434CHAPTER XVII
Under a Spanish Cloak
“What misadventure is so early up,
That calls our person from our morning’s rest?”
–Romeo and Juliet.
Just within their own bivouac four Missourians waited with eight horses. Driscoll and Boone, and the small limping shadow of Murguía between them, went on outside the sentry line toward the Alameda. When they returned, a stranger accompanied them, a little distance apart.
“It’s true,” Driscoll whispered to those who had staid. “The trenches are filled with townsmen. He took me.”
The Americans glanced once the stranger’s way, and grunted. He was a large man, hidden to the eyes in a Spanish cloak. For all the charity of darkness, he seemed ill at ease, and held himself from them, a marked figure, alone. A leprosy in himself tainted his every thought. He would not willingly come near any man. He understood English, unhappily now for him, and Boone’s warning as they mounted seared like vitriol. “Look out, Harry, don’t touch the filthy skut! It’ll take the rotting of death to clean your fingers.” After that, even Murguía drew involuntarily away from the stranger.
They circled the town widely, having only Republican challenges to quiet, and they dismounted under the trees which shade the valley to the northeast, between the Sangremal, or mound of La Cruz, and the besiegers’ range of hills. Here, under La Cruz’s steep bluff, the Republican general-in-chief 435had his quarters, and here he kept a hawk’s jealous watch on the walls above, where slept his country’s invader.
Open battle is clear honor, so reckoned; but it takes a brave man to dive for a pearl in slime. Driscoll was the one to conduct Murguía and his gloomy companion into the presence of General Escobedo. When he rejoined the other five outside the tent, he was alone.
“Well, come on,” he said as he mounted under the trees. “We needn’t stay for the rest of it, thank God.”