The Missourian Part 30

Tiburcio gleamed triumphantly. "An audacious defence!" he exclaimed.

"But luckily for me, Don Anastasio is here."

"Oh, hurry up!" protested Driscoll.

Asked if he knew anything more of the prisoner, witness could not swear for certain, except that he recognized in the American one of the guerrillas who had ambushed and slain Captain Maurel near Tampico. Yes, witness was scouting for the murdered captain at the time. Naturally, witness was present.

"You wanted proof, Senor Americano, that you crossed the river?" said Lopez. "Well, are you content now?"

"Go on," Driscoll returned. He was bored. "Some people on earth are alive yet, but while Tibby is on the stand maybe I killed them too. I wouldn't swear I didn't."

Murguia was called next, but he did not seem to hear. His body was bent over his knees, silently trembling. A Dragoon pressed a hand on his shoulder, but a sobbing groan racked his frame, as of a very sick man who will not be awakened to his pain. The pause that followed was uncanny--a syncope in the affairs of men like a gaping grave under midnight clouds. Lopez spoke again. He regretted that they must intrude on a fresh and poignant sorrow, but the case in hand was a matter of state, before which the individual had to give way. It was very logical and convincing. But the feeble old shoulders made no sign.

Tiburcio leaned over and shook him gently, and whispered in his ear.

Still Murguia did not move. Tiburcio gripped his arm. "You and Rodrigo,"

he said, so low that none could hear, "there was something arranged between you. What was it? Tell me! Tell me, I say, if you want the Gringo shot!"

He bent nearer, and against his ear came a m.u.f.fled sound of lips. When he straightened, it was to address the court.

If he might ask a question, had they searched the prisoner? They had.

But thoroughly? Thoroughly. But not enough to find anything? No. Then he would suggest that they had not searched thoroughly. The court seemed impressed, and Driscoll was fumbled over again. Still they found nothing.

"Whose flask is that?" Tiburcio demanded, pointing to where it had been tossed and forgotten. The prisoner's. "Look that over again," Tiburcio insisted. A guard handed it to Lopez, who squinted inside. "There is nothing," he said. It was only an old canteen whose leather covering was dropping apart from rot.

Murguia's head raised, and his eyes fixed themselves on the judge, and in their intense fixity glittered a quick, keen l.u.s.t. It was hideous, loathsome, fascinating. The eyes were swimming in tears, but their hungered, metal-like sheen made the sorrow monstrous, and was the more foul and ghastly because it distorted so pure a thing as sorrow.

Driscoll felt queerly that he must, must remove from the world this decrepit old man who bemoaned a dead child. The itch for murder terrified him, and he turned away angrily from the horrid face that aroused it. But Murguia's stare never relaxed while Lopez toyed with the canteen. And when Lopez, as though accidentally, thrust a finger under the torn leather and brought out a folded paper, the bright points of Murguia's eyes leaped to flame. But the head went down again, as once more his grief swept over him, and another sob caught at the heartstrings of every man there.

Lopez spread out the paper, and as he read, he started violently. He pa.s.sed it on to the Austrian and the color sergeant, and they also started. But the most amazed was Driscoll, when he too had a chance to read.

"Ha, you recognize it?" exclaimed the president.

"Sure I do. It's an order from Colonel Dupin to Captain Maurel. Rodrigo had it in Tampico, making people think that _he_ was Captain Maurel."

But the court was not so simple. "How came you by it?" demanded Lopez.

"Have occasion to be Maurel yourself sometime, eh?"

With wrath, with admiration, Driscoll faced round on Don Anastasio. "Oh you pesky, shriveled-up gorilla!" he breathed. He was no longer amazed.

This accounted for Murguia's borrowing his flask the night they were in the forest. It accounted for Murguia and Rodrigo plotting together in Tampico. But why tell such things to the court? The Missourian was not a fool like King Canute, who ordered back the waves. "Hurry up," he said wearily to the waves instead. Since he could not hold the tide, antic.i.p.ation chilled more than the drowning bath itself.

The tide a.s.suredly did not wait. It rolled right on, nearer and nearer.

Murguia was lifted to his feet. He was remembering already what Lopez had told him, about his daughter and Maximilian, as Lopez had said he would. The American's easy, stalwart form in gray filled his blurred eyes. Here was a Confederate emissary come with an offer of aid for that same Maximilian. Such had been Murguia's suspicion from the first, and now it moved him with venomous hate. Yes, he would testify. Yes, yes, the prisoner had ridden out alone at Tampico. Yes, yes, yes, the prisoner was with Rodrigo there.

"But why, Don Anastasio," asked Tiburcio purely in fantastic mischief, "did you bring such a disturbing man to our happy country?"

"That will do," Lopez interposed. "The Senor Murguia could not know at the time that this fellow was Rodrigo's agent."

"And," Murguia added eagerly, "I was helpless, there at Mobile. The Confederates could have sunk my boat, and he held an order from Jefferson Davis."

"What's that?" cried Tiburcio, his humor suddenly vanished. "What's that, an order from Jefferson Davis?"

