going?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, it is only five leagues back to the hacienda where I left my own
+horse."
+
+"First let me thank you."
+
+Not seeing the touch of the spur that had caused the beast to rear
+suddenly, he imagined it shied at his outstretched hand. While curbing
+its plungings the other answered: "It is nothing. You owe me nothing. I
+came to repair a mistake and arrived too late. _Adios!_" And swinging
+the fighting beast out of the firelight into the dusk he galloped off,
+leaving Seyd standing with hand outstretched.
+
+Returning to the fire, he passed close to the muleteers, whose faces,
+looking after him, expressed a curious mixture of dislike, suspicion,
+fear. Observing it, Billy laughed. "Our friend's football practice over
+there rather inclines me to favor his theories. I've seen a few
+walking-delegates in my time that I'd like to place under him. I'll bet
+you there are no labor troubles in his cosmos. Fancy a system that
+trains men to put your enemies away without so much as a wink. I call it
+ideal."
+
+"Yes." Seyd laughed. "I have so much respect for it that I propose to
+keep watch and watch on the off chance of an attempt on our throats. If
+you'll just settle down for a snooze I'll take the first trick."
+
+His laughter, however, covered feeling that had been deeply stirred by
+the events of the day. After Billy had curled up close to the fire his
+glance went over to the muleteers, who lay, heads muffled in their
+scarlet serapes, beside their own fire. Their very quiet stimulated
+thoughts which passed back through the medievalism of the "conquest" and
+the savagery of the Aztecs to the dim time that saw the erection of the
+temple they had passed that day. Stimulated by the distant roar of
+waters, the complaint of the wind in the trees, and the voices of night
+that rose out of the valley's black void, his fancies grew and possessed
+him until he saw his own civilization as a flash in the dark space of
+the ages. So absorbed was he that Billy's interruption came as a
+surprise.
+
+"I've slept four hours. Time for your snooze."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+"Phe-ew!" Looking up from a treatise on bricklaying as applied to
+the building of furnaces, Billy pitched a stone at Seyd, who was
+experimenting with a batch of lime fresh drawn from a kiln of their own
+burning. "I'd always imagined bricklaying to be a mere matter of plumb
+and trowel, but this darned craft has more crinkles to it than the
+differential calculus. This fellow makes me dizzy with his talk of ties
+and courses, flues, draughts, cornering, slopes, and arches."
+
+Leaning on his hoe, Seyd wiped his wet brow. "I'm finding out a few
+things myself. I'd always sort of envied a hod-carrier. But now I know
+that the humble 'mort' puts more foot-pounds of energy into his work
+than the average horse. As a remedy for dizziness caused by overstudy,
+mixing mortar has no equal. Come and spell me with this hoe."
+
+"'And the last state of that man was worse than the first,'" Billy
+groaned. "_Can't_ we hire a single solitary peon, Seyd?"
+
+More eloquently than words, Seyd's shrug testified to the sullen boycott
+which had been maintained against them for the past three weeks. On the
+morning of their arrival at the mine, while the fear of Sebastien Rocha
+still lay heavy upon him, Carlos had been half bullied, half persuaded
+into the sale of Paz and Luz at a price which raised him almost
+to the status of a ranchero. But that single transaction summed up
+their dealings with the natives. No man had answered their call for
+laborers at wages which must have appeared as wealth to a peon. The
+charcoal-burners who drove their burros past the mine every day returned
+to their greetings either muttered curses or black stares. They were as
+stubborn in their cold obstinacy as the face of the temple god. Indeed,
+in these days the stony face of the image had become inseparably
+associated in Seyd's mind with the determined opposition that had routed
+his predecessors and now aimed to oust him. He saw it even in the soft,
+round faces of the children who peeped at him from the doorways of cane
+huts, a somber look, centuries old in its stubborn dullness.
+
+Not that he and Billy were in the least discouraged. Once convinced that
+labor was not to be obtained, they had stripped and pitched in. In one
+month they rebuilt the adobe dwelling which had been somewhat shattered
+by the Dutchman's hurried exit, dug a lime kiln, and hauled the wood and
+stone for the first burning. They had completed the laying out of the
+smelter foundation, filling in odd moments by picking for the first
+charge the choicest ore from the hundreds of tons that the Englishmen
+had unwisely mined before they ran head-on into the hostile combination
+of freights and prices.
+
+This last had been an inspiriting labor, for so rich were the values
+which the ore carried that after a trial assay Billy had danced all over
+the place beating an old pan. It is doubtful whether young men ever had
+better prospects; and so, knowing that Billy's present pessimism arose
+from a strong disinclination for physical labor in the hot sun, Seyd
+merely grinned. Sitting down on a pile of brick, he mopped his face and
+stared out over the valley.
+
+Situated, as the mine was, on a wide bench which gave pause to the
+earth's dizzy plunge from the rim three thousand feet above, Seyd sat
+at the meeting-place of temperate and tropic zones. A hundred feet
+below--just where they had climbed the stiff trail out of the jungle
+that flooded the valley with its fecund life--a group of cocoanut palms
+stood disputing the downward rush of the pine, and all along the bench
+pinon and copal, upland growths, shouldered cedars and ceibas, the
+tropical giants. While these battled above for light and room there
+came, writhing snake-like up from the tropics, creepers and climbers,
+vines and twining plants, to engage the ferns and bracken, the pine's
+green allies. A plague of orchids here attacked the copal, wreathing
+trunk and limb in sickly flame. The bracken there overswept the riotous
+tropical life. All along the borderland the battle raged, here following
+a charge of the pine down a cool ravine, there mounting with the tropic
+growths to a sunlit slope. But in the valley below the tropics ruled
+clear down to the brilliant green of the San Nicolas cane fields.
+
+"By the way"--Seyd spoke as his eye fell on these--"Don Luis is back
+from Mexico City. The hunchbacked charcoal-burner told me as he went
+past this morning."
+
+"The deuce he did!" Of all the black looks that came their way that of
+the cripple was the most vindictive. "You must have him hypnotized."
+
+"You wouldn't think so if you had heard his accent. 'El General is
+again at San Nicolas,' just as though he were sentencing me to hang.
+Nevertheless, the news comes pat. I think it would be good policy for me
+to run down and pay the denunciation taxes before we begin work on the
+smelter. No, I don't apprehend any trouble. Your Mexican hasn't much
+stomach for litigation, and no doubt the old fellow feels quite safe in
+his pull with the metals companies and railroads. But while he is still
+in the mind we had better pay the money and complete title. If he once
+gets wind of the smelter--"
+
+"Just so." Billy threw down the hoe. "While you dress I'll saddle up a
+mule--if you will please say to which demon you prefer to intrust your
+precious neck. Light began the day by kicking me through the side of
+the stable. She needs chastening. But then Peace dined on my arm
+yesterday. It's Peace for yours, and I only hope you get it."
+
+"Hum!" he coughed when, half an hour later, Seyd emerged shaved, bathed,
+and clad in immaculate white. "Is this magnificence altogether for el
+General, or did Caliban drop some word of our niece? Really, old chap,
+you look fine. If I were the senorita I'd go for you myself."
+
+Though Seyd laughed, yet the instant he passed out of sight he fell
+into frowning thought which was evidently related to the letter he
+pulled out and reread while he rode down the steep grades. Written in a
+characterless round hand, it covered so many pages that he was halfway
+down before, after tearing it in shreds, he tossed it to the winds. Its
+destruction, however, did not seem to change his mood. He let Peace
+take her own way until, having slipped, slid, and tobogganed on tense
+haunches down the last grade, she felt able to assert her individuality
+by attempting to rub him off against a tree. Next she attempted the
+immolation of a fat brown baby that was rolling with a nest of young
+pigs in the dust outside a hut; and thereafter her performances were so
+varied that he was simply compelled to take some notice of the sights
+and sounds of the trail.
+
+Not the least remarkable were the frequent and familiar scowls of the
+people he met. Various in expression, they ranged between the copious
+curses of the fat senora whose pacing-mule was driven by Peace off
+the trail, and the snarling malice of occasional muleteers; but,
+undisturbed, he pursued his inquiries for laborers at every chance.
+
+"No, senor, we do not desire work."
+
+The stereotyped answer merely stimulated the quiet persistence which
+formed the basis of his character, and he continued to ask at the
+village which raised graceful palm roofs out of a jungle clearing, at
+the ranchos which now began to cover the valley with a green checker
+of maize fields, and at scattered huts, half hidden by the rich foliage
+of palms and bananas. It was while he was questioning a peon who was
+hulling rice with a wooden pole and churn arrangement that the subdued
+hostility broke out in open demonstration.
+
+The trail here ran between a fence of split poles, which inclosed the
+peon's corn and frijoles, and the steep bank of a dry creek bed, so that
+only a few feet leeway was left for the train of burros which came
+trotting out of the jungle behind him. In single file they could have
+passed, but looking around he saw they were coming three abreast.
+
+Had he chosen, there was time to make the end of the fence. But he
+had seen behind the train the sparkling, beady eyes of Caliban, the
+hunchback, and the dark grins of two of his fellows. Flushing with
+quick anger, he backed Peace against the fence, leaned forward over her
+neck, and slashed with his whip at the leading beasts. Checked by this,
+they would have fallen back to single file but for the whips behind that
+bit out hair and hide and drove them on in a huddled mass.
+
+It seemed for a few seconds that he would be crushed. That he escaped
+injury was simply due to the hereditary hate between the mule and the
+ass which suddenly turned Peace into a raging fiend. While her chisel
+teeth slit ragged hides her other and busier end beat a devil's tattoo
+on resounding ribs and filled the air with flying charcoal. Yet even her
+demoniac energies had their limitations. If she held the ground for
+herself and master she could not preserve the inviolability of his white
+trousers, which emerged sadly smudged from the fray. It is a pity she
+could not. Little things always cause the greatest trouble, and but for
+the smudges the incident would probably have closed with Seyd's
+challenge:
+
+"Can't you be content with half the road?"
+
+His patience even survived their insolent grins. Not until the hunchback
+in passing emitted a hoarse chuckle as he surveyed the smudges did
+Seyd's temper burst its bonds. Swinging his whip then with all his
+might, he laid it across the crooked shoulders once, twice, thrice,
+before the fellow sprang, snarling, out of reach. The others, who had
+already passed, came leaping back at his cry, knives flashing as they
+ran, and though they stopped under the sudden frown of a Colt's
+automatic, they did not retire, but stood, fingering their knives,
+muttering curses.
+
+A little sorry on his part for the anger which had turned the sullen
+hostility into open feud, Seyd faced them, puzzled just what to do. It
+was too late to give way, for that would expose him to future insult.
+Yet if, taking the initiative, he should happen to kill a man, he knew
+enough of the quality of justice as dealt out by the Mexican courts to
+realize the danger.
+
+While he debated, the puzzle was almost solved by the peon rice-huller,
+who came stealing up from behind the fence. Not until the man had swung
+his heavy pestle and was tiptoeing to his blow did Seyd divine the
+reason for the glances that were passing behind him. Looking quickly,
+he caught the glint of polished hardwood in the tail of his eye; then,
+without a pause for thought, he dropped flat on the rump of the mule,
+and not a second too soon, for, raising the hair on his brow as it
+passed, the club smashed down through the top rail of the fence. In
+falling backward his weight on the bridle brought Peace scurrying a few
+paces to the rear. When he snapped upright again the fourth enemy was
+also under his gun.
+
+But what to do? The puzzle still remained--to be solved by another, for
+just then came a sudden beat of hoofs, and from behind a bamboo thicket
+galloped first the Siberian wolf hound, then the girl he had met at the
+train.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+So silently did the girl come that the charcoal-burners were forced to
+jump aside, and, springing in the wrong direction, the hunchback was
+bowled over by the beast of the _mozo_ who rode at her back.
+
+"Why, senor!" she exclaimed, reining in. Then taking in the knives,
+pistol, broken club, she asked, "They attacked you? Tomas!"
+
+Her Spanish was too rapid for Seyd's ear, but it was easy to gather its
+tenor from the results. With a certain complaisance Seyd looked on while
+his enemies scattered on a run that was diversified by uncouth leaps as
+the _mozo's_ whip bit on tender places.
+
+"He struck at you?" She broke in on the rice-huller's voluble plea that
+never, _never_ would he have raised a finger against the senor had he
+known him for a friend of hers! "Then he, too, shall be flogged."
+
+"I would not wish--" Seyd began.
+
+But she interrupted him: "You were going toward San Nicolas? Then I
+shall turn and ride with you." Anticipating his protest, she added,
+"I had already ridden beyond my usual distance."
+
+Very willingly he fell in at her side, and they rode on till they met
+the _mozo_ returning, hot and flushed, from the pursuit. He was keen
+as a blooded hound; it required only her backward nod to send him
+darting along the trail, and just about the time they overtook the
+charcoal-burners a sudden yelling in their rear told that the account
+of the rice-huller was in course of settlement.
+
+Passing his late enemies, Seyd could not but wonder at their
+transformation. With the exception of the hunchback, in whose beady eyes
+still lurked subdued ferocity, all were sobbing, and even he broke into
+deprecatory whinings. Having read his Prescott, Seyd knew something of
+the rigid Aztec caste systems from which Mexican peonage was derived.
+Now, viewing their abjectness, he was able to apprehend, almost with the
+vividness of experience, the ages of unspeakable cruelty that had given
+birth to their fear. But that which astonished him still more was the
+indifference with which the girl had ordered the flogging.
+
+Such glimpses of her face as he was able to steal while they rode
+did not aid him much. It was impossible to imagine anything more
+typically modern than the delicately chiseled features lit with a vivid
+intelligence which seemed to pulse and glow in the soft shadow beneath
+her hat. And when from her face his glance fell to her smart riding-suit
+of tan linen he was completely at sea.
+
+Curiosity dictated his comment: "Your justice is certainly swift. Really
+I am afraid that I was the aggressor. At least I struck first."
+
+"But not without cause." She glanced at his smudged clothes. "Tell me
+about it." And when he had finished she commented: "Just as I thought.
+And these are dangerous men. They would have killed you without a qualm.
+In the days that Don Sebastien was clearing the country of bandits he
+counted that hunchback one of his best men."
+
+"Yet he whined like a puppy under your man's whip."
+
+Smiling at his wonder, she went on to state the very terms of his
+puzzle. "You do not know them--the combination of ferocity and
+subservience that goes with their blood. In the old days he who raised
+his hand against the superior caste was put to death by torture, and,
+though, thank God, those wicked days are past, the effect remains. They
+are obedient, usually, as trained hounds, but just as dangerous to a
+stranger. If I had not ordered them flogged they would have taken it as
+license to kill you at their leisure."
+
+"Now I realize the depth of my obligation."
+
+He spoke a little dryly, and she leaped to his meaning with a quickness
+that greatly advanced her in his secret classification. "I have hurt
+your pride. You will pardon me. I had forgotten the unconquerable valor
+of the gringos."
+
+"Oh, come!" he pleaded.
+
+She stopped laughing. "Really, I did not doubt your courage. But do not
+imagine for one moment that they would attack you again in the open. A
+knife in the dark, a shot from a bush, that is their method, and if you
+should happen to kill one, even in self defense, gringos are not so well
+beloved in Guerrero but that some one would be found to swear it a
+murder. Be advised, and go carefully."
+
+"I surely will." He was going on to thank her when she cut him off with
+the usual "It is nothing." Whereupon, respect for her intuition was
+added to the classification which was beginning to bewilder him by its
+scope and variety.
+
+In fact, he could not look her way nor could she speak without some
+physical trait or mental quality being added to the catalogue. Now it
+was the quivering sensitiveness of her mouth, an unsuspected archness,
+the astonishing range of feeling revealed by her large dark eyes.
+Looking down upon the charcoal-burners, they had gleamed like black
+diamonds; in talking, their soft glow waxed and waned. Sometimes--but
+this was omitted from the classification because it only occurred when
+his head was turned--a merry twinkle illumined a furtive smile. Taken in
+all its play and sparkle, her face expressed a lively sensibility
+altogether foreign to his experience of women.
+
+After a short silence she took up the subject again. "But I am giving
+you a terrible impression of our people. It is only in moments of
+passion that the old Aztec crops out. At other times they are kind,
+pleasant, generous. Neither are we the cruel taskmasters that some
+foreign books and papers portray us. You would not believe how angry
+they make me--the angrier because I have a strain of your blood in my
+own veins. My grandfather, you know, was Irish. It was from him I
+learned your speech."
+
+The last bit of information was almost superfluous, for from no other
+source could she have obtained the pure lilting quality that makes the
+Dublin speech the finest English in the world. To it she had added an
+individual charm, the measured cadence and soft accent of her native
+Spanish, delivered in a low contralto that had in it a little break. Her
+laugh punctuated its flow as she came to her conclusion.
+
+"But you will soon be able to see for yourself what terrible people we
+are."
+
+He obtained one glimpse within the next mile. He had already noted the
+passing of the last wild jungle. From fields of maize which alternated
+with sunburned fields of _maguey_ they now rode into an avenue that led
+on through green cane. Rising far above their heads, the cane marched
+with them for a half mile, then suddenly opened out around a primitive
+wooden sugar mill. Under the thatched roof of an open hut half-nude
+women were stirring boiling syrup in open pans, and at the sight of
+Francesca one of them came running out to the trail.
+
+"Her baby is to be christened next Sunday," the girl told him as they
+rode on. "She was breaking her heart because she had no robe. But now
+she is happy, for I have promised to ask the good _mama_ to lend her
+mine, which she has treasured all these years."
+
+Soon afterward as they turned out of the cane into a new planting they
+almost ran down her uncle, who had come out to inspect the work. Only
+his quick use of the spur averted a collision, and as his own spirited
+roan sprang sideways Seyd noted with admiration that despite his bulk
+and age horse and man moved as one. If surprised at the sight of his
+niece in such company, the old man did not reveal it by so much as the
+lift of a brow. It was difficult even to perceive the twinkle in his
+eyes that lightened his chiding.
+
+"_Ola_, Francesca! If there be no respect for thy own pretty neck,
+at least have pity on my old bones. It is you, senor? Welcome to San
+Nicolas."
+
+Neither did Seyd's explanation of his business abate his brown
+impassivity. If assumed, his ponderous effort at recollection was
+wonderfully realistic. "Ah, _si_! Santa Gertrudis? If I remember aright,
+it was denounced before. Yes, yes, by several--but they had no good
+fortune. Still, you may fare better. Paulo, the administrador, will
+attend to the business."
+
+With a wave of the hand, courteous in its very indifference, he put the
+matter out of his province and displayed no further interest until the
+girl told of the attack on Seyd. Then he glanced up quickly from under
+frowning brows.
+
+"You had them whipped? _Bueno!_ The rascals must be taught not to molest
+travelers. And now we shall ride on that the senor may break his fast.
+And thou, too, wicked one, will be late. As thou knowest, it is the only
+fault the good mother sees in thee."
+
+"Would that it totaled my sins," she laughed. "To escape another black
+mark I shall have to gallop. _Ola!_ for a race!"
+
+As from a light touch of the spur her beast launched out and away, the
+roan reared and tried to follow, and while he curbed it back to a walk
+the old man's heavy face lit up with pleasure. "She rides well. I have
+not a vaquero with a better seat. But go thou, Tomas, lest she come to
+a harm. And you, senor, will follow?"
+
+With a vivid picture of the figure Peace would cut in a race occupying
+the forefront of his mind it did not take Seyd long to choose. After the
+girl had passed from sight behind a clump of tamarinds he took note, as
+they rode along, of the peons who were laying the field out in shallow
+ditches wherein others were planting long shoots of seed cane. To his
+practical engineer's eye the hand-digging seemed so slow and laborious
+that he could not refrain from a comment.
+
+"It seems to me that a good steel plow would do the work much cheaper."
+
+"Cheaper? Perhaps." After a heavy pause, during which he took secret
+note of Seyd out of the corner of his eye, the old man went on: "To
+do a thing at less cost in labor and time seems to be the only thing
+that you Yankees consider. But cheapness is sometimes dearly purchased.
+Come! Suppose that I put myself under the seven devils of haste that
+continually drive you. What would become of these, my people? Who would
+employ them? It is true that theirs is not a great wage--perhaps, after
+all, totals less than the cost of your steel plow and a capable man to
+run it. We pay only three and a half cents for each ditch, in our
+currency, and a man must dig twelve a day. If he digs less he gets
+nothing.
+
+"That does not seem just to you?" He read Seyd's surprise. "It would if
+you knew them. Grown children without responsibility or sense of duty
+are they. If left free to come and go, they would dig one, two, three
+ditches, enough and no more than would supply them with _cigarros_ and
+_aguardiente_, and our work would never be done. As it is, they dig the
+full twelve, and have money for other necessities.
+
+"The wage seems small?" Again he read Seyd's mind. "Yet it is all that
+we can afford, nor does it have to cover the cost of living. Each man
+has his patch of maize and frijoles, and a run for his chickens and
+pigs. Then the river teems with fish, the jungle with small game. His
+wage goes only for drink and _cigarros_, or, if there be sufficient
+left over, to buy a dress for his woman. They are perfectly content."
+Slightly lifting his heavy brows, he finished, looking straight at Seyd:
+"I am an old Mexican hacendado, yet I have traveled in your country and
+Europe. Tell me, senor, can as much be said of your poor?"
+
+Now, in preparing a thesis for one of his social-science courses, Seyd
+had studied the wage scale of the cotton industry, and so knew that,
+ridiculously small as this peon wage appeared at the first glance, it
+actually exceeded that paid to women and children in Southern cotton
+factories. In their case, moreover, the pittance had to meet every
+expense.
+
+He did not hesitate to answer. "I should say that your peons were better
+off, providing the conditions, as you state them, are general."
+
+"And they are, senor, except in the south tropics, where any kind of
+labor is murder. But here? It is as you see; and why disturb it by the
+introduction of Yankee methods?"
+
+Pausing, he looked again at Seyd, and whether through secret pleasure at
+his concession or because he merely enjoyed the pleasure of speaking out
+that which would have been dangerous if let fall in the presence of a
+countryman, he presently went on: "Therefore it is that I do not stand
+with Porfirio Diaz in his commercial policies. He is a great man. Who
+should know it better than I that fought with or against him in a dozen
+campaigns. And he has given us peace--thirty years of slow, warm peace.
+Yet sometimes I question its value. In the old time, to be sure, we cut
+each other's throats on occasion. In the mean time we were warmer
+friends. And war prevented the land from being swamped by the millions
+that overrun your older countries, the teeming millions that will
+presently swarm like the locusts over your own United States. As I say,
+senor, I am only an old Mexican hacendado, but I have looked upon it all
+and seen that where war breeds men, civilization produces only mice. If
+I be allowed my choice give me the bright sword of war in preference to
+the starvation and pestilence that thins out your poor."
+
+Concluding, he looked down, interrogatively, as though expecting a
+contradiction. But though, after all, his argument was merely a
+restatement of the time-worn Malthusianism, coming out of the mouth of
+one who had strenuously applied it during forty years of internecine
+war, it carried force. Maintaining silence, Seyd stole occasional
+glances at the massive brown face and the heavy figure moving in stately
+rhythm with the slow trot of his horse, while his memory flashed over
+tale after tale that Peters, the station agent, had told him when he was
+out the other day to the railroad--tales of bravery, hardy adventures,
+all performed amidst the inconceivable cruelties of the revolutionary
+wars. Even had he been certain that the eventual peopling of the earth's
+vacant places would not force a return to at least a revised
+Malthusianism, it was not for his youth to match theories with age. When
+he did speak it was on another subject.
+
+"I have been riding all morning on your land. I suppose it extends as
+far in the other direction?"
+
+"A trifle." A deprecatory wave of the strong brown hand lent emphasis to
+the phrase. "A trifle, senor, by comparison with the original grant to
+our ancestor from Cortes. 'From the rim of the Barranca de Guerrero on
+both sides, and as far up and down from a given point as a man may
+ride in a day,' so the deed ran. Being shrewd as he was valiant, my
+forefather had his Indians blaze a trail in both directions before he
+essayed the running. A hundred and fifty miles he made of it when he
+started--not bad riding without a trail. But it is mostly gone by family
+division, or it has been forfeited by those who threw in their luck on
+the wrong side of a revolution. Now is there left only a paltry hundred
+or so thousands of acres--and this!"
+
+For the first time pronounced feeling made itself felt through his
+massive reserve, and looking over the view that had suddenly opened,
+Seyd did not wonder at the note of pride. After leaving the cane they
+had plunged through green skirts of willow to the river that split the
+wide valley in equal halves, and from the shallow ford they now rode
+out on a grassy plateau that ran for miles along low lateral hills.
+Dotted with tamarinds, banyans, and the tall ceibas which held huge
+leafy umbrellas over panting cattle, it formed a perfect foreground for
+the hacienda, whose chrome-yellow buildings lay like a band of sunlight
+along the foot of the hill. The thick adobe walls that bound stables,
+cottages, and outbuildings into a great square gave the impression of a
+fortified town, castled by the house, which rose tier on tier up the
+face of the hill.
+
+When they rode through the great gateway of the lower courtyard the
+interior view proved equally arresting. Mounting after Don Luis up
+successive flights of stone steps, they came to the upper courtyard,
+wherein was concentrated every element of tropical beauty--wide
+corridors, massive chrome pillars, time-stained arches, luxurious
+foliage. From the tiled roof above a vine poured in cataracts of living
+green so dense that only vigorous pruning had kept it from shutting off
+all light from the rooms behind. Left alone, it would quickly have
+smothered out the palms, orchids, rare tropical plants that made of the
+courtyard a vivid garden.
+
+"They call it the _sin verguenza_." While he was admiring the creeper
+Francesca had joined them from behind. "Shameless, you know, for it
+climbs 'upstairs, downstairs,' nor respects even the privacy of 'my
+lady's chamber.' Thanks to the good legs of my beast, I escaped a
+scolding. Sit here where the vines do not obstruct the view."
+
+If Seyd had been told a few minutes before that anything could have
+become her more than the tan riding-suit he would have refused to
+believe. But now by the evidence of his own eyes he was forced to admit
+the added charm of a simple batiste, whose fluffy whiteness accentuated
+her girlishness. The mad gallop had toned her usual clear pallor with a
+touch of color, and as she looked down, pinning a flower on her breast,
+he noted the perfect curve of her head.
+
+"Room for a good brain there," he thought, while answering her
+observation. "It is beautiful. But don't you find it a little dull
+here--after Mexico City?"
+
+"No." She shook her head with vigor. "Of course, I like the balls
+and parties, yet I am always glad to return to my horses and dogs
+and--though it is wicked to put them in the same category--my babies.
+There are always at least three mothers impatiently awaiting my return
+to consult me upon names. I am godmother to no less than seven small
+Francescas."
+
+"I never should have thought it. You must have begun--"
+
+"--Very young? Yes, I was only fifteen, so my first godchild is now
+seven. That reminds me--she is waiting below to repeat her catechism.
+There is just time--if you would like it."
+
+"I would be delighted. So the position is not without its duties?"
+
+"I should think not." Her eyes lit with a touch of indignation. "I hold
+the baby at the christening after helping to make the robe. When they
+are big enough I teach them their catechism. You could not imagine the
+weight of my responsibilities, and I believe that I am much more
+concerned for their behavior than their mothers. If any of them were to
+do anything really wicked"--her little shudder was genuine--"I should
+feel dreadfully ashamed. But they are really very good--as you shall
+judge for yourself. Francesca!" As, with a soft patter of chubby feet, a
+small girl emerged from a far corner, she added with archness that was
+chastened by real concern, "Now you must not dare to say that she isn't
+perfect."
+
+In one sense the caution was needed. After a brave answer to the
+question "Who is thy Creator, Francesca?" the child displayed a slight
+uncertainty as to the origin of light, added a week or two to the "days
+of creation," and became hopelessly mixed as to the specific quantities
+of the "Trinity"--wherein, after all, she was no worse than the
+theologians who have burned each other up, in both senses, in furious
+disputes over the same question. But better, far better than letter
+perfection, was the simple awe of the small brown face and the devotion
+of the lisping voice which followed the tutor's gentle prompting.
+
+"Fine! fine!" Seyd applauded a last valorous attack on the Ten
+Commandments, and the small scholar ran off clutching a silver coin,
+just so much the richer for his heretical presence. As he rose to follow
+his hostess inside he added, "If all the Francescas are equal to sample,
+the next generation of San Nicolas husbands will undoubtedly rise up and
+call you blessed."
+
+"Now you are laughing at me," she protested. "Though that might be truly
+said of my mother. She is a saint for good works. But come, or I shall
+yet earn my scolding. And let me warn you to take care of your heart.
+All of the _caballeros_ fall in love with mother."
+
+It was quite believable. While seated in the dining-room, a vaulted
+chamber cool as a crypt in spite of the sunblaze outside, a room which
+would have seated an army of retainers, he observed the senora with the
+satisfaction that even a stranger may feel in the promise a handsome
+mother holds out to her girls. In addition to the sweetness of her eyes
+and her tenderly tranquil expression she had retained her youthful
+contour. She exhibited the miracle of middle age achieved without fat or
+stiffness. In her scarf and black lace she was maturely beautiful.
+Waving away his apologies for the intrusion, she was anxiously
+solicitous for his wants through the meal. Yet he noticed that in
+taking his leave an hour later she did not ask him to call again.
+
+Up to that moment there had been no further mention of his business. But
+as he stood hesitating, loath to introduce it, Don Luis relieved his
+embarrassment. "Now you would see the administrador? I am sorry, senor,
+but it seems that he is away at Chilpancin about the sale of cattle. But
+if you will intrust your moneys to Francesca she will see to the
+business and have the papers sent out to the mine."
+
+Neither did Francesca, when saying good-by, ask him to return. But,
+conscious that with all their kind hospitality they still regarded him
+as an intruder, Seyd was neither offended nor surprised. He was even a
+little astonished when Don Luis stated his intention of riding with him
+as far as the cane.
+
+Until they came to the ford they rode in silence. Though only a few
+inches deep at this season, the river's wide bed proclaimed it one of
+those torrential streams which rise from a trickle to a flood in very
+few hours, and when he remarked upon it Don Luis assented with his heavy
+nod.
+
+"_Si_, it is very treacherous. One night during the last rains it rose
+fifty feet and swept down the valley miles wide, bearing on its yellow
+bosom cattle, houses, sheep, and pigs, and it drowned not a few of our
+people. And each year the floods go higher. Why? Because of the cursed
+lust that would mint the whole world into dollars. Year by year your
+Yankee companies are stripping the pine from the upper valley, and,
+though I have spoken with Porfirio Diaz about it, he is mad for
+commerce. He would see the whole state of Guerrero submerged before he
+revoked one charter. And they even try to make me a party to it.
+'General, if you will grant us a concession to do this, that, the other?
+If you will only allow us to run a branch line into your pine we can
+make big money--guarantee you half a million pesos.' When I am in Mexico
+your Yankee promoters swarm round me like hungry dogs. But never have I
+listened, nor ever will!"
+
+He struck the pommel of his saddle a heavy blow, then looked his
+surprise as Seyd spoke. "I should not think that you would. I understand
+your feelings."
+
+"You do? _Caramba!_ Then you are the first Yankee that ever did. In
+return for your sympathy let me offer you advice. You are not the first
+man to denounce on my land, nor is Santa Gertrudis the only location.
+Yankees, English, French, Germans, they have come, denounced claims here
+and there, but no man has ever held one. No man ever _will_. Already you
+have tasted the bitter hostility of my people, and were I to nod not
+even the American Ambassador could save you alive. And this is only the
+beginning. Let me return your money? Mexico is one great mine. Anywhere
+you can kick the soil and uncover a fortune."
+
+"But none like the Santa Gertrudis." Seyd smiled. "Of course, I feel
+it's pretty raw for me to force in on your land; but, knowing that
+if I don't some other will, I shall have to refuse. As for the
+opposition--that is all in the day's work." He finished, offering his
+hand. "But I hope this won't prevent us from being good neighbors?"
+
+Shaking his massive head, Don Luis reined in his horse. "No, senor, we
+can never be that. But next to a good friend I count a hearty enemy, and
+you may depend upon me for that."
+
+With a courteous wave of the hand he rode off; and, watching him go at
+a stately canter, Seyd muttered, "Enemy or friend, you are a fine old
+chap."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You are surely a fine old chap."
+
+Retracing his path through the long succession of farm, jungle, and
+fields, Seyd repeated it, and as he rode along he saw things in a new
+light. As he passed through one village at sundown the entire population
+was filing into church, the peons in clean blankets, their women in
+decent black. The next hamlet was in the throes of a fiesta. Girls in
+white, garlanded with flaming flowers, were dancing the eternal jig of
+the country with their brown swains. And these two functions, church and
+_baile_, marked the bounds of their simple life. A plenty of rice and
+frijoles, a peso or two for clothing, were all that they asked or
+needed.
+
+While prospecting in the Sierra Madres Seyd had drawn many a comparison
+between the happy indolence of the peon and the worry, strain, strife to
+live up to a standard just beyond income that obtains in American life.
+Because the peon had time to think his simple thoughts, listen to bird
+song and the music of babbling streams, to watch the splendors of
+sunrise and sunset over purple valleys, Seyd's suffrage had often gone
+to him. Observing this pastoral life in its tropical setting of palms
+and jungle, the opinion grew into a strong conviction.
+
+"The old fellow's right!" he ejaculated, riding out of the last village
+into the jungle proper. "We have nothing to give his people, and we'd
+surely kill all they have."
