“I think, sir––” she began haughtily.
“The road is free.”
“Oh, why have you to be so, so quarrelsome?”
“The temptation, I reckon.”
“You really will go back with me?”
“I might be going back along about the same time. It’s a public trail.”
“Then I will stay, and you must! I will not permit you to go back there now. I will see that you do wait here so long until Lopez has the time to start to Mexico after you. Then you will be behind him. Have the goodness to hold my bridle. I think I shall take me a rest a little also.”
Together they sat on a huge live-oak root and watched the sluggish Pánuco flow by.
“No hurry now,” Driscoll observed comfortably. “Our scarlet upholstered colonel won’t get away for years yet.”
Years, at least, were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her quaintly inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned it in London long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her father played France’s diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers, then, was as broad as Mayfair, and to the Missourian doubly foreign, and doubly alluring.