Bucky O'Connor Part 31

All three parties to the introduction that followed acknowledged secretly to a surprise. Miss Carmencita had expected the friend of big, rough, homely O'Halloran to resemble him in kind, at least. Instead, she looked on a bronzed young Apollo of the saddle with something of that same lithe grace she knew and loved in Juan Valdez. And the shy boy beside him--why, the darling was sweet enough to kiss. The big, brown, helpless eyes, the blus.h.i.+ng, soft cheeks, the crop of thick, light curls were details of an extraordinarily taking picture. Really, if these two were fair specimens, Americans were not so bad, after all. Which conclusion Juan Valdez's fondness for that race may have helped in part to form.

But if the young Spanish girl found a little current of pleasure in her surprise, Bucky and his friend were aware of the same sensation. All the charm of her race seemed summed up in Carmencita Megales. She was of blue blood, every feature and motion told that. The fine, easy set of her head, the fire in the dark, heavy-lashed eyes, the sweep of dusky chin and cheek and throat certified the same story. She had, too, that coquettish hint of uncertainty, that charm of mystery so fatal in its lure to questing man. Even physically the contradiction of s.e.x attracted. Slender and lissom as a fawn, she was yet a creature of exquisitely rounded curves. Were her eyes brown or black or--in the sunlight--touched with a gleam of copper? There was always uncertainty.

But much more was there fire, a quality that seemed to flash out from her inner self. She was a child of whims, a victim of her moods. Yet in her, too, was a pa.s.sionate loyalty that made fickleness impossible. She knew how to love and how to hate, and, despite her impulses, was capable of surrender complete and irrevocable.

All of this Bucky did not read in that first moment of meeting, but the shrewd judgment behind the level blue eyes came to an appraisal roughly just. Before she had spoken three sentences he knew she had all her s.e.x's reputed capacity for injustice as well as its characteristic flashes of generosity.

"Are you one of the men who have rebelled against my father and attempted to murder him?" she flashed.

"I'm the man he condemned to be hanged tomorrow morning at dawn for helping Juan Valdez take the guns," retorted Bucky, with a laugh.

"You are his enemy, and, therefore, mine."

"I'm a friend of Michael O'Halloran, who stood between him and the mob that wanted to kill him."

"Who first plotted against him and seduced his officers to betray him,"

she quickly replied.

"I reckon, ma'am, we better agree to disagree on politics," said Bucky good-naturedly. "We're sure liable to see things different from each other. Castile and Arizona don't look at things with the same eyes."

She looked at him just then with very beautiful and scornful ones, at any rate. "I should hope not."

"You see, we're living in the twentieth century up in the sunburned State," said Bucky, with smiling aplomb.

"Indeed! And we poor Chihuahuans?"

"When I see the ladies I think you're ce'tainly in the golden age, but when I break into your politics, I'm some reminded of that Richard Third fellow in the Shakespeare play."

"Referring, I presume, to my father?" she demanded haughtily.

"In a general way, but eliminating the most objectionable points of the king fellow."

"You're very kind." She interrupted her scorn to ask him where he meant her to sleep.

He glanced over the room. "This might do right here, if we had that bed aired."

"Do you expect to put me in irons?"

"Not right away. Colonel, I'll ask you to go to the office and notify me as soon as Senor O'Halloran arrives." He waited till the colonel had gone before adding: "I'm going to leave this boy with you, senorita, for a while. He'll explain some things to you that I can't. In about an hour I'll be back, perhaps sooner. So long, Curly. Tell the lady your secret." And with that Bucky was out of the room.

"Your secret, child! What does he mean?"

The flame of color that swept into the cheeks of Frances, the appeal in the shamed eyes, held Carmencita's surprised gaze. Then coolly it traveled over the girl and came back to her burning face.

"So that's it, is it?"

But the scorn in her voice was too much for Frances. She had been judged and condemned in that cool stare, and all the woman in her protested at its injustice.

"No, no, no!" she cried, running forward and catching at the other's hand. "I'm not that. You don't understand."

Coldly Carmencita disengaged her hand and wiped it with her kerchief. "I understand enough. Please do not touch me."

"May I not tell you my story?"

"I'll not trouble you. It does not interest me."

"But you will listen?" implored the other.

"I must ask to be excused."

"Then you are a heartless, cruel woman," flamed Frances. "I'm good--as good as you are." The color patched her cheek and ebbed again. "I wouldn't treat a dog as you do me. Oh, cruel, cruel!"

The surprising extravagance of her protest, the despair that rang in the fresh young voice, caught the interest of the Mexican girl. Surely such a heart-broken cry did not consist with guilt. But the facts--when a young and pretty girl masquerades through the country in the garb of a boy with a handsome young man, not much room for doubt is left.

Frances was quick to see that the issue was reopened. "Oh, senorita, it isn't as you think. Do I look like--" She broke off to cover with her hands a face in which the pink and white warred with alternate success.

"I ought not to have come. I ought never to have come. I see that now.

But I didn't think he would know. You see, I had always pa.s.sed as a boy when I wanted to."

"A remarkably pretty one, child," said Miss Carmencita, a smile dimpling her cheeks. "But how do you mean that you had pa.s.sed as a boy?"

Frances explained, giving a rapid sketch of her life with the Hardmans during which she had appeared every night on the stage as a boy without the deception being suspected. She had cultivated the tricks and ways of boys, had tried to dress to carry out the impression, and had always succeeded until she had made the mistake of putting on a gypsy girl's dress a couple of days before.

Carmencita heard her out, but not as a judge. Very early in the story her doubts fled and she succ.u.mbed to the mothering instinct in her. She took the American girl in her arms and laughed and cried with her; for her imagination seized on the romance of the story and delighted in its fresh unconventionality. Since she had been born Carmencita's life had been ordered for her with precision by the laws of caste. Her environment wrapped her in so that she must follow a set and beaten path. It was, to be sure, a flower-strewn one, but often she impotently rebelled against its very orderliness. And here in her arms was a victim of that adventurous romance she had always longed so pa.s.sionately to know. Was it wonder she found it in her heart to both love and envy the subject of it?

"And this young cavalier--the Senor Bucky, is it you call him?--surely you love him, my dear."

"Oh, senorita!" The blus.h.i.+ng face was buried on her new friend's shoulder. "You don't know how good he is."

"Then tell me," smiled the other. "And call me Carmencita."

"He is so brave, and patient, and good. I know there was never a man like him."

Miss Carmencita thought of one and demurred silently. "I'm sure this paragon of lovers is at least part of what you say. Does he love you?

But I am sure he couldn't help it."

"Sometimes I think he does, but once--" Frances broke off to ask, in a pink flame: "How does a lover act?"

Miss Carmencita's laughter rippled up. "Gracious me, have you never had one before."

"Never."

"Well, he should make verses to you and pretty speeches. He should sing serenades about undying love under your window. Bonbons should bombard you, roses make your rooms a bower. He should be ardent as Romeo, devoted as a knight of old. These be the signs of a true love," she laughed.

Frances' face fell. If these were the tokens of true love, her ranger was none. For not one of the symptoms could fairly be said to fit him.

Perhaps, after all, she had given him what he did not want.

"Must he do all that? Must he make verses?" she asked blankly, not being able to a.s.sociate Bucky with poetasting.

"He must," teased her tormentor, running a saucy eye over her boyish garb. "And why not with so fair a Rosalind for a subject?" She broke off to quote in her pretty, uncertain English, acquired at a convent in the United States, where she had attended school: