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 189nearest 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 twang. 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 naïvely 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. 190Once, 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 damned,” 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.