Several hundred peons stared with open mouths. Gathered before the house, they prattled to one another in childlike expectancy of the Señor Emperador. Most of them were learning for the first time that they had an emperor. Still, it sufficed to know this was an occasion for auto-inspiring vivas, like once when the Ilustrísimo Bishop came. They took new hold on the green boughs they were to wave. A handkerchief here and there fluttered from a bamboo pole. Down in an adobe village by the river junction, every gala scrap of calico print, whether shirt or skirt, pended from cords stretched across the street; and cotton curtains, some of crude drawn work, hung outside the windows. All the poor finery of the Indians was on exhibition to do honor to a gorgeous Old World court. But the fiesta air had already gotten into the susceptible native lungs, and that alone, with only a trumpet’s blare, would make for a hurrah in genuine fervor.
The roomy porch of the old mansion was crowded with the chief people of the hacienda, clerks, foremen, house servants, besides the administrador and the chaplain. Behind a remote column were the three wanderers in the wilderness; the Storm Centre, the Marchioness, and the Maid. They were to have been gone by now, and yet it was not the coming of the emperor that had stopped them. The cause was nearer at hand. Smoking a long black cigar, “grizzled and fierce, as ornate in braid and decorations as a bullfighter,” Colonel Dupin had delayed them.
His Cossacks thronged the colonnade. The brick-red of their raw leather jackets splotched every other color with rust. The Contra Guerrillas were many things. They were Frenchmen and Mexicans. They were Americans, Confederate deserters, Union deserters. They were Negroes and Arabs. 124They were the ruined of fortune, now soldiers of fortune. They were pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters, gamblers, swindlers. They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from the guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was not a softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity could lead them, could hold them.
They surrounded the Missourian on the hacienda portico. If only for his debonnaire indifference, they knew him for a “bad man” such as none of them might ever hope to be. And they watched him like lynxes, though he was unarmed. Yet he did not look “bad.” He merely looked bored. He was a prisoner, but not the only one. Anastasio Murguía fidgetted among the Cossacks on his own porch. His restless eyes roved incessantly over the crowd, seeking his daughter, but they were steadily baffled.
Down in the valley, where the Rio Moctezuma joined its course with the Pánuco, a dusty mist moved nearer along the old Spanish highway, and faintly there came the sound of clarions. An eager murmuring arose from the throng on the hillside. It swelled more confidently to a buzz as the far-away dust lifted at the ford and revealed the beaded stringing of a numerous company. The distant bugles rang clearer on the pure air. “Yes, he comes,” the people cried, “There! Seest thou, hombre?–There! Viva el Señor Emperador!”
For Colonel Dupin the cloud of dust would shortly evolve into a staying hand of mercy, into the exasperating stupidity of mercy. He had captured the American not ten minutes before, and here was interference in a gauzy haze of dust. He signed to one of his men to follow with Murguía, and he himself placed a gauntleted hand on Driscoll’s shoulder. “Now,” he said.
But a white figure of Mexican rebosa and silken instep moved swiftly from behind a column and touched the Tiger’s 125arm. Both Jacqueline and Berthe had been watching the Cossack chief rather than the spectacle in the valley. And as he turned on his prisoner, Berthe half screamed and clutched at the bosom of her dress. It was Jacqueline who gained his side. She addressed him sharply as one who hates to reopen a tedious argument.
“Monsieur Dupin,” she cried, “have I not already permitted myself to tell you–yes, I repeat, you are mistaken. He is in no sense whatever an accomplice of Rodrigo Galán.”
The Tiger heard, no doubt, but he did not stop. He kept on toward the door, Driscoll beside him, and his men around him. He meant to pass through the house. Some secluded corral in the back would do for the execution. Driscoll seemed as indifferent as ever, though there was a lithe, alert spring in his step. Behind him Murguía was moaning, praying to see his daughter. Berthe followed, bewildered, and silently wringing her hands. But the death march was so business-like, and every one else was so intent on the approach of a royally born person, that the crowds shoved aside by the little group never once suspected that they had just brushed elbows with tragedy in the making.
Jacqueline caught her breath, sucked it in rather, in a pang of angry despair; and plucking up her skirts she ran ahead until she could oppose her slender figure squarely in front of the burly Frenchman. If he were to move on, he must trample her down. Her eyes, usually so big and round and shading to a depth of blue with their lively mischief, were all but closed, and through the narrowed lashes they gleamed like white steel. Her voice, though, was clear and even, of a studied courtesy.