The scouts had been despatched; and the main body of the troops waited for marching orders, which were long delayed. Ruiz, closeted with the men who had been most amenable to his reasoning, urged openly the arguments that he had but covertly suggested before. That exhausted apathy which following an exploded project is far more hopeless than that which, merely unignited, precedes its agitation, resisted all his efforts at revival. The officers, like the soldiers, listlessly waited to hear what would happen next, absolutely indifferent to Ruiz, and concerned for the moment in a mere matter of gossip,—the escapade of a young girl.
Toward noon some of the messengers returned. Most of them had nothing to report, but the vaquero Gabriel, the husband of Juana, as soon as he could escape the questioning of Ruiz, disappeared. An hour later he entered the apartment of Doña Isabel.
“What news, Gabriel, what news?” the lady cried excitedly. “Did you come upon any trace of—of the child; of those who have stolen her away?”
The vaquero shook his head, and Doña Isabel groaned. Those few hours had wrought a terrible change in her appearance. She was not young and able to meet shocks of disaster as she had been when they had shaken her in by-gone years.
“I found no trace of them, my Señora,” said the man, slowly. “Perhaps my eyes are not as keen as they were, and they say when one thinks much one sees little. Since I am married I find one must think. A woman gives one abundance for thought. She grinds care for a man more surely than corn for his bread.”
Doña Isabel looked up at him quickly. She knew that this oracular sentence had some bearing on the subject that absorbed her thoughts. “Speak,” she said. “What has your wife to do with this?”
“She was the playmate of the young Señorita,” he suggested.
“True, but what of that?”
“She would be likely to be in her confidence,—at least where there was no other to trust.”
Doña Isabel started, looking at him with fixed attention.