The Missourian Part 10

"And did I," Driscoll had begun angrily, but she was already gone, and he finished it to himself, "did I once intend to leave you?"

He leaped astride his buckskin horse, who trotted with him briskly to the head of the caravan. Behind was Anastasio Murguia, a quaint combination of silk hat, shawl, and ranchero saddle. The two Frenchwomen followed, and behind came the straggling file of burros and pack horses.

Yet the American was as a solitary traveller leaving a town for the wilderness at the first touch of dawn. The road soon narrowed down to a trail as it wound through the undergrowth of the Huasteca lowlands, then westward toward a bluish line of mountains. At each cross trail the American would turn in his saddle to force an indication of their course from Murguia. Then on he would ride again, the while sinking deeper and deeper into his thoughts; thoughts of why he had come, of how he might succeed, and of the Surrender at that moment perhaps a fact. For him, though, there was his sabre yet, dangling there under his leg. And there were the sabres of comrades that likewise would not be given up, for to save them that shame was he in Mexico. Riding there, so much alone, and lonely, he was a rough, savage, military figure. But in his meditations, so grave and unwonted in the wild, hard-riding trooper lad, there was nothing to indicate a second nature in him, an instinct that was on the alert against every leafy clump and cactus and mesh of vine.

CHAPTER VIII

THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH MAY BE PRODIGIOUSLY LONG THOUGHTS

"And many a Knot unravell'd by the Road; But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate."

--_Omar._

Another young person, Jacqueline herself, was also pondering rather soberly this morning. And her thoughts fitted as oddly with her piquant, lightsome, cynical youth as the gloomily patriotic ones of the Storm Centre did with his youth, which was robust and boyish and swashbuckling. To judge from the way their brains worked now, both young people might have been grave wielders of state affairs, instead of the lad and the la.s.s so heartily and pettily scorning each other a short hour before.

Yes, the great rugged Missourian had his disdain too, and for none other than the darling beauty of two imperial courts. The beauty would have been vastly amused, no doubt, had she known of the phenomenon. But knowing a little more, such as its source and the man himself, she must have flushed and drooped, piteously hurt, as none in her own circle could have wounded her. The shafts which flashed in that circle were keenly barbed. They were the more merciless for being politely gilded.

But she understood, and despised, the point of view there. It was a dais of velvet, of scarlet velvet. And a worldly little gentlewoman like the Marquise Jeanne was not one to be unaware of the abyss beneath, of which the flaming color was a symbol. But she rather enjoyed the darts, if only to fling them back more dazzlingly tipped.

The perspective of the Missouri boy was different. And his disdain was different. A t.i.tled belle mattered little with him, and was apart, like the girl in a spectacular chorus. Operettas and royal courts were shows, which real men and women paid to see, and to support. He was a deep-breathing, danger-nourished man of life and of things that count.

And his only cynicism, and even that unconscious, was the dry honest sort which sheer unpolished naturalness bears to all things trivial and vain and artificial. One can readily understand, then, the att.i.tude of such a man toward a playactor off the stage; toward a playactor, that is, who thinks to impress the great, wide, live world with the superficial mannerisms of his little playacting world. Here was Din Driscoll, Jack Driscoll, Trooper Driscoll, here he was, traveling near a handsome young woman who for the moment had been cut off from her precious wee sphere. And he saw her outside of it, playing coquettishly, and to her own mind, seriously; playing bewitchingly her shallow role patterned after life, yet without once realizing the counterfeit. The Western country boy, whatever his Cavalier stock, had a Puritanical backbone in common with the whole American race. And without being aware of it, his personal, private bearing toward the light and airy French girl was a sneer, a tolerant, good-natured and indifferent sneer.

However, Mademoiselle la Marquise was neither amused nor hurt, because, quite simply, she rode in happy oblivion of the rustic and his standards for the appraising of a girl. He looked very straight of neck and spine, and she wondered if he had been cradled in a saddle, but that was all.

Now if Lieutenant-Colonel Driscoll had had the slightest glimpse of what was actually pa.s.sing through the winsome and supposedly silly little head behind him, there is no reliable telling into what change of opinion he might have been jostled. But this is certain, that if he had known, he could have saved himself some rare adventures afterward.

In Jacqueline's musings there was poetry and there were politics. The poetry justified the politics; moreover, was their inspiration. A dilettante such as Jacqueline, aesthetic and delicately sensitive, was naturally a lover of the beautiful in her search after emotions. A sentiment for her surroundings came now as a matter of course. If she turned, she beheld the chaparral plain stretching flatly back of her to the sands and lagoons of the coast. If she flirted her whip overhead, down hurtled a shower of bright yellow hail from the laden boughs. Her nostrils told her of magnolias and orange blossoms; her eyes and ears, of parrots and paroquets and every other conceit in fantastic plumage.

