Jacqueline ran to the end of the portico, from were she could see the pasture. Within, a platoon of red jackets were filing toward the carcel.
“That scoundrel Lopez!” exclaimed Tiburcio, “he has advanced the time on us!”
Only for an instant did Jacqueline wring her hands.
“Michel, your horse!” she cried. “Quick, quick! Now hold the stirrup!”
But Tiburcio was the quicker. He bent his knee, on it she stepped, and up she jumped, and kicked her heel as a 197spur. The charger leaped, and down the road clattered girl and horse, she swaying perilously.
It was a hundred yards to the pasture gate, and as much again to the adobe inside. When her horse rose in his gallop, she caught glimpses over the wall. The Dragoons were drawing up before the carcel. Sentinels tugged at the huge wooden door, and Lopez goaded them on. He saw her coming, and would have it over with before she could interfere. He bellowed an order, and the shooting squad threw up their guns at aim. They would not wait. They would fire on their victim the second the door opened. The heavy oak began to give. But that moment swinging in through the gate, Jacqueline could see only the carcel’s blank adobe wall. Yet she pictured the man just behind. She pictured the door opening. And–too late! Dieu, the muskets had volleyed already!
But–what made the shots scatter so? Scattered and flurried, they sounded. And no wonder! She saw a miracle in the doing. It was the most astounding sight of all her life long. Straight through the blank adobe wall, for all its two feet of thickness, she beheld a man on a great-boned yellow horse, both man and horse plunge mid a sudden cloud of dust, plunge squarely into the light of day.
The dumfounded shooting squad had blazed crazily against the half-open door; and for the critical quarter minute following, their weapons were harmless. Other Dragoons ran wildly out into the pasture, and as wildly fired at the horseman. Only one of the sentinels had happened to be on the side of the magic exit, but as the solid wall dissolved into a powdered cloud and the apparition hurtled past him, down upon his head crashed a gigantic water jar filled with earth. He who had sympathized with pagan ablutions the night before stood now with mouth agape. Some heathen god was having a hand in this, he knew.
Jacqueline wheeled to Driscoll’s side as he dashed toward 198her. He was coatless. His woolen shirt was open at the neck, the sleeves were rolled to the elbows. His slouch hat sat upon the back of his head. The short cropped curls, gray with dust, fluttered against the brim. She had never seen a face so buoyantly happy.
“Morning, Miss Jack-leen! Race you to the river?”