+
+Though the profusion of foliage which made of the trail one long green
+tunnel prevented him from seeing it, he was now riding along at the
+foot of the Barranca wall. Its deep shadow already filled the jungle
+with a twilight that thickened into night as he rode. But, knowing
+that whatever her faults of temperament Peace could be trusted to
+fetch her own stable, he left her to take her own way while he
+pursued his thoughts. While the siren whistle of beetles, chatter of
+_chickicuillotes_--wild hens of the jungle--deafened his ears, he tried
+to bring the crowding impressions of the day into some kind of order--no
+easy task when a fire-eating old general and a typical Mexican mother
+had to be reconciled in thought with a young girl who possessed the face
+of a Celt, eyes of a Spaniard, vivacity of a Frenchwoman, and American
+intelligence.
+
+Next he fell to speculating upon the causes which had kept her single at
+an age that, according to Mexican standards, placed her hopelessly upon
+the shelf, and he found the answer in the gossip of the American station
+agent on his last trip out to the railroad. "She could have had her
+cousin Sebastien any time, and there were others around these parts. But
+once let a high-strung girl like her get a glimpse of the outside world
+and no common hacendado can ever hope to tie her shoestring. They say
+she has had other chances--attaches of foreign legations in Mexico City.
+But she turned 'em down--I don't know why, unless it's ideals." With a
+humorous twinkle the agent had added: "Bad things, ideals--always in the
+way. If you happen to have any in stock give 'em to the first beggar you
+meet along the road. Hers are keeping San Nicolas and El Quiss from
+reuniting, but she don't seem to care."
+
+"A fine girl--the man will be lucky that gets her." Seyd now
+re-expressed the agent's homely verdict. "If it wasn't--" He stopped
+short, with a savage laugh. "You darned fool! mooning over a girl who
+would turn up her pretty nose at any gringo, much more one that has
+forced himself in on her uncle's land. Your business is to get a
+fortune out of the mine, and do it quick. And even if it wasn't--"
+
+The thought was never finished, for the last few minutes had brought him
+out into the starlight at the foot of the Barranca wall, and as Peace
+gathered herself for the scramble upward the jungle lit up with a sudden
+flash. Before Seyd's ears caught the report he felt his left shoulder
+clutched, as it were, by a red-hot hand. The next second he was almost
+thrown by the mule's sudden plunge--fortunately, for otherwise the
+bullet that came out of a second flash would have smashed through his
+brain.
+
+"Muzzle-loaders!" In the moment he lay on the mule's neck he divined it
+from the thick explosion. Then the thought, "It will take them a minute
+to reload," followed a quick calculation, "They'll catch me again on the
+first turn."
+
+With him action always sprang of subconscious processes which were
+quicker than thought, and while he crouched on her neck and Peace took
+the turn on a scrambling gallop he turned loose with both of his Colts,
+aiming at the spot from which the flashes had come. And the sequel
+proved his judgment. This time a single flash announced the bullet which
+grazed the mule's rump just as she shot into a patch of woodland.
+
+"Reckon I made one of you sick," he interpreted the single shot.
+
+The burning smart of his wound and the treachery of the attack had
+loosed within him a fury of anger. Reining in, he felt his shoulder. The
+bullet had plowed a furrow in the flesh of the upper arm, but, muttering
+"I guess it's bled about all it's going to," he first tied the mule to a
+tree, then slid the "reloads" into his guns.
+
+It would have been foolish to expose himself in the open trail under the
+clear starlight. Resisting the savage impulse which urged him to close
+quarters, he crawled back to the edge of the timber and again turned
+loose his guns, searching the jungle below with a swinging muzzle. Time
+and again he did it, thanking his stars whenever he reloaded for the
+forethought which had caused Billy to slip an extra box of cartridges
+into the holsters, and not until only one charge was left did he pause
+to listen.
+
+Whether or no it was the firing that had frightened even the night birds
+into temporary quiet, not even a twig stirred in the darkness below. He
+caught only the distant whooping which told that Billy had heard, and as
+this drew nearer with astonishing quickness Seyd rose and went back to
+his mule.
+
+"Coming downhill hell for leather!" he muttered. "If I don't hurry he'll
+break his neck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+One afternoon about a week later Mr. William Thornton was to be seen
+mixing mortar for the bricks he was laying on the smelter foundation.
+Rising almost sheer from the edge of the bench behind him, the Barranca
+wall shut off the western breeze, and from its face the fierce sunblaze
+was reflected in quivering waves of heat. Coming out from an early lunch
+he had noted that the thermometer registered ninety in the shade, and
+he was now ready to swear that with one more degree he himself would be
+able to supply all the moisture required for the operation.
+
+While working he cast occasional glances toward the house; and when, the
+mortar being mixed, he began to lay brick he used the trowel with care
+lest its clink should awaken Seyd. For though the blood loss from a
+severed artery had left him quite weak, he had obstinately refused to
+stop work. To-day he had even balked at the suggestion of a siesta until
+Billy had lain down himself. As soon as Seyd fell asleep Billy had
+slipped out, and when he now paused to listen the concern in his look
+passed into sudden attention as the clink of a shod hoof rose up from
+the trail below.
+
+Five minutes passed before he heard it again, and in the mean time his
+actions bespoke an intelligent appreciation of the needs of the case.
+Picking up a Winchester which leaned against a tree, he crouched behind
+his bricks, and while training it on the point where the trail emerged
+on the bench a ferocious scowl overshadowed his sunburn.
+
+"If we played it your way I'd brown you the second your nose shows," he
+muttered as the hoofbeats grew louder. "Thank your musty old saints that
+we don't. Ah! Eh? Well!"
+
+The interjections respectively fitted the wolf hound, her young
+mistress, and the _mozo_, as they appeared in the order named. As only
+Billy's head showed over the bricks, and both were on the same color
+scheme, he was practically invisible; and, reining up her beast, the
+girl allowed her curious gaze to wander around the bench from the
+gaping hole where the drift ran into the vein over the adobe hut and
+foundation--just missing Billy's head--to the blue-green piles of copper
+ore.
+
+"So this is the _mina_!" Her tone denoted disappointment. "Good heavens!
+Tomas, is this the wealth the gringos seek? What an ado over a pile of
+stones! I should think Don Luis would be thankful to have them carted
+away."
+
+She had spoken in Spanish, but when, having shed his arsenal under
+cover of the bricks, Billy rose and came forward, she addressed him in
+English. "Mr. Thornton, is it not? We have brought the papers from the
+administrador--at least, Tomas has. I am playing truant. Though it is
+only fifteen miles from here to San Nicolas, this is the first time that
+I have seen the place. Where is Mr. Seyd?"
+
+Now than Billy, was there never a young man more naturally chivalrous.
+Usually a locomotive could not have dragged from him a single word
+calculated to shock or offend a girl. But in his confusion at finding
+an expected enemy changed into a charming friend he let slip the naked
+truth. "He was shot--returning from your place."
+
+"Senor! He--he is not--dead?"
+
+There was no mistaking her concern. Sorry for his abruptness, Billy
+plunged to reassure her. "No! no! Only wounded."
+
+"Is he--much hurt?"
+
+It occurred to Billy that a flesh wound was, after all, rather a small
+price for such solicitude. But where a touch of jealousy might have
+caused another to make light of Seyd's wound, his natural unselfishness
+made him paint it in darker colors. "The bullet cut an artery, and he's
+pretty weak from loss of blood. Yet he won't lay off. I had to trick him
+into a siesta to-day. I'll go call him."
+
+But she raised a protesting hand. "No! no! Let him sleep. You can give
+him the papers. Tell him when he awakes that he will hear from us
+again."
+
+With a smile which caused Billy additional regret for his lack of wounds
+she rode off at a pace which filled him with anxiety for her neck. Until
+he caught a glimpse of her, foreshortened to a dot on the trail far
+below, he stood watching. Then, muttering "I'll bet Seyd will raise Cain
+when he awakes," he went back to his work.
+
+Nor was he mistaken, for when Seyd came out, yawning and stretching, an
+hour or so later, the last vestige of sleep was burned up by the sudden
+flash of his eyes. "You darned chump! Do we have visitors so often that
+you let me sleep on like a rotten log?"
+
+Neither was he appeased by Billy's answer, delivered with an irritating
+grin: "Why should she wish to see you when I was around? A pallid wretch
+who has to make three tries to cast a shadow!"
+
+"He has, has he?" Seyd growled. "Well, I'm solid enough to punch your
+fat head."
+
+The atmosphere having thus been cleared, he commented: "Went off to tell
+the General, eh? I wonder how he'll take it?"
+
+"Shouldn't imagine he'd shed any tears--unless at their poor shooting.
+Well, we'll see!"
+
+And see they did, for as they sat at lunch on the second day thereafter
+a yell followed by the crack of a whip brought them out just in time to
+see Caliban, the charcoal-burner, and the peon rice-huller coming on a
+shuffling run ahead of Tomas. The bloody bandages which bound the head
+of one and the leg of the other testified to Seyd's shooting, just as
+their glazed eyes and painful pantings told of the merciless run ahead
+of the _mozo_. It required only the hempen halter which each wore around
+his neck to complete the picture of misery.
+
+"These be they that attacked you, senor?" While the rice-huller squirmed
+under a sudden cut of his whip the _mozo_ went on: "This son of a devil
+was found nursing a wound in his hut, and he told on the other. Don Luis
+sends them with his compliments to be hanged at your leisure. If it
+please you to have it done now--there is an excellent tree."
+
+Too surprised to answer, Seyd and Billy stood staring at each other
+until, taking silence for consent, the _mozo_ began to herd his charges
+toward the said tree. "Here!" Seyd called him back. "This is kind of
+Don Luis, and you will please convey to him our thanks. It is very
+thoughtful of you to pick out such a fine tree, but, while we are sure
+that they would look very nice upon it, it is not the habit with our
+people to hang save for a killing, and I, as you see, am alive."
+
+The _mozo's_ dark brows rose to the eaves of his hair. "But of what use,
+senor, to hang _after_ the killing? Will the death of the murderer bring
+the murdered to life? But hang him in good season and you will have
+no murder. And this is a good tree, low, with strong, wide branches
+ordained for the purpose. See you! One throw of the rope, a pull, a
+knot--'tis done, easily as drinking, and they are out of your way."
+
+It was good logic; but, while admitting it, Seyd still pleaded his
+foolish national custom.
+
+Though his bent brows still protested against such squeamishness, the
+_mozo_ politely submitted. "_Bueno!_ it is for you to say. I leave them
+at your will to cure or kill."
+
+"Now, what shall we do?" Seyd consulted Billy. "If we send them back the
+old Don will surely hang them."
+
+"Well, what if he does? I'm sure that I don't care a whoop--" He paused,
+then suddenly exclaimed: "Are we crazy? Here we have been chasing labor
+all over the valley, and now that it is offered us free we turn up
+noses. Keep them, you bet! Put it into Spanish as quickly as you can."
+
+Smiling, the _mozo_ nodded comprehension. "As you say, senor, a live
+slave is better than a dead thief. They are at your orders to kill by
+rope or work."
+
+Though it was scarcely his thought, Seyd allowed it to go at that.
+Throwing the ends of the halters to Billy, the _mozo_ concluded his
+mission. "It remains only to say that Don Luis will have you come to
+San Nicolas till your wound is cured."
+
+"Fine!" Billy enthusiastically commented, when the invitation was
+translated. "I've said all along that you ought to lay off. Go down for
+a week. By the time you come back I'll have these chaps beautifully
+broken."
+
+"And you unable to speak a word of Spanish--not to mention the risk to
+your throat?" Seyd shook his head. "Besides, the old fellow made no
+bones of his feelings the other day. The invitation is merely in
+reparation for what he considers a violation of his hospitality. If it
+wasn't--My place is here."
+
+Accordingly, the _mozo_ carried back to San Nicolas a note which, if not
+penned in the best Spanish, yet caught its grave courtesy so cleverly
+that its perusal at the dinner table caused Francesca to pause and
+listen, drew an approving smile from the senora, and produced from Don
+Luis his heavy nod.
+
+"The young man is a fine _caballero_. Your ordinary gringo would have
+saddled himself upon us for three months, and we should have been worn
+to skeletons by his parrot chatter. As he lets us off so easily, I must
+ride up to the mine and warn those rascals to play him no tricks."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile Seyd and Billy had been giving the disposition of the said
+rascals considerable thought. After the _mozo_ left, Billy cut the
+halters from around their necks and brought them food and drink from
+the house. But whether or no they considered this fair front as being
+assumed to emphasize future tortures the two kept their sullen silence.
+
+"If we have to stand guard all the time we'd be better without them,"
+Billy doubted.
+
+"Yes," Seyd acquiesced. "Unless we can find some incentive. I wonder
+if they have families." When the two returned nods to his questions
+he continued, hopefully: "There we have it. Your Mexican peon takes
+homesickness worse than a Swiss. If we offer them a fair wage while the
+smelter is building I think they'll prove faithful. At least we can
+try."
+
+To an experienced eye--the _mozo's_, for instance--the sudden
+brightening of the dark faces might have meant something else than
+relief. At first Caliban seemed to find the good news impossible. But
+presently, setting it down as another idiocy of the foolish gringos,
+his incredulity vanished. In one hour he and the rice-huller were
+transformed from sullen foes to eager servants. Indeed, what with their
+willing work that afternoon and next morning, the smelter foundation had
+risen a full yard by the time that Don Luis came riding up to the bench.
+
+Looking up from a blue print of the foundation, Seyd saw him coming at
+the heavy trot which combined military stiffness with vaquero ease, and
+noting the keen glance with which he swept the bench the thought flashed
+upon him, "Now the cat's out of the bag!" He did not, however, try to
+smuggle the animal in again. When, greetings over, Don Luis turned a
+curious eye on the foundation he answered the unspoken question. "A
+smelter, senor."
+
+"A smelter?" For once the old fellow's massive self possession showed
+slight disturbance. "I thought--"
+
+"That it took a fortune to build one." Seyd filled in his pause. "It
+does--to put in a modern plant." While he went on explaining that this
+was merely an old-style Welch furnace of small capacity he felt the
+constraint under the old man's quiet, and was thereby stimulated to a
+mischievous addition. "You see, the freight rates on crude ore from this
+point are prohibitive, but one can make good money by smelting it down
+into copper matte."
+
+"A good plan, senor." Like a tremor on a brown pool, his disquiet
+passed. "And how long will it be in the building?"
+
+"We had calculated on four months. But with the help you so kindly sent
+us we can do it now in two."
+
+He could not altogether repress a mischievous twinkle. But Don Luis gave
+no sign. "_Bueno!_ It was for this that I came--to read these rascals
+their lesson." Menacing the peons with a weighty forefinger, he went on:
+"Now, listen, _hombres_! Since it has pleased the senor to save you
+alive, see that you repay his mercy with faithful labor. If there be any
+failure, tricks, or night flittings, remember that there is never a
+rabbit hole in all Mexico but where Luis Garcia can find you."
+
+Emphasizing the threat with another shake of his finger, he turned
+and went on with quiet indifference to comment upon the scenery. "A
+beautiful spot. Once I had thought to build here, but one cannot live on
+the edge of a cliff, and San Nicolas has its charm. Is it true that we
+cannot tempt you to come down? The senora begs that you reconsider."
+
+But he nodded his appreciation of Seyd's reasons. "_Si, si,_ a man's
+place is with his work--and I have stayed too long. There is business
+forward at Chilpancin, and even now I should be miles on the way."
+
+"Will you not stay for lunch?" Seyd protested.
+
+But replying that he had already lunched at a ranch in the valley, the
+old man rode away on his usual heavy lope. "You see," Seyd commented,
+watching him go, "it is all right for me to accept his invitation, but
+he will not eat of our bread."
+
+"Well, I don't blame him," Billy answered. "I'd feel sore myself if I
+were he. But, say, we're getting quite gay up here. Regular social
+whirl. I wonder who's next? We only need mamma to complete the family."
+
+The remark was prophetic, for, while the senora did not herself brave
+the Barranca steeps, only two days thereafter Francesca and the _mozo_
+reappeared driving before them a mule whose panniers were crammed with
+eggs and cheese, butter and honey, fruit, both fresh and preserved, also
+a full stock of bandages, liniments, curative simples, and home-made
+cordials. While unpacking them on the table in their house the girl
+laughingly explained that if Seyd would not come to be cured the cures
+must needs come to him.
+
+"This is a wash for the wound." She patted a large fat jug. "This other
+is to be taken every hour. Of this liquor you must take a glass at
+bed-time. Those pills must be swallowed when you rise. This"--noting
+Billy's furtive grin, she finished with a laugh--"you will not have room
+for more. Give the rest to Mr. Thornton. But under pain of the good
+mamma's severest displeasure I am to see you drink at least two cups of
+this soup."
+
+"You shall if you stay to lunch," Seyd said. "Billy makes gorgeous
+biscuit, and they'll go finely with the honey."
+
+"If you can eat bacon--we have only that and a few canned things," Billy
+added, a little dubiously, and would have extended the list of
+shortcomings only that she broke in:
+
+"Just what I like. I'm tired of Mexican cooking, and I am dreadfully
+hungry."
+
+That this was no idle assertion she presently proved, and while she
+ate of their rough food with the appetite of perfect health their
+acquaintance progressed with the leaps and bounds natural to youth.
+Before the end of the meal she had drawn Billy completely out of his
+painful bashfulness, and he was telling her with great pride of his
+beautiful sister while she contemplated her photograph with head held
+delicately askew.
+
+"Yes, she's fair," he told her, adding with great pride, "but not a bit
+like me."
+
+"The most wonderful hair!" Seyd volunteered. "Darkest Titian above a
+skin of milk."
+
+"Oh, you make me envious!" she cried, with real feeling. "I love red
+hair. Luisa Zuluaga, my schoolmate in Brussels, had it combined with
+great black Spanish eyes. She got her colors from an Irish great
+grandfather who came over a century ago to coin pesos for the Mexican
+mint. Now, why couldn't I have had them?"
+
+Observing the fine-spun cloud that flew like a dark mist around
+the ivory face, Seyd could not find it in his heart to blame her
+grandfather, and, if good taste debarred him from saying it, the belief
+was nevertheless expressed through the permitted language of the eyes.
+Perhaps this accounted for the suddenness with which her long dark
+lashes swept down over certain mischievous lights.
+
+Any but an expert in feminine psychology might indeed have found himself
+puzzled by certain phases of her manner. Its sympathy, addressing Billy,
+would give place to a slight reserve with Seyd, then this would melt and
+give place to unaffected friendliness. Occasionally, too, she offered
+all the witchery of her smiles, yet the hypothetical expert would never
+have suspected her of coquetry. The feeling was far too mischievous for
+the fencing of sex. Its key was to be found in the thought that passed
+in her mind. "'Almost pretty enough to marry,' you said. The trouble is
+that my girlish beauty is in inverse ratio to my future fatness. What a
+pity!"
+
+Yet this little touch of pique was never sufficiently pronounced to
+interfere with her real enjoyment. As for them--it was a golden
+occasion. If they ate little, they still feasted their eyes on the face
+that bloomed like a rich flower in the soft shadows of the adobe hut,
+their ears on her low laughter and soft woman's speech. They found it
+hard to believe when she sprang up with a little cry: "I have been here
+two hours! Now I have earned my scolding. The _madre_ only let me come
+under a solemn promise to be back before sunset."
+
+Had they been unaware of the principal concomitant in the charm of the
+hour, knowledge would have been forced upon them when she rode away,
+for, though the birds still sang and the hot sun poured a flood of light
+and heat down on the bench, somehow things looked and felt cold and
+gray.
+
+And she? Going downgrade an afterglow of smiles lent force to her
+murmur: "Gringos or no, they are very nice."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+A hard gallop of eight miles carried Francesca to the forks where the
+path to and from Santa Gertrudis joined the main valley trail, and she
+had traveled no more than a hundred yards beyond before she was roused
+from renewed musings by the thud of hoofs. Turning in her saddle, she
+saw Sebastien coming along the valley trail at a gallop. Passing the
+_mozo_, whose beast had lagged, the hacendado pulled his beast down to
+a trot, and as Tomas, answering a question, nodded backward toward the
+hills, vexation swept the girl's face.
+
+It cleared, however, as quickly, and while waiting for Sebastien she
+measured him with a narrow glance. The straight, lithe figure, easy
+carriage, dark, quiet face could stand inspection, and she paid
+unconscious tribute. "If I hadn't gone to Europe I suppose--" A decided
+shake of the head completed while dismissing the thought. In the next
+breath she murmured, "Now for a fight." Yet her expression, saluting
+him, displayed no apprehension.
+
+"Yes, I was at Santa Gertrudis." She quietly answered his question. "Two
+of our people shot one of the gringos as he was leaving our place, and
+the good _mama_ would have it that it was our duty to cure him."
+
+"Ah! the good mother?" He raised his brows. "And she chose you for her
+doctor?"
+
+"As you see."
+
+"Yes, I see. 'No, Francesca, thou canst not go. It would not be right
+for a young girl--well, if you must--' I hear it as though I had been
+there, and wonder that the senora, who was brought up in the letter of
+our conventions, should send her daughter to a gringo camp with only a
+_mozo_ for escort. But Don Luis? Is he also mad?"
+
+"No, only wise." She answered with irritating simplicity. "Take care
+that you do not put heavier strains on a slight kinship. Third, fifth,
+tenth, just what is the degree of our cousinship?"
+
+"God knows!" He shrugged. "The slighter the better. 'Twill serve till
+replaced by a closer."
+
+"Which will be never."
+
+"Only the gods say 'never.'" He quoted the proverb. "But returning to
+your _amigos_, the gringos--"
+
+"My _amigos_?"
+
+"You have received and repaid their visits. But listen! It is not that
+I would set bounds for your freedom, but if you had stood, as I have,
+on a street corner in Ciudad, Mexico, and had heard the gringo tourists
+pass comments on our women--_Dios_! I choke at the thought! If you but
+realized their coxcombry, conceit, the contempt in which they hold us--"
+
+She had flushed slightly, but with a toss of her head she broke in: "It
+is not necessary. I have heard young Mexican men comment on both our own
+and American women. If the gringos can teach them any lessons--"
+
+"Apes!" he burst angrily in. "Fools! The degenerate apes who put on the
+vices of civilization with its collars!"
+
+"Perhaps. But, even so, it makes for the same point--there are gringos
+and gringos just as we have Mexicans _and_ Mexicans."
+
+"And these, of course, are the other sort?"
+
+"Exactly!" She robbed his sarcasm by her quiet. "If one judges, as one
+must, by their behavior. I am pleased to find you, for once, of my
+opinion."
+
+"Of your opinion?" He regarded her with sudden sternness. "That is, to
+be friends with these men who have forced themselves in on your lands?
+I had never expected to hear it fall from the lips of a Garcia. Now
+listen! What if your people did wound this man? Is he the first? Will he
+be the last?" His face darkening under a rush of blood, he continued: "I
+had thought this pair would soon ruin themselves as did the other fools
+before them. But since they are working on a surer plan--"
+
+"What do you mean?" She searched his face.
+
+"So anxious?" he laughed bitterly. "What is it to you?"
+
+"Only that I would not have them murdered."
+
+"And would they be the first? Is there a foot of Mexican soil which has
+not been soaked with good Mexican blood that you should be so careful
+for a gringo?" Slanting through an opening in the trees overhead the sun
+shone on his face, transforming it into a red mask of hate. "As yet no
+one of them has secured himself in the Barranca de Guerrero! So long as
+a Rocha is left to do the duty that belongs to the Garcias no one of
+them ever will."
+
+But now he had touched another string, and, straightening in her saddle,
+she gave him look for look. "When the Garcias need the Rochas to settle
+their quarrels it will be time for you to interfere. I should not advise
+you to speak thus to my uncle."
+
+Nevertheless she flinched a little at his answer. "That is my
+intention--this very night."
+
+With that they rode on, in silence for a while, then speaking of other
+things. But when he left her in the upper courtyard an hour later she
+stood at her door, listening apprehensively to the jingle of his spurs
+along the gallery. When he took a chair beside Don Luis, who sat there
+smoking, she listened for a while. Then, flushing suddenly, she hastily
+went in.
+
+If she had remained there was nothing to hear, for during many minutes
+the conversation ran altogether on the herds as they came winding in
+from distant pastures to the corrals in the square. Night had reduced
+everything to a dark blur before Sebastien commented on a yellow twinkle
+high up on the Barranca wall.
+
+"That will be the gringos' light at Santa Gertrudis." After a long
+pause, "It is now a month past since they came, and--they are still
+here."
+
+Don Luis flicked the ash from his cigar. "What hurry?"
+
+"But this new business? The smelter you spoke of the other day."
+
+"_Si_, the smelter?"
+
+Sebastien gave his own interpretation to the other's slow tone. "Then
+there is something forward?"
+
+"What need? The gringo at the station tells me they have no money. A
+single mistake and they are done." After a sententious pause he added,
+"It is the part of youth to make mistakes."
+
+The dusk did not conceal the other's impatience. "But why this tender
+care? Are they so different from the others? A word from thee and--"
+
+"Yes, yes, a nod and it would have been done long ago. There speaks
+young blood--the hot blood that lost us Texas and Alta California. These
+lads are of good family, Sebastien, and there can be no disappearance
+without inquiry. Their death would be but one more thorn in the side of
+the rabid beast that requires small urging to devour us. No, let them
+make their own end."
+
+"And Francesca? Is she to have the run of their camp?"
+
+Don Luis's deep laugh rumbled through the courtyard. "At last from a
+long cast we come to the quarry. Francesca? She is a wild filly, the
+despair of every staid tabby in the countryside. Long ago I discovered
+that the one way to manage her was to let her have her head. Nor will it
+be the part of wisdom for thee to interfere."
+
+"Neither would I try--yet. Commands are for husbands; lovers must wait.
+That which I propose she will never know. It is--" Answering the other's
+interrogative look, he leaned over, whispering in rapid Spanish.
+
+Don Luis emitted an amused chuckle. "Sebastien, thou art truly a devil.
+Had thy father possessed but the half of thy wit, some things had gone
+different in the last war. Yes, feet that are still spoiling good sod
+would now be rotten bones." After a pause he went on: "It seems a scurvy
+trick, yet it depends on the men themselves. But--if they rise not at
+the bait?"
+
+"If?" Sebastien repeated it with bitter scorn. "Was there ever a gringo
+that would not bite at such? They are kind as goats. I ask only that you
+go there with Francesca at the close of the week."
+
+"And thou?"
+
+"I shall go there to-morrow."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Living in the letter of his intention, Sebastien was up next morning and
+had covered ten miles of the trail before the sun rose over the Barranca
+wall. Early as it was, however, others were already abroad. The sudden
+increase in his family had obliged Seyd to make a journey out to the
+railroad for more provisions, and when Sebastien paused to breathe his
+beast halfway up the grade to the bench, a good glass would have shown
+him Light and Peace gingerly picking their way along the trail that had
+been built by Don Luis's orders around the slide on the opposite wall.
+
+As usual, Sebastien's approach was announced by the ring of hoofs, but,
+imagining it to be some charcoal-burner, Billy, who was already at his
+bricks, did not look up till warned by Caliban's stealthy hiss. In his
+surprise he forgot to reply to Sebastien's greeting, and simply answered
+the other's question.
+
+"Don Roberto? He is not here?"
+
+"No, gone out to the railroad. Won't be back for three days."
+
+"_Caramba!_ After I had climbed these heights to see him!" Though
+his eyebrows and hands both testified to Sebastien's disappointment,
+a sharper eye than Billy's might have discerned the underlying
+satisfaction. Moreover, if he appeared merely inquisitively friendly
+during the hour he stayed to chat, not one minute was wasted. From the
+first question to his final comment on Billy's work, "You gringos are
+certainly a wonderful people," all was directed to one end.
+
+"Yes, we usually get there," Billy modestly admitted, and his next words
+paved a lovely road for Sebastien to come to his purpose. "The building
+would go faster if I hadn't so many things to do. After laying bricks
+all day I have to turn in and cook, and, though it's pretty tough, there
+doesn't seem to be any way out of it. We tried both of the peons at the
+cooking and nearly died of the hash they served up."
+
+"Tut! tut!" Sebastien was there with ready sympathy. "This is too bad.
+Soon you will be completely worn out." After a pause, during which he
+may be imagined as taking Billy's mental temperature, he said: "_Bueno!_
+I have it! I shall send you a cook--one than whom there is no finer in
+all this country."
+
+If he had harbored any suspicions, Billy's beaming smile now wiped them
+out. "That's awfully good of you. Seyd will be ever so glad. When can we
+expect your cook?"
+
+"To-morrow afternoon." Scenting hospitality in Billy's glance toward
+the hut, Sebastien hastily added, "That is, if I reach home to-night--to
+do which I shall have to be going." And refusing the offer of lunch
+which justified his premonition, he rode away, leaving Billy puffed up
+with pride.
+
+"I rather think I turned that trick well," he congratulated himself.
+"Seyd couldn't have done it a bit better." Occasional fat chuckles
+emitted during the afternoon testified to his increasing opinion of his
+own diplomacy. But his rising pride did not attain its meridian until,
+midway of the following afternoon, a pretty brown girl came driving a
+burro up the trail.
+
+Having anticipated a man cook, it required five minutes of vehement
+Spanish, helped out by a wealth of gesticulation, to convince Billy that
+the girl was not an estray from a neighboring hamlet, and while her dark
+eyes, white teeth, and shapely brown arms were engaged in explanation
+they wrought other work. By the time Billy was finally able to
+understand the fact he was hardly in condition to pass upon it.
+
+It is only right to state that he had little time for reflection, for
+from the very beginning the girl took the direction of affairs into her
+own hands. Driving her burro over to the stable she unpacked a stone
+_metate_, or grinding-stone, a pestle, and a quantity of soaked corn.
+She turned the beast out to graze, then dropped at once on her knees and
+began grinding paste for the supper tortillas, or cakes. When, toward
+evening, Billy dropped in for a drink he found her mantle spread on his
+bed and certain articles of feminine wear depending from the nails which
+had hitherto been sacred to his own clothing.
+
+Blushing furiously, he went out--without the drink. But, though his
+colors would have done credit to a girl, they were not to be weighed in
+the same balance with the green peppers stuffed with minced beef that
+she served at supper with the tortillas. While eating with an appetite
+born of a protracted canned diet it is to be feared that he fed just as
+ravenously on the atmosphere shed by her luxurious presence. When, after
+supper, he sat in the doorway and watched the blood-reds of the sunset
+flow through the valley he might, with his fiery stubble, have passed
+for some ancient Celt at the mouth of his cave. Not until he caught a
+second glimpse of the mantle while stealing a look at the girl washing
+up dishes did he return to his usual bashful self. Slipping quietly
+inside, he gathered up the blankets off Seyd's bed and carried them out
+to make his own couch under a tree.
+
+This procedure on his part the girl watched with a certain astonishment
+which she vented on Caliban while giving him his breakfast next day. "I
+had thought differently of the gringos. Be they all like this one--"
+
+"Give time, give time!" the hunchback advised. "Big fish are ever slow
+at the hook, but when they once rise--" The tortilla he used for
+illustration vanished at one gulp. "Wait till thou seest Don Roberto.
+There's a man! Of his own strength he threw a burro off the trail into
+the Barranca and so turned the train that would otherwise have driven
+him and the 'Red Head' into the canon. 'Tis so. The history of it was
+written by Don Sebastien's whip on the shoulders of Mattias and Carlos.
+And what of the magic that turned my bullet fired at twenty yards, then
+found me and Calixto in black jungle and shot us down from the high
+cliff? Si, chief of the other is he, so waste not thy freshness."
+
+"Bah! am I a fool?" She elevated her nose.
+
+This conversation undoubtedly explains the staidness of her demeanor
+that day. Not that it was necessary to keep Billy at his distance.
+Leaving his painful modesty out of the question, in his ignorance of the
+Mexican peon folk he placed her in his imagination on the same plane
+as a white girl, and as the color of a skin cuts no figure in the
+calculations of the little god, providing that it be fitted smoothly
+over a pretty body, she found favor in his sight. At work both the next
+and the following days he kept always an eye open for the flash of her
+white garments in the doorway. When, with the earthen jar on her head,
+she went to draw water from the spring his glance followed the swaying
+rhythms of her figure. If not actually in love by the time Don Luis and
+Francesca put in their appearance next morning, Billy was at least
+living a tropical idyl, one not a whit less beautiful because its object
+departed far from his ideal in all but her physical perfection.
+
+The visit had been skilfully timed to miss lunch, and Billy was already
+back at his work. Crossing the bench, Don Luis's eye went instantly to
+the girl who had been drawn to the door by the sound of hoofbeats. But
+his expression gave no hint of his grim amusement. The keenest ear would
+have found it difficult to detect sarcasm in his remark.
+
+"I see, senor, that you have added to your family."
+
+Also it need not be said that Francesca's woman's eye had summed at a
+glance the smooth oval face, rounded arms, shapely figure; yet their
+undeniable comeliness brought no pleasure to her expression. If Billy
+had overlooked Don Luis's sarcasm it was impossible to miss her scorn.
+
+"A capable housekeeper--if one may judge from her looks--and quite at
+home. You are to be congratulated, Mr. Thornton."
+
+Looking up in quick surprise, Billy noticed the absence of the sympathy
+that she had shown him during her last visit. Feeling the cold anger
+behind, and sadly puzzled, he was not sorry when, after a few minutes of
+strained talk, Don Luis asked to be shown the vein. Judging by his
+backward glance from the mouth of the tunnel, it would appear that he
+had coined the request to pave the way for that which happened the
+instant they disappeared. For, walking her beast over to the house,
+Francesca spoke to the girl.
+
+"Thy name?"
+
+"Carmelita, senorita."
+
+"Of what village?"
+
+"Chilpancin--I am the daughter to Candelario, the maker of hair ropes."
