“That poor dub, Torres, who fell down on the scar on Henry!” Francis was meditating sympathetically, when the bolts of his cell door shot back and he arose to greet Leoncia.
But she declined to greet him for the moment, as she flared at the Comisario in rapid-fire Spanish, with gestures of command to which he yielded when he ordered the jailer to remove the peons to other cells, and himself, with a nervous and apologetic bowing, went out and closed the door.
And then Leoncia broke down, sobbing on his shoulder, in his arms: “It is a cursed country, a cursed country. There is no fair play.”
And as Francis held her pliant form, meltingly exquisite in its maddeningness of woman, he remembered Henry, in his canvas pants, barefooted, under his floppy sombrero, digging holes in the sand of the Bull.
He tried to draw away from the armful of deliciousness, and only half succeeded. Still, at such slight removal of distance, he essayed the intellectual part, rather than the emotional part he desired all too strongly to act.
“And now I know at last what a frame-up is,” he assured her, farthest from the promptings of his heart. “If these Latins of your country thought more coolly instead of acting so passionately, they might be building railroads and developing their country. That trial was a straight passionate frame-up. They just knew I was guilty and were so eager to punish me that they wouldn’t even bother for mere evidence or establishment of identity. Why delay? They knew Henry Morgan had knifed Alfaro. They knew I was Henry Morgan. When one knows, why bother to find out?”
Deaf to his words, sobbing and struggling to cling closer while he spoke, the moment he had finished she was deep again in his arms, against him, to him, her lips raised to his; and, ere he was aware, his own lips to hers.
“I love you, I love you,” she whispered brokenly.
“No, no,” he denied what he most desired. “Henry and I are too alike. It is Henry you love, and I am not Henry.”
She tore herself away from her own clinging, drew Henry’s ring from her finger, and threw it on the floor. Francis was so beyond himself that he knew not what was going to happen the next moment, and was only saved from whatever it might be by the entrance of the Comisario, watch in hand, with averted face striving to see naught else than the moments registered by the second-hand on the dial.