Tiburcio's was a new interest, now. He possessed a mind as crooked as his vision, and being crooked, it followed unerringly the devious paths of other minds. So, they had made a tool of him! Rodrigo and Murguia wanted the Gringo shot to help the rebel cause. And he, Tiburcio of the cunning wits, had just sworn away, not only the Gringo's life, but the possible salvation of the Empire. Coming from Jefferson Davis, the Gringo with his mission could mean nothing else. Then there was Lopez.

Tiburcio did not love this changeling Mexican who had red hair. But what could be the mongrel's game? Why had he freed Murguia, if not to unleash a small terrier at Maximilian's heel? Why was he trying the American over again, if not to poison a friendly mastiff? And why either, if Don Miguel Lopez were not seeking to make friends with the Republic? Or perhaps he was at heart a Republican. Thus Don Tiburcio, a loyal Imperialist, read the finger posts as he ambled down the crooked path.

Yes, and here was Lopez putting on the final touch. Here he was, the traitor, p.r.o.nouncing the death sentence, and poor impotent Don Tiburcio gnawing his baffled rage, as one would say of a villain. The execution was to take place the very next morning. His Majesty the Emperor would be asked to approve, afterward.

CHAPTER XXIII

A CURIOUS PAGAN RITE

"e un peccato che se ne va con l'acqua benedetta."

--_Machiavelli_.

The Storm Centre looked round, about and above. He was as a fly in a bottle. A ma.s.sive rough-hewn door, jammed tight, sealed him within adobe walls two feet thick. There was one window, cross-barred, as high as his chin, and only large enough to frame his head. They had brought him to the carcel, or dungeon, of the hacienda, where peons were constrained to docility. A wide masonry bench against the wall approximated a couch, but it was as blocked ice. By the flickering of a lone tallow dip, Din Driscoll noted these things with every sense delicately attuned to strategy. But his verdict was unpromising.

"Tough luck!" he observed.

The adobe was built among the stables that bordered on the pasture, and when not needed as a calabozo, it served snugly for the administrador's best horse. From the one stall came a tentative whinny. Driscoll jumped with delight. "Demijohn! W'y, you good old scoundrel, you!" The night before, he remembered, he had seen the horse bedded here. "Say howdy as loud as you want," he cried, slapping him fondly on the flank, "you'll not betray us. _That's_ been done already."

Driscoll was cavalryman to the bone, and it heartened him unaccountably to find his horse. If, only, he could have his pistols too! Ever since the Federals had cut him off from his furloughs home, those black ugly navies were next to the nearest in his affections. The nearest was the buckskin charger. And now, only the buckskin was left, which simply made the dilemma more poignant. The condemned man gazed critically at the walls, the rafters, the ground, and shook his head. Supposing a chance for escape, could he bring himself to leave Demijohn behind? He got his pipe to going, sat down, and frowned ruefully at the candle.

"I don't want to be shot!" he burst out suddenly, with a plaintive tw.a.n.g. Then he grinned. The boy still in him had prompted the absurdity.

And the rough warrior had laughed at it. Boy and warrior faced each other, either surprised that the other existed. The boy flushed resentfully at the veteran's contemptuous grunt. His eyes still had the boy's navely inquisitive greeting to the world before him. Next, quite abruptly, the warrior knew a bitterness against himself. If he could, but once, whimper as the lad about to be soundly strapped! He took no pride in his irony, nor in his hardened indifference to the visage of death. How far, how very far, had the few past years of strife carried him from the youngster who used to gaze so eagerly, so expectantly, out on life!

First, he was home from the University, from the pretty, shady little Missouri town of Columbia. But the vacation following he spent in bloodily helping to drive the Jayhawkers back across the Kansas line.

And soon after, when the fighting opened up officially, and his State, at the start, had more of it than any other battle ground, how many hundreds of times did his life bide by the next throw of Fate? During one cruel winter month he had lain with other wounded in a hospital dug-out in the river's cliff, and there, wanting both quinine and food, he would peep through the reeds, only to see the merciless Red Legs prying about in search of his hiding place.

And then there was the wild, busily dangerous life with Old Joe's Brigade, with that brigade of Missouri's young firebrands. Once, stretched on the prairie, where he had dropped from exhaustion and hunger and loss of blood, the Storm Centre awoke to find a Pin Indian stooping over him for his scalp. On that occasion, the deft turning of the wrist from the waist outward, with the stripping of the pistol's hammer simultaneously, had enabled him later to restore to relatives certain other scalps already dangling from the savage's girdle.

And now here he was in an adobe with walls two feet thick, and numerous saddle-colored Greasers proposing to shoot him first thing in the morning!

"I'll be blessedly d.a.m.ned," he drawled querulously, "I object!"

It was the warrior who spoke now, and with him the boy joined hands.

They became as one and the same person. The common foe was without. They would see this through together, with grim stoicism, with young-blooded daredeviltry.

The door opened, and one of the common foe, bearing a tray, came within.

"Well, Don Erastus, how goes it?" With a pang of homesickness the Missourian thought of darkies who carried trays.

"Juan Bautista, at Y'r Mercy's orders," the Dragoon corrected him.

"Don John the Baptist then, como le whack?"

"Bien, senor, bien."