“It said that Sal was false to me,
Her love for me had fled,
She’s got married to a butcher–
The butcher’s hair was red.”
But he sung it as a plaint, yet not hopelessly, and Mademoiselle Berthe was the maid entreated of his melody.
The sharpshooters on both sides paused as the coach drove into the little sweet-scented wood that was called the Alameda, and the Missourians, with sabres at salute, transferred their 410charge to the Imperialists crowding around. Among the latter were some of Jacqueline’s own countrymen, and those, in starvation and defeat, were as debonair as the cadets of Gascogne.
“A rose, mademoiselle,” said one, bowing low. He had an arm bandaged, and his sword was broken. “An early merciful bullet plucked it for you, so that it fell unhurt, though the petals of all the others are scattered everywhere among the leaves, among the fallen branches, among the shattered statues of our classic grove here. See, like the rose I tender, you come among us poor broken soldiers of fortune. I think, dear lady, there will be those above to bless you for it.”
Jacqueline smiled behind her tears. “Always a Frenchman, eh, mon lieutenant?” she said.
The fragrance of the place was smothered under gunpowder and sluggish fumes. The pleasant drives, the grass, the flowers, were trampled by gaunt soldiers bearing their wounded, but the young officer murmured on in the speech of the Alameda’s one time fashionable promenade.
“Who is that?” she interrupted.
She pointed over the heads around her to a man bearing someone off the late bloody field, and that moment staggering across the trenches into the Alameda. It was an act that moved her, for the rescuer was a richly uniformed officer, and the other but a common soldier. With Berthe close behind, she alighted from the coach and hurried forward to help. The wounded soldier’s face lay on the officer’s breast, and she saw only his hair, matted and very white, from which a rusty brown wig had partly fallen. But more to the purpose she saw that he was bleeding, and the callous warriors there knew that the angels of the siege had come at last.
“Lay him in my carriage–but carefully, you!” she said, and was obeyed, while Berthe deftly fixed cloaks and blankets around the withered form. Someone mounted with Toby 411and the driver, and the coach rolled slowly away to the hospital, leaving behind the two girls staring at the richly uniformed officer, and the officer staring tenfold harder at them. He was a large man, with big hands and feet, and for a Mexican he had a mongrel floridness of skin. His cap was in his hand, and his hair was red and thin. Amazement and a startled prying anxiety choked his utterance.
“Now then, Colonel Lopez,” Jacqueline addressed him calmly, “may I ask you the way? I have come to speak with Maximilian.”