"The deuce you were!" The small eyes filmed craftily. "I beg your pardon, Miss Murdaugh, but you astonish me! I had no idea——! Most disastrous affair, that."
"Very." Willa dropped her eyes. "That is the worst of the country down there, those bandit raids. Creatures like El Negrito know no law but their own; they can't be hired or bribed or coerced and no one knows when they will take it into their heads to appear, murdering and looting and burning. It's a picturesque country, but bad for the nerves."
She turned as the man on her right spoke to her, and apparently was deaf to the sigh with which Harrington Chase drained his wine-glass. She had piqued his curiosity, aroused his interest and disturbed by just a pin-prick his pachydermatous equanimity; she would not raise again before the draw.
Later, Winnie found his way to her side in the music-room.
"Chase has been telling us over the liqueurs that you've had some exciting experiences down in Mexico. That's where you learned to play poker, isn't it? Jove, I envy you!"
"Poker isn't so difficult!" she laughed. "If you'd stop betting your head off on two pairs, Mr. North, you wouldn't find it so expensive."
"Oh, you know I don't mean that! I was thinking of your adventures. Father told me he found you living with some old friends on a big fruit-growing estate near a small town, and I supposed it had been all rather lonely and humdrum, until that quiet little game a few weeks ago made me realize that you must have seen a bit of the strenuous side down there. That would be the life for me!"
She glanced at his round, innocuous face, with the downy mustache and ruminative eyes, and smiled irrepressibly. Then her own face grew grave.
"I wonder! You see, Mr. North, it isn't all like a movie; there's an element of uncertainty that keeps a man quick on the trigger. I was living with friends at the Casa de Limas, as your father told you. But if he had arrived on a certain night just a week or so before, he would have found me barricaded in a—a great hall in town, with men shot to pieces and dying like flies all around me, and three hundred butchering rebels from the hills battering in the door."
"Great guns!" exclaimed Winnie. "Fancy your living through that! What happened—did your friends manage to beat them off?"