"The man is a crank," said he, "and I shall have him watched." The colonel asked that one or two of the soldier police guard should be sent to the house to look after the stranger. A corporal came from the company barrack around on the Calle Real, and it was after nightfall when next the "old friend" rang the bell and was permitted by Ignacio to enter.
But the instant the corporal started forward to look at him the caller bounded back into outer darkness. He was tall, sinewy, speedy, and had a twenty-yard start before the little guardsman, stout and burly, could squeeze into the street. Then the latter's shouts up the San Luis only served to startle the sentries, to spur the runner, and to excite and agitate Maidie.
Dr. Frank was disgusted when he tried her pulse and temperature half an hour later and said things to the corporal not strictly authorized by the regulations. The episode was unfortunate, yet might soon have been forgotten but for one hapless circumstance. Despite her announcement, something had overcome Miss Perkins's sense of injury, for she had stepped from a carriage directly in front of the house at the moment of the occurrence, was a witness to all that took place, and the first one to extract from the corporal his version of the affair and his theory as to what lay behind it. In another moment she was driving away towards the Nozaleda, the direction taken by the fugitive, fast as her coachman could whip his ponies, the original purpose of her call abandoned.
As in duty bound, both Mrs. Brent and Dr. Frank had told Sandy of this odd affair. Mrs. Brent described the stranger as tall, slender, sallow, with big cavernous dark eyes that had a wild look to them, and a scraggly, fuzzy beard all over his face, as though he hadn't shaved for long weeks. His hands—of course, she had particularly noticed his hands; what woman doesn't notice such things?—were slim and white. He had the look of a man who had been long in hospital; was probably a recently discharged patient, perhaps one of the many men just now getting their home orders from Washington.
"Somebody who served under your father, perhaps," said Mrs. Brent soothingly to Marion, "and thought he ought to see you."
"Somebody who had not been a soldier at all," said she to Sandy. "He had neither the look nor the manner of one." And Sandy marvelled a bit and decided to be on guard.
"Maidie," he had said that afternoon, before riding away, "when you get out next week we must take up pistol practice again. You beat me at Leavenworth, but you can't do it now. Got your gun—anywhere?—the one Dad gave you?" And Dad or Daddy in the Ray household was the "lovingest" of titles.
Maidie turned a languid head on her pillow. "In the upper drawer of the cabinet in my room, I think," said she. "I remember Mrs. Brent's examining it."
Sandy went in search, and presently returned with the prize, a short, big-barrelled, powerful little weapon of the bull-dog type, sending a bullet like that of a Derringer, hot and hard, warranted to shock and stop an ox at ten yards, but miss a barn at over twenty: a woman's weapon for defence of her life, not a target pistol, and Sandy twirled the shining cylinder approvingly. It was a gleaming toy, with its ivory stock and nickeled steel.
"Every chamber crammed," said Sandy, "and sure to knock spots out of anything from a mad dog to an elephant, provided it hits. Best keep it by you at night, Maidie. These natives are marvellous sneak-thieves. They go all through these ramshackle upper stories like so many ghosts. No one can hear them."