Murguía’s head raised, and his eyes fixed themselves on the judge, and in their intense fixity glittered a quick, keen lust. 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 Murguía’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 Murguía’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 186violently. He passed 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 Murguía’s borrowing his flask the night they were in the forest. It accounted for Murguía 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, anticipation chilled more than the drowning bath itself.
The tide assuredly did not wait. It rolled right on, nearer and nearer. Murguía 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 Murguía’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?”
187“That will do,” Lopez interposed. “The Señor Murguía could not know at the time that this fellow was Rodrigo’s agent.”
“And,” Murguía added eagerly, “I was helpless, there at Mobile. The Confederates could have sunk my boat, and he held an order from Jefferson Davis.”