As a matter of fact, he felt like anything but hiding. His eye lit with a hard gray gleam. But in these premises that he had forced upon her it was not for him to pick and choose. He yielded to her pleading, “For my sake?”
Dismounting, he led his horse in through the arched doorway, and as she closed the door upon him Francesca added a last hurried instruction. “He will undoubtedly turn with me. Give us time to gain cover under the oaks, then take you the trail to the south. It reaches high ground quickly. And ride hard”—her voice broke in a sob—“for if you should be overtaken by the water what in this miserable world would be left for me?”
“And this is the end?” He caught her hand between the closing doors.
“The end—for thy sake.” She dropped into the tender second person of the Spanish. “Si, if you wish it.”
Left alone, Seyd stood listening, the soft touch of her lips thrilling upon his. In the guardhouse, used now for a storeroom, all but one window was blocked by piles of sacked maize, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the half gloom he made out the massive beams which held up the heavy roof. The wall from which the one window looked out formed part of the hacienda’s southern face, and, remembering that the trail inclined in that direction, he moved over to it when he caught the clatter of departing hoofs. Deeply recessed in the thick wall, the low sill afforded standing room, and by peering obliquely through the bars he caught first the flutter of her skirt, then gradually she forged into full view. About three hundred yards away the trail ran in among shade oaks, cedars, and great spreading banyans, that were strewn in clumps all over the pastures. But just before she rode in among them Sebastien and Pancho, his mozo, galloped out from among the trees.
Even if the wind had not been dashing the sheeting rain in his face it would have been impossible for Seyd to have caught a distant murmur of voices. But he saw the mozo lift Roberta from Francesca’s beast, and lead off, with his mistress following. Then Sebastien came galloping on toward the gates.
“Coming for something—money or papers,” Seyd thought. “Just for fear he looks in—”
At the far end of the room a pile of sacked beans formed a natural stall, and he had no more than gotten his horse behind it when the clatter of hoofs broke in the court. He could not, of course, see Sebastien dismount. But, faint as they were, his highly keyed senses recorded the vibrations of the other’s footsteps as he followed the muddy horse tracks across to the guardhouse.
Outside the door Sebastien stopped. In the tense pause that followed Seyd’s hand went to his gun. At first the act was due to the natural instinct of self protection, but in the very moment of its inception that gave place to a second, more powerful impulse that dyed his face and neck with a dark flush. Drawing the weapon, he trained it across a sack at the door, and at that moment no primitive man in hiding at the mouth of his enemy’s cave was ever obsessed by a fiercer lust to kill. All of his trials and long travail, despair, seemed in his disordered fancy to materialize just then in Sebastien’s person. And it would be so easy! A slight pressure of his finger the instant he showed in the doorway, then—the flood!