+
+Though she answered with the glib obsequiousness of her class, the
+appraising glance which swept Francesca from head to heel carried a mute
+challenge and conveyed her full knowledge that a battle was pitched such
+as women fight all the world over. Neither could Francesca's patrician
+feeling smother equal recognition. It was revealed in her next question.
+
+"How long hast thou been in this employment?"
+
+The girl paused. Then, whether it was due to Sebastien's tutoring or her
+own malice, she gave answer. "Eight days, senorita."
+
+"Who hired thee?"
+
+Downcast lashes hid the sudden sparkle of cunning. "Don Roberto." But
+they lifted in time for her to catch the sudden hardening of Francesca's
+face.
+
+"Then see that thou renderest good service, for these be friends of
+ours."
+
+As beforesaid, neither the cold patronage of the one nor the sullen
+obsequiousness of the other could hide the issue from either.
+Francesca's calm, as she turned her beast, did not deceive. Malicious
+understanding flashed out as the girl called after, "_Si_, he shall have
+the best of service."
+
+Returning to the smelter, Francesca began to talk to Caliban, yet
+while questioning him concerning his new employment she could not be
+unconscious of Carmelita lolling in the doorway, hands on shapely hips,
+an attitude gracefully indolent and powerfully suggestive of possession.
+Perhaps it was her acute consciousness of it which injected an extra
+chill a few minutes later into her refusal of Billy's invitation to
+dismount and rest. His suggestion that Seyd was likely to arrive any
+moment drew a still more decided shake of the head. Moreover meeting
+Seyd as they rode downgrade she passed with the slightest nods, nor even
+looked back to see if her uncle were following.
+
+Doubtless because he felt that he could well afford it, Don Luis did
+stop, and before riding on he once more threatened Calixto, the
+rice-huller, who was with Seyd. "This fellow--he still gives good
+service?" His courtesy, however, did not remove the chill of Francesca's
+snub. Hurt and wondering, Seyd passed on up to the bench--to have his
+eyes opened the instant that he saw the girl in the doorway. When, after
+dismounting, he walked across to where Billy was at work on the
+foundation, her big dark eyes took him in from tip to toe in a flashing
+embrace. She studied him while he stood there talking.
+
+"What is _she_ doing here?"
+
+He cut off Billy's welcome with the sharp question, and while listening
+to explanations his gray eyes drew into points of black. In the middle
+of it he burst out, "You don't mean to say that you fell for it as
+easily as that?"
+
+"Fell for what?"
+
+Billy's round eyes merely added to his irritation. "You chump! didn't
+you see the trap?"
+
+"The trap?"
+
+"Yes, trap! _T-r-a-p_, trap! Got it into your fat head? Don't you see
+that you have catalogued us with the San Nicolas people as a pair of
+blackguards forever? Oh, you fat head!"
+
+That was not all. While he stormed on, saying things that he would
+willingly have taken back a minute later, every bit of its usual
+mercurial humor drained out of Billy's face. Over Seyd's shoulder he
+could see the girl in the doorway. A certain dark expectancy in her
+glance told that she knew herself to be the bone of contention. As a doe
+might watch the conflict of two bucks in the forest, she looked on, and,
+meeting Billy's eye, her glance touched off his anger.
+
+"Stop that!" he suddenly yelled. "Stop it or I'll hand you one! I will,
+for sure! What do I care for your San Nicolas people? I didn't come down
+here to do a social stunt, and why should the opinions of a lot of
+greasers cut any ice? Let 'em go hang. The girl looks all right to me."
+
+"All right! You innocent!" Shaking with anger, Seyd turned and spoke to
+Caliban, who was mixing mortar close by. "As I thought! If half he says
+is true her reputation would hang a cat."
+
+But Billy's jaw only set the harder. While he might easily have been
+persuaded out of his idyl, he was not to be driven. Out of pure
+obstinacy he growled: "What of it? I reckon her morals won't spoil the
+food. She's proved she can cook, and that is all I want. She's going to
+stay."
+
+"She's not."
+
+"She is."
+
+For a pause they eyed each other. Though their friendship had survived,
+nay, had been cemented by many a quarrel, never before had a
+disagreement gone such lengths.
+
+"Look here, Billy." Seyd spoke more mildly. "This won't do. She's got to
+go."
+
+"Not till you've shown me--not now," he hastily added, as Seyd began to
+strip. "I'd hate to hit a cripple, and--"
+
+"Come on."
+
+But, ducking a swing, Billy gave ground, genuine concern on his face.
+"No, no, old man! You are still weak. Let it go for another week. That
+left fin of yours--"
+
+Landing at that precise moment on his ear, however, the member in
+question proved its convalescence and ended the argument by toppling him
+sideways. Up in a second, he closed, and for the next ten minutes they
+went at it, clinching and breaking, jabbing and hooking, with an energy
+and science that would have filled the respective souls of a moralist
+and a prize-fighter with disgust and delight. Avoiding both of these
+extreme viewpoints, the account may very well be given in the terms used
+by Caliban in describing the affair next day to one of his _companeros_,
+a charcoal-burner.
+
+"Like mad bulls they go at it, grappling and tearing, each striking the
+other so that the thud of their blows raise the echoes. It is in the
+very beginning that the Red Cabeza fells Don Roberto, but instead of
+splitting his head with the spade that stands close by--was ever such
+folly!--he helps him up from the ground. I then think it the finish,
+but no, they go at it again, hailing blows in the face hard as the kick
+of a mule, and so it continues for a time with only pauses to catch
+their breath. I am beginning to wonder will it ever come to an end
+when--crack! sharp as the snap of thy whip and so swift that I do not
+see the blow, it comes. The Red Cabeza lies there quietly on the ground.
+Believe it or not, Pedro, he is knocked senseless by a blow of the
+hand."
+
+The immediate consequences may also be left to Caliban. "Their quarrel,
+as I have said, is over Carmelita, the dove of Chilpancin, and I now
+expect to see Don Roberto take her for his own. That she is of the same
+mind is proven when she comes running with her knife for him to finish
+up the Red Cabeza. But again, no! who shall understand these
+gringos?--he gives her the sharpest of looks.
+
+"'_Vamos!_' He shouts it with such anger that she stumbles and falls,
+running back to the house. Also she makes such a quick packing that she
+is driving her burro out to the trail before the Red Cabeza comes to his
+senses."
+
+Billy's eyes, indeed, opened on the departing flash of her garments.
+"You didn't lose much time," he commented, with a quizzical glance
+upward. "Well, to the victor the spoils--or the rejection thereof. That
+was a peach of a punch--the bum left, too, wasn't it?" The old merry
+look flashing out again from the blood and bruises, he asked: "How'll
+you trade? In exchange for one admission from you I'm willing to grant
+you're right."
+
+"Shoot!" Seyd grinned.
+
+"Would you have been as careful of the proprieties if the senorita were
+out of the case?"
+
+Smiling, Seyd raised doubtful shoulders. "_Quien sabe_, senor?"
+
+"Ahem!" Billy coughed. "Now you justify the continuance of my wretched
+existence. All the same, while it may be correct in theory your darned
+morality is mighty uncomfortable practice. That girl could cook. The
+next time you fall in love please--"
+
+"_Now_, what are you talking about?"
+
+"What have I done?"
+
+Before his look of hopeless surprise Seyd's anger faded. "I beg your
+pardon. Of course you didn't know, but--I'm already married."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Me." With grim sarcasm he added, "And you know that it is against the
+law of both God and man for a married man to fall in love."
+
+Feeling dimly that something was expected of him, but debarred from
+congratulations by the other's irony, Billy floundered, bringing several
+attempts at speech to a lame conclusion. "When--when did it--happen?"
+
+"Happen? That's it." Seyd jumped at the word. "It _happened_ in New
+Mexico three years ago when I was down there 'experting' the Calumet
+group. She was the daughter of a mine foreman, pretty and neat as a
+grouse in the fall, but of the hopelessly common type. I don't have to
+describe her. You've seen them, in pairs, swinging their skirts along
+the boardwalks of any small town, their eyes on every man and a burst
+of giggles always on tap. I should never have paid her any serious
+attention if several of her admirers hadn't done me the honor of getting
+jealous. Until one big lout warned me to leave her alone under penalty
+of broken bones it was never more than a mild flirtation, but after that
+I went deeper--so deep that it was soon impossible for me to withdraw.
+At least, I thought it was then, though I have since come to regard my
+marriage with her almost as a crime. You see, I thought it would break
+her heart, but in less than a week after the marriage I discovered that
+she was nothing but a bundle of small vanities bound up in a pretty
+skin, that she hadn't a thought above the money and position she
+expected to gain through me. And how she changed! As a girl she was
+soft, fluffy, and innocent as a kitten, but one by one her small
+vanities and frivolities developed into appetites and passions, and I
+awoke to the fact that she was altogether animal--a beautiful animal,
+prettier than ever in her young wifehood, but without the slightest
+capacity for intellectual or spiritual development.
+
+"If that had been all--one can love a handsome horse or a dog, and I
+have seen women of as low a type to be lifted out of themselves by the
+strength of their love. But she was absolutely selfish--loved only
+herself. What made it even more unbearable, she was conceited with the
+supreme conceit of absolute ignorance that scorns all that is unknown
+to itself. She would try to impose her own inch-and-a-half notions of
+things upon me, and she did not hesitate to pit the scraps of knowledge
+she had picked up around the mines against my professional training. She
+was bound to remold me on her own crude model. Actual wickedness would
+have been easier to bear, and I can assure you that the third month of
+our married life found me absolutely miserable. Fortunately, I received
+a commission just then to 'expert' a group of Mexican mines, and, as she
+preferred civilization as it goes in New Mexico to the hardships of a
+trip through the Sonora desert, I left her behind. Later I came south on
+a prospecting trip through the Sierra Madres, and have never seen her
+since."
+
+All through he had spoken with the furious vehemence of a man easing a
+load off his mind. Thrusting a letter into Billy's hand, he finished,
+walking away: "Read that--I got it at the station yesterday. It reveals
+more than I could tell you in the next twenty-four hours."
+
+And it surely did. The stiff round hand, as much as the bald statement
+of want and desires, revealed a nature blind to all but its own ends.
+Every phrase was a cry or complaint. He had no business to go off and
+leave her alone! All her friends agreed that it was a "shame and a
+disgrace." But he needn't think that she would stand such treatment
+forever! He had better come home, and that at once! So far she hadn't
+tried to "better herself." But it wasn't for lack of the chance! There
+was a gentleman--no fresh dude or college guy, but a rich mining man,
+eminently respectable, who had shown a decided interest! He (Seyd) had
+better look out. Thus and so did the awkward hand run over many pages,
+and, while Billy's eye followed, his expression gradually settled in
+complete disgust.
+
+"Hopelessly common! You poor chap," he muttered, looking after Seyd, who
+was now helping Caliban to arrange the goods as he carried them from the
+mules into the adobe. "To think that you have had this on your mind all
+this time!" After a moment's reflection he added, "But--married or
+unmarried, you are still in love."
+
+Unaware of this frank opinion, Seyd went on arranging the stores. While
+working, the eager vehemence of his manner settled into heavy brooding,
+and it was not for some time that a cheerful flash indicated his arrival
+at some conclusion.
+
+"I've got it!" he murmured. And turning so suddenly that Caliban dropped
+the package he was carrying in, he asked, "Hast thou any acquaintance at
+San Nicolas?"
+
+Reassured that the strange gringo madness was not to be vented on him,
+the hunchback nodded. "One of the kitchen women is daughter to my
+sister."
+
+He nodded again in answer to a second question as to whether his niece
+could convey certain information to the senorita Francesca's ear?
+
+"_Si_, there is always gossip moving among the women. It could be
+passed through Rosa, her maid."
+
+For a man who had just taken offense at the very suggestion that he was
+in love Seyd's face expressed a surprising amount of satisfaction. A
+little sheepishly he now went on: "It must be that thou wouldst care to
+see thy relative? To-morrow is Sunday, and, as thy service has been
+good, it shall be a holiday, and thou shalt have a mule to ride to San
+Nicolas."
+
+To tell the truth, the hunchback did not seem overjoyed at the prospect,
+at least not until Seyd tossed a silver peso on the table. "This is to
+buy thee meat and drink by the way, and if it be that thy niece can
+whisper--"
+
+His beady eyes glittering with comprehension, the hunchback broke in,
+"That the dove flew at thy coming. She shall know it, senor--also from
+whose hand she came hither."
+
+The quickness with which the fellow leaped to his meaning was rather
+disconcerting, and Seyd blushed. But, commanding his guilty colors, he
+brazened it out. "But see! She is not to know that it proceeds from me."
+
+"_Si_, senor." The man's quick grin indicated an unearthly
+comprehension. "It will be a bit of gossip from the mouth of a
+muleteer."
+
+It was at this juncture that Billy, who had just returned to work after
+washing the blood from his face, heard a cheerful whistling inside.
+When, an hour later, he went in to help with supper he found Seyd his
+usual cheerful self. Next morning his spirits were still higher, but did
+not attain their meridian until Caliban departed for San Nicolas,
+bravely attired in a gaudy suit which he had dug from some obscure
+corner of the stable. Toward evening, however, a touch of anxiety
+dampened his mood. It might almost have been regarded as premonitory of
+the news Caliban delivered in the dusk outside.
+
+"The senorita Francesca has gone to visit her mother's people at
+Cuernavaca. It is not known when she will return."
+
+"Very well; thou hast done thy share," Seyd answered.
+
+His quiet tone, however, did not deceive the hunchback. "Did I not say
+these gringos were a mad people?" he demanded of Calixto, showing two
+pesos by the light of the stable lantern. "He pays me a peso to bring
+him good news, and gives me two when I return with bad--and to think
+that I was minded to feed him lies. Truly, there is no knowing when to
+have them! 'Tis the truth serves best with fools and gringos."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+"Done--at last!"
+
+Sprawled on the flat of his back, with his curly head propped on his
+hands and his lime-eaten boots spread at a comfortable angle, Billy
+gazed upon their completed labor. The "well"--into which the liquid
+copper matte would presently be flowing--crucible, slag spout, blast
+pipes, or tuyeres, and canvas blowers, even the inclined way that led up
+to the platform over the loading trap, all were finished, and from the
+solid bed to the tip top of the brick chimney shaft Billy's vision
+embraced it all. Including the tons of charcoal that Caliban had burned
+and brought in from the woods, and the piles of ore which Seyd and
+Calixto had broken into smelting size with "spalling" hammers, all stood
+ready for the match that Seyd scratched while echoing Billy's
+observation.
+
+"Done--at last!"
+
+When the shavings and wood were fairly started under the mixed charge of
+charcoal and ore Seyd also lay down to watch the first smoke. Under the
+vigorous blast it quickly appeared--a thin blue spiral which waxed in
+volume and blackness. In thirty minutes it laid a sooty finger halfway
+across the Barranca above the hills, a sinister portent to the rancheros
+and peons, one that found a dark reflection in Don Luis's frown as he
+looked out from the upper patio of San Nicolas, far away.
+
+Unconscious, however, of alien observation, Seyd watched the
+fluctuations of the black smoke with lazy enjoyment. He permitted his
+fancy to float with the waving pennon out over the valley down the
+river, where it set him aboard a log raft with his first shipment of
+copper matte and set him drifting down to the coast, where he could
+either sell to the United Metals Company or ship by sea to California
+smelters. There was nothing impractical about his musings. Independent
+of the gold values it carried, one smelting would transmute their
+thirty-dollar ore into copper matte worth a hundred and twenty dollars a
+ton. At a liberal estimate the extra twenty would pay expenses, and with
+a profit of a hundred dollars on an output of sixty or seventy a week
+during the two months before the rains, there was a small fortune in it.
+Next year they could both import their labor and put in a regular plant.
+Thereafter they would be in a position to deliver "blister" copper
+instead of matte to the market. Why, flaming under the breath of this
+first success, fancy leaped out to all sorts of possibilities, raised
+wharves, bunkers, storehouses in the jungle below, set a fleet of
+flat-bottomed sternwheelers on the river. And never was there such a
+river! He was traveling its long reaches in thought when fancy suddenly
+steered his argosy of dreams into the San Nicolas landing.
+
+The next second he was sitting again in the shaded gallery of the upper
+patio, its flowers and bird song, sunshine and fountain splash in his
+eyes and ears. As on the other day, he watched Francesca bending over
+her godchild, and while he was contrasting her air of tender solicitude
+with the cold hauteur of her face a month ago he thought she looked up
+with a smile. He was answering it when the smiling eyes were wiped out
+by the intrusion of some unpleasant thought.
+
+"You fool!" he chided himself. Then, sitting suddenly up, he smote Billy
+on the thigh with force that drew a yell of anguish. "It's a mint, boy!
+A blooming mint! I wouldn't trade my share for the best gold mine in
+Tonopah. Next year we'll put in a big plant--"
+
+"Reverberatories with water jackets!" Billy enthusiastically took up the
+tale.
+
+"Sure, and we'll build down on the flat by the river and deliver the ore
+by--"
+
+"Gravity. Aerial cable--self-dumping buckets--"
+
+"We'll refine our own matte--"
+
+"Market our own copper and gold." His blue eyes shining, Billy ran on:
+"In five years we'll be rich, then for a rest and a trip. New York,
+London, Paris, with Nice and Monte Carlo thrown in. Europe in a
+touring-car, by golly! Egypt and the Pyramids! A steam yacht and a trip
+around the world! Hurray for us!"
+
+"In the mean time"--Seyd led him gently back to earth--"remember,
+please, that this is your trick. Go and stoke up, or there'll be no
+Paris in yours."
+
+And surely their days of ease lay a long way off. Long and hard as they
+had labored, the completion of the smelter merely marked the beginning
+of still more strenuous tasks. Upon them and the two peons would rest
+the entire weight of running the smelter at its full capacity. Besides
+the breaking of the ore, tapping of the slag, continuous firing, they
+would have to burn their own charcoal after the first supply ran out.
+Though they had spread the strain by dividing day and night into shifts,
+it would have been work enough for four times their number.
+
+Seyd's first shift ended at twelve that night, but, though he sent
+Caliban off to his sleep, he himself sat up to wait for the first matte,
+which was due to come trickling from the spouts at any moment. Reclining
+his head, propped on his hand, he watched Billy and Calixto, both now of
+one color, each at his task, one working the blowers while the other
+dumped fresh ore and charcoal into the loading trap. At such times the
+blast would send a burst of flame high over the chimney top, lighting
+the house, stables, green ore mounds, showing ghostly trees beyond as
+under a calcium glare. Though the roar of the blast fell like a lullaby
+on his tired ears, excitement kept him awake till the first matte flowed
+in a red stream out of the tap.
+
+"She'll go a hundred and fifty to the ton!" Billy exclaimed, after a
+careful examination of a cooled sample. Then, waving his hand at the
+huge ore mounds, he groaned: "What a shame that we hadn't enough labor
+and capital. We could have run it all through before the rains."
+
+"Pig! Hog!" Seyd found a vent for his own surplus feelings by punching
+Billy in the chest. "Think how much worse off we should have been if we
+had had to mine it. Go down on your American knee bones and thank your
+lucky stars for the English Johnnies."
+
+Still smiling, he lay again to watch the glowing matte as Billy ladled
+it out of the well. It was the culmination of their long labor, but he
+was too tired even to think, and, giving himself up to a dim luxurious
+feeling, he insensibly passed into sleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Wake up, Bob, and go to bed. You still have four hours."
+
+Only half aroused, he arose and stumbled across to the adobe, threw
+himself down on the bunk without waiting to remove even his boots, and
+fell into slumber at once so dead and dreamless that it seemed as if his
+head had no more than touched the pillow before Billy's voice again
+rang in his ear.
+
+"Seven o'clock, Bob. I gave you an extra hour."
+
+"Oh, quit your joshing." He murmured it, rolling over, and was again
+almost asleep when a sudden report, louder than thunder, but with a
+peculiar vibrant note, brought him swiftly to his feet. A second later
+the door banged to and stuck, but not before they had caught a glimpse
+of a huge cloud plume, densely yellow, shooting upward above the
+smelter.
+
+During the moment required to wrench the door from its frame the adobe
+rocked under the concussion and scattered mud bricks, and there was a
+rain of stores from the shelves to the floor. It did not require
+Caliban's frightened yell on the outside, "_Explosion! Una explosion_,
+senores!" to tell them what had happened. The first glance, as they
+rushed out over the broken door, merely filled in the details of the
+vivid mental picture each had formed for himself. Hundreds of feet in
+mid air, the explosion cloud floated like a yellow balloon above the
+stump of a stack, the half-fused bricks of which were scattered over the
+bench. A cavity had been torn downward through the solid brick bed to
+the clay beneath, and, looking down into it, Seyd read the sign.
+
+"Dynamite! What was the last thing you did?"
+
+"Stoked up and sent Calixto to call Caliban while I came for you.
+Luckily for him that I did."
+
+The charcoal piles were also leveled and spread over half an acre, and,
+walking to and fro, Seyd began to pick up and break the larger pieces.
+And it was only a few minutes before he called out: "Look here! Stick
+dynamite, broken in two and gummed over with charcoal dust--a bushel of
+it right here."
+
+"Do you suppose--" Billy glanced toward the peons, who stood close by.
+
+Seyd shook his head. "No, they had nothing to gain by it, and everything
+to lose. It was the easiest thing in the world for anybody to steal into
+the woods at night and slip a ton of this into the charcoal piles."
+
+"Man, why didn't we think of it?" Billy groaned.
+
+In moments of stress no two natures will express themselves in quite the
+same way. As they stood looking gloomily over the wreck big tears slowly
+forced themselves out of Billy's inflamed eyes and washed white runnels
+down the soot. Heartbroken, he looked up in sudden fright as Seyd burst
+out laughing.
+
+"Bob! Bob!" he pleaded. "Have you gone crazy? Get a grip on yourself,
+there's a good fellow!"
+
+But his pathetic anxiety merely caused Seyd to laugh the more. It was
+not that he was hysterical. Somehow the thought of the pain and
+travail, trouble, anxiety, and discomforts they had endured during the
+past three months touched his sense of humor.
+
+"We have to allow that they made a pretty clean job," he said, wiping
+his eyes. "Let's be thankful that you were out of the way."
+
+"Where are you going?" Billy called out, as he began to walk away.
+
+"To finish my sleep and catch up a few hours on all that I have lost in
+the last three months. Take a nap yourself."
+
+"Oh, I couldn't."
+
+He undoubtedly thought so, yet when Seyd came out again, having slept
+the clock round, it was to find Billy curled up and snoring hard under
+the shade of the palm mat that Caliban had stretched between him and the
+sun. "Quit your fooling," he broke in severely on Seyd's chaffing.
+"Don't you know that we are down to our last dollar?"
+
+"Thirty-three dollars and sixty cents Mex," Seyd gravely corrected.
+Kicking a chunk of cooled matte, he added: "But we now have this. It
+ought to stake us for a new start."
+
+Billy, however, was not to be so easily separated from his grief. "Where
+are you going to raise capital," he demanded, "with every spare dollar
+in California locked up in the Nevada gold fields? If this had happened
+a year ago, before the Tonopah rush, we might have done it. But now?" He
+shook a doleful head.
+
+"Well--New York?"
+
+"Worse and more of it. The New Yorkers want all the bacon for killing
+the pig. Might as well give them the mine at once. No, Bob, it's all
+off. We're done--cooked a lovely brown in our own grease. Why _didn't_
+we guard those piles! Who do you suppose did it? Don Luis?"
+
+Seyd shrugged. "_Quien sabe?_ Doesn't look like his style. Of one thing,
+however, we can be certain. Your common peon doesn't habitually walk
+around with dynamite in his jeans. If I was going to lay any money, I'd
+place it on your friend Sebastien. But we haven't any time to fool on
+detective work. The question is--what's to be done?"
+
+It was no light problem. As Billy had said, every dollar of Western
+mining capital was invested in Nevada, and Mexican projects, however
+good, would have to wait till the new gold fields were completely
+exploited. A canvass of moneyed friends yielded no results, for, while
+the wreck lay there under their eyes to emphasize the possibility of
+similar future troubles, they could not but feel it to be a hazardous
+venture for any person of limited means. Night brought no conclusion.
+But, having slept on it again, they arose and began once more,
+unconscious of the fact that while they lay in the heavy shade of a wild
+fig tree, proposing, debating, rejecting various plans, the solution was
+fast approaching upon its own legs.
+
+Obviously, neither of them recognized the solution in the person of Don
+Luis when, about the middle of the forenoon, his horse lifted him up
+over the edge of the grade. On the contrary, it is doubtful whether
+smiling fortune was ever met with a blacker scowl than Billy's.
+Growling, "He's come up for a huge gloat," he would undoubtedly have
+returned some insult to the old man's greeting but for Seyd's stealthy
+kick on the shins.
+
+Prepared as he was by the reports that charcoal-burners had brought to
+San Nicolas, Don Luis's face expressed his utter astonishment at the
+extent of the ruin. "We but heard of it last night," he told them. "It
+was, I suppose, accidental? I understand that these furnaces--dynamite?
+_Senor?_" He glanced with an interrogative frown at the peons asleep in
+the shade of the adobe. "It was not they?"
+
+Reassured on that point, he nodded in confirmation of Seyd's statement
+that it would be foolish to hunt for the culprit. "As well try to single
+out a flea on a peon's dog. I warned you, senor, to expect an enemy in
+every stone of the Barranca. It would have been well had you listened.
+But"--his eyes, hands, and shoulders expressed his acceptance of
+fate--"it is done. And now?"
+
+"We shall rebuild--as soon as we can raise the money."
+
+Turning to survey the destruction, Don Luis hid a sudden gleam that was
+evenly compounded of admiration and irritation. When he spoke again,
+shrewd calculation peered from his half-closed eyes. "This time you will
+build a larger--"
+
+"--Plant?" Seyd supplied the word. "No."
+
+"But I am told, senor, that the larger the plant the greater the
+profits."
+
+Seyd raised comical brows. "Fifty thousand dollars, senor--gold?"
+
+"A small sum to your rich American capitalists."
+
+"But we are not capitalists. No, we shall have to get along with a small
+furnace."
+
+The calculation deepened in the old man's brown eyes. After a pause, to
+their utter astonishment, it took form in words. "But if you could raise
+the money?"
+
+"What's the use of talking; we can't."
+
+"If I were to lend it to you?"
+
+"_You!_" It was Billy who expressed their wonder. Seyd added, after a
+pause, "But we have no security to offer--that is, nothing but the
+mine."
+
+"And if we ran away?" Billy suggested, grinning. "Took your money and
+never came back?"
+
+For the first time in their acquaintance a touch of humor lightened the
+heavy bronzed face. "There are some in this valley, senor, who might not
+count it too high a price. But as you say"--he bowed to Seyd--"the mine
+is security enough. Now that you have shown how, I might even work it
+myself. To put in a complete--"
+
+"--Plant." Billy supplied the strange word.
+
+"How long?"
+
+"Between six and nine months. We should then require a little time to
+smelt some ore and realize. We could not--"
+
+"_Si, si!_" In his impatience Don Luis relapsed into Spanish. "_Si_, one
+would not expect immediate repayment. Perhaps five thousand pesos at the
+end of a year--"
+
+"Oh, we could do better than that. Ten thousand of a first payment,
+fifteen for the second, the remainder at a third with interest--"
+
+"Interest? I had not thought of that." But he yielded to their
+insistence. "Very well, if you will have it! Shall we say five
+per-cent.? _Bueno!_ You will, of course, have to make a trip to the
+United States to buy your material. If you will call at San Nicolas on
+your way the administrador will have letters prepared to my bankers in
+Ciudad, Mexico."
+
+With a shrug that expressed relief at the conclusion he changed the
+subject. Riding forward to obtain a closer view of the furnace, he again
+clucked his surprise at the complete destruction, wagged a grave head
+over the half bushel of dynamite that the peons had picked out of the
+charcoal, curiously examined a piece of copper matte, lifting heavy
+brows over the statement of its values, then rode quietly away, leaving
+Seyd and Billy to recover as best they could from this fortunate
+stroke.
+
+"Am I dreaming?" Billy's exclamation defined their mental condition.
+"Hit me, Bob. I want to make sure that I'm awake."
+
+Convinced, he gasped with his first breath: "Fifty thousand dollars!
+By golly! Why, we can put in a complete outfit."
+
+"Reverberatories with water jackets." Seyd took up the tale again.
+"We'll build down in the valley."
+
+"Aerial cable--"
+
+"--With iron self-dumping buckets--"
+
+"--A flat-bottomed sternwheeler to--"
+
+"--Take our copper down to the coast."
+
+Blinded by the sudden light that had flashed out of their black despair
+they stood for some time looking out over the Barranca with shining eyes
+which saw a small mining town rising out of the jungle's tangles. It was
+fully ten minutes before Seyd came back to earth.
+
+"I wonder what is behind all this? Seems rather funny that the old chap
+should come to our help?"
+
+"Not knowing, can't say and don't care a darn! So far as I am concerned,
+at fifty thousand a throw he can be just as inconsistent as he jolly
+well likes."
+
+"Nevertheless," Seyd mused, "I'd give three cents to know."
+
+Meanwhile, Don Luis pursued his quiet way, now at a heavy canter, again
+on a stately trot, through the jungle out to the first village beyond
+the forks of the trail. As he passed the little _fonda_ Sebastien Rocha
+rode out from a group of rancheros who stood drinking at the rough bar.
+
+"They told me of the passing," he said, nodding backward. "And I waited.
+What news? Did the gringos go up with their furnace? No? Still they will
+now have their bellies full of Guerrero?"
+
+But his face dropped at Don Luis's answer. "No, they are to build
+again."
+
+"But I thought--was it not the agent at the station who said they had no
+money?"
+
+"Neither had they." It was always difficult to read the massive face,
+but now it expressed just a shade of malicious amusement. "I have lent
+them fifty thousand pesos."
+
+"_Thou!_" For once the man's usual cynical calm was completely
+disrupted. In his vast astonishment he whispered it: "_Thou? Fifty
+thousand pesos?_"
+
+"_Yo._" Smiling slightly, he went on: "Now listen, Sebastien. Not to
+mention thy little attempt on their virtue, this is the third on their
+lives, and all badly bungled. So do not wonder that I thought it time to
+take them into my own hand. Now that they are there, let there be no
+mistake--the meddling finger is likely to be badly pinched. From this
+time--they are _mine_."
+
+"But--why give them money?"
+
+"To forestall others." Had he been there to hear, the following words
+would fully have answered Seyd's question. "The elder of these lads is
+no common man. By hook or by crook he would have raised a company--if he
+had to rope and tie down his men on the run. Then, instead of these two,
+we should have a dozen gringos, with Porfirio and his rurales to back up
+their charter. But do not fear."
+
+From the cleared fields through which they were riding it was possible
+to see Santa Gertrudis, and, turning in his saddle, he extended his
+quirt toward its green scar.
+
+"Do not fear."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+It was in the middle of the rainy season. Stepping out of his office,
+where he had just added a few drops of Scotch to the water he was
+absorbing at every pore, the station agent came face to face with the
+engineer of the down train.
+
+"Nine hours late?" The engineer gruffly repeated the other's comment.
+"We are lucky to be here at all. Besides being sopping wet, the wood
+we're burning is that dosey it'd make a fireproof curtain for hell. This
+kind of railroading don't suit my book, and I'm telling you that if they
+don't serve us out something pretty soon that smells like wood I know
+one fat engineer that will be missing on this line." Jerking his thumb
+at the lone passenger who had descended at the station, he added: "But
+for that chap we'd never have got through. When the track went out from
+under us at La Puente he pitched in and showed us no end of wrinkles. If
+you've got anything inside just give him a nip for me."
+
+"Hullo, Mr. Seyd!" Coming face to face with the passenger after the
+train had gone on, the agent thrust out his hand. "What a pity you
+weren't on the other train. She was twenty hours late--in fact, only
+pulled out a couple of hours ago. Miss Francesca was aboard, and she
+just left."
+
+"Not alone?"
+
+The agent laughed. "Sure! She don't care. Three weeks ago she came
+galloping in through one of the heaviest rains and took the up train."
+
+"So she has been home since I left?"
+
+"Let me see--that's nigh on three months, isn't it? Sure, she came home
+just after you left."
+
+With this bit of information lingering in the forefront of his mind
+Seyd, a little later, rode out from the station. Not that it engrossed,
+by any means, the whole of his thought. Even had he been free, the hard
+work and bitter disappointment of the first venture, and the equally
+hard thought and careful planning for the second during his long absence
+in the States, would have been sufficient to keep her in the background.
+If he had never happened to see Francesca again she would probably have
+lingered as an unusually pretty face in the gallery of his mind. While
+it was only natural that he should wonder if the news that he sent in by
+Caliban had ever reached her ear, it was merely a passing thought. His
+mind soon turned again to his plans. Up to the moment that, four hours
+later, he came slipping and sliding downhill upon her she was altogether
+out of his thought.
+
+For that very reason his fresh senses leaped to take the picture she
+made standing in the gray sheeting rain beside her fallen horse, and
+through its very difference from either the tan riding habit or virginal
+batiste of his memory her loose waterproof with its capote hood helped
+to stamp this figure upon his brain. Before she said a word he had gone
+back to the feelings of four months ago.
+
+The pelting rain had washed all but a few clay streaks off her coat.
+Touching them, she explained: "The poor beast fell under me. I fear it
+has broken a leg."
+
+While speaking she offered her hand; and if that had not been
+sufficient, her friendly smile more than answered his speculation.
+Caliban's niece had certainly done her duty! Indeed, while he was
+stooping over the fallen animal a quick glance upward would have given
+him a look evenly compounded of mischief and remorse. It gave place to
+sudden sorrow when he spoke.
