The captain returned. “We’ll try to save the rest o’ that ’ere cotton, sir,” he said.
He looked out at the trembling smoke that betrayed their course so rashly, and from there back to the pursuer on the horizon. He waited a little longer, carefully calculating; then sent an order down the tube to the engineer. The dampers were shut off, and the fuel was changed to anthracite. Soon the smoke went down, and a hazy invisible stream puffed from the funnels instead. The Luz swung at right angles to her former course. The paddles threshed hopefully, and on she sped, leaving no track. The skipper gazed back at the lowering line, which ended abruptly on their port and trailed off toward the horizon with a telegraphy of deceit for the distant sail.
“You soldiers, colonel,” he announced, “don’t ’ave no monopoly on tricks and gammon, I’m a thinkin’. But I s’y, w’at if you and me go down to my cabin and have a noggin?”
Thus La Luz ran her last blockade, and came safely into port. She reached Tampico some two days before the Impératrice Eugénie. Whereupon Din Driscoll, as he was called anywhere off the muster roll, informed Don Anastasio that he 42 would continue with him on into the interior. And as seen already, Murguía humbly excused delay, though his guest was not invited, not wanted, and cordially hated besides. That meek smirk of Don Anastasio’s was the absurdest thing in all psychology.
Yet what perhaps aggravated the old man most was curiosity. He craved to know the errand of his young despot. In the doorway of the Tampico mesón he still hovered near, and ventured more questions.
“How was it that, that you happened to be sent, señor?” he asked.
“Well now,” observed the trooper, “there you go figuring it out that I was sent at all.”
“It must have been–uh, because you know Spanish. Are you a–a Texan, Señor Coronel?”
“They raised me in Missouri,” said the colonel. “But I learned to talk Pan-American some on the Santa Fé trail. We had wagon trains out of Kansas City when I was a good sight younger.”