"My daughter!" Tranquil shrieked, as he rushed toward him.
He had recognised Carmela; the poor child had fainted, and seemed dead. The Colonel and the Jaguar had also recognised the maiden, and by a common impulse hurried to her aid.
The White Scalper, recoiling step by step before the cloud of enemies that surrounded him, did not reply a word to the insults poured upon him. He laughed a dry and sharp laugh, and whenever an assailant came too near him, he raised his terrible club, and the imprudent man rolled with a fractured skull on the ground.
The hunters and the two young men, recognising the impossibility of striking this man without running the risk of wounding her they wished to save, contented themselves with gradually contracting the circle round him, so as to drive him into a corner of the court, where they would be enabled to seize him. But the ferocious old man foiled their calculations; he suddenly bounded forward, overthrew those who opposed his passage, and climbed with headlong speed up the steps leading to the platform. On reaching the latter, he turned once again to his startled enemies, burst into a hoarse laugh, and leaped over the breastwork into the river, bearing with him the young girl, of whom he had not loosed his hold.
When the witnesses of this extraordinary act of folly had recovered from the stupor into which it threw them, and rushed on the platform, their anxious glances in vain interrogated the river—the waters had reassumed their ordinary limpidness. White Scalper had disappeared with the unhappy victim whom he had so audaciously carried off. To accomplish this unheard-of ravishment he had surrendered the Larch-tree hacienda to the Texan army. What motive had impelled the strange man to this unqualifiable action? The impenetrable mystery that enveloped his life rendered any supposition impossible.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE CONSPIRATORS.
More fortunate than dramatic authors, the romancers, being bound by no rules of time and place, can, at their pleasure, transport their action and characters from one country to another, and then return to their starting point, not having any account to give of the time that has elapsed, or of the space they have traversed. Employing in our turn this privilege, we will momentarily quit the Indian border, on the skirt of which our story has hitherto passed, and crossing at a leap over about two hundred miles, beg the reader to follow us to Galveston, in the centre of Texas, four months after the events we chronicled in our last chapter.
At the period when our story is laid, that city, in which General Lallemand wished to found the Champ d'Asyle—that sublime Utopia of a noble and broken heart—was far from that commercial prosperity which the progress of civilization, successive immigrations, and, most of all, the speculations of bold capitalists, have caused it to attain during the last few years. We shall therefore describe it such as it was during our stay in America, leaving out of sight the enormous transformations it has since undergone.