+
+"It is broken, all right. There is only one thing to be done. If you
+will lead my horse around the shoulder of the hill I will put the poor
+thing out of its pain."
+
+Her life had been cast too much in the open for her to be ignorant of
+the needs of the case. Nevertheless, he saw that her eyes were brimming
+as she led his horse away; and, remembering their black fire on the day
+that she had ordered the charcoal-burners flogged, he wondered. It
+would have been even harder to reconcile the two impressions had he
+seen the tears rolling down her cheeks when the muffled report of his
+pistol followed her around the hill. But she had wiped them away before
+he rejoined her. If the sensitive red mouth trembled, her voice was
+under control.
+
+"No, I had not waited long," she answered his question. "You see, the
+poor creature lost a shoe earlier in the day, and I had to ride back to
+have it replaced. It would have been better had I stayed there."
+
+For the moment he was puzzled. An hour ago he had ridden past the last
+habitation, a flimsy hut already overcrowded with the peon, his wife,
+their children, chickens, and pigs. All around them stretched wide
+wastes of volcanic rock and scrub. They were, as he knew, on the
+hacienda San Angel, but the buildings lay five leagues to the north.
+With hard riding he had expected to make the inn at the foot of the
+Barranca wall that night. She might do it by taking his horse. But if
+anything went wrong? She would be alone--all night--in the rain! He felt
+easier when she refused the offer of his beast.
+
+"And leave you to walk? No, sir."
+
+A second offer to walk by her side not only ran counter to the prejudice
+of a race of riders, but also aroused her sympathies. "I could never
+think of it!" After a moment of thought she propounded her own solution.
+"Your beast is strong. I have ridden double on an animal half his size.
+We will both ride."
+
+Now, though Seyd had long ago grown to the sight of rancheros on their
+way to market in the embrace of their buxom brown wives, the suddenness
+of it made him gasp. But by a quick mounting he succeeded in hiding the
+rush of blood to his face. Also he managed to control his voice.
+
+"Fine idea! Give me your hand."
+
+Just touching his foot, she rose like a bird to the croup. When, as the
+horse moved on, she slid an arm around his waist his demoralization was
+full and complete. If he glanced down it was to see her fingers resting
+like small white butterflies on his raincoat. Did he look up, then a
+faint perfume of damp hair would come floating over his shoulder. He
+thrilled when her clasp tightened as the horse broke into a gentle trot,
+and was altogether in a bad way when her merry laugh restored order
+among his senses.
+
+"Now we can play Rosa and Rosario on their way to market. It will be for
+you to grumble at prices while I rail at the government tax that puts
+woolens beyond the purse of a peon."
+
+"I prefer to ask what brought you out in such weather." He returned her
+laugh. "A pretty pickle you would have been in if I had not come along."
+
+He felt the vigorous shake of her head. "I should have walked back to
+the last hut, and an oxcart would have taken me in to the station."
+
+"But then you would have been out all night."
+
+"I should have loved it." Though he did not see the sudden blooming
+under her hood, he felt the unconscious squeeze which testified to the
+sincerity of her feeling. "I love them--the roar of the wind, black
+darkness, the beat of the rain in my face. Mother would have had me stay
+in Mexico till the rains were over, but when Don Luis wrote that the
+river was at flood nothing could hold me." He had thrilled under her
+unconscious pressure, but her conclusion proved an excellent corrective.
+"I am afraid that the site for your new buildings must be under water."
+
+"How can that be?" He spoke quickly. "We are building well back from
+last year's mark, and Don Luis said that it was the highest known."
+
+"But this year it has gone even higher--and all because of the Yankee
+companies that are stripping the upper valley of timber. There were
+great fires, too, last year which broke away from their servants and
+burned hundreds of miles of woods."
+
+Her quiet answer went far to allay his sudden suspicion, but not his
+anxiety. He spoke of Billy. "It is over a month since he came out to the
+station for stores, and the agent told me that none of your people had
+seen him for weeks."
+
+"But he has with him Angelo"--she gave Caliban his correct name--"and
+he, as I once told you, was counted Sebastien's best man in his war
+against the brigands. Though he may not show it to you, he is not
+ungrateful for the gift of his life. If food is to be had in the
+country, Mr. Thornton will not go lacking."
+
+He spoke more cheerfully. "Then I don't care; though if the site _is_
+flooded we shall be thrown back at least three months with our work."
+
+"And what is three months?" she added, laughing.
+
+To him it was a great deal. Before paying over the loan Don Luis's
+lawyers had taken Seyd's signatures upon certain instruments which
+exhibited the General in the new light of a shrewd and conservative
+business man. Withal, having still plenty of time, he answered quite
+cheerfully when she turned the conversation with a question concerning
+his plans. Under the stimulation of her curiosity, which surprised him
+by its intelligence, he went into details, talking and answering her
+questions while the horse trudged steadily on into the darkening rain.
+If the trail had not suddenly faded out, night would have caught them
+unnoticed.
+
+In that volcanic country, where for long stretches a hoof left no
+impression, the loss of a trail was a common experience, and, trusting
+to the instinct of the beast, Seyd gave it the rein. Left to its own
+devices, however, it gradually swerved from the beating rain and
+presently turned on to a cattle track which swung away into gum copal
+trees and scrub oak at an imperceptible angle. Had he been alone Seyd
+would have soon noticed the absence of the Aztec ruin. As it was, but
+not until an hour later, Francesca was the first to speak.
+
+"That's so," he agreed, when she drew his attention. "We ought to have
+passed it long ago. The animal evidently picked up a wrong track coming
+out from the rocks." After a moment's reflection he said: "It would be
+worse than foolish to try to go back. We could never find the trail in
+this black rain. Better follow on and see where it will bring us." With
+a sudden remembrance of what it might mean to her, a young girl brought
+up in the rigid conventions of the country, he repentantly added: "I'm
+awfully sorry for you. I ought to be kicked for my carelessness."
+
+"No, I have traveled this trail much oftener than you," she quietly
+protested. "If any one is blamed I should be the one."
+
+Sitting there in black darkness, lost in those lonely volcanic hills,
+with the rain dashing in his face and the roar of the wind in his ears,
+he was prepared to appreciate her quiet answer. "You are a brick!" he
+exclaimed. "Nevertheless, I feel my guilt."
+
+"Then you need not." She gave a little laugh. "Did I not say that I
+enjoyed being out at night in the rain?"
+
+"And now the gods have called your bluff."
+
+"_Bluff?_" She laughed again at the meaning of that rank Americanism.
+"It was no bluff, as you will presently see."
+
+And see he did--during the long hour they spent splashing along in black
+darkness, up hill, down dale, fording swollen arroyos, through chaparral
+which tore at them with myriad claws and wet woods whose boughs lashed
+their faces. Up to the moment that the roof of a hut suddenly loomed out
+against the dim, dark sky she uttered no doubt or complaint. When,
+having tied his horse under the wide eaves, he lit a match inside, its
+flare revealed her face, quiet and serene.
+
+Also it showed that which, while not nearly so interesting, had its
+immediate uses--a candle stuck in a _tequila_ bottle; and its steadier
+flare presently helped them to another find--a chemisette and other
+garments of feminine wear, spotlessly clean and smoothly ironed,
+arranged on a string that ran over a bunk in one corner.
+
+"The fiesta wear of our hostess," Francesca remarked. "How lucky! for I
+am drenched."
+
+"And look at that pile of dry wood!" he exclaimed. "The gods are with
+us. I'll build a fire, then while I rub down the horse you can change.
+What's this?"
+
+It was a rough sketch done with charcoal on the table. Two
+parallelograms with sticks for legs were in furious pursuit of certain
+horned squares which, in their turn, were in full flight toward a
+doll's house in the far corner.
+
+"Oh, I know!" the girl cried, after a moment of study. "Here, in the
+wild country where they never see man, are raised the fighting bulls for
+the rings of Mexico. This hut belongs to a vaquero of San Angel, and
+this is an order, left in his absence, to drive the bulls into the
+hacienda." Laying her finger on a triangle which had evidently been
+added later, she continued, laughing: "This shows that his woman has
+gone with him. They were evidently called away unexpectedly, for she had
+already set the corn to soak in this _olla_ for the supper tortillas.
+And the saints be praised! Here are dried beef, salt, and chilis. Now
+hurry the fire, and you shall see what a cook I am."
+
+While he was building it in the center of the mud floor she made other
+finds--a cube of brown sugar, coffee, a cake of goat's cheese; and her
+little delighted exclamations over each discovery both amused him and
+proved how sincere was her acceptance of the situation. "She's a brick!"
+he told the horse, rubbing him down, outside, with wisps pulled out from
+the under side of the thatch. "Thoroughbred in blood and bone." As the
+animal had already experimented with the thatch and found it quite to
+its liking, the question of provender was settled. But in order that
+Francesca might have ample time to change, Seyd rubbed and rubbed and
+rubbed till a rattle of clay pots inside gave him leave to come in.
+
+At the door he paused to admire the picture she made in the red glow of
+the fire. In place of the slender girl of the stylish raincoat a pretty
+peona raised velvet eyes from the stone _metate_ on which she was
+vigorously rubbing soaked corn for the supper tortillas. By emphasizing
+some features and softening others strange attire always gives a new
+view of a woman. The sleeveless garment showed the round white arms and
+foreshortened and filled out her slender lines.
+
+Glancing down at her arms, she confessed, with an uneasy wriggle: "I
+don't like it, though I wear decollete every evening when we are in the
+city. But I shall soon get used to it."
+
+Conscious of his admiring eyes, she found them employment in watching
+the tortillas. But, having grown accustomed to the new dress by the time
+supper was ready, she left him free to watch the white arms and small
+hands which hovered like butterflies over the clay pot. In the lack of
+all other utensils, they used bits of tortilla for spoons, dipping
+alternately into the pot which she had set between them; nor did he find
+the chili any the worse for its contact with the tortilla which had just
+taken an impression of her small teeth. It required only an after-dinner
+pipe, to which she graciously consented, to seal his content.
+
+After the wet and fatigue of the trail the warmth and cheer of food and
+fire were extremely grateful, but not conducive to talk. While he sat
+watching the tobacco smoke curl up into the blackened peak of the roof
+she leaned, chin in her hands, elbows on crossed knees, studying the
+fire. Leaping out of red coal, an occasional flame set its reflection in
+her deep eyes, and as his gaze wandered from her around the rough
+_jacal_ Seyd found it difficult to realize that it was indeed he, Robert
+Seyd, mining engineer of San Francisco, who sat there sharing food and
+fire with a girl, on the one hand scion of the Mexican aristocracy,
+descendant on the other of a line which ran back into the dim time of
+the Aztecs. The thought stirred the romance within him and helped to
+prolong his silence. It would have held him still longer if his musings
+had not been suddenly interrupted by her merry laugh.
+
+"_Si?_" he inquired, looking suddenly up.
+
+"I was thinking what they would say--my mother, Don Luis, the
+neighbors?"
+
+"Horrible!" he agreed. "Your mother? What would she say?"
+
+As the white hands flew up in a horrified gesture it was the senora
+herself. "_Santa Maria Marissima!_"
+
+"And Don Luis?"
+
+Her expression changed from laughter into sudden mischievous demureness.
+"His remarks, senor, are not for me to repeat."
+
+"Well--the neighbors?"
+
+Once more her hands went up. "'Was it not that we always said it of that
+mad girl! Maria, thou shalt not speak with her again.'" Smiling, she
+added, "For you must know, senor, that I have been held as a horrible
+example of the things a girl should not do since the days of my
+childhood."
+
+"Like the devil in the old New England theology," he suggested, smiling,
+"you make more converts than the preacher?"
+
+He had to explain before she understood. Then she laughed merrily. "Just
+so. What they would do were I to marry, die, or reform, I really cannot
+tell. It would leave a gap almost equal to the loss of the catechism."
+She finished with a mock sigh, "They will never appreciate me till I'm
+dead."
+
+"Any present danger?"
+
+The smiling mouth pursed demurely under his whimsical glance. "I am
+afraid not. You saw my performance at supper. I am the despair of my
+mother, who would have me more delicate and refined."
+
+"Marriage?"
+
+"No one wants me."
+
+"Don Sebastien?"
+
+It slipped out, and he was immediately sorry, but she only laughed.
+"Tut! tut! A cousin?"
+
+Surveying him from under drooping lashes, a glance soft and warm as
+velvet, she added: "I will confess. There _were_ others. Some too fat,
+some too thin, all too stupid, here at home. In Mexico they were
+triflers--or worse. But on the honor of a lone maid, senor, never a man
+among them." With a sudden relapse into seriousness she repeated, "Among
+_all_ of them--never a man." Though she was looking directly at him, her
+glance seemed to go on, fly to some further vision which, for one
+second, set its reflection in her eyes. Then her long silky lashes wiped
+it out. When they rose again it was over mischievous lights. "Never a
+_man_," with a change of accent.
+
+"But he will come--some day," he teased.
+
+"And go--after the fashion of dream men."
+
+"And dream women."
+
+For a while she studied him curiously. "Then she has not come?"
+
+"Yes," he answered, with sudden impulse. "But--"
+
+She softly filled the pause. "'But' and 'because' are woman's reasons."
+
+"Unhappily, sometimes man's," he gravely answered; and, feeling,
+perhaps, that the conversation was drifting into unsafe latitudes, he
+rose and began to pull dry grass from the under side of the thatch. "For
+you," he exclaimed, with a glance at the bunk. "I knew you wouldn't care
+to sleep there."
+
+Having arranged a thick layer at a safe distance from the fire, he
+gathered another armful, and was going outside when she called him back.
+"To make my bed," he answered her question.
+
+"In the wet?"
+
+"Oh, it isn't so bad--here under the eaves."
+
+"Only an inch of water," she answered him, with pretty sarcasm; and,
+indicating certain small trickles that were coming through the cane
+siding, she gave him his orders. "You will sleep here--inside."
+
+"But--" he began.
+
+"Senor, I said that you would sleep _inside_."
+
+As a matter of fact, the "prospect" outside was not inviting, and his
+acquiescence lowered the quick colors his previous obstinacy had raised.
+She had already settled down on one elbow; and when, having arranged a
+bed on the opposite side of the fire, he lit a second pipe, she studied
+him through the smoke, wondering what pictures were responsible for his
+earnest gaze. But warmth and comfort presently produced their natural
+effect, and she began to nod. After a few shy, sleepy glances that
+showed him still staring moodily into the fire her head sank upon the
+white fullness of her doubled arm.
+
+As a matter of fact, it was his wife's face that returned his steady
+gaze from a nest of red coal. Absorbed in bitter musings, he received
+the first intimation of Francesca's sleep from a sigh which caused him
+to start as though at the report of a gun. Then while the warm blood
+streamed through his drumming pulses, every sense vividly alive, he
+looked down upon her. With all the timid awe that Adam must have
+displayed when he awoke to the sight of Eve he studied this greatest of
+masculine experiences, a woman clad in the soft armor of sleep.
+
+For some time his senses dwelt only on the fact, and gave him merely the
+soft sigh of her sleep, the play of firelight over the unconscious
+figure. But presently his mind began to work, to compare the broad
+forehead, oval contours, fine-cut nostrils, delicate chiseling of her
+features, with the common prettiness of his wife. Even the little foot
+and slender ankle, freed by relaxation from the jealous skirt, helped to
+emphasize differences wide as those between a hummingbird and a pouter
+pigeon. It had required the rigid selection of a thousand generations,
+the pre-eminence in strength and brains of a line of fighters to produce
+the one, just as the slacker choice of a commoner breed had created the
+other; and Seyd, whose own blood had come down through the clean
+channels of good Colonial stock, recognized the fact. As never before he
+was impressed with the fatuity of his chivalric rashness. While the
+firelight rose and fell he strained at the ties which stretched over
+mountains, desert, plains, binding him to the coarse woman in
+Albuquerque.
+
+His sudden jerk forward was the physical equivalent of his mental
+strain. Though homely, even slangy, his mutter, "Your cake is baked,
+son. The sooner you let this girl know it the better," was none the less
+tragic. The thought was the last in his waking mind.
+
+Before going to sleep he performed one last service. Noticing that she
+shivered under the wet breath of the night, he took off his coat,
+tiptoed across, and, after laying it softly across her shoulders,
+returned with equal caution. She did not stir or even change the slow
+rhythm of her breath, but he had no more than lain down before her eyes
+slowly opened. When his deep respirations told that he was fast asleep
+she rose on one elbow and looked at him across the fire.
+
+In her turn, with glances shyly curious as those with which Eve, newly
+formed, may have eyed Adam still in "deep sleep," she noted the
+wide-spaced, deep-set eyes, strong nose, the ideality of the brows, the
+humorous puckers at the corners of his mouth. Though she did not analyze
+their individual meanings, the totality made a strong appeal to instinct
+and intuitions formed by the vast experience of the race. Her impression
+phrased itself in her murmur, "A wholesome face."
+
+Only the cleft chin seemed to carry a special meaning. Surveying it, a
+gleam of mischief shot through the soft satisfaction of her look, and
+she murmured beneath her breath in Spanish, "Oh, fickle! fickle! Thy
+wife will need the sharpest of eyes."
+
+The thought brought a little laugh, and for a minute thereafter she sat,
+a finger upon her lip, listening for a break in his breathing. When it
+did not come she rose slowly, stole like a mouse across the floor, and
+laid his coat, light as a feather, over his unprotected shoulders. Back
+again on her own couch, she looked across at him again; a glance naive
+in its enjoyment of the romantic impropriety of the entire proceeding.
+Then, curling up under her raincoat, she fell fast asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Thoroughly fagged out by six weary nights on the train, Seyd slept like
+the dead, and did not awaken until a sudden clatter of pots aroused him
+to knowledge of a golden cobweb of light streaming in between the flimsy
+siding of the hut. Through the open doorway he obtained a glimpse of a
+bejeweled world, resonant with the song of birds. After informing him of
+these facts, his eyes reintroduced him to the young lady in the tan
+riding habit who had ousted the pretty peona of last night from her
+command over fire and dishes. The satisfying odor of hot coffee
+completed the verdict of his senses.
+
+"Breakfast all ready? I must have slept like a log."
+
+"You did." She laughed. "I rattled the dishes in vain. I was just about
+to throw something at you."
+
+Now, his last waking thought had outlined a purpose to inform her at
+once of his marriage, and while they were eating breakfast it recurred
+again. But not with the same force. That which, when imbued with the
+sentimental values of firelight and silence, appeared necessary and
+right somehow appeared almost absurd when viewed in broad day. Checking
+sentiment, too, by its very friendliness, her manner did not invite
+confession.
+
+"It would be impertinent," he concluded. "She has no personal interest
+in me."
+
+If he had observed her only an hour earlier re-entering the _jacal_
+after a shivering exchange outside with the peona he might not have been
+quite so sure. Once or twice she had indulged in softer thought, whose
+key was to be found in her murmur just before she tried to awake him:
+
+"_Adios_, Rosario."
+
+Also the morning had brought its own problem to fill his mind. He could
+not but see that their appearance at the inn in the Barranca so early in
+the day would be a confession of their breach of the most rigid of
+Spanish conventions. But how to broach the subject without offense?
+Though he racked his brains while saddling the horse and, later, when it
+was carrying them double upon their way, he had come to no conclusion up
+to the moment that she settled it herself with a little cry.
+
+"Now I know where I am." She was indicating an outcropping of rock on a
+sterile hillside. "We strayed miles away from our trail. We shall soon
+come to a path that leads past a rancho where I can borrow a horse."
+
+Almost as they spoke the cattle track they had been following joined a
+trail, and shortly after she spoke again, laughing. "And now, Senor
+Rosario, I must bid you good-by. This good beast has done nobly, but we
+shall gain time if one rides forward to the rancho and sends back a
+horse. Which shall it be?"
+
+But he was already on the ground, hat in hand. "Rosa, _adios_."
+
+Laughing, she rode on while he sat down on an outcropping of rock to
+wait, for he was not minded to wade through the wet grass and brush of
+some woods at the foot of the hill. Until she passed from sight he sat
+watching, then, feeling a little lazy, he fitted his angles into a sort
+of natural couch in the rock and fell to musing, reviewing again the
+incidents of the night. He had not intended to sleep. But what with the
+warmth and stillness, he presently passed quietly away, was still
+unconscious when the stroke of a hoof on a rock awoke him to the sight
+of two horsemen with a led beast.
+
+"For me," he thought. Then, as he recognized Sebastien Rocha in the
+second horseman, he whistled his consternation. If the hacendado had not
+actually met Francesca he must surely have pumped the _mozo_ dry, and
+now the sight of him, Seyd, would fully reveal their case!
+
+"Now for a big fat row," he told himself. But, greatly to his surprise,
+Sebastien passed on with a nod, and presently turned from the trail,
+following their fresh hoof tracks over the hill. The _mozo_ had already
+gone on to retrieve Francesca's saddle from the dead horse, and,
+irritated and alarmed, Seyd mounted the led beast and rode on at a
+gallop. But, quickly realizing that his further company was not likely
+to improve the girl's case, he presently pulled the beast back to a
+walk. Lost in frowning thought, he rode on slowly until, an hour later,
+there came a beat of galloping hoofs, and Sebastien rode up from behind.
+
+His reiteration of the thought "Now for the row!" was colored by the way
+in which the hacendado's hand went to his holster. But Seyd's hand,
+which moved as quickly to his own gun, dropped, and he blushed crimson
+as the other held out his brier pipe.
+
+"Merely _this_, senor." He glanced meaningly at Seyd's gun. "For _that_
+you would have been too late. I could have shot you through the back.
+After this do not let your foolish Yankee pride stop you from looking
+behind."
+
+Though both angry and alarmed, the cold impudence of it made Seyd laugh.
+"Yes? How did you resist the temptation?"
+
+"It was a temptation." He gravely approved the word. "Your back made
+such a fine smooth mark. I could see the bullet splash in the center."
+
+"Then why didn't you? Since you are so frank I don't mind saying that I
+believe that you already had a hand in at least one of three attempts on
+my life! Is it that you would prefer to have me blown up?"
+
+"Like your predecessor, the Hollander?" Sebastien's shrug might have
+meant anything. "I have, of course, my preferences, and some day I shall
+have to decide in just which way I would wish you put to death. In
+passing the opportunity now you ought to feel complimented, for let me
+tell you that I would never leave any Mexican lips free to tell of your
+experiences last night."
+
+The man's tone of quiet certainty robbed the words of extravagance; and,
+accustomed now to a life that out-melodramaed melodrama, Seyd knew
+better than to take them for jest. "That's very nice of you," he quietly
+answered, and as just then the trail narrowed to pass through a copal
+grove he added: "Forewarned is forearmed. Just to keep you out of
+temptation--will you please to go first?"
+
+"With pleasure."
+
+Faint though it was, the smile that loosened the firm mouth made it
+easier for Seyd to continue when they were riding once more side by
+side. "For the young lady's sake I am glad to have you take such a
+sensible view of an unavoidable situation. I take it that you were going
+the other way. If you can trust me--"
+
+"Trust no one and you will never be deceived. If I had my way of it
+there would be an end to the girl's wild tricks. But since she _will_ be
+abroad, what better escort could she have than her kinsman?"
+
+"None," Seyd agreed. "I overtook her by accident, cared for her the best
+that I could; now she is in your hands."
+
+Sebastien shook his head. "Not so swiftly. She would hardly thank me for
+your dismissal." While the shadow of a smile lifted the corner of his
+thin lips he added: "The last time I mixed in her affairs she refused to
+speak with me for over a year, and I have no mind to repeat the
+experience. We are all going to San Nicolas. It would be foolish to ride
+apart."
+
+"Very well," Seyd agreed, not, however, with any great degree of
+pleasure. Apart from the strain involved by a day's travel with a man
+who had just confessed to a permanent intention of killing him he felt
+more disappointment than he would have cared to admit at the spoiling of
+the tete-a-tete with the girl. In fact, the feeling was so acute that he
+found it necessary to justify it in his own thought. "It was only for a
+day," he mused, slightly changing his previous conclusion to fit the
+case, "and I'd like to have seen it out."
+
+"So! so! The storm proved a little too much for this one."
+
+They had just ridden into copal woods, and, looking up, Seyd saw that he
+was pointing at a pile of bones and wet tatters of clothing that lay
+under a swinging fray of rope. If possible, it was more grisly of
+appearance than a second mummy which still swung, clicking its miserable
+bones in the wind. Whether or no he noticed Seyd's shiver of disgust
+Sebastien ran easily on:
+
+"He was a stout rogue, this fellow, with a keen eye for a pretty woman
+and small scruples as to how he got her. It was, indeed, through this
+little weakness that we caught him, using a girl to bait the trap. But
+he died game--with a joke on his lips. 'Senor,' he said, as the mule
+went from under him, 'if but one-half of my brats walk in my steps thou
+wilt have need of an army to finish us up.'
+
+"He had humor, too. He it was that stole the altar service from the
+church of San Anselmo to pay the priest of Guadaloupe to say a thousand
+masses for the repose of his soul. He was dead and the masses said
+before the service was traced by a pilgrim to the Guadaloupe shrine, and
+ever since the priests have been at war--both over the return of the
+service and to decide the burning question as to whether it is possible
+to nullify a heavenly title obtained through fraud. It makes a pretty
+point in theology, and the battle still rages. Being debarred from
+physical expression, the brute in a priest exercises itself through the
+tongue, and they will not leave such a choice morsel till the last shred
+of meat has been gnawed from the bones."
+
+In presence of those dumb witnesses to its truth, the grim banter
+sounded even grimmer. During the long white nights that followed hard
+days at work on the smelter nothing had suited Caliban more than to be
+drawn on to talk of the war against the brigands. Under the red light of
+a camp fire, with the vast night of the Barranca yawning below, the
+tales had been spun--tales that had outdone the dime novels of Seyd's
+youth. Of them all, that which had ended with the hanging of the last
+bandit in this very glade had outdone all in sheer desperation.
+
+Kindling to the romance of it all, he took stealthy note, as they rode
+on, of the lithe muscular figure, which was as extraordinary in its
+balanced strength as the calm power of the quiet brown face. When memory
+drew a vivid contrast between Sebastien and his early training in the
+sober atmosphere of the English commercial boarding-school Seyd
+wondered, and finally put his wonder into words.
+
+"Didn't you find the transition from Manchester rather sudden? It must
+have been like plunging head first into a romance."
+
+"Romance?" For the first time that morning, for matter of that, in all
+their intercourse, Sebastien laughed outright. "Oh, you Anglo-Saxons!
+Romance is a creature of your own dreamy idealism. We do not know it. We
+are passionate, nervous, hysterical, gross, materialistic, but for all
+our heat we see life more clearly than you. It would be better for us if
+we did not. For where in the mirror of your imaginings you see your
+strength enormously magnified our clearer perceptions show our
+weaknesses. Even at the point of death you neither see nor accept
+defeat. But we, cowering before it, are swept the quicker away." Just as
+on that other occasion when he stood talking beside their fire on the
+rim of the Barranca, this came out of his quiet with volcanic heat.
+Dropping as quickly into his usual calm, he finished, "No, I did not
+find it romantic--merely amusing."
+
+Nettled a little by his amused contempt, Seyd quickly retorted: "I fail
+to see how you can claim to have no ideals? You who are striving with
+all your might against the American invasion?"
+
+Sebastien shrugged. "Racial aversion--backed up by the instinct of
+self-preservation. Even cattle will band together against the wolves.
+But remove the danger and the bulls fall at once fighting for command of
+the herd. Before Diaz we had sixty-five rulers in sixty years, very few
+of whom died in their beds. Once remove his iron hand from our throats
+and we shall go at it again, revolution upon revolution, for the sole
+purpose of satisfying some man's personal ambition, lust, or individual
+greed. No, senor, we are individualists in the extreme. We have nothing
+in our make-up to correspond to the racial ideal that makes you Northmen
+subordinate personal interest to the general good. And because of our
+lack you will eventually rule us."
+
+"Yet you strive against it?"
+
+"For the one reason, as I told you, that the weaker wolf declines to be
+eaten. Individually, I find it amusing. I would much prefer shooting
+gringo soldiery to hanging Mexican bandits."
+
+"And the General--Don Luis?"
+
+Once again Sebastien laughed. "That old revolutionist? He would deny all
+I have said as rank heresy, though he himself is its most startling
+example. He would say that he was for Mexico, but Mexico, to him, is
+Mexico with a Garcia for president. Selfish to the backbone, every one
+of us."
+
+In a phrase he had described Don Luis, and, while he could not but smile
+at its truth, Seyd was just a little startled by the keen intelligence
+and flashing intuition. Even after allowing for advantages of travel and
+education the man's sharp reasoning and originality were remarkable.
+Like a clear black pool his mind sharply reflected all that passed over
+it, and always the conception stood out as under a lightning flash.
+
+"No, senor," he went on, after a pause, "we are individualists, and as
+such can only obtain happiness by following our own bent. If we are held
+back for a while by Porfirio, be sure that sooner or later we shall
+return with greater zest to our ancient pastime of cutting each other's
+throats."
+
+His uncanny intelligence, too, threw sinister lights on everything they
+passed. "I told you we were gross," he said, indicating a youth and a
+brown girl who were flirting through the barred windows of an adobe
+ranch house. "The proof--the bars. With us love is a passion; the ideal
+exists only in our songs."
+
+Shortly thereafter they rode out on the rim overlooking the Barranca,
+and the necessity of riding in single file down the zigzag staircases
+brought an end to their talk. Neither did he begin it again as they
+crossed the bottom flat to the inn. Coming after a long silence, the
+invitation which he delivered at last, as they rode into the patio, came
+as a greater surprise.
+
+"I feel certain, senor, that my cousin will wish you to lunch with us."
+
+Because another trait in Sebastien's nature was not revealed until, a
+few minutes later, he knocked at Francesca's door, Seyd failed to see
+that which, after all, was perhaps even more surprising. As he entered
+in response to her call she rose and stood, one hand resting on the
+small altar where burned a tiny taper; and as he stood looking at her
+across the length of the room the inquiry in her wide eyes became
+touched with fear.
+
+"It is you?" she broke the silence. "They told me that you spent last
+night here. How was it that I did not meet you on the way?"
+
+"Simply because I had happened to turn in at the Rancho del Rio to look
+at some cattle. But I overtook the _mozo_ you sent back with the horse
+for the gringo. Also I called in at the _jacal_ of Miguel, the vaquero
+of San Angel, where I found Maria, his woman, just returned. She was
+rejoicing over a supernatural visitation. It seems that while she and
+Miguel were away the Virgin Guadaloupe abode in their house, and even
+honored Maria by putting on her best fiesta clothes. In proof thereof
+she showed me a silver peso that the Virgin left tied up in one corner
+of her chemisette. It was truly remarkable, and I was well on my way to
+a healthy conversion when I happened to stumble on the gringo's pipe--at
+least, he claimed it on sight."
+
+"And you immediately turned about to tattle this to me?"
+
+He merely smiled under her bright scorn. "To see you home."
+
+"Where you will proceed to make my mother eternally miserable, and
+uncle--"
+
+"--Infernally angry? On the contrary, I am prepared to back up with
+pistol and knife the tale of Maria's visitation. Why should I wish to
+bring suffering to the good mother? It was a hap of the trail, and, much
+as I hate all gringos, it was far better that you should have been in
+this man's hands. Some day I may have to kill him, and I shall do it
+with greater pleasure because of this!"
+
+"If the attempt does not fail as miserably as that which you made on his
+soul."
+
+"Put it morals, cousin, just to bring it within the bounds of my
+comprehension. You know my beliefs as to souls."
+
+"In any case it was a mean trick."
+
+"Tricks are tricks only when they fail. Successful, they rise to the
+dignity of strategems. And he ought not to complain. Did he not come out
+of the ordeal unscathed, tricked out in the flowers of virtue? He's
+really in my debt. But returning to my point, some day I shall kill him;
+but in the mean time I have asked him to lunch with us. As he looked
+hungry, I should suggest a little haste."
+
+"I am ready now." Going toward him, she spoke, hesitantly: "Let
+me--thank you. Were you always thus, Sebastien, we should be better
+friends."
+
+"_Gracias_, anything but that." Bowing, he stood aside to permit her to
+pass. "The half liking that you deal out to Anton, Javier, and other
+fat-jowled hacendados, your admirers, would never do for me. I prefer
+your--fear."
+
+"But I am not afraid of you." She looked straight in his eyes passing
+out.
+
+"You will be--some day."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Coming out from luncheon--at which Sebastien had presided with a grave
+courtesy which lifted the inn's humble fare of eggs, tortillas, and rice
+to epicurean heights--Seyd and Francesca came face to face with Tomas,
+her _mozo_, who had just ridden into the patio. At sight of his mistress
+the _mozo's_ teeth flashed in the golden dusk under his sombrero, but he
+shook his head when she reached for the letter which he took out of his
+saddle bags.
+
+"It is for the gringo senor. The _jefe_ did not know of your coming."
+
+It was, of course, from Don Luis. Couched in terms massively dignified
+as his own reserve, it apologized for the floods as for some personal
+fault, and finished by placing hacienda San Nicolas at Seyd's service.
+
+"So you will ride on with us," Francesca commented upon its content.
+
+As Sebastien had gone to order fresh horses, there was no one but Seyd
+to observe her evident pleasure. But if he thrilled, yet he persisted,
+pleading that he intended to establish headquarters there at the inn and
+would be head over heels in business, freighting machinery and supplies
+in from the station.
+
+He smiled at her further objection that he would hardly find the
+accommodations of the inn to his liking. "They are better than at the
+mine. If they prove too bad I shall run down to San Nicolas to beg a
+meal."
+
+"Very well, senor, we shall expect you."
