“I have been thinking how it could be done, miss. Soon it will be dark, and with night comes fear. Miss is with him now; she is there alone.”
Frances turned to her, such pain in her face as if she had been stabbed.
“Why should you go over that again? I know it!” she said, crossly. “That has nothing to do with my going into the room.”
“It has much,” Maggie declared, whispering now, treasuring her plot. “The old one is upstairs, sleeping, and she will not wake until I shake her. Outside the soldiers make their fires and cook, and Alvino in the barn sings ‘La Golondrina’—you hear him?—for that is sad music, like his soul. Very well. You go to your room, but leave the door open to let a finger in. When it is just creeping dark, and the soldiers are eating, I will run in where the one sits beside the door. My hair will be flying like the mane of a wild mare, my eyes bi-i-i-g—so. In the English way I will shout ‘The rustlers, the rustlers! He ees comin’—help, help!’ When you hear this, fly to me, quick, like a soul set free. The soldier at the door will go to see; miss will come out; I will stand in the door, I will draw the key in my hand. Then you will fly to him, and lock the door!”
“Why, Maggie! what a general you are!”
“Under the couch where he lies,” Maggie hurried on, her dark eyes glowing with the pleasure of this manufactured romance, “are the revolvers which he wore, just where we placed them last night. I pushed them back a little, quite out of sight, and nobody knows. Strap the belt around your waist, and defy any power but death to move you from the man you love!”
“Maggie, you are magnificent!”
“No,” Maggie shook her head, sadly, “I am the daughter of a peon, a servant to bear loads. But”—a flash of her subsiding grandeur—“I would do that—ah, I would have done that in youth—for the man of my heart. For even a servant in the back of a house has a heart, dear miss.”
Frances took her work-rough hands in her own; she pressed back the heavy black hair—mark of a vassal race—from the brown forehead and looked tenderly into her eyes.