80CHAPTER X
The Brigand Chief
“Don Rodrigo de Vivar,
Rapaz, orgulloso, y vano.”
–El Cid.
Imagine an abnormally virtuous urchin and an abnormally kindly farmer. The urchin resolutely turns his back on the farmer’s melon patch, though there is no end of opportunity. But the farmer catches him, brings him in by the ear, makes him choose a big one, and leaves him there, the sole judge of his own capacity. Driscoll had tried to dodge a fight, but Fate was his kindly farmer.
“Better fall back a little, Murgie,” he said. “You’d only scare ’em, you know.”
He himself passed on ahead. But it was mid-afternoon before anything happened. Jacqueline meantime had shown some pettish ill-humor. Those who had fought to be her escort were now singularly indifferent. Driscoll was idly curious and quietly contemptuous, but he detected no fright in her manner. “Fretting for her silver-braided Greaser,” he said to himself. “A pretty scrape she’s got herself into, too! Now I wonder why a girl can’t have any sense.” But as the answer was going to take too long to find, he swerved back to the simpler matter of a possible fracas.
“Well, well,” he exclaimed at last, rising in his stirrups, “if there isn’t her nickel-plated hero now!”
A quarter of a mile ahead, mounted, waiting stock-still across the trail, was Fra Diavolo. The American put away 81his pipe and barely moved his spurred boot, yet the good buckskin’s ears pointed forward and he trotted ahead briskly. From old guerrilla habit, the cavalryman noted all things as he rode. To his left the blue of the mountain line, being nearer now, had deepened to black, and the Sierra seemed to hang over him, ominously. But the dark summits were still without detail, and midway down, where the solid color broke into deep green verdure and was mottled by patches of dry slabs of rock, there was yet that massive blur which told of distance. Foothills had rolled from the towering slide, and mounds had tumbled from the hills, and a tide of giant pebbles had swept down from the mounds. These rugged boulders had turned the trail, so that the American was riding beneath a kind of cliff. To his right, on the east of the trail, the boulders were smaller and scattered, like a handful of great marbles flung across the cactus plain. He may have glanced toward this side especially, at the clumps of spiny growth over the pradera, and caught glimpses behind the strewn rocks, but his look was casual, unstartled. He breathed deeply, though. The old familiar elation set him vaguely quivering and tingling, with nervous, subtle desire. The young animal’s excess of life surged into a pain, almost. Even the buckskin, knowing him, took his mood, and held high his nostrils.
Fra Diavolo’s peaked beaver, his jacket, his breeches, his high pommeled saddle, his great box stirrups, the carabine case strapped behind, all be-scrolled with silver, danced hazily to the magic of rays slanting down from the lofty Sierra line. Like himself, his horse was a thing of spirited flesh, for glorious display. The glossy mane flowed luxuriantly. The tail curved to the ground. A mountain lion’s skin covered his flanks. He was large and sleek and black, with the metal and pride of an English strain. He was a carved war-charger. The man astride was rigid, stately. Man and horse had a heroic statue’s promise of instant, furious life.
82“Oh, la beauté d’un homme!” cried Jacqueline, perceiving the majestic outline silhouetted against the rocks. “Why, why–it’s Fra Diavolo!”