+
+Her little backward nod, riding away with Sebastien a few minutes later,
+reaffirmed it, but while Seyd bowed in acknowledgment his thought ran
+oppositely. Unaware how quickly circumstances would compel the visit, he
+formulated a hardy resolution. "Now, young man, no more sentimental
+fooling. It's you for work. The first thing is to get across to Billy."
+
+When, however, he took counsel with his fat brown host concerning the
+hire of a dugout the latter held up pudgy hands in horror. _Santissimo
+Trinidad!_ The very idea was madness! With the river running a mile wide
+at its narrowest? Not a peon would venture upon it! And under the
+inspiration of his belief that a live customer was to be preferred to
+even a drowned gringo he worked privately against Seyd's suicidal
+intention. So well did he scatter his pessimistic seed that when Seyd
+succeeded in finding a dugout he had to buy it outright; nor could he
+persuade a single peon to dare the flood.
+
+It was while returning to the inn late in the day that he obtained his
+first glimpse of the river from a knoll which lifted him above the
+drowned jungle. Around wooded islands, which were usually dry hills, a
+waste of waters, thick and brown as chocolate, swept madly. Along the
+edge of the jungle it boiled in fat eddies which sucked and licked the
+trailing greenery. Farther out it was whipped into a yellow cream by the
+thrashing branches of uprooted trees, ceibas and cedars, huge as a
+church, which rolled and tumbled as their submerged limbs caught on the
+bottom. Everywhere it was studded with debris, trees and brush, whole
+acres of water lilies which here massed like a garden around a floating
+hut, there wreathed the carcass of some drowned beast.
+
+In all the world there is nothing more melancholy than the voice of a
+flood. Its resurgent dirge stirs vague forebodings which root in the
+calamitous experience of the race. Standing there alone, with the call
+of rushing waters, patter of rain, and sough of a sad wind in his ears,
+Seyd was able to understand the peons' superstitious fear. Yet he
+remained undeterred. The water being far too deep for poling, he made a
+pair of oars and fitted wooden thole pins in the dugout that evening,
+and next morning put off by himself on the tangled breast of the flood
+with such food as he had been able to buy.
+
+Once afloat, he found navigation even more precarious than the direst
+prophecy of his host. Now backwatering until an opening showed in a
+bristle of brush and water lilies, he would next almost crack his back
+in a supreme effort to cross the currents which ran like millraces
+between wooded islands. Once a quick spurt saved him from disastrous
+collision with a derelict log; and, dodging or running, he was kept so
+busy that Billy's sudden hail came as a surprise.
+
+"Hello, Seyd! Got any decent grub? We've lived on frijoles straight for
+the last thirty days."
+
+The monotonous diet, however, did not seem to have impaired Billy's
+customary cheerfulness. At the sight of eggs, honey, chickens, and
+bananas in the stern of the boat his freckles loomed like brown spots on
+a shining sun. Neither had misfortune affected his industry. Though--as
+Francesca feared--ten feet of water now covered the new foundation, he
+had immediately started another on a bench which rose fifty feet above
+the flood. And, now munching a tortilla rolled in honey, he led the way
+to where Calixto and Caliban, with half a dozen others, were hard at
+work. It was their first meeting since Seyd left for the States, and
+there was, of course, no end to the things each had to tell. Then, in
+reviewing the new work and planning for more, the day slipped rapidly
+away.
+
+Indeed, afternoon was drawing on before Seyd pushed off again. He had
+intended to land as close as possible to the inn and have the dugout
+carried back upstream the following day. But he could not, of course,
+foresee the event which, a third of the way across, caused him to stop
+rowing and stare with all his eyes. For as he backwatered to avoid a
+huge ceiba that bore down upon him with a slow, leisurely roll he spied
+a patch of white amidst the branches, and as it drew closer this
+presently resolved into a drenched chemisette which clung to the limbs
+of a young girl.
+
+A slim brown thing under thirteen, terror had drained away every
+particle of her natural color, leaving her big dark eyes looming dead
+black in the pale gold mask of her face. Though she had seen Seyd first,
+the inborn humility of her subject race deterred her from making any
+outcry. She just sat perfectly still astride the thatched peak of a
+submerged hut which, caught in the branches, acted as an outrigger to
+keep the great tree on an even keel. Only her eyes expressed the pitiful
+appeal whose utter hopelessness was emphasized by flash of wonder when
+Seyd drove the dugout in among the branches.
+
+Rising, then, she leaped into the bows, and, whether because the mass
+rode in a balance too delicate to endure the sudden change of weight or
+that a submerged branch happened to catch just then on some obstruction,
+the tree rolled heavily upon the dugout while Seyd was pulling his oars.
+Fortunately, the one heavy stroke had carried them out from under all
+but the thinner branches, and, though the dugout was capsized and forced
+under, it rose instantly, with Seyd and the girl clinging at each end.
+The hut on which she had been floating also emerged, and, working
+alongside, Seyd was able to right his craft and bale it out with his
+Stetson sombrero. A few yards away he recovered one oar, and, using it
+as a paddle, he tried to work across the flood.
+
+By the time he had gained half the way, however, he was miles below the
+inn, and dusk found him floating on the wide lake which now covered the
+San Nicolas cane fields. Here, where the water ran more slowly, he made
+way faster toward the shore, and through a leaden dusk he presently made
+out red twinkles which grew, in another half hour, into the lights and
+fires of the hacienda. Soon his oar struck bottom, and, using it as a
+pole, he drove rapidly into a landing.
+
+The night rains had already set in and they came down in sheets which
+soaked him to the skin and made of the girl, who had fallen asleep in
+the bows, a dim white nude. She had given him her simple history--how,
+of the five who were asleep in the hut when it was swept away by a
+cloudburst, she alone had survived. Utterly tired and exhausted, she did
+not awaken when he picked her up, and she lay quietly in his arms during
+the long sloppy tramp across the upland pastures. She was still asleep
+when, aroused by the baying of his dogs, Don Luis peered down from the
+upper patio upon their draggled figures.
+
+"_Hombres! hombres!_" Looking up as his heavy bass boomed through the
+hacienda calling the _mozos_, Seyd caught a glimpse under the portal
+lantern of Francesca's face in its frame of dark hair through a
+glittering mist of rain. The next moment she came flying down the great
+stone stairs, followed by an irruption of brown maids.
+
+"The _nina_! Oh, the poor _nina_!" Though she was wearing an evening
+dress of delicate white, she gathered the soaked child into her bosom,
+and, a center of flying skirts and soft womanish exclamations, hurried
+her away to the upper regions.
+
+In the longer time required for him to descend, Don Luis subdued his
+first astonishment, but it broke bonds again when Seyd explained his
+plight. "You crossed and recrossed the flood? _Por Dios mio!_ I would
+never have dreamed that man could do it and live! You are wet to the
+skin. Come up at once."
+
+"I had not expected--" Seyd began.
+
+But the old man cut him off at once. "You gringos are difficult folk to
+please. Surely a dry bed in San Nicolas is to be preferred to a wet
+night on the river."
+
+Nevertheless he was not displeased. Conferring with Francesca concerning
+a change of clothes after Seyd was safely bestowed in a bedroom, he
+expressed his secret admiration. "See you, an enormous ceiba rolls over
+and sends him and the _canoa_ to the bottom, yet he speaks of it with
+shamed laughter as though of a fault. Also he would have borrowed a
+_mozo_ and horse to travel back to the inn. What a man he would have
+made for the old wars!"
+
+A _charro_ suit, so close to Seyd's size as to be almost a fit, was the
+best that Francesca, after a voluble consultation with her maids, could
+offer in the way of change, and, though he experienced modest qualms at
+the sight of himself in tight trousers and short bolero jacket of soft
+leather gorgeously embroidered with silver, they undoubtedly brought out
+qualities of limb which were altogether lost in his usual clothing. If
+he could have seen the touch of admiration that softened the mischief in
+Francesca's dark eyes when he entered the living-room, his misgivings
+might have vanished. But the phenomenon occurred behind his back, and
+his recent vow against "sentimental fooling" did not prevent him from
+coloring at her whispered remark:
+
+"You remind me of one Senor Rosario."
+
+Later, he was to spend considerable time trying to appease conscience
+with plausible explanations of his feeling, to set it down to relief
+that their adventure had brought her no trouble. But while relief may
+have entered in, it was principally due to the fact that she had chosen
+to retie the thread of their acquaintance just where it had been severed
+by Sebastien's intrusion. Yet, whatsoever its constituents, his pleasant
+embarrassment did not paralyze his tongue.
+
+"I cannot return the compliment."
+
+Neither could he. With Rosa, the pretty peona, this young lady in foamy
+white had nothing in common, and Rosa would have certainly felt out of
+place amidst the luxurious appointments of the room. Ample in all its
+dimensions, the furnishings had evidently been selected from the
+garnered treasures of several generations, with such taste, however,
+that the unmatched pieces made a harmonious whole. The old hangings
+which excluded the damp night, the old rugs on the mahogany floor, and
+old furniture lent each other countenance, melted into a rich design.
+Even the grand piano, undoubtedly the latest addition, was taking the
+tone of age. Only the bookcases which flanked the great fireplace
+displayed a modern note, for in them fine editions of English classics
+crowded the novels and plays of Cervantes and Lope Felix de Vega,
+Daudet, Flaubert, Anatole France, De Maupassant, competed for room with
+Spanish and English translations of the modern Russians.
+
+"Her taste," Seyd had summed the room. "Your books?" he asked, with a
+nod at these astonishing shelves.
+
+"Yes, no one else reads them." She added, with smiling directness: "Or
+could understand. If the dear mother read French, oh, what a bonfire we
+should have!"
+
+"And you like them--the Frenchmen?"
+
+"Some--in some things." Her brows arching in the effort for clear
+expression, she went on: "They know life, and one cannot but enjoy their
+beautiful style. But"--the delicate penciling drew even finer--"they
+see only with the eye. They are brilliant--as diamonds, and just as
+hard, cold. They analyze, dissect, probe life, take it apart, then
+forget to put it together. Love they see only as passion devoid of
+sympathy, affection, friendship. Their art is of the senses, their
+refinement--of manner. Under the veneer they are gross and hard."
+
+To his astonishment she had expressed his own feeling for French
+literature, and, intensely curious, he went on probing her with
+questions, in his interest forgetting both his clothes and hunger till
+Don Luis interrupted.
+
+"Lindita, the senor cannot live on words. The girls are calling dinner."
+
+But after the meal--which was set out with silver, glass, napery, all of
+the finest, and served by brown maids who moved in and out with the soft
+stealth of bare feet--they went at their talk again, gleaning in fields
+of common knowledge while Don Luis alternately smoked and dozed by the
+fire.
+
+It was a revelation for Seyd, and while he watched the play of feeling
+over her face, the flow of her soft color, the swift moods of the arched
+brows, and the lighting and lowering of dark eyes in unison with the
+change of her talk, his hardy resolution of yesterday--already sapped by
+his present luxurious comfort--underwent further disintegration.
+
+"After all," he thought, "why shouldn't I run down and see them
+occasionally?"
+
+Following Don Luis to his bedroom, he arrived at this conclusion, and in
+his argument with Conscience he reaffirmed it with even greater force.
+"After all the old man's kindness it would be blackly ungrateful to
+flout his hospitality."
+
+"No reason why you should," Conscience conceded, but added the
+unpleasant rider, "providing you don't sail under false colors."
+
+"Of course!" Seyd here grew quite huffy with Conscience. "I always
+intended to let her know I was married--not that it is necessary. I'm
+not so conceited as to think that she feels the slightest personal
+interest in me."
+
+If it were really sincere his belief might have been shaken, could he
+have reviewed a little scene that was being enacted at that very moment
+across the patio. After the waif from the floods had been bathed and fed
+she was put to bed on a couch in Francesca's own room, and, aroused by
+the brilliant sheen of wax candles on the dresser, she lay and watched
+with eyes of awe the young lady at her toilet. In her simple sight the
+dresser, with its big French mirror and gleaming silver appointments,
+doubtless appeared as the altar before which was being accomplished the
+marvelous transmutation of a woman into the exact semblance of those
+angels of light pictured on the stained windows of the church of
+Chilpancin. From the plaiting of the dark cloud of hair into a thick
+cable, to the final assumption of filmy white, she remained quiet as a
+mouse. Francesca had risen to blow out the candles before a small voice
+rose behind her.
+
+"He said you were beautiful. Could he but see thee now!"
+
+After a sudden start Francesca moved over to the couch and collapsed
+beside it in a white heap.
+
+"Awake, _nina_? What is this? He said I was beautiful? Who?"
+
+"The gringo senor. When I began to cry for my mother and little Pedro
+that was drowned with her in the flood he said for me to take comfort,
+that he was going to place me with the most beautiful senorita in all
+Guerrero--one that would be kinder to me than my mother."
+
+"And that I will be." Drawing her close, Francesca kissed the small gold
+face. "But did he really say--No, you shall tell me all about it from
+the very beginning."
+
+While the tale was proceeding in soft lisping Spanish Francesca's eyes
+eloquently illustrated its varied course. But their wide horror, moist
+pity at the drowning of the poor brown mother, suspense until Seyd and
+the child had climbed back into the dugout, merged in a soft glow at the
+repetition of his promise. "'The most beautiful senorita in all
+Guerrero?' Then he could not have meant me."
+
+"_Si._" The girl emphatically nodded. "Also he said you would take me
+into your service."
+
+"And so I will. I shall have thee trained for my own little maid. I
+shall call thee Roberta, after him, and every night it will be thy duty
+to speak for him in thy prayers. Are they said?"
+
+"_Si_, senorita. I said them to the big girl, Rosa, but I will say one
+now for him--with thee."
+
+Could Seyd have heard the soft voice following Francesca's gentle
+promptings he would undoubtedly have suffered another onslaught from
+Conscience. As it was, just to prove his disinterestedness he rose at
+dawn. Leaving a note of thanks on the table, he went out on a hunt for
+peons and mules to haul the dugout back to the inn, and, having found
+them, went sternly on about his business.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+For two weeks thereafter Seyd held fast to his work, suppressing with
+iron firmness successive vagrant impulses which urged a second visit to
+San Nicolas. Then having proved to himself his perfect indifference
+toward Francesca, he rode down one day--strictly on business--to ask Don
+Luis's assistance in obtaining more men and mules.
+
+"I shall return this evening," he arranged with Conscience, starting
+out.
+
+He had forgotten, however, to make allowance for the probable action of,
+in legal verbiage, the party of the second part, for upon his arrival he
+received from Francesca as stiff a lecture on his folly in leaving the
+other day in half-dried clothes as ever fell from the lips of an anxious
+mother. Upon it, too, Don Luis set the stamp of his heavy approval.
+
+"One may do it in the high altitudes, senor, but here in the tropics
+such carelessness leads to the fever. This time we shall not let you
+forth till properly fed and dried."
+
+Now while a girl's acceptance of flowers, candy, and other favors may
+mean anything or nothing, no sooner does she begin to concern herself
+with a man's health and clothes than the affair becomes serious, for it
+clearly proves that she has been touched in the mother instinct, which
+forms the basis of woman's love. In his masculine ignorance of this
+fundamental truth, however, Seyd gave her solicitude a sisterly
+interpretation, and congratulated himself upon the fact that their
+acquaintance was established at last on such solid ground. Agreeing with
+himself that it would be the worst of taste for him to disturb a purely
+friendly relation with any reference to the squalid tragedy of his
+marriage, he continued silent.
+
+It is to be feared, also, that several subsequent visits were based upon
+rather frivolous excuses. In the next month he carried down to San
+Nicolas the news of at least a dozen cases of destitution through the
+floods, and when, for some inexplicable cause, deliveries of his
+material at the railroad suddenly ceased he plunged head over heels into
+the relief work which had been instituted under Don Luis's direction.
+Sometimes alone, more often with Francesca and Tomas, he rode up and
+down the valley hunting out the sufferers. And it was on one of these
+journeys that the fates which dog insincerity laid bare his pretense.
+
+It came--his awakening--a week or so after a sudden fall of the floods
+foretold the end of the rains. Though the river still ran wide of its
+banks, most of the ranches with intervening patches of jungle had come
+again to the surface; and, riding through one of the latter on his way
+to San Nicolas, Seyd overtook Francesca and Tomas.
+
+"Is it not good to see the fields again?" she greeted him. "The crops
+will be late this year, but Don Luis says that the yield will be all the
+richer because of the flood. But the jungle! The poor jungle! It has
+been swept clean of shrubs and flowers."
+
+It did look most forlorn. Shorn of its luxuriance, the orchids and wild
+flowers, and all the tide of vegetation which usually flowed everywhere
+in waves that rose and tossed a froth of green creepers into the tops of
+the tallest trees, the jungle was now a fat black marsh littered with
+bejucos which lay in twisted masses like drowned snakes. Edged with
+draggled grass, still others hung down from the trees, writhing darkly
+in the wind that had sprung up in the last hour. Taken in all, it was
+weird, gruesome, a fit setting for the tragedy that lay waiting for them
+amid the roots of a dead ceiba just ahead. Twisted back and forth by the
+storms of the last month, the tree now stood in a hole of mud, ripe and
+ready for the gust that snapped the rotten tap root just as Francesca
+was riding by.
+
+Without noise the tree inclined, reaching out huge arms above her head.
+So silently it fell that Francesca never saw it at all, and Seyd, who
+was riding just behind her, received first warning from the sudden swing
+of a bejuco across his eyes. Leaning over his horse's neck, he lashed
+her beast across the quarters. Almost unseated by the wild forward
+plunge of her beast, the girl recovered her seat and looked back just in
+time to see him knocked out of the saddle. Had he been struck by one of
+the main branches, thick as a barrel, both he and his horse had surely
+been crushed down into the mud beyond need of other burial. But though
+he had gained almost from under, even a twig strikes a shrewd blow after
+describing a three-hundred-foot arc, and he lay in the mud under her
+eyes, white and still, with an ugly bruise showing across his brow.
+
+"Tomas! Tomas! Ride thou for help!"
+
+Crying it, she leaped from her horse, sank beside Seyd in the mud, and
+lifted his head into her lap. With water from a pool which was soaking
+her skirt she laved the bruise with one hand, intently studying his
+face; and when, some minutes later, he gave no sign of life, her dark
+anxious eyes blazed with a sudden passion of fear. Gathering his head in
+against her bosom, she rocked back and forth with passionate murmurs:
+"Oh, he is dead! He is killed--for me!" But though, if told of it, he
+would have sworn that such treatment would really have brought him back
+from the dead, he neither felt, saw, nor heard the soft cradling arms,
+burning black eyes, the broken murmurs in English and Spanish.
+
+He did feel her lips when, stooping suddenly, she kissed the bruise,
+because it happened just as her lowered face hid the first quiver of his
+eyelids. Also he felt the unconscious embrace and saw the deep blush
+which told that she knew he had felt her kiss. But she did not try to
+avoid his gaze. From the midst of her blushes she answered it with the
+bravery of love, discovered and unafraid.
+
+"_Querido_, I had thought thee dead."
+
+In the wonder of it, the foolish, tender wonder, Seyd, on his part,
+forgot all else. Perhaps the delicate brain plexuses which govern memory
+were still stunned, leaving his mind clean as a new slate till some
+stimulus should presently rewrite upon it the pretty, common face of his
+wife. Conscious only of this new bursting love, he reached up at her
+murmur and pulled her face down to his. Then it came, the stimulus. With
+the powerful association of some other kiss, the moist clinging of her
+lips started the wheels of memory, but, remembering, he did not desist.
+For simultaneously there had burst upon him a vision of love, rounded
+and complete, with the perfect fullness which satisfies every instinct
+and need. Already he had felt that at every point her personality met
+and complemented his, and in the fullness of the realization his whole
+being rose in rebellion against that other tie. He was kissing her with
+furious abandon when she suddenly broke away.
+
+"Oh, I wonder if he saw us?"
+
+Looking quickly up, he saw Tomas returning through the trees. "I don't
+know," he reassured her, "but I'll find out. If he did--just leave him
+to me."
+
+After Tomas, but at a safe distance, came three peons whom he had called
+from the nearest rancho, also a _mozo_ who had been sent out from the
+_meson_ to overtake and deliver a letter to Seyd.
+
+"If you'll permit me?" he asked. But his head still swam; and when he
+tried to read it the angular chirography danced under his eyes,
+describing such curious antics that he was driven at last to ask her
+aid.
+
+It was from Peters, the station agent, and announced the arrival of a
+consignment of American provisions; and, as Billy had been condemned to
+straight Mexican diet for the last two weeks, the news called for Seyd's
+instant return. While the soft voice was reciting its content he
+oscillated between mixed feelings of chagrin and relief, for after its
+long sleep outraged Conscience was now working overtime. He felt like a
+hypocrite when she spoke.
+
+"You are still weak. You must not go."
+
+"I'm afraid that I shall have to."
+
+"But suppose that you are taken ill on the way?"
+
+"The _mozo_ will be with me--anyway, I'm all right."
+
+Though she looked disappointed, she gave way when he explained Billy's
+need; the more readily, perhaps, because she felt within her the
+stirrings of the feminine instinct to hide and brood over her new
+happiness all alone. The feeling even formed her speech. "The poor senor
+Thornton! He must be very lonely over there all by himself, and he must
+be fed. I shall not mind--for a few days. You have given me--so much to
+think about. But then--you will come?"
+
+He groaned inwardly at the thought of that which their next meeting
+entailed, and had it been possible he would have preferred to make open
+confession there and then. As it was not, he let her ride away with her
+own clear happiness undimmed, unconscious of the stab inflicted by her
+last tender whisper.
+
+"Surely I shall come," he had answered; and, after mounting his horse,
+he sat and watched her ride away among the trees. When, with a parting
+wave, she disappeared, his sun went out, yet through his bitter feeling
+he remembered his promise.
+
+"Tomas!" He called the _mozo_ back. Ignorant of just how much the fellow
+had seen, he tried him out with the Spanish proverb, "'The saints are
+good to the blind.'"
+
+At the sight of the five-peso note in Seyd's hand the _mozo's_ white
+teeth flashed in a knowing grin. "_Si_, senor," he answered in kind,
+"neither do flies enter a closed mouth." And, pocketing the note, he
+galloped after his mistress, leaving Seyd to go his own way.
+
+It was not pleasant, either, the path that Seyd pursued the next few
+days. Going back to the inn, following the mules out to and back from
+the railroad, crossing and recrossing the river with Billy's supplies,
+fits of rebellion alternated with moods of black self reproach.
+
+"If you had declared yourself in the beginning she would never have
+given you a second thought."
+
+Up to the moment when he turned his horse's head once more toward San
+Nicolas, a few days later, this formed the text of his musings; and if
+he winced when the gold of the hacienda walls broke along the green
+foothills it was not in pity for himself. If it would have freed her
+from pain he would have hugged his own with the savage exultance of a
+flagellant. But too well he knew that in these things there is no
+vicarious atonement, and the face that he carried into the San Nicolas
+patio was so grim and sad that it provoked Don Luis's comment.
+
+"Senor, you are sick? Before she left Francesca told us of the accident.
+'Tis plain that you are not yet recovered."
+
+"Before she--left?"
+
+Out of feeling in which surprise and relief struggled with bitter
+disappointment Seyd's question issued. At Don Luis's answer despair
+rolled over all.
+
+"_Si_, senor. She is gone to Europe--for a year."
+
+Through his amazement and despair Seyd felt the justice of the stroke.
+As yet, however, the smart was too keen for submission. In open mutiny
+once more against the scheme of things, he repeated the phrase, "Gone?
+To Europe?"
+
+"_Si_," Don Luis nodded. "Our kinswoman, the senora Rocha, mother of
+Sebastien, has been ailing for a great while, and now goes to Europe for
+special doctoring. As she speaks only our own tongue, she could not
+journey alone, and, like the good girl that she is, Francesca consented
+to accompany her."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+As a matter of fact, Don Luis knew even less than Seyd of the real
+reason behind his niece's departure. Like many another and much more
+important event, it was brought about by the simplest of causes, which
+went back to the afternoon when, on her arrival at San Nicolas,
+Francesca found Sebastien waiting there with the news of his mother's
+illness.
+
+First in the sequence of cause and effect which sent her away stands
+Seyd's five-peso note; next, Pancho, Sebastien's _mozo_, for the
+conjunction of these two gave birth to the event. Ordinarily, that is,
+when in full possession of his simple wits, Tomas, Francesca's _mozo_,
+would have suffered crucifixion in her cause, and had he chosen any
+other than Pancho to assist in the transmutation of Seyd's note into
+alcohol at the San Nicolas wine shop the process would have been
+accomplished without damage to aught but his own head. But when in the
+cause of their tipplings Pancho began to enlarge on the benefits that
+would follow to all from the blending of their respective houses by
+marriage Tomas began to writhe under the itch of secret and superior
+knowledge. From knowing winks he progressed to mysterious hints, and
+finally ended with a clean confession of all he had seen that afternoon.
+
+"But this is not to be spoken of, _hombre_," he warned Pancho, with
+solemn hiccoughs, at the close. "By the grave of thy father, let not
+even a whisper forth."
+
+As being less difficult to find in a country where parenthood is more
+easily traced on the feminine side, Pancho swore to it by the grave of
+his mother. But, though he added thereto those of his aunts,
+grandmother, and entire female line, the combined weight still failed to
+balance such astonishing news. Inflamed by thoughts of the prestige he
+would gain in his master's sight, he moderated his potations. After he
+had seen Tomas comfortably bestowed under the _cantina_ table he carried
+the tale straight to Sebastien's room.
+
+In this, however, he showed more zeal than discretion, for in lieu of
+the expected prestige he got a blow in the mouth which laid him out in a
+manner convenient for the quirting of his life. Not until Sebastien's
+arm tired did he gain permission to retire, whimpering, to his straw in
+the stable; and next morning both he and Tomas trembled for their lives
+when Sebastien arraigned them before him.
+
+"Listen, dogs!" He struck them with his whip across their faces. "For
+this piece of lying the tongues of you both should be pulled out by the
+roots. If I spare you it is because until now you have both been
+faithful servants. But remember!" He swore to it with an oath so
+frightfully sacrilegious that both shrank in anticipation of a bolt from
+the skies. "But remember! If ever, drunk or sober, there proceeds out of
+either of you one further word 'twill surely be done."
+
+Leaving them shaking, he passed out and on upstairs to the patio where
+Francesca was sitting, with Roberta at her knees, in the shade of the
+_corredor's_ green arches. The drone of hummers, fluting of birds in the
+patio garden set her soft musings to pleasant music, and she looked up
+with sudden vexation at the jangle of his spurs.
+
+"So this is the child that we have renamed in his honor?"
+
+Last night they had parted better friends than usual, for out of the
+pity bred of her own realized love she had done her best to please him.
+Love had also sharpened her naturally sensitive perceptions. Divining
+his knowledge from the concentrated anger of his look, she rose,
+instinctively nerving herself for the encounter.
+
+"Just so." He divined, in turn, her feeling. "Between those who
+understand words are wasted. Send the child away."
+
+As he said "understand" a surge of passion wiped out the weary lines
+left by a night of hate. But while the child was passing along the
+corridor he controlled it and became his usual sardonic self. He was
+beginning "Thanks to the excellent Tomas--" when she interrupted with an
+angry gesture.
+
+"Then it _was_ he! I'll have him--"
+
+"_Caramba!_" He shrugged. "What a heat! But easy--do not blame Tomas for
+your gringo's fault. What else could you expect from a peon that found
+himself enriched at a stroke? The wonder is that he did not proclaim his
+news from your topmost wall. Be content that he will never whisper one
+word again."
+
+"You didn't--" she began, alarmed now for her servant.
+
+"No. Pancho, to whom he told it, I flogged for the liar he now thinks
+Tomas, and Tomas--is trembling for his tongue. Except between us the
+matter is dead. Yet Tomas served his purpose. Thanks to him, we may now
+pass words and come to terms."
+
+"Terms?" She faltered it after a silence.
+
+"Terms!" he repeated, gravely. "That is, if you would save your gringo
+alive. Supposing this were to escape to the good uncle? Soft as he has
+been with these gringos of late, supposing that he were to hear of both
+this and that other night in the hut, how long, think you, would the man
+last?"
+
+Her eyes told. After a pause her mouth opened with a small gasp.
+"You--oh! you will not?"
+
+"Not if you obey. Now see you, Francesca." He dropped into a tone of
+grave confidence which was really winning. "If I had not known that his
+death at my hands would place you forever beyond me the man had never
+seen the dawn of another day. Whether he sees its setting depends on
+you. If you will go with my mother to Europe--"
+
+"_Si_--if--I--go?" It issued between pauses of pain after a long
+silence.
+
+"He lives. I will even protect him till he arrives at the end of his
+fool's rope."
+
+"And--then?"
+
+"There will be no 'then.' I know these gringos. They will disappear like
+their vanishing gold."
+
+Her slight flush indicated defiant unbelief. But knowing that this was
+in deadly earnest, that Seyd's life hung by a hair, she let him go on.
+"Let there be no misunderstanding. I shall require your promise, on the
+word of a Garcia, not to attempt communication." He added, turning away,
+perhaps in pity for the misery of her face: "There is no hurry. Take
+time to think it over--an hour, two if you wish."
+
+He could easily afford, too, the concession, for her love was playing
+into his hands. None knew better than she that a contrary answer would
+make of Seyd an Ishmaelite with every man's hand raised against his
+life. He could never escape. With that dread fact staring her in the
+face she could give but one answer; and while, later, she spent hours
+pacing her bedroom in restless strivings to find a way out, she reached
+her decision before he gained the end of the gallery.
+
+"I will go."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+"Really, I don't know what to make of it. That last car load of
+machinery rusted for a month in the damp heat of the Tehuantepec tropics
+before we got it traced. It has happened so often now that I'm almost
+tempted to suspect a design."
+
+Seyd's complaint to Peters, the agent, nearly a year later summed the
+exasperating experiences which had retarded the building of the new
+smelter. Beginning before the end of the last flood, the failure in
+deliveries had multiplied as the work of construction proceeded, until
+it seemed to Seyd that his material had been distributed on a thousand
+side tracks by an impartial hand. While two high-priced American
+mechanics had spent their expensive leisure shooting and fishing he had
+spent most of his own time tracing the shipments, and now, with the
+rains almost due again, another month would be required to finish the
+work.
+
+"You have sure had your share of bad luck." While sympathizing with him,
+Peters discouraged the idea of premeditation. "You don't know these
+Mexican roads. Our charter calls for the employment of sixty-five per
+cent. of Mexican help, and, if you'll believe me, that means six hundred
+per-cent. of inefficiency. Take this _mozo_ of mine. He's been with me
+six years. But, though I show him the correct way to do a thing a
+thousand times, the moment my back is turned he'll go at it in some fool
+wrong-headed way of his own. The wonder to me is not, that your freight
+goes wrong, but that it ever arrives. Nevertheless, you've had, as I
+say, your fill of bad luck. If I were you I'd just jump the up
+train--she's due in twenty minutes--and call on the general traffic
+manager in Mexico City. He can do more for you in five minutes than I
+can in ten days."
+
+It was sound advice. Quick always to perceive advantage, Seyd answered,
+"Give me a ticket."
+
+Because of his isolation, the agent's wells of speech were always
+brimming, and while waiting for the train he delivered himself of
+several pieces of news. "By the way, Don Luis went up yesterday to lodge
+a protest with the government against the dam a gringo company is
+building across the valley fifty miles north of San Nicolas. It is
+located just below the Barranca de Tigres, a canon that drains all the
+watershed west of the volcano. They have cloudbursts up there, and when
+one lets go--well, old Noah's deluge isn't in it. When I was hunting
+jaguar in the canon a couple of years ago I saw watermarks a hundred
+and fifty feet up the mountainside. Boulders big as churches were piled
+up in the bed of the stream like pebbles, and if that dam was built of
+solid concrete instead of clay they'd go through it like it was dough.
+Though I'd be the last man to go back on my own folks, I'm bound to
+confess that we do carry some things with a bit too high a hand. If that
+dam ever breaks, the wave will sweep the barranca clean between its
+walls. But, Lordy! that won't cut any figure with the paint-eaters that
+hedge in Diaz. To secure a rake-off they'd see all Guerrero drown, and
+I'm doubting that the General's kick will do any good."
+
+Seyd nodded. "No, the times are against him--both in this and his other
+efforts to hold back civilization. So far, he and Sebastien have
+succeeded pretty well in checking it here in Guerrero. But it is
+creeping in around them--some day will flow over their heads. They might
+as well stand in the path of a barranca flood."
+
+The naming of Sebastien brought the second piece of news. "That reminds
+me--you almost had him for a fellow traveler. I forwarded a cable
+message last night that his mother had died in France. I rather thought
+that he'd be in for this train."
+
+"Then she is coming back?"
+
+Seyd meant Francesca. But Peters misunderstood. "Yes, they've shipped
+her by a German line that runs to Havana and Vera Cruz. By mistake the
+cable was sent to another Rocha somewhere up in Sinaloa, and, being a
+Mexican, he slept on it a week before replying that his mother was
+there, quite lively and frisky at home. So it arrived here ten days
+late--long enough to put Miss Francesca and her mother into Vera Cruz.
+Yes, the senora was there--had just joined them--luckily, for death is
+too grim a thing for a young girl to face by herself." Just then the
+train drew into the station, and as Seyd climbed on, he added: "If you
+could find time to pass the word on to Don Luis he'd surely appreciate
+it. He puts up at the Iturbide."
+
+Seyd's nod was purely automatic, for the news had loosed once more
+bitter tides which had lain dormant these last few months under the
+weight of his business cares. Unconscious, too, of the import that
+events would presently give to such apparently trivial consent, he
+nodded again when Peters asked permission to look through a batch of
+American papers which had come for him by yesterday's mail.
