"You are an angel," he said to her in a low voice. "Will you persevere?"
"I am his to the tomb," she answered with a feverish energy.
[CHAPTER VII.]
GUETZALLI.
Were we writing a romance there are many details we would leave in the shade, many facts we should pass over in silence. Unfortunately we are only historians, and, as such, compelled to the most scrupulous exactitude.
In the first episode of this history we related how the Count de Lhorailles, at the head of 150 Frenchmen, selected from the colony of Guetzalli, which he had founded, let himself be led in pursuit of the Apache Indians into the great Del Norte desert; and how, after wandering about with his party in the midst of this ocean of shifting sand, and seeing his bravest comrades fall around him, he had blown out his brains, while, in a few hours after his death, the few Frenchmen who survived this great disaster succeeded in emerging from the desert and regaining the road to the colony.
The Frenchmen left at Guetzalli beheld the arrival of the relics of the expedition with stupor, and the news of the Count de Lhorailles' death completed their demoralisation. Abandoned without chiefs, so far from their country, in the midst of an enemy's territory, exposed at any moment to the attacks of the Apaches, they gave way to despair, and seriously revolved the question of leaving the colony and returning to the seacoast. The Count de Lhorailles, who founded the settlement, was, in fact, the soul of it. He dead, his companions felt in themselves neither the necessary energy nor strength to continue his work—a work which, indeed, they knew but imperfectly, for the count had no confidants among the men who had joined him. Jealous of his power, and naturally of a reserved temper, he had never confided to anyone his plans or his projects.
The Frenchmen who had followed him—for the most part greedy adventurers, devoured by that inextinguishable thirst for gold which had made them give up everything to go to America—had been cruelly deceived in their hopes, when, on disembarking in Mexico, that classic land of riches, the count, instead of leading them to gold or silver mines, which they would have worked and filled their pockets abundantly, took them to the Mexican frontier, and forced them to, till the soil.
Thus, when the first moment of stupor had passed, each colonist, acting under the impression of his own will, began his preparations for departure, in his heart well pleased at seeing an exile thus terminated which was beset by dangers, while offering none of the advantages of the situation. It was all over with the colony; but fortunately, wherever a number of Frenchmen are assembled, when the indispensable man disappears, another immediately arises, who, impelled by the circumstances, reveals himself suddenly to the great amazement of his comrades, and frequently of himself.