“Your–Your Excellency remembers?”
“How well!” The admission came involuntarily. Juarez was laboring under an emotion that he could not at first control. He stared at his visitor in a new wonder. So gaunt, so hollow, so utterly insignificant! The President’s wonder grew.
“You–you gained entrance here by one of these slips?” he questioned sharply. The old man nodded. “And it was countersigned by––”
“Si señor, by El Chaparrito. The slip said, ‘Admit bearer at once.’”
“Then I cannot blame my orderly! But who are you?”
“Anastasio Murguía, to serve Your Mercy.”
“Bien, Señor Murguía, and now will you explain what no other messenger from our unknown friend has done? Who–who is El Chaparrito?”
But, like the wretched messengers who had gone before, Anastasio Murguía only shrugged his shoulders blankly. “Your Excellency does not know El Chaparrito?” he asked. “And yet you trusted him, a stranger, with your signature?”
There was a crafty stress on his words.
“Ah, señor,” Juarez placidly inquired, “what if a chief magistrate did not know when to trust? You are to be informed, then, that one year ago last October, at Chihuahua, I was saved from a French flying column by an Indito. The 452poor wretch had run across the desert with his warning. But he could prove nothing. He couldn’t even tell who sent him, except that it was a short gentleman, a señor chaparro. Yet it was well for the Republic that I took his word and fled. Later, when I reached the Rio Grande, and he wanted my signature to some blank squares of parchment, which he was to take back to his señor chaparro–well, señor, I trusted again. That Indito in breech-clout obtained my autograph some twenty times over.”