+
+For that matter, it would have been difficult to discern anything
+unusual or alarming in the spectacle of Peters as he sat in his office
+after the departure of the train, heels on the table and chair
+comfortably tilted, while he slit, one after the other, the covers of
+Seyd's papers. Yet while he smoked and read his way down through the
+pile he unconsciously but surely prepared the way for the event which
+was approaching at the top speed of Sebastien's horse. Had he read, or
+Sebastien ridden, a little faster or slower things had gone differently.
+But, just as though it had been predoomed and destined, eyes and hoofs
+kept perfect time. Just as Peters opened Seyd's Albuquerque paper
+Sebastien walked in.
+
+"Left--an hour ago." Yawning, Peters laid down the Albuquerque paper on
+top of the pile, and as the train usually ran from two to twelve hours
+late three hundred and sixty-five days in the year he lent a sympathetic
+ear to Sebastien's vitriolic curses.
+
+"I can wire for a special," he suggested. "They could send an engine and
+car down from Cuernavaca in little more than an hour."
+
+"If you will be so kind, senor."
+
+In all Guerrero, Peters was the one gringo with whom Sebastien was on
+speaking terms, and he now accepted both a cigar and a paper to while
+away the time. After one glance had shown it to be a gringo sheet he
+would have cast it aside, but the one word "Mexico!" in scare heads
+caught his eye. Setting forth the international complications that were
+likely to come from the lynching of a Mexican in Arizona, it held his
+interest. He not only read it to the bottom of the column, but followed
+over to the next page, upon which heavy ink lines had been scored around
+a local article.
+
+As the heading caught his eye he started, looked again, then bent over
+the paper and read to the end. For a few seconds thereafter he sat
+thinking. A stealthy glance showed Peters at the key clicking off the
+call for the special. Quietly folding the paper, he slid it beneath his
+coat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+With Seyd and his cargo of reflections aboard, the train meanwhile
+puffed steadily up the four-per-cent. grades which carry the railway
+eleven thousand feet high to the shoulder of the old giant volcano,
+Ajuasoa. While he stared out of the window the vivid panorama of the hot
+country, the green seas of corn or cane which surged around white-walled
+haciendas, the chocolate peons behind their wooden plows, and the pretty
+brown girls at the stations gradually gave place to volcanic lava fields
+and gloomy woods of pinon, and these again merged into the innumerable
+hamlets which spread brown adobe skirts around Mexico City unseen by
+him.
+
+"She is coming back! She is coming back!" It ran all the while in his
+mind, and formed the undertone of his conversation with Don Luis in the
+patio of the Iturbide that evening. When the old man stated his
+intention of taking the night train down to the Gulf it was only by a
+powerful effort that Seyd avoided the lunacy of offering to accompany
+him. All that night he burned in a flame of feeling, and as a
+consequence he rose tired out and presented such a picture of meekness
+when ushered into the office of the general manager, one so opposite to
+the usual fiery mien of the wronged shipper, that the stony heart of the
+official was melted within him.
+
+"You certainly have a kick coming," he admitted. "A big one, at that.
+I'll look into this myself, and if you'll please return at four I hope
+to have news of your freight."
+
+In their passage down through the departments, however, his inquiries
+soon came to a stop. "So this is the fellow who has been bucking old
+General Garcia in the Barranca de Guerrero?" he commented to his third
+assistant; and his further remarks were equally enlightening. "Well,
+politics are politics, but this has gone far enough. I like the boy's
+looks, and this railroad isn't going to be used to fight the General's
+battles any longer. After this, Mr. Chauvez, see that Mr. Seyd gets his
+freight. Where is that last car?"
+
+The third assistant's shoulders executed the Latin equivalent of "Search
+me!" At last news, peon "brakies" on the Nacional had been using it as a
+roller coaster on the mountain grades going down to Monterey. If
+Providence had intervened before it ran off into the sea Mr. Chauvez
+opined that it would most likely be found on that city's wharves. All of
+which, after some clicking and humming of wires, culminated in the
+manager's report to Seyd at four.
+
+"It seems that your freight was switched by mistake over to Monterey.
+If you leave it to us"--his stern eye loosed a twinkle--"you'll probably
+get it sometime in the next six months. But if you'll take these passes
+for the evening train and hunt it up yourself you can have it tagged
+onto the train that leaves to-morrow night."
+
+Though the vicissitudes of thirty years' railroading had almost
+petrified his heart, the organ stirred faintly as Seyd returned hearty
+thanks. Watching him go out, he even muttered: "It's a damned shame! But
+I'll take care that he's bothered no more."
+
+More grateful on his part than he had any legal right to be, Seyd would
+have been better pleased had the passes read to Vera Cruz. Knowing that
+Francesca must pass through Mexico City on her way home, he would have
+preferred even to stay where he was. But the thought of Billy fretting
+himself thin at the mine reinforced his naturally strong sense of duty,
+and he took the train out that night. And his steadfastness made for his
+good. During his three days' absence the flame of feeling which was
+consuming his resolution and blinding his thought burned itself out. The
+morning after he had seen his car billed through to his own station he
+rose with his mind clear and a renewed purpose to do the right thing.
+
+"At the first favorable opportunity I shall tell her," he told himself,
+in the coach going down to the station. With the thought strong in his
+mind he stepped on the train and--came face to face with Francesca
+herself.
+
+"Oh! it is _you_!"
+
+"I--I--thought you were already gone!"
+
+While he blushed and stammered confusedly his senses, nevertheless, took
+cognizance of the fluttering rush of her hands, the happy eyes in the
+midst of her flushes, other things that answered, without words, several
+questions which had greatly perplexed him. Whatever the cause behind her
+long silence, it was neither the resurrection of her racial pride nor,
+as he had sometimes suspected, her discovery of his marriage. Indeed,
+her very next words gave him an inkling.
+
+"You must have wondered why I did not write? But I--could not help it."
+She glanced at her mother, who, with eloquent hands, was telegraphing
+him welcome from the other end of the car. "I will tell you later--all."
+
+In his surprise and gladness his mind still clung to his resolve, and,
+nearly as possible, he kept his pact with himself. "I also have
+something to tell."
+
+She looked up quickly. But his eyes indicated no diminution of the old
+feeling. Satisfied, she asked, with a little sigh: "The mine? Something
+gone wrong? You will tell us--now."
+
+The senora, who had caught the last sentence, added her word. "_Si_, for
+we, you know, are your friends." Making room for him by her side, she
+punctuated his tale of the summer's mishaps with pitiful exclamations,
+and comforted him at the end with maternal solicitude. "_Si_, at the
+first glance I saw it, that you had suffered. But, courage, _amigo_, it
+will make for your greater enjoyment in the end."
+
+Francesca had taken the seat opposite, and, catching her eye just then,
+Seyd saw, along with the sympathy and understanding, a gleam of
+exultation. "You suffered, _si_, but I'm glad for--'twas for me." Her
+glance said it plainly as words, and he ached to answer it; but, in
+accordance with the honest course he had laid out for himself, he
+refrained, and went on talking to her mother.
+
+"Don Luis," she answered his question, "is in the front car with
+Sebastien--in attendance on our dear friend, his mother."
+
+He knew that he had no part in their grief, and, tentatively, he began,
+"If I can be of any help--"
+
+Divining his feeling from the pause, she answered at once: "You are very
+kind. Francesca, poor _nina_, has been under a great strain. 'Twill be a
+mercy if you will stay here and talk."
+
+Now that her first blushes had died, he could see it for himself. Her
+smile added the soft confession, "You did not suffer alone."
+
+Under her look Seyd felt his resolution weaken; to save it he looked out
+of the window, whereupon it gained strength from the thought of his
+impending confession. But it relaxed again the next time their glances
+met; and, as love is an anarchist who scoffs alike at law and death,
+their communications proceeded with alternate thawings and freezings,
+while, in reverse order, the black lava fields and gloomy pinon gave
+place to the painted hamlets, pink churches, and villages of huts in
+green seas of corn. Yet, if a little worse for wear, his resolution
+held. Indeed, it found definite expression when the train stopped at
+last at their station.
+
+"I must see you soon!" he said, as they went out. "I have something very
+serious to say."
+
+Once more she looked up quickly. "We shall be at El Quiss, Sebastien's
+place, for three days. After that you will find me at home. But do not
+come alone!" The hasty addition threw more light on the causes behind
+her sudden departure. "As you value your life--nay, you were always
+careless of that--promise, for my sake, that you will not come alone?
+When you go out anywhere take with you at least one man."
+
+"Is it so serious as that?" But he stopped laughing when he saw she was
+hurt. "There! I promise!"
+
+She paid him, alighting, with a clasp of her hand that left its soft
+clinging pressure tingling after she disappeared in the crowd of
+rancheros and hacendados, Sebastien's retainers and friends, who filled
+the station. His sharp gray eye had already singled out his car on a
+side track, and while he waited for the agent Sebastien and Don Luis
+passed, walking behind the coffin.
+
+He was seen, moreover, by them, and after they had mounted and were
+riding side by side at the head of the funeral procession Sebastien
+spoke. "Your gringo was at the station."
+
+Don Luis nodded. "_Si_, he came down on the train."
+
+After a silence Sebastien spoke again. "It seems that he has been having
+trouble with his freight."
+
+Ignoring the subtle suggestion conveyed by the accent, Don Luis
+laconically answered, "He is not the first."
+
+"But will be the last. Ernestino Chauvez, my second cousin, is in the
+department of freights. Yesterday he told me that, by special order,
+there are to be no more miscarriages of this man's freight."
+
+The heavy brown mask refused even a sign. "This had better happened a
+year ago."
+
+"Then he is near the end of his rope?" Sebastien leaped to the
+conclusion.
+
+"His first note of hand to me is due next month."
+
+"And--"
+
+Don Luis's massive shoulders rose. "How should I know, _amigo_, what
+money he has?"
+
+"But if he pay not?"
+
+Again Don Luis shrugged. "Sebastien, how often am I to tell it--that no
+gringo shall force in on my lands."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In happy ignorance as yet of the significance implied in their
+conversation, Seyd at that moment was reading and rereading, with
+incredulous joy, a newspaper clipping which had been forwarded by a
+friend in Albuquerque.
+
+     MRS. ROBERT SEYD, WIFE OF PROMINENT MINING ENGINEER, GRANTED
+     DIVORCE
+
+The content below ran as is usual when feminine enthusiasm over its
+wrongs has been unchecked by fear of a reply, and in handing down his
+decision the local Dogberry--who was unaware that the notice of the
+plaintiff's remarriage would appear in the same issue with his
+remarks--had pronounced it the most heartless case of desertion in all
+his experience upon the bench. Reading a second clipping which set forth
+the marriage, Seyd indulged in a grin. But this quickly faded. Pity and
+sympathy colored his remark.
+
+"Poor thing! I hope she'll be happy." Self reproach vibrated in the
+addition, "She was not, never could have been, with me."
+
+With that she passed out of his thought just as she had already gone
+from his life. His mind leaped to review the consequences. Free! Free!
+In the first flush of his joy he exulted over the fact that his
+intended confession was now unnecessary. But later and more sober
+reflections caused him to shake his head.
+
+"No!" He laid down the law peremptorily for himself. "There's been
+enough and to spare of shilly-shallying. You will go to her and tell
+her--all! And if she refuses you there'll be no one to blame but
+yourself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+In the calendar of love days count as weeks, months as years; but,
+though the following week conformed to this universal law, Seyd managed
+to extract from its laggard hours his modicum of joy. Following the
+mules on two trips between the mine and station he lived in a glow of
+feeling, the natural reaction of his late despair. By turns relief, joy,
+hope governed his reflections, finally uniting in optimism that drowned
+his customary caution. Whereas only a week ago he had begun to plan for
+a trip home to California to raise money to meet their first note he now
+determined to put it off until he should have seen Don Luis, and then,
+if necessary, send Billy.
+
+"I'll call on him immediately after the funeral," he said, talking it
+over with Billy. "If he demands his pound of flesh there'll still be
+time for you to go north."
+
+This settled, he had gone about his business in happier mood than he had
+known for many a year. It seemed to him as if the tangled run of his
+life was beginning to unfold straight and plain. But while he worked,
+the evil fates which had made such a ravel in his personal skein were
+equally busy inventing fresh tangles. On the day that saw at once the
+delivery of the last piece of machinery and the arrival of the first
+seasonal rain Sebastien and Francesca joined battle at the El Quiss
+hacienda.
+
+Until, the morning after the funeral, Sebastien called her aside to
+thank her for her care of his mother she had shown him only the sympathy
+due his sorrow. But under it resentment still smoldered, and it was
+fanned to a flame by his accidental expression.
+
+"It was the kinder because I had forced you away. If I can make any
+return--"
+
+"You can." She filled his pause. "During the last six months I had time
+for reflection, and the more I thought of it the more I wondered at
+myself for my easy yielding to your will. It is not that I was unwilling
+to do that or more for your mother. But to be sent away like a naughty
+school girl under a solemn vow against correspondence--"
+
+"The price of your consent, you remember, was the gringo's life?" His
+eye lit with the old saturnine sparkle. "As you see, he still cumbers
+good Mexican earth."
+
+"You dared not have harmed him in any case."
+
+"No?"
+
+"No." She met without flinching his look of sarcastic interrogation.
+"Porfirio Diaz will not stand for the killing of _Americanos_. As you
+well know, Sebastien, he would surely have hunted you down."
+
+"If there had been any to tell? Even your folly would hardly have arisen
+to that."
+
+"'Twould not have been necessary. If I had warned him, placed your
+threat on record with his friends, 'twere sufficient. If not, there is
+still another argument that would have held you."
+
+"And that?"
+
+"The sure knowledge that I would hate you forever."
+
+"Good reasons, both of them." He shrugged. "But you overlook the fact,
+my cousin, that a whisper in the ear of the good uncle would have taken
+the matter out of my hands."
+
+"That would not have cleared you--with me. Now listen, Sebastien. I
+yielded because at the time it seemed the only way, and after I realized
+my folly I still lived up to my promise. But now I give you warning.
+Henceforth I shall not permit your interference in my affairs."
+
+"Your love affairs?"
+
+"_Bueno!_" Looking him straight in the eye, she accepted the correction.
+"My _love_ affairs."
+
+"It will not be necessary."
+
+Instead of the violent outburst she expected he stood looking at her, in
+his eyes a peculiar light half of pity, half vindictive. A trifle
+nonplussed, she returned his gaze. Perhaps, with feminine inconsistency,
+she was not altogether pleased by his tame acceptance, for her color
+rose and one small foot tapped the polished floor tiles. "I am glad you
+take it so reasonably."
+
+Again he failed with the expected outburst, and her uneasiness grew in
+correspondence with the pity in his glance. "You mistake me. I said it
+would be unnecessary. Read!"
+
+He turned and went out, a mercy she appreciated when, after a puzzled
+glance at the paper he had stolen from Peters, her eye was guided by the
+heavy ink scorings to the article that set forth Seyd's divorce. At
+first she hardly realized its import. But when she did--surely the hand
+that guided the pen had achieved revenge far beyond its owner's blackest
+hope! Going out, Sebastien heard the paper crackle. Looking back, he saw
+her standing frozen, eyes wide and black in her mute white face; and,
+stricken with sudden pity, he softly closed the door.
+
+But he did not go away. He knew her too well. Given her wild Irish blood
+plus her Spanish pride there could come but one result, and while she
+struggled toward it within he paced the _corredor_ without. When at last
+she opened the door and came on him there he knew that he had won by the
+scorn that set her soft mouth in straight red lines. In the dusk of the
+_corredor_ her face loomed, pale and drawn, the eyes red and swollen.
+But when she saw the deep pity in his stern eyes her own lost something
+of their hardness.
+
+"You were always kind--and wise." Her mouth quivering, she gave him both
+hands. "'Twould have made for my good had I listened to you more."
+
+For him it was a perilous moment. The touch of her hands aroused an
+intense desire to seize and comfort her with kisses. Had he given way to
+it she would have surely been shocked out of the resolution that had
+been born of her anger and shame. But the habit of years enabled him to
+keep the impulse under restraint. She went quietly to the end.
+
+"I am very grateful--I would like to make some return. If we had not
+grown up together I should no doubt have loved you from the beginning in
+the way you wished, for you are closer to the man of my girlish dreams
+than any other I have ever known." She smiled wanly. "He does not exist,
+my dream man, or, if he did, what use could he have for such a wild,
+naughty girl as I? So, if you still want me--"
+
+"Want you!" He would have drawn her to him, but she pulled back.
+
+"Not yet! I like you, have always loved you--in a sisterly way. I must
+have time to change my viewpoint. Give me a month?"
+
+"And then--"
+
+"If you still wish it I will be your wife."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+As before said, the last piece of machinery and the first rain arrived
+simultaneously at Santa Gertrudis. The break in the summer heat came
+with a south wind which herded mountainous vapors in from the warm
+Pacific. All night the rain fell in sheets that set the thirsty arroyos
+running bank-high and raised the river ten feet. Then, after the
+pleasant tropical fashion, the downpour ceased, and day broke with a
+blaze of sunlight over the Barranca.
+
+"Sinbad's valley of diamonds!"
+
+It was Billy's metaphor when he came out with Seyd from breakfast, and,
+trite as the comparison might be, nothing else could better describe the
+millions of wet jewels that flashed in the dark mantle of pine above and
+embroidered the green cloak of the jungle beneath. Yesterday had seen
+the last touches put on the aerial cable which would be soon dropping
+buckets of ore into the red jaws of the furnace two thousand feet below.
+From the edge of the plateau it ran, a streak of silver fringed with
+glittering rain drops, down and out to the smelter; and when, in the
+pride of his heart, Billy loosed the brakes the first vibration threw
+off a cloud of prismatic spray.
+
+"Balanced to a hair! You see, the weight of one full bucket is
+sufficient to start the chain."
+
+"Fine!" Seyd echoed. "Runs like a clock. Another week and we'll be
+running steady."
+
+Standing there, watching the buckets sail up and down like great
+iron birds, they gave themselves up to the joy of accomplishment;
+as once before, permitted fancy to run amuck through the golden
+future. And after their hard labors and prolonged anxieties a little
+self-congratulation was quite in order. If, one way or another, they
+succeeded in meeting their first note they really could be counted in
+splendid shape, for their shipments of copper matte would be on the
+market before the second fell due.
+
+Billy nodded assent when Seyd spoke. "Francesca said they would be home
+to-day. I think I'll run down there and tackle Don Luis."
+
+Between them were no secrets, and when Seyd rode away an hour later with
+Caliban at his heels Billy called after him: "And say, old man, have it
+out with the girl. If she has half the brains I have always allowed her
+she'll easily see the accidental way in which it all came about."
+
+Though the advice merely restated his own intention, Seyd found it
+inspiring. Riding down the Barranca staircases, he whistled and sang.
+While following the trail through the long succession of ranchos,
+jungle, hamlets, he lived over again that first ride with Francesca.
+Very plainly he now perceived that it dated his love, that in the
+pauses of his stealthy study she had ensnared him with her rich
+personality.
+
+"She got you then," he mused, adding, with a burst of feeling that
+astonished himself, "And now I'll get her--if I have to take her by
+force."
+
+Planning and dreaming, he rode along until the sight of the river,
+flowing swiftly and deep over the San Nicolas ford, broke up his
+reverie. Only a mile away, on the other side, the hacienda lay in full
+view, yet it appeared at first as if they would have to turn back. But
+after nosing up and down the banks Caliban presently flushed a peon and
+a dugout. With the horses swimming behind, they were ferried over, and
+rode across the tree-studded pastures, which were still clad in summer
+brown.
+
+At the sight of the amber walls in their setting of low brown hills
+Seyd's pulses had quickened, and, interpreting everything by his own
+feeling, it seemed to him that the dark women who peeped from their
+doorways, the swart vaqueros, and the slender girls that passed to and
+fro with _ollas_ balanced ahead, all turned faces of welcome. But when
+at last he reined in before the shut gates of the _casa_ he experienced
+a sudden, cold revulsion. Like so many eyes, the iron studs stared from
+the oaken face of the door, until the sudden sliding of a hatch revealed
+the wrinkled visage of Paulo, the Spanish administrador.
+
+With his employer's toleration of the gringo the administrador had no
+sympathy. Malice sparkled in his small brown eyes while he answered
+Seyd's question. "As you see, senor, the _casa_ is empty. The senora and
+the _nina_"--he used the family diminutive for Francesca--"are still at
+hacienda El Quiss. Don Luis? He has gone again to Ciudad, Mexico, to
+talk with Porfirio Diaz himself about the gringo dam. I do not know when
+he will return," he replied, further, "nor the senora."
+
+His high spirits dashed to the ground, Seyd sat his horse, oppressed
+with heavy forebodings, for the disappointment raised vivid memories
+of the suddenness with which the girl had been snatched out of his life
+on two other occasions. Sick at heart, he refused for himself the
+refreshment that the house's tradition compelled Paulo to offer, and
+spent the hour required for the beasts' feeding in heavy brooding.
+
+From this, however, he roused himself presently to a lighter mood.
+"After all, the week is only up to-day," he urged. "She might easily
+be detained beyond her expectations."
+
+At first he thought of leaving a note. But, realizing the formal terms
+in which it would have to be couched might make an unfavorable
+impression, he left, instead, verbal regrets. That settled, he had time
+to think of Don Luis, and, being now on practical ground, came to a
+quick conclusion. Forgetting all about his promise not to travel alone,
+he sent Caliban back to the mine while he went himself straight out to
+the station.
+
+On his arrival there, however--so late that he had to call Peters out
+of his bed--he was not a little surprised to find that nothing had been
+seen of Don Luis. It was, of course, easily possible that he had boarded
+the train at a flag station ten miles up the line that was nearer to El
+Quiss. But when, next evening, a thorough search of his usual haunts in
+Mexico City failed to yield sight or sign of Don Luis, Seyd began to
+grow suspicious. Suspicion developed into a certainty when on his return
+two days later Peters informed him that Don Luis had taken the up train
+that very morning.
+
+"He came from San Nicolas, too," Peters added. "I shouldn't wonder if he
+was there all the time. Looks to me like he's trying to dodge you."
+
+Intentional or not, it left Seyd in a serious plight. A second trip to
+Mexico City would take three days. Adding two more to get Billy away in
+the event of Don Luis's refusal of further time, less than three weeks
+would be left of their month of grace. It was not to be thought of; and,
+though the afternoon rains were draping the mountains with heavy gray
+sheets, he rode out to the inn that night. Crossing the river early next
+morning, he sent Billy away at once.
+
+"You'll have to spend twelve hours in Mexico City anyway," he instructed
+him, concerning Don Luis, "so you might as well try to find him. If you
+succeed, no trifling! Get his fist on a written extension. If he
+doesn't come through--and I have my doubts--chase right on home to
+California. With the photos of the prospect and plant you ought not to
+have much trouble in raising enough to cover the note. And the minute
+you get it wire me credits on Mexico City."
+
+Hardly expecting it, he was not surprised when Billy wired, two days
+later, that he was leaving that evening for the States. Under the
+message Peters had scribbled, "Don Luis came in to-day on Number Nine.
+Go right down and see him."
+
+Half an hour after receipt of the message Seyd and Caliban were again on
+their way.
+
+For nearly a week now it had rained heavily night and day, and here and
+there on the bottoms small inundations gave early warning of coming
+floods. Though the river still ran in its banks opposite San Nicolas,
+the dugout in which they crossed was swept with the swimming horses half
+a mile downstream before they made a landing, and it was easily to be
+seen that another week's rain would cut off travel on that side of the
+stream.
+
+Riding in to the great square, Seyd's pulses beat a lively accompaniment
+to the thought: "It is now the end of the second week. She is sure to be
+home." Yet in the moment of its riotous birth the hope gave place to
+black misgivings at the sight of the shut house.
+
+His spirits touched zero when the sliding hatch left Paulo's wrinkled
+visage framed again in the blank oaken face of the door. "Don Luis is
+still in Mexico, senor." He anticipated Seyd's question.
+
+"But he returned--was seen the day before yesterday at the station."
+
+"At the station, senor? How could that be?" His brown beads of eyes
+blinked in uneasy surprise; then in an instant the wrinkled mask fell
+into an expression of simple cunning. "Or, if so, then it must be that
+he has gone to join the senora and the _nina_, who are still at El
+Quiss."
+
+She was not there! For the third time he found himself confronted by
+silence, mysterious and complete as that which had attended her previous
+disappearances. But, though oppressed by a weight of care, he tried to
+hide his bitter disappointment from the administrador's inquisition.
+Once again he spent a black hour while the beasts were feeding. His
+broodings, riding homeward, shed no light on the enigma. A night of dark
+thought left him baffled, furious, in good fettle for the news that
+Caliban gleaned from a passing charcoal-burner.
+
+"Don Luis must have been there, senor, for Benito saw him ride forth
+this morning. He has gone north to see for himself the gringo dam."
+
+"Oh, he has, has he!" Seyd ground the words out between his teeth. "The
+old fox! But now I'll chase him into his earth."
+
+In this, however, he had forgotten to allow for the rains which, driving
+down the Barranca in great wet sheets, caused Don Luis to put in at El
+Quiss, there to wait in the leisurely fashion of the country until the
+weather should break and Sebastien have time to accompany him. Arriving
+at the power plant after two days' wallowing on jungle trails, Seyd
+found himself foiled once more in their little game of hide and seek.
+
+The trip, however, was not altogether wasted, for the pert young
+Chicagoan in charge gave him uproarious welcome. "So you're the fellow
+that has been bucking the whole state of Guerrero! I'm awfully glad to
+know you, Mr. Seyd, though I'm puzzled yet as to how you managed to hold
+out. It took a whole regiment of Diaz's _rurales_ to establish us here,
+and if they were withdrawn even now we wouldn't last long."
+
+Also it was worth the labor to see the dam. A huge earthen structure,
+nearly a hundred feet high, it spanned the Barranca just where the
+valley nipped in from a wide angle to a passage a quarter mile wide.
+Behind it a muddy lake stretched as far as the eye could reach, and
+while standing in the center Seyd recalled and quoted Peters's
+prediction.
+
+"'Boulders big as churches were piled up in the bed of the stream like
+pebbles, and if that dam was built of solid concrete instead of clay
+they'd go through it like it was dough.'"
+
+The Chicagoan, however, laughed at the quotation. "If the devil himself
+was bowling them I'd defy him to knock off a single chip. She's solid,
+and the sluiceways allow ample flood escape. Nothing but an earthquake
+could touch it--a jim dandy, at that."
+
+Nevertheless, while that enormous volume of water hung suspended, as it
+were, over the valley, Seyd felt nervous. Traveling homeward the next
+day, he measured with a careful eye the valley floor, and, using last
+year's high-water mark as a base for his calculations, concluded that
+only San Nicolas, the smelter, and one or two haciendas that stood on
+higher ground would escape destruction if the dam should happen to
+burst. Approaching El Quiss, he noted, in particular, that, standing on
+level ground, it would surely be inundated.
+
+For some fifteen miles his trail ran through Sebastien's lands, and,
+climbing in one place over a knoll, it afforded a view of the hacienda
+buildings across the rain-swept pastures. As, reining in, Seyd watched
+the faint pink of the walls flash out and fade in the shifting vapors he
+was seized with a mad impulse to ride in. But his native good sense
+quickly reasserted itself, for a moment's reflection showed that the
+intrusion could only result in humiliation for Francesca and himself.
+The knowledge, however, did not render her proximity less maddening. He
+was sitting there restlessly chafing when Caliban's voice suddenly rose
+behind.
+
+"If it were desired to leave a message there is one I know that could
+place it in her own hands."
+
+Startled, Seyd swung in the saddle. He had known long ago that kindly
+usage had transformed the hunchback into a faithful friend, but he was
+not prepared either for the sympathy that softened his glittering beads
+of eyes or his uncanny divination.
+
+"_Si._" The hunchback nodded. "A cousin of my woman is in Don
+Sebastien's household service. 'Twould be easy to pass a paper by the
+little maid you picked out of the river. The senorita keeps her always
+close to her own body."
+
+Before he finished Seyd had cut a pencil and was writing on the back of
+an envelope under cover of his raincoat. At first he gave free vent to
+his feelings, but, remembering the danger of interception, he tore it
+up and wrote instead a humorous protest against her continued absence.
+Then, after instructing Caliban to take all the time necessary to
+procure an answer, he journeyed on alone.
+
+It was well, too, that he gave the hunchback free rein, for three days
+elapsed before he returned to the mine soaked to the marrow by the
+continuous rains that had raised the floods almost to last year's mark.
+"With Don Sebastien one goes slowly," he explained. "If the sharp eye
+of him had once touched me 'twould have been a short shrift under the
+nearest tree. For two days I lay close in the _jacal_ of my woman's
+cousin before she brought me this."
+
+It was a considerable package, and Seyd rather wondered at its size
+while tearing away the dried corn leaves in which Caliban had wrapped
+it. When the last leaf fell off he stared at first in surprise, then,
+as his eye fell on the ink scores, in utter consternation at the
+Albuquerque _Times_. Minutes passed before he could command words to
+send the hunchback away, then, sitting down by the table, he leaned his
+head on his hand and remained for some time plunged in black reflection.
+
+From a long distance in time and space his first insincerity had come
+home to roost. But, while he saw himself as the designer of his own
+undoing, he was by no means resigned. Presently hard, mutinous lights
+broke in his gloomy eyes. The stubborn fighter awoke. Throwing the
+traitorous sheet across the room, he picked up a pen and began to write.
+
+Wasting no time in wonder at the fortuitous chance that had placed the
+paper in Francesca's hands, he wrote steadily on the story of his love
+from the first doubtful beginnings to its actual consummation. Very
+clearly he explained his first natural dislike to intrude his personal
+affairs upon people for whom he had no reason to suppose they would have
+the slightest interest, the later honorable intention that had always
+been frustrated by unfavorable circumstances. And he finished with a
+statement that is never unwelcome in a woman's ear:
+
+"No matter what comes I shall always love you."
+
+Steady rain all that day and night had given the floods another lift and
+sent the river roaming wide through the jungle. Once again the valley
+opposite the mine was converted into a great lake dotted with wooded
+islands between which swift currents hurtled floating debris. Profiting
+by last year's lesson, Seyd had had two roomy dugouts fitted with oars
+and rowlocks, and early the next morning he rowed Caliban across
+himself. Returning, he was to send a smoke signal to call the boat, and
+when, on the afternoon of the fourth day, Seyd spied the thin blue
+spiral through a break in the drifting rain he almost cracked his back
+rowing across the flood.
+
+But his glowing hope died at the shake of the hunchback's head. "The
+senorita is gone with her mother and Don Luis to San Nicolas, senor. But
+she is to return to El Quiss in a few days. The cousin of my woman had
+it from Roberta, the little maid. She is still there, and will deliver
+the letter when the senorita returns."
+
+The news was not altogether bad, for Francesca, at least, was now at San
+Nicolas. Within the hour Seyd crossed the river to the inn--where a
+horse was to be had for hire--and his purpose gained strength from a
+wire that he found waiting there from Billy.
+
+     "San Francisco burned to the ground. Not a cent to be raised in
+     California. Am going east."
+
+In view of the aforesaid game of hide and seek he had been playing with
+Don Luis the situation looked very dark. But, serious as it was, when,
+halfway to San Nicolas, he met Paulo riding at the head of a mule train
+loaded with fagots it was wiped altogether out of his mind.
+
+"We go to build beacons along the rim of the Barranca to give warning
+against the bursting of the gringo dam," he answered Seyd. "_Si_, Don
+Luis and the senora are at the _casa_. The senorita?" His creases drew
+into a malevolent grin. "The senora, you mean. She was married two hours
+ago to Don Sebastien."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+"What!" In the language of the good old romances, Seyd roared the word.
+
+In the main, Paulo was not a bad old chap. To further the interests of a
+Garcia he would cheerfully have surrendered his old bones to be boiled
+in oil, and in his joy at the event he allowed his natural garrulity to
+dominate his prejudice against the gringo.
+
+"_Si_, senor, they were married at the hacienda by the priest of
+Chilpancin. On account of the death of Don Sebastien's mother Don Luis
+and the senora only were present, and immediately afterward the young
+couple went home alone to El Quiss. A sensible practice, say I! When
+young hot blood mixes it should be left to cool and settle. Over there
+at El Quiss the fur will be flying before the end of a week, and put me
+down as a liar if Francesca do not keep him busy. She has run too long
+single not to kick at double harness. But she'll settle to it, and like
+the fine wench she is, there is to be no European travel or such
+kickshaws as now are common with our rich young folk. No, in the good
+old Mexican fashion she goes from the church straight to her man's
+home, there to stay till the first babe makes us all completely happy."
+
+Over and above his real joy in the event the old fellow was undoubtedly
+aware of its effect on Seyd. While speaking, his small red eyes searched
+his victim's face for the pain beneath its confusion. But even under the
+spur of race hatred his imagination could not divine a tithe of the
+torture he was inflicting. Like all lovers, Seyd had dreamed long moving
+pictures of himself and Francesca as husband and wife, and now, with the
+speed of light, the reels spun backward, exhibiting her with another in
+the thousand and one intimacies of married life. Through all, his stiff
+Anglo-Saxon reserve persisted, and, finding egress at his heels, the
+pain that he tried to hide brought the situation to a ludicrous close.
+Springing from the unconscious pressure of his spurs, his horse, a
+mettled little beast, collided with Paulo and knocked him flat on his
+back.
+
+More hurt in his pride than body, the old fellow scrambled up and stood
+shaking his fist and cursing. But Seyd rode on without attempt to check
+the animal, whose top speed ran slower than his own hot thought. Indeed,
+when, from sheer fatigue, it slowed he laid on with quirt and spur, and
+kept on at a gallop till violent exercise had withdrawn the blood from
+his swelling brain.