They were a restless kaleidoscope of colors blending with the foliage, and from their turmoil they might have been quarreling myriads, and never birds of a paradise. Little red monkeys grinned down at her as they raced clutching among the branches, while a big bandy-legged sambo, an exceedingly ill-tempered member of the same family, bawled his reproaches in a tone gruesomely human. Now and then her horse reared from an adder squirming underfoot, or she would see a torpid boa twined sluggishly around a limb, as about a victim. Once in a jungle-like place she experienced something akin to the prized ecstatic shudder as she made out the sleek form of a jaguar slinking into the swamp. The ugliest of the picturesque "properties" was a monstrous green iguana with his p.r.i.c.kly crest and horn and slimy eye, basking full five feet along a rotten log.

But the things of horror merely gave to those of beauty a needed contrast, and did not hurt the poetry in the least. They were every one on the same grand, wild scale. As the palms, for instance, rising like slender columns a hundred feet without a single branch. As yet other palms, which were plumed at the summit like an ostrich wing; or as the smaller ones at their base, spreading out into fans of emerald green.

Again, as the forest giants which far overhead were the arches of a watercourse, like the nave of a Gothic cathedral. And even the parasite vines were of the same t.i.tan designing, for they bound the girders of the vault in a dense mat of leaves and woven twigs, while underfoot the carpet was soft inches deep with fern and moss. As for the flowers--Jacqueline wanted to pluck them all, to wreathe the wondering fawns, as ladies with picture hats do in the old frivolous rococo fantasies. And as to that, she might have been one of those Watteau ladies herself, so rich was the coloring there, and she in the foreground so white, so soft of skin, so sylvan and aristocratic a shepherdess.

And then it was a thing for wonderment, that beyond, where the mountains were, all this world changed, yet changed to another as strange and vast. And that still farther on there stretched yet other regions, and each one different, and each no less marvelous and grand. A bewildering prodigality of Nature, spelling the little word "romance"! Jacqueline's lip quivered as she gazed and imagined, and as the poetry of it filled her soul. But of a sudden the little woman sighed. It was a sigh of rebellion. And just here the politics leaped forth, inspired of the wild thrilling beauty of the world.

"To think," she half cried, "that we are losing this--all this! And yet we have won it! Mon Dieu, have we not won it? Yet for whom, alas?

Maximilian?--Faw, an ungrateful puppet such as that, to have, to take from us, such as--this! Now suppose," her lips formed the unuttered words, while her gray eyes closed to a narrowing cunning, "just suppose that we--that someone--reminds His Majesty how ingrat.i.tude falls short of courtesy between emperors."

The boy's thoughts were of the country he had lost. Those of the resplendent and wayward b.u.t.terfly were of an empire she meant to gain.

But in her, who might suspect the consummate diplomat? Even then she was speaking to Murguia, asking if it were not time that Fra Diavolo remembered his engagements. Driscoll heard the query, and his comment was a mental shrug of the shoulders.

CHAPTER IX

TOLL-TAKING IN THE HUASTECA

"And when he came bold Robin before, Robin asked him courteously, 'O, hast thou any money to spare, For my merry men and me?'"

--_Robin Hood._

For all his campaigner's instincts, the first of Driscoll's expected troubles came and was gone before he knew that it was trouble. It arrived so naturally, and was so well behaved! With a stop for a bowl of coffee at a roadside fonda, they had been traveling for perhaps five hours, when Driscoll saw the heads of two horses and their riders over the brush, and at a turn in the trail he found that they were coming leisurely toward him. He observed them suspiciously, and wistfully. The wild tropics around him had quite won his heart as peculiarly adapted to violent amus.e.m.e.nts of a desperate tinge, far more so really than his own Missouri woodlands. Yet thus far the uneventful tameness had depressed him as a shameful waste of environment.

To boot all, here was this brace of villainous, well-armed Mexicans not giving the least promise of entertainment. There was nothing to distinguish them from the usual sun-baked rancheros of the Huasteca, unless it were the first man's straw sombrero, the heavy silver mounting of which must have been worth in bullion alone a fair pocketful of pesos. There was a cord of silver hanging over the broad brim, and there was a silver "T" on one side of the sugar loaf, an "M" on the other side, and a Roman sword in front, and all three were linked together in fanciful silver scrolls. But the rest of the man was wretched. His feet were encased in the guaraches, or sandals, of a peon. One of his eyes was so crossed that hardly more than a baleful crescent was ever visible. The other vaquero, his companion, had no relieving trait at all, either luxurious or strikingly evil. His breeches of raw leather flapped loosely from the knee down, and at the sides they were slit, revealing the dirty white of cotton calzoncillos beneath. Though the April morning was hot, a crimson serape covered his shoulders. Both men had pistols, and each also had a long machete two inches wide hanging with a lariat from his saddle.

