But all that he gained was a little soft laugh that came floating out from behind the sheet.
From his third of the wide circle which he, Jake, and Sliver now described about the hacienda, Gordon came in at sundown to the rise from which he and the widow had looked down on Los Arboles. It had become his daily habit to pause there and look for Lee returning with Sliver or Jake—and to-night he saw all three, small dots on the crests of great earth waves—then to sit and muse while the declining sun washed the wide world with its resplendence.
As on that other evening, the hacienda lay with its walls, painted adobes, patio, and compound aglow and plumed with soft smoke. As then, the plains lay, an undulating carpet of crimson and violet away to the burning hills. But—in place of soft woman voices, laughter low and wild—there came floating up to him a frightened murmur broken by a cry.
“Beast! she is but a child!”
Startled, he looked more closely and now saw, first; half a dozen horses standing with trailing bridles in the center of the compound; then as a flash of brass caught the sunlight, their riders straggling among the adobes.
“Raiders!” he thought, then noting their khaki, he changed it to, “Revueltosos!”
A glance north and south would have shown him the others coming in at a fast lope. But at the cry, thrilling in its human anguish, wild in its panic, he was seized with excitement blind and savage as the blood fear which turns a band of peaceful cattle into a snorting, bellowing herd. Digging in his spurs, he shot down the slope, in through the back compound gate just as a woman came staggering back through the doorway of the nearest adobe, felled by a blow on the mouth.
From within issued a wild, hysterical sobbing. At first Gordon’s sight, blinded by the bright sun, showed him only a convulsive movement in the half-gloom, but as they swung back into the light of the doorway he saw a slim brown girl struggling in the arms of a revueltoso. The elder sister of his little playmate, she herself was but a child, but this helped her no more than her heartbroken sobbing.
“Señor! Señor! Pity of Mary!”
At sight of the girl a cold shiver went down Gordon’s spine. Blind, breathless, choking, conscious only of a savage impulse to rend and tear, he rushed in, tore the girl out of the man’s arms, and threw him violently against the wall.