+
+In place of pulsing waves of confused pain came the tortures of
+clear thought. In turn he was ruled by anger, despair, unbelief. The
+thought of Francesca as he had seen her on the train, quiet, lovely,
+sympathetic, inspired the last. It was not possible! Then up would rise
+the blank ink scores round the divorce notice to provide the motive and
+plunge him back into deep despair. Lastly came anger, blind and
+unreasoning, in furious gusts.
+
+Occasionally through his welter of feeling there flashed a glimmer of
+reason. "She's married now! She's married! That ends it--for you!" But
+instead of despair the thought produced furious reactions. "I don't
+care! She's mine! I'll have her--I have to take her by force!" It rose
+again and again, his cry on the trail of the other day.
+
+By instinct rather than conscious thought he had turned his horse into a
+path which presently curved at a sharp angle into one that led from San
+Nicolas up to the rim of the Barranca where at this season ran the only
+passable trail. At the forks he came on the fresh tracks of shod horses
+that led up the zigzag staircases.
+
+Overlapping each other on the narrow trail, they might have been made
+by two or a half dozen, and not until he saw two sets clearly imprinted
+side by side crossing a small plateau did he think of the riders.
+If proof were required it was presently furnished by the little
+handkerchief that hung, fluttering in the rain and wind, on a
+"crucifixion thorn."
+
+As, reining in, he examined the corner initial a whiff of violets rose
+in his nostrils. Under the sudden crush of his hand it shed a rain of
+tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Fifteen miles away along the rim Francesca and Sebastien had just reined
+in. On a bare knoll close to the trail which led down to El Quiss three
+peons were building a beacon of dry wood around a core of hay, and while
+Sebastien talked with them the girl looked out over the valley.
+
+Ever since, in a burst of anger at Seyd's message, she confirmed her
+conditional promise she had lived in a fever of feeling which precluded
+clear thought. In the same way that a sufferer from toothache
+anticipates with almost revengeful pleasure the wrench of the extraction
+she had looked forward to marriage as though it were to bring the end of
+her pain. Not until the words that made her a wife fell like a chill on
+her fever did she perceive the illusion. Riding along the trail, the
+consequences had presented themselves, and they grew with every mile
+until they filled her mind with horror. She had shrunk in fear and
+revulsion when Sebastien offered the ordinary courtesies of the road.
+When he buttoned his own big rain capote around her she trembled under
+his hands. Again, when her beast slipped and he threw his arm round her
+to lift her out of the saddle, she uttered a nervous cry, and, though he
+released her at once, she shuddered under her cloak. Yet, with all her
+pain, when she gazed out over the storm-beaten valley her old passion
+for nature asserted itself through her agony.
+
+Along the Barranca the south wind herded great fleecy clouds. There they
+piled themselves up in shadowy hills, there they rolled and tumbled like
+thistledown in a breeze, and again cascaded down to lower levels to
+dissolve with muttering thunder in slaty sheets of rain. One minute the
+vapors filled the Barranca, flowing, a ghostly river, between the
+towering walls. The next a sudden rent in the veil permitted a fleeting
+glimpse of the trail falling like a yellow snake with myriad writhings
+into the treetops thousands of feet below. Enormous in scale, the scene
+was rendered more impressive by the roll of low thunders and flash of
+pale lightnings amidst leaden writhing shapes. Watching it, Francesca
+was forgetful until, through a sudden rift, she caught the distant pink
+flash of the El Quiss walls. Then she shivered, and she was still
+trembling when, turning from the peons, Sebastien spoke.
+
+"It is one of a chain of beacons they are building up and down the
+valley to warn the people if the gringo dam should burst." Noticing her
+shiver, he added: "You are cold, _querida_? Let us ride on."
+
+His usual stern gravity had given place in the last few hours to a look
+soft, pleasant, and very human. If she had looked into his eyes she
+might have read there both sympathy and understanding. But softness in
+him just then merely added to her fear. Following downhill, too, she
+watched him closely with dark, frightened eyes. In the past his strong
+face and lithe figure had aroused in her a certain admiration, but now
+they inspired revulsion. A lost spirit descending into Hades could not
+have battled more fiercely than did she descending the interminable
+staircases, and the struggle left her so pale and exhausted that
+Sebastien remarked upon it when they rode out at last on the valley
+floor.
+
+"You are tired? We shall soon be there."
+
+That started her again upon a conflict which continued all the way
+across the pastures to the hacienda gates and reached its climax when
+she entered her room--not the one she had occupied before, but that
+which had chambered before her the line of wives and mothers which began
+with the Aztec bride of Flores Rocha, the conquistador. In that long
+line the room may have harbored a bride fully as unhappy, but none more
+mutinous than its present occupant.
+
+"The senora is fatigued. She will have the meal served in her room."
+Sebastien's quiet order had dispersed the brown maids who flocked about
+her like cooing pigeons with greetings and offers of service. Unaware
+that he would observe it himself, she sprang out of her chair and ran a
+few steps toward the barred window when a tap sounded upon her door. In
+her relief when it proved to be only Roberta, she pulled the child in to
+her bosom.
+
+"It is thee, _nina_! Oh! I had thought--what is this?"
+
+Her sudden flush betrayed her recognition of Seyd's writing on the
+package the girl held out. In the few seconds she stood hesitating her
+changing expression revealed the struggle between her misery and her
+sense of wifely honor. The issue was not long in doubt, for, suddenly
+murmuring "'Twill do no harm to read it," she ripped off the cover.
+
+While she read the blush faded. At the end her low distressed cry,
+"Francesca, see what thy hasty pride has done! A little patience would
+have saved thy happiness and his!" told of the deep impression. Sinking
+into a chair, she was beginning to read it again when the door trembled
+under a heavier rap.
+
+Thrusting the letter into her bosom, she leaped up, under the urge of
+the same wild instinct to escape, retreated toward the window, and so
+stood, with Roberta tightly held against her skirts. Seconds passed
+before she managed a tremulous "Enter!" and the face she turned to
+Sebastien presented such a passion of fear, revulsion, and despair that
+he stopped and stood gazing at her from the door. If surprised, his
+look, however, was still kind. He even smiled. Not until, retreating as
+he came forward, she stopped only with her back against the wall,
+Roberta still between them, did his smile give way to sudden dark
+offense.
+
+"Are you ill?" He spoke sharply. "Or is this the usual way of a bride?
+If I were a tiger and you alone in the jungle 'twould be impossible to
+show more fear."
+
+"I wish you were!" The confession burst out of her miserable fear.
+"'Twere preferable a thousand times! Oh, why did I do it--commit this
+great wrong? Love is, can be, the only cause for marriage, but in my
+hasty pride I sought only revenge--on him. Oh, 'twas a sin--a sin
+against you, Sebastien, who have always been so kind. Somewhere there
+must have been a woman who would have borne you children out of her
+love. And now--I have not only sealed my own misery, but also yours.
+For, though I do not, never _can_ love you, I am--your wife."
+
+To repeat, it came out of her in a wild burst, without consideration.
+But with the last word she looked her apprehension. He, however, took it
+quietly. Already the flash of offense had faded. Only the measured tone
+betrayed restraint.
+
+"It is so--we are husband and wife. But do not let that fact disturb
+you. Did you think me so much of a beast as to believe that I would take
+you stone-cold! Neither need you grieve over your sin in marrying
+without love, for I took you on those terms. I knew very well that you
+were falling to me through anger. My only fear was that it might cool
+before you were placed forever beyond the gringo's reach. But now that
+is accomplished, have no fear, we stand as we were. You are still
+Francesca, to be wooed with a larger license, but still to be wooed and
+won to my love."
+
+"Oh, you are--as always--kind!" A little of the terror had died out of
+her face, and if she had never received Seyd's letter, had lacked the
+reassurance that lay warm in her breast, his generosity might have
+prevailed. Pitifully, she was going on, "I am sorry--" but he
+interrupted.
+
+"Let us have none of that. Pity is the last thing I ask of you. The
+issue between us lies clearly--can be settled only one way." His dark
+eyes lighting, he went on after a pause: "It needs not for me to remind
+you of the birth of my love, for it reaches back beyond your memory.
+When you were still a lovely child I gleaned a fallen eyelash from your
+dress and carried it for years--ay, until it was displaced by a stolen
+curl clipped while you slept by the maid I bribed. With you my love
+grew--grew with you from that lovely girl into a beautiful woman. The
+place which your foot had trod was, for me, the only holy ground. You
+were my church, the only one I ever believed in, the only one that
+gained my prayers. For me you and you alone held the keys of heaven,
+and be sure that now that they have passed through your own act into my
+hands I shall never rest till they have opened for me the doors."
+
+"You will always have my liking and respect--"
+
+He cut her off again. "Idle words--they are not enough. And you owe me
+one thing--your willingness to help. I shall try hard, harder than I
+have ever done, to win you, but without that my efforts will be in vain.
+And remember--for your own sake--if you do not help me it may be that
+you yourself will reap the pain. The immortality of love is the wild
+talk of poets. One cannot love a statue. The eye tires at last of the
+most beautiful marble, goes roving after warm flesh. So take care that
+you do not awake too late to find yourself unloved, pining for the
+affection you once rejected."
+
+Through all he had maintained his dark calm, speaking quietly with a
+touch of sadness. Yet, the stronger for its suppression, vibrant feeling
+pulsed in the appeal. Had Francesca still been smarting under the lash
+of hurt pride he might have caught her on a second reaction. For she was
+moved. Pity and distress governed her answer.
+
+"Oh, I feel wretchedly ungrateful. But what can I do? I cannot--oh, give
+me time?"
+
+"All that you need, _querida_. You are to have your own time and terms.
+Now listen! I am going away."
+
+He smiled a little grimly at her start of relief. "So _very_ glad? Then
+I am sorry it will not be for longer. I shall be back in a few days.
+Word came to the administrador yesterday that the gringo dam is greatly
+endangered by warm rains that have added the volcano's snows to the
+flood. A hundred feet deep, the waters are pouring down the Barranca de
+Tigres, and if they once top it the dam will go." He uttered a bitter
+oath. "A curse on it! If it were not that the wave would sweep the
+valley clean I would send one to hasten the end with a charge of powder.
+But that must wait for the dry season. I go now with every man and mule
+I can muster to raise and strengthen it. Signal beacons such as we saw
+at the trail head have been built all along the rim, and, if the dam
+goes, smoke by day or fire by night will flash timely warning. But if
+you are timid--San Nicolas stands on higher ground. If you would prefer
+to return--"
+
+"No! no!" Her fervent gratitude prompted her to attempt some return. "I
+shall stay here--to care for our people."
+
+He smiled at the "our." "Spoken like a Rocha. You never lacked courage,
+Francesca, but be careful. At the first signal leave everything, fly
+with the people up to the hills. If it should happen that the place is
+spared you can come back again. If not, follow the upper trail down to
+San Nicolas."
+
+Her fright had now altogether faded. While he was giving a few last
+instructions a touch of anxiety diluted her brimming thankfulness. But
+when he went out without having attempted anything more intimate than
+his usual bow, this vanished. And his restraint gained him more ground.
+Walking to the window which overlooked the patio, which was now thronged
+with a motley mixture of peons, mule-drivers, and serving women, she
+watched him mount and ride away at the head of the mule train. Looking
+backward from the great gates, he saw and answered the wave of her hand.
+But it was too far for him to catch either her wistful expression or
+pitiful murmur "If it had not been--"
+
+Inside her bodice Seyd's letter crackled under her hand. The blush with
+which she withdrew it indicated a doubt that his letter had a right to
+further tenancy in that warm nest. Roberta had followed Sebastien out to
+watch his departure. After placing the letter on the table she sat, one
+oval cheek propped on her hand, her dark head drooping over it like a
+tired flower. Once she made to pick it up, then snatched back her hand
+as though from a flame.
+
+"No! no! It would be wrong--after his kindness." After a few minutes'
+further musing she added: "'Tis now of the past. By your hand was it put
+there, Francesca. Now remains only to make a finish."
+
+Taking a match from a tray at her elbow, she lit the letter and threw
+it, all flaming, to the center of the tiled floor. While its pages
+withered her face quivered in sympathy, and when suddenly a single line
+stood blackly out in the expiring glow--"I love you--shall always love
+you!"--her breath came in a sudden sob.
+
+Rising, she gathered the ashes into a small tray, carried them across
+the room to the little altar that stood against the wall--an action
+significant as it was conscious. Kneeling, she bowed her head in her
+hands. She remained there a full hour, and when she rose no one of the
+ten generations of women whose soft knees had worn a depression in the
+tiles was ever animated by a more honest sense of duty. The face she
+turned to little Roberta, who came bursting in a few minutes later, was
+quiet and serene.
+
+"Oh, senorita!" In her excitement the child gave her the maiden title.
+"Pancho, the administrador, will have you come at once. Smoke is rising
+northward along the rim. Also there comes a horseman at full speed."
+Lowering her voice, she added: "Pancho showed him to me through Don
+Sebastien's far-seeing glasses. It is the senor Seyd."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+Riding at a hard gallop, Seyd had cut down Sebastien's lead by a full
+hour in the run along the rim. At the sight of the beacon--which the
+peons were now thatching with grass--he, also, reined in. But, having
+learned from them that Sebastien and Francesca had passed two hours ago,
+he rode on down the staircases at a pace which showed little respect for
+his neck.
+
+Nearly an hour later he stopped again on the very knoll from which he
+had overlooked El Quiss. If he had looked northward it would have been
+possible to see Sebastien at the head of the mule train which was
+wriggling like a mottled brown snake across the wet green pastures. But
+during the quarter hour that Seyd remained there his gaze never left the
+distant pink of the hacienda walls.
+
+Somehow their solid realism cooled his fever and brought order to his
+rioting senses. "Well, you are here! Now what are you going to do? What
+_can_ you do?" The still small voice of Reason rose above the storm.
+"These, you know, are not the days of chivalry. It is no longer the
+fashion for a jilted lover to snatch his bride from the horns of the
+altar. And if it were"--Reason here observed a deadly pause--"what
+chance would you have against Sebastien and his retainers?"
+
+"But I must see her! I _will_ see her!" The still small voice was
+drowned in a gush of passion. "There have been too many accidents
+already. Not till I hear from her own lips that she has done this of her
+free will shall I quit."
+
+"Sounds good." Reason agreed only to differ. "But it has one
+drawback--she might not care to be interviewed in her bridal chamber."
+
+The suggestion was ill-timed, for it started a new riot among his
+senses. "I'll see her! I _will_ have speech with her!" It went roaring
+through his brain.
+
+But how to compass it? Had he known the name of Caliban's woman's cousin
+it would have been difficult enough! Not knowing it, the thing was
+almost impossible. He was tossing on successive waves of feeling that
+now urged him forward, again carried him back in the undertow of
+despair, when there came a patter of nude feet behind him.
+
+"Senor! senor! _Mira!_ The beacons! The beacons!"
+
+It was one of the peons whom he had left above. "Ride, senor! Ride and
+give warning lest they have not seen it at El Quiss! I go to my woman
+and children!" Shouting it, he swung at right angles and flew down the
+valley at top speed.
+
+Almost as quickly Seyd galloped off. One glance had shown the tall smoke
+plumes which were rising like ghostly sentinels above the black edge of
+the pine, and with it there burst upon him a vivid picture of the muddy
+sea behind the great dam. Crossing the river that morning, he had
+noticed that the floods were running above last year's highest mark, and
+almost as plainly as by actual sight his imagination pictured the wave
+which had just leaped, like a huge yellow hound, over the broken dam. A
+solid wall of water, he saw it sweeping down the valley, lapping up
+villages, ranches, _jacals_, with greedy tongues. Roweling the flanks of
+his tired beast, he drove on. Yet, despite his apprehension, the phrase
+rang in his mind like a clashing bell:
+
+"I shall see her! Now I shall see her!"
+
+While he was still half a mile away he saw two mounted men dash out of
+the patio gates and ride off at right angles, north and south. After
+them came a crowd on foot, and as they opened to let him through Seyd
+noted with wonder that all were women. His surprise deepened when,
+driving in through the gates, he almost rode over Francesca, who stood
+with Roberta against her skirts in the deserted patio. While, breathing
+hard after his wild ride, he sat looking down upon her she returned his
+gaze with big mournful eyes.
+
+"You are--alone?"
+
+"Yes." Hesitating, she went on, "Don Sebastien left an hour
+ago--immediately after our arrival--with the men to work on the dam."
+
+He almost shouted. It was inconceivable, except on a supposition that
+filled him with sudden hope. "Then it isn't true? If it were, he would
+not have left you. He lied! Paulo lied! All day I have ridden hard on
+your trail to disprove it! He lied! Tell me that Paulo lied!"
+
+It was not necessary to reply in words. The slender weaving fingers, her
+quivering distress, the pity and grief of her eyes, made answer.
+
+"Oh, how could you?" But his natural sense of justice instantly asserted
+itself. "But no! I have only myself to blame. I played the fool all
+through. Yet, I meant well--but I explained that in my letter."
+
+"I only received it two hours ago. Oh, why didn't you send it sooner?"
+
+"I did--wrote the instant I got the paper. It lay here four days."
+
+Now, only twenty miles away, at speed swifter than bird flight, the wave
+was leaping over the jungle with plumage of tangled debris streaming out
+behind. Even then they might have caught its distant roar. But, blind to
+all but the fortuitous chance that had dogged their love to this unhappy
+conclusion, they stood gazing at each other in distress and despair.
+
+"We have been unfortunate, you and I." She spoke, mournfully, at last.
+"And this is the end."
+
+He would not accept it. In thought he was storming the barrier her act
+had placed between them when her sorrowful voice answered the mute
+appeal of his eyes. "_Si_, the end. If Sebastien had not been so kind!
+He took advantage of my anger to place bars between you and me, but
+there he rests. His consideration deserves some return, and the least I
+can offer is the outward semblance of good wifehood. You must go!"
+
+"What! Leave you--now?" Recalled to a sudden realization of their
+imminent danger, he pleaded, "First let me place you in safety?"
+
+"No." She nodded toward a saddled horse under the gateway. "In a few
+minutes I can overtake the people. With you will go my--"
+
+While they talked Roberta had wandered over to the gates. Now she
+suddenly cried: "Oh, senora! Don Sebastien!"
+
+Seyd's view of the trail was limited by a swing to the south that cut
+off all but a couple of hundred yards. As he made, instinctively, to
+move forward Francesca caught his bridle. "No! no! He must not see you!
+If he finds you here--with me--oh, has there not been trouble enough?"
+Her distracted glance circled the courtyard. "See, the old guardhouse!
+Dismount--quickly! Lead in your horse, then I will ride with the child
+to meet him!"
+
+As a matter of fact, he felt like anything but hiding. His eye lit with
+a hard gray gleam. But in these premises that he had forced upon her it
+was not for him to pick and choose. He yielded to her pleading, "For my
+sake?"
+
+Dismounting, he led his horse in through the arched doorway, and as she
+closed the door upon him Francesca added a last hurried instruction. "He
+will undoubtedly turn with me. Give us time to gain cover under the
+oaks, then take you the trail to the south. It reaches high ground
+quickly. And ride hard"--her voice broke in a sob--"for if you should be
+overtaken by the water what in this miserable world would be left for
+me?"
+
+"And this is the end?" He caught her hand between the closing doors.
+
+"The end--for thy sake." She dropped into the tender second person of
+the Spanish. "_Si_, if you wish it."
+
+Left alone, Seyd stood listening, the soft touch of her lips thrilling
+upon his. In the guardhouse, used now for a storeroom, all but one
+window was blocked by piles of sacked maize, but as his eyes grew
+accustomed to the half gloom he made out the massive beams which held up
+the heavy roof. The wall from which the one window looked out formed
+part of the hacienda's southern face, and, remembering that the trail
+inclined in that direction, he moved over to it when he caught the
+clatter of departing hoofs. Deeply recessed in the thick wall, the low
+sill afforded standing room, and by peering obliquely through the bars
+he caught first the flutter of her skirt, then gradually she forged into
+full view. About three hundred yards away the trail ran in among shade
+oaks, cedars, and great spreading banyans, that were strewn in clumps
+all over the pastures. But just before she rode in among them Sebastien
+and Pancho, his _mozo_, galloped out from among the trees.
+
+Even if the wind had not been dashing the sheeting rain in his face it
+would have been impossible for Seyd to have caught a distant murmur of
+voices. But he saw the _mozo_ lift Roberta from Francesca's beast, and
+lead off, with his mistress following. Then Sebastien came galloping on
+toward the gates.
+
+"Coming for something--money or papers," Seyd thought. "Just for fear he
+looks in--"
+
+At the far end of the room a pile of sacked beans formed a natural
+stall, and he had no more than gotten his horse behind it when the
+clatter of hoofs broke in the court. He could not, of course, see
+Sebastien dismount. But, faint as they were, his highly keyed senses
+recorded the vibrations of the other's footsteps as he followed the
+muddy horse tracks across to the guardhouse.
+
+Outside the door Sebastien stopped. In the tense pause that followed
+Seyd's hand went to his gun. At first the act was due to the natural
+instinct of self protection, but in the very moment of its inception
+that gave place to a second, more powerful impulse that dyed his face
+and neck with a dark flush. Drawing the weapon, he trained it across a
+sack at the door, and at that moment no primitive man in hiding at the
+mouth of his enemy's cave was ever obsessed by a fiercer lust to kill.
+All of his trials and long travail, despair, seemed in his disordered
+fancy to materialize just then in Sebastien's person. And it would be so
+easy! A slight pressure of his finger the instant he showed in the
+doorway, then--the flood!
+
+In a flash the pros and cons of it passed through his mind. If the
+circumstances were reversed he knew exactly the course that Sebastien
+would take. And almost as he thought it came proof--first the grating of
+the key in the lock of the inner door, next the groaning complaint of
+rusty hinges as Sebastien swung to the iron outer doors which had not
+been used for a score of years, finally the wooden crash of the oaken
+bars falling into their staples.
+
+It was all over before Seyd really understood. With knowledge there
+flashed upon him the thought of the flood. Rushing across the floor, he
+leaped and threw all of his weight against the inner door. It hardly
+shook, and the recoil threw him flat on the floor. As he rose came the
+clatter of Sebastien's departing hoofs, and running across to the window
+he was just in time to see him come in view. On the skirts of the timber
+he reined suddenly in and sat his beast, listening. Then, after a quick
+glance northward, he galloped on.
+
+And Seyd, at the window, also heard.
+
+Above the sough of the wind which drove the sheeting rain into his face
+he caught the roar of the oncoming flood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+In the few minutes that passed before she met Sebastien Francesca had
+regained self control. To his reproof, "This was foolish; why did you
+linger?" she calmly replied, "I wished to make sure that all the people
+were out."
+
+He nodded approval. "Then no one is left?"
+
+"No one."
+
+"_Bueno!_ We have no more than time to make the hills. Pancho's beast is
+stronger than yours. Give him the child." She had begun to hope, but it
+died within her as he went on: "In my rooms are valuable papers. 'Twill
+take but a moment to get them. Ride on, you. My horse goes two paces to
+your one. I can catch you halfway to the hills."
+
+She almost fainted when he rode off, for just as surely as though she
+had seen him questioning the fugitive women she knew now that he was
+aware of Seyd's presence. She reined her animal around to follow, then
+checked it sharply under a sudden inspiration.
+
+"Why do you wait, Pancho?" she asked, sharply. "While you sleep the
+flood will be on us. Ride! Ride your hardest! I will follow."
+
+The _mozo_, to tell the truth, was damning with inward tremblings the
+luck that had placed him in such jeopardy. Only the fear of Sebastien
+had kept him from bolting, and now, without even a backward glance, he
+laid on with quirt and spurs and galloped off with Roberta, leaving
+Francesca free to carry out her plan.
+
+It was quite simple. In this, the rainy season, the shade trees were
+draped from crown to foot with green lace of morning glories, and on the
+outer edge of the nearest clump a banyan had been converted into a huge
+tent which would have stabled a hundred horses. Parting the lacework of
+leaves with one hand, after she had ridden under it, Francesca obtained,
+through the gateway, an oblique view of the guardhouse at the moment
+Sebastien closed the iron doors. The crash of the bars carried to her
+tree, and had he looked that way he might have seen the curtain of
+leaves swing under the forward move of her beast. But, controlling the
+impulse, she reined it back again. When Sebastien raced past a couple of
+minutes later she dropped her hand and shrank in sudden fear.
+
+It was, however, impossible for him to see her. Moreover, the
+intervening clumps prevented him from discovering that she was not with
+Pancho until he came bursting out on his heels in open pasture half a
+mile ahead.
+
+"_Tonto!_ where is thy mistress?"
+
+The _mozo's_ look of frightened surprise proclaimed at once his
+ignorance and fear. Both had reined in, and under the other's deadly
+look Pancho cowered behind his bent arm. Sickly green patches stained
+his dull chocolate. When Sebastien pulled a pistol from his holster he
+bowed down to the saddle horn, his face in his hands. Leaning over,
+Sebastien placed the muzzle against the fellow's head. His finger even
+had tightened. Then, checking the impulse, came Roberta's whimper,
+"Senor! oh, senor!" Above it rose a distant thunderous roar, and,
+glancing northward, he saw in the far distance a writhing movement in
+the jungle beyond the pastures.
+
+"Off, fool! Save the child!"
+
+Striking the man's shoulders with the pistol, he wheeled his horse and
+shot away, heading back to the hacienda. Riding, he kept one eye on the
+green wave that was moving with the speed of the wind over the jungle.
+As he passed in among the shade trees it boiled over the far edge of the
+pastures, and from beneath the swaying trees emerged a muddy wall
+crowned with bristling black. Traveling more swiftly in the open, it
+came on at an acute angle which had its point in the flooded lands along
+the river, its base in the jungle close to the hills, and when Sebastien
+dashed out of the timber the point had passed the hacienda.
+
+Even then he must have known it for hopeless. The thunderous diapason
+had risen into a furious crescendo which was spaced by the tear and
+crash of uprooted trees, and, higher than his head, the liquid wall was
+coming on under the pressure of the yellow frothing sea that stretched
+behind to the limit of sight. Yet, laying on quirt and spurs, he raced
+down its front in a desperate spurt for the gates.
+
+While he was still a hundred yards away the wave struck the northern
+wall of the compound that fenced the buildings. Built solidly of stone,
+it melted, vanished without a premonitory shiver, and in its overthrow
+accomplished good. Catching root and branch in the debris, the grinding
+welter of fallen trees hesitated, then piled in a huge tangled bar upon
+the line of cottages and stables which intervened between the wall and
+house.
+
+To Sebastien, however, this brought no respite. Shooting along the
+eastern wall, the wave outraced him and beat him to the gate by a long
+fifty yards.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While Francesca was still under the banyan she had heard the roaring
+diapason of the flood. Clothed in dripping lacery of leaves and flowers
+torn away by the beast's leap from the spur, she galloped into the
+patio, and when she dismounted the vines still twined around her limbs.
+Without waiting to tear them off she threw all of her strength into a
+vain effort to swing the bars of the guardhouse doors, but, swollen by
+the rain, they were fast in the staples.
+
+"Oh, _what_ shall I do?"
+
+Her cry carried through to Seyd. After a fruitless attempt on the door
+he was just about to attack the window bars with an oaken club he had
+found in one corner. Now, tearing away the sacks of maize that blocked
+the one small square window on her side, he thrust it between the bars.
+
+"Knock them up with this!"
+
+But after the bars yielded the rusty doors defied her strength. "They
+will not budge! Oh, I cannot move them!"
+
+Again his practical sense served. "Slip a stirrup over the staple, then
+start your horse gently. Fine!" He heard the groan of the moving door.
+"Key gone! Never mind, I can shoot out the lock. Stand away--off to one
+side."
+
+Above the roar of the flood Sebastien heard the shots. A few seconds
+later he saw Seyd look out of the gateway, then rush back in. Behind the
+gates an iron ladder led up to a lookout post on top of the guardhouse,
+and, racing down the front of the wave, Sebastien saw Seyd rise above
+the low parapet and lift Francesca to his side.
+
+At the same moment they saw him. In Francesca's outstretched hands
+Sebastien saw her impulse to save. In the sudden covering of her eyes he
+read his fate. The fifty yards that lay between him and the gates might
+just as well have been a thousand, for, less than half the distance
+away, the great yellow comber rose high over his head.
+
+Before it broke, however, he did two things--reined his horse to face
+it, then, just before he went under the grinding welter, with the same
+easy courtesy which he would have shown to a kinsman or a friend, he
+turned in the saddle and waved his hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+From the time Seyd rode into the hacienda up to that moment less than
+twenty minutes had passed, but events had leaped to a conclusion.
+
+The barrier of debris across the outer buildings had diminished the
+force of the blow upon the house, and had the water gained instant
+access to the interior and equalized the pressure it might have stood.
+As the wave raced past, level with the high wall, the patio presented
+for an instant a curious resemblance to a square vessel pressed down
+till its edges just rose above the water. The next, its stout walls fell
+inward, and over them a yellow wave leaped at the house. Reinforced by
+its partition walls, it withstood for a few seconds the enormous
+pressure. Then above the cracking and grinding of debris and the mingled
+roar of the flood rose the boom of doors and windows blown out of their
+frames.
+
+Because of its length the guardhouse went first. Feeling it tremble
+under his feet, Seyd lifted Francesca and held her face in against his
+breast. Not that he was in the least resigned. Never in all his life had
+he felt a keener desire to live. His glance darted hither and thither,
+and when, freed by the fall of the stone lintels, a patio gate sprang
+out of the yellow cauldron almost at his feet he snatched up Francesca,
+leaped, and landed in its very center. Falling under her, he was, for an
+instant, breathless. But in the few seconds that he lay there gasping
+circumstances worked in their favor. Thrust by the impact into the
+recoil of the wave from the house wall, the gate was heaved out of the
+patio, and passed the guardhouse just before the heavy tiled roof
+collapsed with the walls.
+
+Almost in an instant the house crumbled and melted with scarcely a
+splash. Sitting up a few seconds later, Seyd looked back on all that was
+left of El Quiss, the barrier of debris rising, a black reef, out of a
+yellow sea. A mile ahead the wave roared on, its furious crescendo again
+reduced to a booming diapason. While the gate was being carried with
+incredible swiftness across the El Quiss pastures the roar sank to a
+distant hum, and presently died altogether, leaving only the quiet
+lapping of the waters in the falling dusk.
+
+So quickly had it all passed that Seyd found it hard to believe they
+were floating in comparative safety. The gate, which was ten feet by
+twelve in size and four inches thick, floated evenly, and if an
+occasional wave ran across it the tepid rain water of the tropics caused
+no discomfort. Neither were they in danger from the debris, logs, and
+uprooted trees which floated at equal speed on currents that were
+setting back to the river. With a pole that he picked up Seyd was able
+to keep out of the way of the few that rolled and tumbled when their
+branches caught on the bottom, and when at last they drifted on the
+deeper, slower currents of the river he turned to Francesca, who had
+remained a huddled, sobbing heap just where she fell.
+
+She looked up when he touched her shoulder. "Oh, I feel wicked!" she
+cried, remorsefully. "If I had only waited for a few more days, given
+you time to explain, he would still be alive."
+
+"It was perfectly natural," Seyd comforted her. "He would absolve you
+from all blame were he here, for with all his faults he was big and
+brave."
+
+"You really think that he would?" She looked up with tearful anxiety.
+
+"I'm sure of it. How could he do otherwise?"
+
+"But he was--my husband. And I left him--for you."
+
+"Yet I do not think that he held you in blame."
+
+Kneeling beside her, with one arm around her shoulders, he gave his
+reason--Sebastien's last salute. Even if this started her tears anew
+she, nevertheless, felt comforted. When a black shape forged out of the
+dusk alongside, and he had to return to his pole, her natural spirit
+reasserted itself.
+
+"Here am I, crying like a child instead of helping. What can I do?"
+
+There was really nothing. But to keep her from brooding he placed her on
+watch. "If you'll keep a lookout I'll take a shove at everything that
+floats in reach. The current is setting across the river, and we have
+nearly twenty miles to work in. With any old luck we ought to be able to
+land at Santa Gertrudis."
+
+Thick dusk presently merged into night, but they were helped by a full
+moon which shed a dew of light through the falling rain. Not that they
+voyaged without hazard. Twice they were almost swamped by trees which
+rolled over under the thrust of Seyd's pole. Farther down they narrowly
+escaped shipwreck on wooded islands. Yet, thrusting and hauling, he
+worked steadily with the favoring current, and they had gained almost
+across when, rounding a bend, they sighted a distant light.
+
+"Caliban's, for sure! Only another hour to food and fire!" Seyd cheered
+her.
+
+He had, however, his own misgivings. As they drew into the shadow of the
+Barranca wall the moonlight grew fainter, and, drifting later over the
+submerged jungle, they were hard put to avoid the treetops which
+upreared like huge mushrooms above the flood. More than once they were
+almost swept off the raft by bejucos, vegetable cables, which stretched
+from top to top, and as these grew thicker Seyd saw that disaster was
+merely a question of time. He was hoping desperately that their
+capsizing would not entail too long a swim, when out of the obscurity
+rose a huge black shape.
+
+With a shock that threw them both down, the raft grounded in shallow
+water.
+
+It was the plateau on which the new smelter stood. But, changed as it
+was in the new geography of the flood, Seyd did not recognize it until,
+scrambling ashore with Francesca, he saw above the dark mass of the
+buildings the cable and iron ore buckets in dim outline against the sky.
