“To go through that peril, and yet a coward!” she murmured. “It’s a waste––”
The runaway gained the top of the embankment, and fell behind a rock. And now a half dozen of the little demons were coming across the trail to the shack–to take her.
“Oh, the frisson, the ecstasy!” she cried. There was a certain poignant sense of enjoyment in it.
89CHAPTER XI
The Cossacks and Their Tiger Colonel
“Ah, Captain, here goes for a fine-drawn bead;
There’s music around when my barrel’s in tune.”
–Song of the Fallen Dragoon.
Din Driscoll tumbled himself over among the rocks. “There, I’m fixed,” he grunted, as he squatted down behind his earthworks. “Plenty of material here”–he meant the cartridges which he poured from his coat pockets into his hat–“and plenty out there too”–indicating the Hydra heads–“and my pipe–I’ll have a nice time.” He got to work busily.
In the door of the shack Jacqueline saw the campaign for her possession begin. Don Rodrigo had fled to the corner of the shack, taking his horse with him. The hut of bamboo and thatch was no protection against Driscoll’s fire, but the two girls, though inside the hut, were between and afforded a better screen. Jacqueline did not, however, hold that against her Fra Diavolo. To save himself behind a woman was quite in keeping with his sinister rôle. And she, as an artist, could not reproach him, and as a woman she did not care. But the American’s running away–now that was out of character, and it disappointed her.
She heard Rodrigo bellowing forth an order, and she saw five or six guerrillas rise out of the cacti and spring toward her. But the constant shadow of self-introspection haunted her even then. In her despair, and worse, in her disgust, feeling already those filthy hands upon her, she yet appraised this jewel among ecstatic shudders, and she knew in her heart that she would not have had it otherwise.