The Missourian Part 8

"To this meson here, around the corner."

"If Your Mercy is not in a hurry----"

Driscoll nodded, and the capitan stopped to say a few words to two of his vagabonds. One of these immediately hurried off in the direction of the river. The other was still loafing outside the cafe when his chief rejoined Driscoll.

"Looks like you were interested in His Resplendent Majesty," Fra Diavolo began with weighty lightsomeness. "Mustn't hurt his feelings, eh, caballero?"

Driscoll laughed easily, "It was all on the girl's account," he said.

The ranchero glanced at him quickly, sideways, a dark look of suspicion.

"On her account, senor, not Maximilian's?" he repeated. "Dios mio, caballero, I'll wager you have forgotten her already." Which, to tell the truth, was fairly exact.

At the meson Don Anastasio regarded the American with much more respect to see him returning in such company. But to Fra Diavolo he addressed himself in his thin obsequious voice, "You see I am waiting, as you wished. But on my, my daughter's account, I----"

"So, captain," Driscoll interrupted, "you're the one that's holding back Murgie! Just tell him, Murgie, that I am in a rush."

Fra Diavolo smiled and bade his American have patience, for he quite believed that the Senor Murguia would be starting in the morning.

"Si senor," he went on in a different tone, when Driscoll had left him alone with the trader, "you set out to-morrow, and you are to have two extra horses ready. But for whom, do you suppose? Bien, they are for La Senorita Jacqueline and her maid."

Murguia's countenance changed strangely, a most inexplicable contortion.

His little rat eyes focused on the ranchero, and he drew back in a sort of fear. Convoy her whom people called Jacqueline through the lawless Huasteca, at the bidding of this man! "No, no, no!" he cried, and shuddered too.

Trying to read a meaning behind the capitan's dark scowl, he knew only too well the meaning that was there. He moaned at the thought.

Maximiliano would have him shot, or burned, or tortured. He would lose his ranch, his cotton mill. He would be poor. It was vague, what would happen, but it was horrible, horrible!

"Hush, you fool!" growled Fra Diavolo. "The entire meson will hear you, including that Gringo."

"That Gringo? He, he is one of your friends?"

"Friend! For Dios, he nearly ruined my little plans for Jacqueline.

Listen, he has business of some kind with Maximiliano."

"Yes, yes. And there's a--a mystery in his business."

"What do you mean?"

"If I knew, would it be a mystery?"

"Who is he?"

"He won't tell. I only know that he is a Confederate officer."

"A Confederate officer?" The capitan whistled low and softly. "Come to the Plaza, there you can tell me what you think."

And in the solitude of the Plaza they planned according to their suspicions.

CHAPTER VII

SWORDSMANs.h.i.+P IN THE DARK

"Cry 'holla' to thy tongue, I prithee; it curvets unseasonably."

--_As You Like It._

"Strange there's no motion," thought Jacqueline the next morning, rubbing her eyes. "Why, what ails the old boat, I wonder?" Then she remembered. She was in the Tampico hotel which called itself a cafe, and the landlord's wife was knocking on her door and calling "Nin-a, nin-a"

with a plaintive stress on the first syllable. The word means girl, and oddly enough, is often used by a Mexican servant to address her mistress.

"I'm not a n-e-e-n-ya," Jacqueline a.s.sured her drowsily, "and if I were, madame, why make a fete out of it this way in the middle of the night?"

"Nin-a," the unctuous nasal rose higher, "if Your Mercy goes with Don Anastasio, she must hurry. It is late. It is four o'clock, nina."

"Four o'clock--late?" gasped the luxurious little marquise. "And how much difference, exactly, would your four o'clocks make on the planet Mars, my good woman?"

"But nina, there is Don Anastasio, he is ready to start."

"And who is Don Anastasio, pray?"

"The trader, nina, at the meson. He is to take Your Mercy to Valles, as Don--as the Capitan Morel told Your Mercy yesterday."

"The Capitan Morel, _pardi!_ Faith, if any man had told me it meant rising at any such unholy hour. Oh well, I suppose it is the hour for larks, too."

And sighing at the sacrifice of an age of slumber, Jacqueline reached out for the matches. But there was no dainty limbed night table of a Louis XV. beside her bed, which helped her again to remember where she was, and if doubts still remained, they were gone when her bare feet touched the fibrous, p.r.i.c.kly native carpet instead of soft furs.

She groped to the door, and opened it enough to take a greasily odorous candle from a dusky hand outside. As the sickly glimmer awakened the shadows, she called the woman back in sudden dismay. "My trunk, senora, kindly have it sent up at once. No," she added, catching a fluffy garment from a chair, "in five minutes."

There was a brief silence, followed by positive lament. "Nina, it is not here. I believe, nin-a, it is at the meson, with Don Anastasio."

"F-flute!" cried Jacqueline. The word means nothing at all, but it may express a la.s.s's exasperation in a wardrobe crisis, and that is nothing except a catastrophe. "Now just possibly," she soliloquized, "they permit themselves to imagine that one can wear a white frock two days together," whereupon she sat herself down despairingly among the crisp things that had already had their poor little day. To mock her there was the jaunty handsatchel packed for an hour's sh.o.r.e leave. She let petulance have sway, and informed herself that she should not go a step, when the voice in the hall pleaded insidiously that Her Mercy make haste.

"But I am, senora, I'm making fast haste," and she sat three minutes longer, communing with her tragedy. "_Oh_, this bitten, biting country," she cried, gazing ruefully at arms and shoulders, and fiery blotches on the soft white skin. "Still, if there's a brigand for every mosquito, it may yet be worth while." Hopefully she rose and called Berthe from the next room to help her dress.

When the two girls came downstairs, the landlord's wife took their satchel, and led them over broken sidewalks to the meson, where the street was filled with torches and laden burros and blanketed shadows.

Murguia's caravan was forming, making a weird, stealthy scene of activity. Jacqueline picked up a lantern, and searched here and there.

"Now where _can_ it be?" she cried.

The rebosa about the shoulders of the Mexican woman rose. She knew nothing. But the gesture was an unabridged philosophical system as to the resignation and the indifference that is seemly when one knows nothing. Jacqueline refrained from pinching her, and pursued the quest of her trunk even into the meson.

Hardly had she pa.s.sed within when a greatly agitated little old man tried to overtake her. But at the door he thought better of it and vented his chagrin on the Mexican woman.

"Why did you let her go in there?" he cried. "She will wake the Gringo, she will wake the Gringo!"

Jacqueline reappeared. "No trunk," she announced. "Do you know, Berthe, I do not believe it came at all?"