“Left—an hour ago.” Yawning, Peters laid down the Albuquerque paper on top of the pile, and as the train usually ran from two to twelve hours late three hundred and sixty-five days in the year he lent a sympathetic ear to Sebastien’s vitriolic curses.
“I can wire for a special,” he suggested. “They could send an engine and car down from Cuernavaca in little more than an hour.”
“If you will be so kind, señor.”
In all Guerrero, Peters was the one gringo with whom Sebastien was on speaking terms, and he now accepted both a cigar and a paper to while away the time. After one glance had shown it to be a gringo sheet he would have cast it aside, but the one word “Mexico!” in scare heads caught his eye. Setting forth the international complications that were likely to come from the lynching of a Mexican in Arizona, it held his interest. He not only read it to the bottom of the column, but followed over to the next page, upon which heavy ink lines had been scored around a local article.
As the heading caught his eye he started, looked again, then bent over the paper and read to the end. For a few seconds thereafter he sat thinking. A stealthy glance showed Peters at the key clicking off the call for the special. Quietly folding the paper, he slid it beneath his coat.
CHAPTER XVII
With Seyd and his cargo of reflections aboard, the train meanwhile puffed steadily up the four-per-cent. grades which carry the railway eleven thousand feet high to the shoulder of the old giant volcano, Ajuasoa. While he stared out of the window the vivid panorama of the hot country, the green seas of corn or cane which surged around white-walled haciendas, the chocolate peons behind their wooden plows, and the pretty brown girls at the stations gradually gave place to volcanic lava fields and gloomy woods of piñon, and these again merged into the innumerable hamlets which spread brown adobe skirts around Mexico City unseen by him.
“She is coming back! She is coming back!” It ran all the while in his mind, and formed the undertone of his conversation with Don Luis in the patio of the Iturbide that evening. When the old man stated his intention of taking the night train down to the Gulf it was only by a powerful effort that Seyd avoided the lunacy of offering to accompany him. All that night he burned in a flame of feeling, and as a consequence he rose tired out and presented such a picture of meekness when ushered into the office of the general manager, one so opposite to the usual fiery mien of the wronged shipper, that the stony heart of the official was melted within him.