“But what made him do that, that way?”
“Poor simple babe! That was a pose. Our mule driver knows he can ride, but we did not. And there you are.”
“But the little monsieur, he looks like a ghost?”
Jacqueline laughed. “That, I admit, is not a pose. With the little monsieur, it’s become–constitutional.”
A half-hour later they heard an easy canter behind them, and Din Driscoll reappeared, flushed and happy as a boy pounding in first from a foot race. His left hand covered the bowl of his cob pipe from the wind, the other held his slouch hat doubled up by the brim. As for bridle hand, old Demijohn needed none. Driscoll seized Murguía’s silk tile and poured into it from the slouch a shimmering stream of coin and a mass of crumpled paper.
75“To be robbed while I’m along, now that makes me mad,” he said. “You won’t tell anybody, will you, Murgie?”
The old man did not hear. His palsied hands were dipping down, dipping down, bathing themselves in the deep silk hat. The hat was heavy with gold and silver pesos, and foaming with bills.
“Greenbacks, Confederate notes,” he mumbled. “Some I’ve paid before–only, lately, the rascals won’t take anything but coin.”
“Why’s that, Murgie?”
“Why, because these green things are not worth much now, while these gray ones”–he fingered them contemptuously–“would not, would not buy a drunkard’s pardon from our cheapest magistrate.”