"But again I returned upon my road: I reached a copse outside Desolada, outside the house itself. I was near enough to see that the windows were ablaze with lights, sometimes even I saw people passing behind the blinds of those windows--once I saw my brother's figure and that excited me again to madness. If she were dead I swore that then, too, he should become childless. Her child should become mine, not his. I would have that satisfaction at least.
"Still I drew nearer to the house, so near that I could hear people calling to each other. Once I thought--for now I was quite close--that I could hear the wailing of the negro women-servants--I saw a half-breed dash past me on a mustang, riding as for dear life, and I knew, I divined as surely as if I had been told, that he was gone for the doctor, that she was dying--or was dead. Your father's chance was past."
"Heaven help him!" said Julian Ritherdon. "Heaven help him. It was an awful revenge, taken at an awful moment. Well! You succeeded?"
"Yes, I succeeded. She was dead--I saw that when, an hour later, I crept into the room, and when I took you from out of the arms of the sleeping negro nurse--when, God forgive me, I stole you!"
[CHAPTER III.]
"THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN SUN."
The mustang halted on a little knoll up which the patient beast had been toiling for some quarter of an hour, because upon that knoll there grew a clump of gros-gros and moriche palms which threw a grateful shade over the white, glaring, and dusty track, and Julian Ritherdon, dropping the reins on its drenched and sweltering neck, drew out his cigar-case and struck a light. Also, the negro "boy"--a man thirty years old--who had been toiling along by its side, flung himself down, crushing crimson poinsettias and purple dracæna beneath his body, and grunted with satisfaction at the pause.
"So, Snowball," Julian said to this descendant of African kings, "this ends your journey, eh? I am in the right road now and we have got to say 'Good-bye.' I suppose you don't happen to be thirsty, do you, Pompey?"
"Hoop! Hoop!" grunted the negro, showing a set of ivories that a London belle would have been proud to possess, "always thirsty. Always hungry. Always want tobaccy. Money, too."
"Do you!" exclaimed Julian. "By Jove! you'd make a living as a London johnny. That's what they always want. Pity you don't live in London, Hannibal. Well, let's see."