They lifted their sombreros, and he of the gorgeous one inquired if that were Don Anastasio's outfit coming up behind. A civil answer was merest traveler's courtesy, and Driscoll reluctantly took his cob pipe from his mouth to reckon that they were pretty nearly correct. He might have loaned them a thousand dollars, to judge from their grat.i.tude, and they made way for him by drawing off the trail entirely. Here they halted till all the burros and horses had gone by. The muleteers in pa.s.sing them, confusedly touched their hats. Murguia, who was then in the rear, stopped when he saw the two strangers. Driscoll looked back, but judged from the greetings that the three were old acquaintances. The a.s.siduously respectful bearing of the timorous old man was to be counted as only habitual. And when he saw one of Don Anastasio's mozos bring a bottle and gla.s.ses, he was completely rea.s.sured, and rested like the others of the caravan some little distance ahead.

Murguia dismissed the mozo, himself poured the cognac, and begged the honor of drinking health and many pesetas to his two "friends." They craved a like boon, and the clinking of the copitas followed ceremoniously.

"I counted three hundred and sixty-eight half-bales," said he of the crossed eye, with a head c.o.c.ked sideways and tilted. The evidence was against it, but Murguia knew well enough that the sinister crescent was fixed on himself. "Three-sixty-eight, at half a peso each, that makes one hundred and eighty-four pesos which Your Mercy owes us, Don Anastasio. Add on collection charges, ten per cent.--well, with your permission, we'll call it two hundred flat."

Don Anastasio manifested an itch for argument.

"Oh leave all that," he of the crimson serape broke in. "Why go over it again? We are loyal imperialists, and only our lasting friends.h.i.+p for you holds us from informing His Majesty's Contras how you contribute to that arch rebel, Rodrigo Galan."

"But," weakly protested Murguia, "but who believes that Don Rodrigo turns any of it over to the Liberal--to the rebel cause?"

"A swollen-lunged patriot like your Don Rodrigo--of course he does, every cent," and the cross-eye took on a jocular gleam.

"Now, Senor Murguia," he of the same eye continued, "the favor of your attention. See that 'T' on my sombrero? That's 'Tiburcio.' See that 'M'?

That's 'Maximiliano.' And that sword? That's 'Woe to the Conquered,' at least the sombrero maker said so. Well, Don Anastasio----" and he ended with a gesture that the poor trader saw even in his dreams, the unctuous rubbing of fingers on the thumb.

Sadly Don Anastasio unstrapped a belt under his black vest, and counted out in French gold the equivalent of two hundred Mexican dollars.

Don Tiburcio took the money, and observed, as in the nature of pleasant gossip, that Don Anastasio had quite an unusual outfit this time.

Murguia took alarm immediately. "Not so large as usual, Don Tiburcio.

The crops up there----"

"Crops? No, I don't mean your cotton. I mean fine linen and muslin, and silks, and laces--petticoats and stockings, Don Anastasio."

"They--they are Don Rodrigo's affairs, not mine."

"Enough yours for you to be anxious to deliver the goods safely, I think. But the rate on that cla.s.s of stuff is rather high. Now what do you suppose, my esteemed compadre, Don Rodrigo would say if we had to confiscate the consignment?"

But Don Anastasio did not need to suppose. "How much?" he whimpered.

"Well, with the American----"

"Fires of h.e.l.l consume the American! Collect your tolls from him yourself. He's no affair of anybody's."

The vaqueros laughed. "We'll throw in the American for nothing," said Don Tiburcio generously. "Besides, to look at him, he may not be very--tollable. But delicate dress goods now, there's a heavy duty on them. I should say a hundred apiece." And without any seeming reference to this revenue statement, the toll taker placed the tip of an index finger under each ear, then pointed them lower down against his throat, then lower again, and at the last the two fingers met in an acute angle, significantly acute, under his chin, while the half-veiled black bead in the outer corner of his eye had a sheen unutterably merry and malignant.

The pantomime bore a money value, for Murguia stifled his wrath, again drew out the belt, and more Napoleons changed hands. Murguia was then for remounting, leaving the flask of brandy with the two imperialist emissaries, as had become his custom. But the jovial Tiburcio stopped him. "What must you think of us, Don Anastasio?" he exclaimed contritely. "We haven't offered you a drink yet." Murguia dared not refuse, and he paused for the return of hospitality from his own bottle.

At last he was on his horse, when Tiburcio again called.