Appleby laughed again as he glanced at the ragged men sprawling in attitudes that were rather easy than picturesque a little farther up the gorge. They were of various shades of color, from pale Castilian olive to African jet, and a good many of them were barefooted, while the shoes of the rest were burst. The arms scattered about them were as curiously assorted—American Marlin rifles, old English Sniders, Spanish service weapons, and cutlass-like machetes with a two-foot blade, which proved as efficient when, as quite frequently happened, there was a difficulty in obtaining the right kind of cartridges.
They were for the most part men with wrongs, individual as well as national; for the Spanish system of checking disaffection was sharp and stern, and the man who has seen brother or comrade butchered to bolster up an effete authority is apt to remember it. Those who had no wrongs possessed a lust of plunder which served almost as well as animus; but there were a few who had been driven to join them by patriotic convictions. They had already made themselves a terror to the conscript troops of Spain, as well as peaceful peasants with loyalist sympathies, who called them the Sin Verguenza—the men without shame. It was not from choice that Appleby had cast in his lot with them, but because it seemed to him preferable to falling into the Spaniards’ hands. He had, however, by daring in one encounter, and shrewd counsel, already made himself an influence, and had been endowed with the rank of Teniente.
“No,” he said a trifle dryly, “it is not. When I plundered folks in my country I did it for other people with a bill, and I had the law behind me. I was trained to it, you see.”
“It’s quite a good trade,” said Harper, who had joined the Sin Verguenza because the coast was too strictly watched to leave him any chance of getting away again. “Kind of pity to let up on it. It was a woman sent you here?”
Appleby laughed, and then sat silent a moment or two staring straight before him. The dusty gorge seemed to fade, and he could fancy himself standing once more at the head of a shadowy stairway in an English hall looking into a woman’s eyes. They were big gray eyes that seemed to read one’s thoughts, set most fittingly in a calm, proud face, above which clustered red-gold hair, and he had seen them often since that eventful night, on many a weary march, as well as in his sleep.
“Yes,” he said; “but not in the way I think you mean. She was my best friend’s sweetheart, and nothing to me. No doubt she has married him by now.”
Harper’s smile seemed to express incredulity, and for the first time a doubt flashed into his comrade’s mind. Would he have done so much for Tony if the woman had been any one else than Violet Wayne? The question almost startled him and though he strove to answer it in the affirmative no conviction came. Tony had been his friend, and until he came to Northrop he had never seen the girl; while it was, of course, preposterous to suspect that he had gone out under a cloud for her sake; and yet the doubt remained to be afterwards grappled with. In the meanwhile he brushed the question aside as of no moment. Violet Wayne would marry Tony, and in all probability he had already passed out of her memory. He was, however, glad when a man with an olive face stood up beside the fire and glanced at him with a smile.
“Among comrades it is not good courtesy to speak apart, and the English is a difficult tongue to me,” he said in Castilian. “I have apprehended no more in the Havana than the response discourteous, ‘You bedam.’”
Appleby laughed. “I fancy you others can beat us in that line,” he said. “Shall we get in to-night, Maccario?”
The Insurgent captain made a little expressive gesture. “Who knows!” he said. “They have two companies of cazadores, but there is this in our favor—they do not expect us. Four days’ march—for troops—from Adeje, and we have come in two! Yes, I think we shall get in, and then there will be trouble for those others in Santa Marta and the Colonel Morales.”