As we entered the wide-arched portals of the hotel, the telephone struck a jarring note. The American mining man, still pacing nervously up and down the patio, leaped to the receiver.
“Laughlin speaking! What news? Did they—? Shot them both? White and Garcia both? Get the troops out! I’ll be there in just—”
IV
In an instant Eustace and I were at his elbow.
Ours was the newspaperman’s unsentimental eagerness, which might have hailed the burning of an orphan asylum with its four hundred helpless inmates as splendid front-page copy. Here was murder! This was Mexico! Viva Mexico! Here was our first story!
“No time to talk!” snapped Laughlin. “I’ll send John Luy for you in the morning. He’ll take you to La Colorada, in the Yaqui country itself. You’ll get the dope there!”
And he vanished down the street. We stood at the hotel gate, a little startled, gazing out into the night. The moon smiled down over low, flat roofs, and a man’s voice drifted to us, singing very softly to the throbbing of a guitar, and the plaintive note of a gendarme’s whistle seemed to say, “All’s well.”
CHAPTER IV
AMONG THE YAQUI INDIANS
I
John Luy met us in an elderly Buick early the next morning.