“You done it!” His homely phraseology increased rather than lessened the force of his indictment. “Yes, you done it!”
The woman had fallen again to her praying. Her mutter drew his attention. Even in that moment of dire distress racial feeling was still forceful enough to halt an impulse to kneel at her side. Instead he knelt in mind. Head bowed, he stood beside her, a silent partner to supplications which his keen sense of unworth prevented him from sharing.
When she broke into a second wild frenzy of cursing, arms raised to the sky, he turned and walked away, his face set toward the mountains—and revenge.
[XXXVI: “IN THE MIDST OF LIFE—”]
Out of the midst of these terrors and alarms, through the tragic night that was sweeping over the land, broke a solitary beam of light, gleam of romance that was destined to burn brightly for two love-illumined days before obscured by gathering dangers.
Just about the time that Bull, with the wounded correspondent in his arms, was swept along the mad battle rout, Gordon and Lee reined in their beasts and looked back and down on the little town of San Carlos nestling in a valley below. Sequestered in the hills, far from the railroad along which the red tides of revolution ebbed and flowed, it had so far escaped the prevailing destruction. Its painted adobes glowed like a great opal within the setting of warm-brown hills, as happy a picture as bride and groom ever gazed upon, for, helped out by the wise counsel of Lee’s good friends, the jefe and priest, Gordon had prevailed.
“These wicked days a young girl may not expect to hold her own,” the priest had advised. “Los Arboles needs a man’s hardness.”
To which the jefe had added his little joke, “Managing thee, niña, will not be his lightest work.”
No doubt, because Cupid rides like a mad racer through the sunny lands, taking bolts and bars, duennas and like obstacles in his stride, Mexican law gives him pause at the last; places the bars so high that the wildest of lovers must needs take breath. Ordinarily two weeks would have been required to fulfil the forms; but where both law and church are on Cupid’s side—well, there is no country on earth where his business receives greater despatch. Accordingly, from the church that shoved its square gold tower out of the rainbow mass of the town Lee and Gordon had ridden away, man and wife, an hour ago, to honeymoon, according to her plan, in the great bowl of the mountain pastures.
Now, as she looked back, a certain wistfulness crept into the girl’s expression; a shadow slight yet sufficient to attract Gordon’s notice. Working his beast alongside, he laid his arm across her shoulder.