+
+"Why, it's the smelter!" he shouted, in glad surprise. "Ever since the
+explosion we have kept a man here on guard. _Ola!_ Calixto! _Ola! Ola!_"
+
+While he was calling a yellow oblong broke out of the building's mass,
+framing the black silhouette of a man. "It is the _jefe_!" They heard
+his comment to his woman inside, then, uttering a volley of surprised
+"_Caramba's!_" he came rushing down the bank with his lantern.
+
+When Francesca's pale wet face shone under its sudden glow he dropped
+the lantern, which, fortunately, did not go out. Picking it up again, he
+lighted their way to the adobe that had served Billy for house and
+office while the smelter was building.
+
+For use during the rains, a chimney and wide hearth had been installed
+in the adobe, and while Calixto was building a roaring fire Seyd
+directed a piratical raid on Billy's trunks. At first his search
+returned only muddy overalls and soiled clothing of various sorts, but
+at the very bottom--just as they had been placed by the hands of a
+careful mother--a new suit of flannel pajamas and a voluminous woolen
+bathrobe appeared. When, with some misgivings, and confused, he
+suggested a change, a touch of the girl's old archness flashed out. Her
+smile was almost mischievous as she returned thanks.
+
+"I'm sorry there's nothing better to offer." The smile emboldened him to
+add: "But they will serve till we have something to eat. Then you may
+have the fire all to yourself to dry your own things."
+
+She smiled again when, returning with food and coffee prepared by
+Calixto's woman, he exclaimed, "You look like the Queen of Sheba!"
+
+With the brown-black hair swinging almost to her knees and the
+bathrobe--a gorgeous affair in pink chosen with an eye to Billy's vivid
+taste--belted in to her waist and pajamas ballooning beneath over small
+bare feet, she did look Oriental. When the coffee and food had relit her
+eyes and restored her usual faint color he was sure that she had never
+looked so distractingly pretty. The effect was not diminished either by
+her small vexed frowns at the revelations of smooth whiteness caused by
+the persistent slipping of the wide sleeves. When, as they sat by the
+fire after the meal, warmth and fatigue moved her to a yawn and he
+caught the full redness of her mouth before she could cover it the
+intimacy of it all sent the blood drumming through his pulses. If her
+serious eyes restrained him, they did not repress his thought.
+
+"I have you--now! I have you at last, and I'll never let you go again!"
+
+Undoubtedly she furnished the inspiration which kindled a sudden light
+in his eyes. "Why not?" he urged against the one objection that occurred
+in his thought. "It's an awful smash at the conventions, but--it's the
+only way. He locked me in to drown--and do you suppose that he'd
+hesitate if he were here now in my shoes? I guess not. And if he would,
+I won't. By the Lord, I'll do it!"
+
+He rose soon after reaching his conclusion. "You must be very tired, so
+I'll go now and leave you to dry your things. You know, we start early
+in the morning."
+
+"Start early?" She opened her sleepy eyes.
+
+"Listen!" He took her gently by both shoulders. "We have been held apart
+so far by all sorts of accidents and misunderstandings. You know how
+closely we came to utter shipwreck?" Her shiver answering, he went on,
+"Now, will you trust--leave all to me?"
+
+She had been no woman if she had not divined the restraint behind his
+quiet during the last warm hour, and, rising suddenly upon small bare
+toes, she paid him for his consideration. "I will do anything you say."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Breaking through the stream of ocean vapors, the morning sun showed the
+jungle raising a languid head above the ruins of the flood. Long rents
+in its green mantle, bare patches of yellow mud, dark bruises where
+acres of debris had been piled in twisted masses, testified to the force
+of the wave. But, overlooking the wreckage from the smelter, Seyd took
+notice principally of a fact that suited his purpose--the river had been
+swept clean of driftwood. Not since the beginning of the rains had it
+shown such open stretches.
+
+"Good!" he muttered. "The sooner we get away the better. I'll call her
+at once."
+
+When, however, he knocked at the office door Francesca answered "Come!"
+When he entered she smiled at his surprise. "You said that we were to
+start early. Here I am, dressed and dried."
+
+"Not before breakfast," he laughed. "It is ready. I'll have it brought
+right in."
+
+All through the meal her eyes questioned, but, denying her curiosity, he
+talked of anything and everything but that which filled her mind. Even
+when, clothed in his waterproof, she took her seat opposite him in the
+stern of the dugout he denied their eloquent appeal. While sending the
+boat with vigorous strokes flying downstream he drew her attention to
+this and that phase of devastation and commented on the beauty of the
+morning, but not a word as to his purpose. It was cruel, and her eyes
+said so. But, remorseless, he held on till, about midway of the morning,
+they sighted San Nicolas. All the way down he had hugged the Santa
+Gertrudis side, and she received the first inkling when he replied to
+her question if it were not time to pull across.
+
+"We are not going there."
+
+"Not going there?" she repeated, surprised.
+
+"No, we shall keep right on--down to sea."
+
+"The sea?"
+
+"The sea." He nodded firmly. "And the minute we land there we're going
+to be married."
+
+The idea was altogether too radical to be absorbed at once. No doubt she
+thought he was joking, for a smile broke around her mouth. Not until
+they were almost opposite San Nicolas did it give place to puzzled
+alarm.
+
+"But, senor--Rob--Roberto." She changed it in answer to his quick look.
+"But, Roberto--"
+
+"Might as well make it Bob," he cut in, crisply. "It may seem strange at
+first, but seeing that we're to be married you might as well begin to
+get used to it now."
+
+The San Nicolas walls now lay, a long, warm band, across their beam.
+From them her glance returned to the pendulum swing of his body.
+Finality centered in his steady stroke. It told that he had settled down
+for the day. Had he calculated its effect beforehand he could not have
+done better. Accustomed to Spanish deference, she was nonplussed by his
+authoritative air, yet its very unusualness invested it with a certain
+charm.
+
+"But--Bob?" Somehow the curt appellation acquired grace and softness
+from her Spanish lisp. It fell so prettily that he made her repeat it.
+But, though she added to its attraction an appealing glance, he remained
+grimly obdurate.
+
+"Give me time to think?"
+
+"All you want. At this speed"--the oars creaked under his stroke--"you
+will have about twenty-four hours."
+
+She looked at him, frightened. "_Please?_ At least let us talk it over."
+
+The cheerful roll of oars in the rowlocks returned wooden answer.
+
+"Won't you?"
+
+He stopped rowing and sat regarding her sternly. "I'm allowing you more
+time than you gave me. If"--he paused, then, judging it necessary,
+relentlessly continued--"if _he_ were here in my place do you suppose--"
+
+"Oh, he would! He did! After he had insured me against--"
+
+"--Me," he supplied, with a dogged shake of the head, then went on,
+"Well, even if he would, I won't." As he bent again to the oars the
+touch of admiration that leavened her undoubted fright paid tribute to
+his stubborn logic. Settling to his stroke, he began again: "Supposing
+that I complied and put you ashore at San Nicolas? Do you think that Don
+Luis would be any more favorably inclined toward me? You know that he
+wouldn't. I should do well to escape with my life. But if you go back as
+my wife--well, the most they can do is to turn us out. Of course I can
+understand your feeling. It will be a frightful breach of the
+conventions--"
+
+"No, it is not that," she interrupted him. "My friends will be
+scandalized, _si_, but they are long ago broken to that. They would be
+dreadfully disappointed if I did not fulfil their predictions by making
+a shameful end. And it isn't--he. It is wicked to acknowledge it, but I
+know--I know now that no matter how hard I tried to school myself I
+should sooner or later have run away to you. They'll think it
+shocking--my friends, my mother--but I can endure it."
+
+"And that can be avoided. I'll take you away--throw up everything
+here--make a new start somewhere else."
+
+"No! no!" She shook her head. "Your work is here, and I am just as proud
+of it as you could be. Let them chatter. No, it isn't even that."
+
+"Then what is it?"
+
+"You wouldn't understand. It is silly, just a woman's reason. No, you
+would not understand."
+
+"I'll try."
+
+"It is _so_ foolish." Nevertheless, encouraged by his sympathy, she
+continued: "Do you know that since the first kiss passed between us a
+year ago we have had speech together only for a few minutes in the
+presence of others? And her courtship is of such supreme importance in a
+girl's life. It is her love time, and she loves to lengthen and draw out
+its lingering sweetness. And ours has been so short."
+
+It was the poignant cry of her girl's heart expressing the yearning of
+her starved love, and, coming from such spirited lips, it moved him
+deeply. Slipping the oars, he seized her two hands and pulled her
+forward into his arms. Then, while her dark head lay pillowed upon his
+shoulder, he continued the argument to better advantage.
+
+The walls of San Nicolas had dwindled to a golden streak before she
+looked up in his face. "Supposing that I had refused?"
+
+"I'd have carried you off in spite of yourself."
+
+And, whether she believed him or not, she clung the closer in that
+embrace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The new day opened a new and fertile country before Seyd's sleepy eyes,
+a country wonderfully beautiful with variegated foliage of coffee,
+rubber, palm, and banana plantations.
+
+During the night the Barranca walls had, while growing lower, closed in
+to a long gorge through which the river ran like a millrace. For two
+hours their ears were dinned and deafened by the roar and thunder of mad
+waters, but, as the boulders of the one rapid were buried thirty feet
+deep, they sustained nothing worse than a slight deafness and natural
+apprehension at the hair-raising speed with which they were catapulted
+onward. Excepting those two hours when he had to use both oars to hold
+the dugout's head in the center of the current, Francesca had slept in
+his arms, and, nestling upon his shoulder the moment they emerged upon
+quieter waters, she had fallen asleep once more, nor did she move till
+the sun pointed a golden finger down between two clouds.
+
+Awakening, she uttered a small cry and lay for a few seconds looking up
+into Seyd's face, her eyes blank with bewildered terror. Then,
+recognizing him, she gave a sob of relief. "Oh, I was dreaming--that I
+was at El Quiss--to stay there--forever!" She paused and sat for a
+moment looking into his tired face, then burst out: "Oh, little animal!
+All night I slept while you kept watch. Now you shall sleep."
+
+Taking his place in the stern, she forced him, with pretty authority, to
+cushion his head in her lap. "_Si_, I will awaken you before we reach
+the harbor, but do not dare to open an eye till then."
+
+The command was unnecessary, for, completely fagged, he had no more than
+lain down when he was fast asleep. Until sure of the fact she sat
+perfectly still. Then, with a rueful glance at her soiled and shrunken
+garments, she murmured, "Nevertheless, we must try to look our best."
+
+After a second shy study of his sleeping face she let down her hair and
+began to comb it out with her slender fingers. Because of the length and
+thickness of the dark masses this proved a long task. The dugout had
+drifted miles before she finished the coiffure with small feminine pats.
+Reassured that he still slept, she dipped her handkerchief overside and
+washed her face and neck.
+
+Her own toilet completed, she next essayed his. After warming the wet
+handkerchief against her own cheek she cleansed his face with delicate
+touches, then, with the same soft white comb--her fingers--smoothed his
+hair. Discovering, in the process, a few gray hairs, she murmured: "Oh,
+_pobre_! See what I have cost thee!"
+
+Very gently she began to trace and smooth out the lines of worry upon
+his face, and, rediscovering his cleft chin, she repeated, with a soft
+laugh, her comment made that night in the shepherd's hut. "Oh, fickle!
+fickle! I said thy wife would need the sharpest of eyes, but they will
+needs have nimble fingers that steal thee from me."
+
+Her face at that moment formed a playground for all that was arch, but
+presently it took the shadow of sadder thoughts. Brimming over, a big
+tear rolled down her cheek. Yet, while sincerely sorry for Sebastien,
+she was perfectly frank with herself in thought. "I would not, if I
+could, bring him back. 'Twould mean only more trouble--for all of us.
+Now, at least, he is at peace.
+
+"They will think me hard and cruel." Her musings continued. "The whole
+Barranca will throw up hands of horror--the hands that applauded the
+greater sin when I gave myself without love in marriage. _Bueno!_" She
+scornfully tossed her head. "Wicked or not, I will do it--for thee."
+
+She squeezed his face so hard, murmuring it, that he stirred, and for
+fully a minute thereafter she sat holding her breath. But he slept on.
+During the last hour the river had widened, and along its banks tufted
+cocoa palms were woven with the brighter foliage of bananas into the
+rich green damask of the bordering jungle. Also the sun had prevailed
+for a few hours in the daily battle with the mists, and under the
+golden spell of light and warmth the girl's musings grew happier as they
+floated on. When she awoke him to the sight of the blue harbor opening
+up from behind a long bend, Seyd looked up at a smiling face.
+
+"That's the American consulate." After rubbing the sleep out of his eyes
+he pointed out a white stone building which perched, like a gull, on a
+terrace above the flaming rose and gold of the adobe town. "We'll go
+there. The consul is a fine old fellow. He'll help us all he can."
+
+First, however, they were destined to encounter the unexpected, for
+when, an hour later, Seyd pulled the dugout into a ragged wooden pier an
+officer in the silver and gray of the Mexican rurales pushed through the
+peon laborers who thronged the wharf.
+
+"You are from up river, senor? Then you can tell us of the flood in the
+Barranca. A cousin of mine, Don Sebastien--_Caramba!_" At the sight of
+Francesca he broke suddenly off. "It is surely the senorita Garcia? You
+will remember me, Eduardo Gallardo, upon the occasion that I visited, at
+San Nicolas, your uncle, the excellent General Garcia, with my wife, who
+is of your kinsfolk?"
+
+Recognizing him while he was still in the crowd, Francesca had gained
+time to prepare. His use of her maiden name proved that here at the port
+they had heard nothing as yet of her marriage, so, after briefly
+describing Sebastien's death and the destruction of El Quiss, she
+concluded: "I was saved by the senor, here, who rode in to warn us. But
+for him I also should have drowned."
+
+And Seyd availed himself of the opening. "As the senorita is completely
+exhausted, senor, you will please to excuse us. We go to the American
+consulate."
+
+"But why the consulate, senor," the rurale politely objected, "when she
+owns here the house of her kinswoman? The senora, my wife--"
+
+"_Si_, I have heard of her--nothing that is not lovely." Drawing him a
+little aside, Francesca proceeded to heal, with winning smiles, the
+wound in his pride. "You shall give her my love, cousin. Tell her that I
+should prefer to visit her, but, having taken my life from the hand of
+this senor, I cannot do otherwise than fall in with his plans."
+
+Deferring with Latin politeness to her wish, his pride was none the less
+hurt, and while they climbed the hill to the consulate he hurried home
+to his wife, whose feminine intuitions placed the whole matter in an
+entirely new light.
+
+"A gringo, sayest thou? Then it will be he for whose sake she was sent
+away to Europe. Medium tall, is he, with a straight nose, hollow cheeks,
+quick gray eyes? The very man that Paulo, the administrador, described
+to me on his last visit to the port. _Caramba!_ Here's fine bread for
+the baking! 'Tis told all over the Barranca that she has this man in
+her blood, and count me for a liar if she comes with him this far for
+any purpose but marriage. 'Twill never do to have Don Luis knocking at
+our door to ask why we let her go before our very eyes. He is a power,
+_hombrecita_, with the government, thy master, and, fail or win, we lose
+nothing by trying to trip her run. And 'twill be easy! A word in the ear
+of the _jefe_, judge, and priest, and 'tis done. And do not sleep on it.
+Away with you--at once."
+
+In his cool white salon on the hill above, the consul--a portly old
+fellow with a clean, good-natured face--was counseling Seyd at that
+moment in almost the same terms.
+
+"As you say, this is no time to stand on conventions--especially after
+the man had locked you in and left you to drown. After seeing the young
+lady"--his smiling glance went to the door through which Francesca had
+just gone with his wife--"I should feel less than ever like protracted
+mourning. Besides, it is now or never. If you don't marry her at once
+the chance may never come again. If Eduardo Gallardo hadn't seen you it
+would have been quite simple. I could have fixed it up for you all
+right. But he is counted something of a sneak, and if he once sniffs the
+wind--well, you can be sure he won't let such a chance slip to better
+himself with General Garcia. You've simply got to beat him to it."
+
+After a pause of thought he went on: "In their usual course, both the
+legal and ecclesiastical procedures are very slow. It takes about a week
+for the lawyers to coin the bridegroom's natural impatience into ready
+money, and after they are through the Church holds out its hand for
+what's left. It's an awful graft, but has its advantages, for if the
+wheels are well greased they spin like lightning. Shut up! I don't have
+to be told that you emerged from the flood with empty pockets. I'll
+attend to that, and you can settle with me any old time. All you have to
+do"--taking Seyd by the shoulders, he marched him into his own
+bedroom--"is to take a shave and bath and make yourself look as much as
+you can like a happy bridegroom."
+
+With a last order, "Help yourself from my clothes," he went out
+laughing. But when he returned an hour later his smile was obscured by a
+vexed cloud. "Eduardo wins," he reported to Seyd, who had just come out
+on the veranda. "He must have gone right to it, for when I arrived at
+the _edificio municipal_ they were already primed. The judge and
+_jefe-politico_ both count themselves of mine, but they wouldn't do a
+thing. Really you can't blame them. _El general_ Garcia is a name to
+conjure with down here, and they are all afraid of their official heads.
+'Much as we would like to serve you,' and so forth, 'but in the case of
+a young lady of such high family we dare not proceed without her
+guardian's written consent.'
+
+"And the _jefe_ gave me good advice. _El capitan_, Eduardo, it seems, is
+not only ambitious, but not a bit too scrupulous about the way by which
+he gains his ends. So you must not go out alone. It would be quite easy
+to trump up some charge, arrest, and then shoot you as an escaping
+prisoner under the law of _El Fuga_. You wouldn't be the first to be
+shot inside the prison and then thrown outside, and, though I should
+most certainly hold an inquiry and kick up an awful row, that wouldn't
+bring you back to life. Also we shall have to look out that they don't
+kidnap your girl."
+
+While the consul was thus easing his bosom of its load of doubt Seyd had
+stared out over the blue harbor at a steamer that was taking cargo from
+a dozen lighters. Suddenly he asked, "What ship is that?"
+
+"The _Curacao_, of San Francisco."
+
+"American, then. When does she sail?"
+
+"To-morrow morning at five."
+
+"How far outside the harbor does Mexican jurisdiction extend?"
+
+"The usual three miles beyond the headlands."
+
+Seyd came to his point. "Then what is to prevent her skipper from
+marrying us?"
+
+"_Bueno!_" The consul slapped him on the back. "He'll do it sure, for
+he's a friend of mine. Bravo! Trust your lover to find a way."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+Instead of the steps of a church, which form the natural way to their
+new estate for the great majority of brides, Francesca stepped into hers
+from the companion ladder of the _Curacao_. But there had been various
+happenings--the visit of the Dona Gracio de Gallardo y Garcio to urge,
+in her own stout black person, Francesca's acceptance of her house and
+contents, her husband's equally hospitable offer of horses and escort
+for her safe conduct to San Nicolas, also his subsequent espionage and
+the means by which they evaded it. And now she was stepping from the
+companionway into the launch which was to take the newly married pair.
+
+Just as the consul had done his best for Seyd, so, with a woman's
+natural enthusiasm for a wedding, his wife had dressed the girl. By
+means of a few pins plus a basting needle a pretty dress had been pulled
+into a perfect fit, and out of its foam her shapely head now rose like a
+delicate dark flower. In the dusk of a crushed panama her clear-cut face
+glowed with unusual color. Swaying there on Seyd's arm, she made a
+picture which drew the admiration of the men and the tender sympathy of
+the women passengers who looked down upon them from the rail. While
+Seyd was handing her into the launch a storm of rice broke overhead and
+fell softly into the water, and when, leaving them dancing in its wake,
+the big hulk of the ship moved on, a hearty cheer floated back to them.
+
+If not so boisterous, the congratulations of the consul at the pier were
+equally hearty. "You didn't do it a bit too soon," he informed them.
+"Just after you left friend Eduardo notified me that it had been decided
+in a family council that your wife should go at once to the house of her
+relative. Without actually saying it he gave me to understand that a
+charge of kidnapping lay behind the demand. Just for the fun of it I let
+him wander along, and when I sprang it, and told him that by this time
+you were undoubtedly married, you should have seen his face. He won't
+trouble you again--neither will he furnish you horses."
+
+"That doesn't matter," his wife put in. "I have that all arranged."
+
+"What?" The consul looked his surprise. "What's this? A conspiracy? I
+expected that you would stay with us at least a week?"
+
+"No." His wife took the answer into her own hands. "You know,
+Francesca's mother and uncle are grieving in the belief that she is
+drowned. And she has other reasons of her own--and yours," she added for
+Seyd. "Though you are not to bother her with questions."
+
+At the consulate breakfast was waiting, and in the cheer of the
+following hour and bustle of departure, Seyd forgot his momentary
+wonder. It did not revive until, early that afternoon, they reined in to
+rest their horses on the crest of the first hill in the chain that led
+in giant steps up to the plateau above the Barranca. As they rode on,
+after a last look at the harbor, which lay like a huge turquoise within
+its setting of hills, he looked inquiringly at Francesca.
+
+"Can you not guess?" she asked. When he shook his head she rallied him
+with a happy laugh upon his dullness. "I think your memory is very poor,
+Senor Rosario."
+
+"What--Rosa!" For instantly there flashed up a picture of her wet face
+looking at him from under her capote hood on the day that he found her
+standing in the rain beside her fallen horse.
+
+"So you recognize me at last?"
+
+"You don't mean to say--"
+
+"_Si_, senor, my husband"--contradicting her laugh, a deep thrill
+inhered in the words--"it is even so. In the days before the railroad,
+when there was great travel between San Nicolas and the port, Don Luis
+maintained houses a day's journey apart. Though none of our family has
+visited them in the last two years, they were in good condition when
+Paulo passed this way at the beginning of the rains. So to-night,
+Rosario, we bide in our own house."
+
+Again did her accent on the "our" move and thrill him. Always
+undemonstrative, however, he merely caught her hand, and so, linked like
+children, they rode on side by side. At first they observed a happy
+silence, but presently the trail took on such remarkable likeness to the
+one they had traveled that other day, proceeding from the stretches of
+black volcanic rock through copal and scrub oak to sparsely grassed
+barrens, that the strength of the associations forced them into talk.
+
+"That's where your horse fell," he began it. When she agreed, he asked,
+"I wonder if you had any conception of the risks you were running when
+you rode behind me?"
+
+Though she knew very well what he meant, she pretended ignorance and
+made him explain in detail his feelings at the sight of her hands
+resting like white butterflies on the front of his coat, his sudden
+emotion when the scent of her wet hair floated over his shoulder, utter
+intoxication whenever a slip of his horse caused her to tighten her hold
+on his waist.
+
+"You hid it very cleverly," was her comment upon these revelations.
+
+"And you never knew it?"
+
+"Of course I did." To which she added the brazen confession, "Or I would
+not have done it."
+
+Shooting over a hill not long thereafter, the trail suddenly fell
+through copal and oak woods into a sheltered valley where, with a
+suddenness that drew an exclamation of admiration from Seyd, they came
+in sight of the house. A small adobe, washed with gold with pale-violet
+borders, it stood under a great banyan tree within the embrace of a
+grove of tall palms. Almost across its doorway a bright arroyo ran
+swiftly, to disappear in the dark shade of clump tamarinds. All the
+afternoon the sun had pursued a futile struggle with the ocean mists,
+and now, completing the beauty of the place, it shot a last coppery
+shaft between two clouds.
+
+"A happy augury," was Francesca's greeting to the pathway of light. "Now
+let it rain."
+
+The door was unlocked, and, entering with her, he found the interior
+equally to his taste. The solid walls were cream-tinted, and after he
+had lit the wood which was ready on the open hearth they reflected a
+comfortable glow on massive tables and chairs of plain oak, wide
+settees, and roomy lounges. His satisfaction was complete when she told
+him that it stood alone. The knowledge that they would be barred by
+leagues of distance, shut in by the rainy night from the rest of the
+world, filled him with deep content. From a survey, conscious of warmth
+and comfort, his satisfied gaze returned to the fingers which were
+fluttering like white butterflies from button to button down her
+raincoat.
+
+"Lazy one!" She spoke with a pretty assumption of wifely authority.
+"Stable the horses--but first bring in the bundle from my crupper.
+While you are out I shall prepare our meal."
+
+"What! Do we really eat? How thoughtful! It had never occurred to me."
+
+"A pretty beginning," she made demure answer, "for a wife to starve her
+husband."
+
+Neither could there be any complaint of the meal that faced him on his
+return, for it represented the best that could be bought or borrowed by
+the consul's wife. Afterward Seyd would have washed the dishes, but,
+taking him by the shoulders, Francesca marched him back to the fire.
+
+"No, I shall do it myself. Please?" She headed off the mutiny betrayed
+by his eyes. "If you knew how often I have peeped into our work-folks'
+adobes at night to watch, with envy, some little peona preparing her
+man's meal, you would understand." So, smoking by the fire, he watched
+with huge comfort the play of dimples in her arms and the fluttering of
+the small hands which seemed so hopelessly at odds with their task.
+
+While working she chattered happily, but after the last dish was ranged
+in the plate rack on the wall she came to him and sank in a graceful
+heap beside his chair. Head pillowed on one white arm spread across his
+knee, she gazed thoughtfully into the fire; and, looking down upon her,
+Seyd's thought reverted once more to the shepherd's hut. Again he had
+difficulty in realizing that it was indeed he, Robert Seyd, mining
+engineer, who was sharing food and fire with this, his wife, daughter on
+one side of a proud Spanish house and on the other of descent that ran
+back into the dim time of the Aztecs.
+
+Her voice called him out of his wonder, and while the fire leaped and
+crackled in defiance of the wind and rain without they talked of this
+and that, their trials and travail, absent thoughts, hopes; and in
+the telling of it they obtained surcease from the smart of past
+misunderstandings. Also there were confessions. Each told--she with a
+blush--how they had overlooked each other's sleep in the shepherd's hut.
+Because opportunity for such communion had been altogether lacking,
+they talked late. Their murmurs died with the last light of the fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+At high noon two days thereafter Seyd and Francesca drew rein on the rim
+of the Barranca above San Nicolas.
+
+During the moment that the horses rested their thoughts reverted to the
+last occasion when they had overlooked the great void, and if the
+thought of Sebastien brought a touch of sadness into the girl's
+reflections it caused no bitterness. She turned with a low laugh when
+Seyd produced from an inner pocket the handkerchief he had picked up
+that day on the trail.
+
+"It did," she said, when he told how it seemed to drip tears. "I had
+cried all the way up the trail to the rim."
+
+After the usual nightly downpour the sun had come out, and under a flood
+of golden light the valley floor stood out in relief, with its wooded
+hills and hollows diminished to toy proportions by the awful depth. In
+the center the _casa_ of San Nicolas sat like a gold cup in the wide
+green saucer of surrounding pastures. Beyond, the river lay, a band of
+fretted silver, splitting the valley; and, following its course upward,
+the girl's eye paused at the yellow scar, high on the opposite wall,
+which marked Santa Gertrudis.
+
+"My beacon on many a dark day." She pointed.
+
+"And that reminds me that it is in great danger of being extinguished,"
+Seyd answered. "Our first payment was due the day before yesterday.
+Unless Billy has returned in my absence with the money--and I haven't
+the slightest hope--the property is forfeited to your uncle."
+
+"But he will not claim it." Out of her simple woman's faith she went on:
+"He is too good and kind to advantage himself by your misfortune. In
+spite of his hate for the gringos, he likes you personally. Now that you
+are--my husband, he will not attempt your harm."
+
+In view of his present clear view of Don Luis's machinations, Seyd was
+not so sure. Unwilling to hurt her, he conceded: "Well, we shall see.
+Let us ride on down."
+
+"Not together, dear." Leaning over, she caught his arm. "I must see him
+first alone. He will be furiously angry, of course. But the angrier the
+better, for just so much sooner will follow the calm."
+
+"But he may try--"
+
+"--To take me from you?" She took the words out of his mouth. "He
+cannot. In a day, a week, a month, sooner or later, I should escape.
+They could not forever keep me locked up. But he will not try. You know,
+he stole his own wife, snatched her away while she was going to church
+to marry another, and he comes of a race that gained wives as often as
+not by the sword. He cannot blame you without condemning himself, and I
+am sure that he will not try. If you give me a little time to conquer
+him and soothe my poor scandalized mother it will come out all right. So
+you must go on to Santa Gertrudis now and see if there be any news of
+Senor Thornton. And to-morrow--you may come."
+
+"If you have the slightest doubt"--loath to let her out of his hands, he
+hesitated--"I would ride on to the station. Beautiful as is this place,
+and much as I have come to love it, I would rather abandon all than
+incur the risk."
+
+"But there is none, husband mine." She looked up in his face, tenderly
+smiling. "He will rage and roar like an old lion, but that is all. I
+should be only half a woman to have come to my age without learning to
+manage him. Remember, for the second time you have saved my life, and,
+being already married, he cannot deny us. So go in peace, and"--she put
+up her mouth--"love."
+
+In spite of her reassurance, he watched her go with apprehension that
+took a blacker tinge when, arriving at the inn late in the afternoon, he
+found no word from Billy. Though the inn's meager accommodations had not
+been improved by a slap from the wing tip of the wave, he remained there
+all night in preference to crossing and recrossing the river. With so
+much at stake, Santa Gertrudis could take care of itself for another
+day. Sleeping with anxiety for a bedfellow, he rose and was on the road
+at daybreak--but not a bit earlier than Francesca, who met him halfway.
+
+"I knew you would be anxious," she explained, "so I saddled a horse and
+stole away while all of San Nicolas was still asleep. But not for
+nothing are you to have my news. _Si_, it is good!
+
+"'Twas as I said," she went on, having received her reward. "The _madre_
+had already cried herself beyond further tears, and was glad to have me
+on any terms. The good uncle, of course, stormed. Never was there such a
+battle since the French wars, and had you been there 'twould not have
+lacked its killed and wounded. Until midnight we fought; then, after
+cursing the blood of the Irishman that has always led me astray, he gave
+in. ''Tis not for an old soldier to cross tongues with a woman,' he
+growled. 'To-morrow bring me thy man.' But he knew that he was beaten,"
+she finished, confidently, "for when I kissed him he laughed in his
+throat and patted my hair."
+
+Again Seyd refused to dash her hope, but he was not quite convinced, and
+when they entered the big living-room where Don Luis stood with Paulo in
+waiting his dark gravity cast its shadow over the girl's glad face. His
+immobility afforded no clue to the feeling that lay behind the
+stereotyped greeting, "The house, senor, is yours.
+
+"I am the more pleased to see you," he went on, "because Paulo reminded
+me an hour ago of a matter of business that lies between us. Such things
+stick not in my memory. But I believe it concerns some money."
+
+"Senor!" Her face flaming with the scarlet of shame, Francesca was
+moving forward.
+
+He stopped her with a shake of his heavy head. "This is between me
+and--your husband. The papers, Paulo. Hand them to the senor."
+
+It was a legal process, signed and sealed according to Mexican law, and
+before opening it Seyd knew it for the end. More out of curiosity than
+for information, he rapidly scanned the terms which had taken Santa
+Gertrudis and its mined riches forever out of his hands. While he read,
+Don Luis studied his face. If he looked for signs of deep hurt there
+were none to be seen, for in the long game between them Seyd was
+confronted for the first time by the expected. He looked up, squaring
+his shoulders.
+
+"The victory is yours, senor."
+
+To Francesca's anxious eyes it seemed that the old man's gravity
+lightened by a shade. "You will concede, senor, that I warned you--that
+no gringo would ever force himself in on my lands?"
+
+"Yes, and I did my best to disprove it. For my partner's sake I am
+sorry. For my own"--he looked at his wife--"I am glad."
+
+"Well spoken, senor." The shadow of a smile illumined the old man's
+dark reserve. "But if I warned you, it does not follow that I have not
+watched with some sympathy your struggle. In watching, too, my old eyes
+have been opened upon truths that I had refused to see, though they lay
+under my nose. We are an old people, senor, we Mexicans. The old blood
+of Spain added no effervescence to the Aztec strains that were grown
+stagnant long before Cortez landed, and when a people ages nature
+removes it to make way for younger stock. _Si_, though I refused to
+acknowledge it, I have known many years that just as the Moors overran
+Spain, and the Spanish overran the Aztecs, so will your people overrun
+Mexico from the Northern Sierras to the Gulf.
+
+"Once I had thought to stay it. But time cools the hottest blood, and
+the one I had counted upon to uphold my old hands is gone to his place
+forever. Also I have seen that no man can dam the tide or shut the gates
+that Porfirio Diaz opened. As it went with Texas and Alta California so
+will it go with all our states. Against your Yankee our softer people
+can never stand. In the time to come only those of us that mix blood
+with shrewder strains will be able to withstand the flood, and thus it
+is I, who would have killed once the man that said I should ever take
+a gringo for kinsman, accept you with resignation. Perhaps it is the
+easier because one such mixture gave us this bright girl. And if you
+took time by the forelock 'tis not for me to grumble. One word more--"
+He threw one arm around Francesca, who had crossed to his side. "It has
+never been the habit of the Garcias to overlook a good dower to one of
+the house, and the fact that my niece has given you herself in exchange
+for her life does not cancel _my_ debt. Give me the papers. The others,
+Paulo--to the senor."
+
+While Seyd gazed at the title deeds to Santa Gertrudis, made out to
+himself and Billy, the old man slowly tore up the forfeiture. Applying a
+match to the pieces, he threw them on the hearth, and, blazing up, they
+added warmth to the grim smile that accompanied his words.
+
+"I told you, senor, that no gringo should ever _force_ himself in on my
+land."
+
+                              THE END
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
+
+Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise,
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
+intent.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of The Barranca, by Herman Whitaker
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