"I LIVE TO KILL HIM."
Still she went on, unhalting and resolute, feeling neither fatigue nor heat, or, if she felt them, ignoring them. She was resolved to reach Belize, or to fall dead upon the road or in the forests while attempting to do so.
And thus she came at last to All Pines, seeing the white inn gleaming in the first rays of the sun, it being now past six o'clock; while although her thirst was great, she determined that she would not go near it. She was known too well there as the girl, Zara, from Desolada, and also as she who acted as croupier for all the dissipated young planters who assembled at the inn to gamble, she doing so especially for Sebastian when he held the bank. She would be recognized at once and her presence commented on.
Yet she must pass near it, go through the village street to get forward on her way to Belize; she could only pray in her half-savage way that there might be none about who would see her, while, even as she did so, she knew that her chances of escaping observation were of the smallest. In such broiling lands as those of which Honduras formed one, the earliest and the latest hours of the day are the hours which are the most utilized because of their comparative coolness and consequently few are asleep after sunrise.
Yet, she told herself, perhaps after all it was not of extreme importance whether she was recognised or not. By to-night, if all went well, and if the pale-faced English girl and her father had any spirit in them, they would have taken some steps to prevent that which was meditated at Desolada on this very night. And, if they had not that spirit, then she herself would utter some warning, would herself see the "old judge man," and tell him her story. Perhaps he would listen to it and believe her even though she was but half-breed trash, as those of her race were termed contemptuously as often as not.
But, now, as she drew nearer to the village street, and to where the inn stood, she started in dismay at what she saw outside the door. An animal that she recognised distinctly, not only by itself but by the saddle on its back and the long Mexican stirrups, and also by its colour and flowing mane.
She recognised the favourite horse of Sebastian, the one he always rode, standing at the inn door.
At first a sickening suspicion came to her mind; a fear which she gave utterance to in the muttered words:
"He has followed me. He knows that I have set out for Belize." Then she dismissed the suspicion as impossible. For she remembered that Sebastian had been absent from Desolada all the previous day, and had not returned by the time when the others had gone to rest; she thought now (and felt sure that she had guessed aright) that he had slept at the inn all night, and was about to return to Desolada in the cool of the morning.
Determined, however, to learn what the master of that horse--and of her--was about to do, and above all, which direction he went off in when he came outside, she crept on and on down the street until at last she was nearly in front of the inn door. Then, lithe and agile as a cat, she stole behind a great barn which stood facing the plaza, and so was enabled to watch the opposite house without any possibility of being herself seen from it.