“I pushed back the bolt, also I spoke, but it did not seem me! That is strange, but of a truth I did not know the voice I heard say: ‘Enter, her body is yours––and she no longer flees from you.’
“‘Ha! That is good sense at last!’ said José, and Conrad laughed and praised himself as a lover.
“‘I told you so!’ he grunted. ‘The little dear one knows that a nice white German is not so bad!’
“And again I heard the voice strange to me say, ‘She knows nothing, José––and she knows all!’
“José stumbled in smiling, but Conrad, though drunk, stopped at the door when he saw my hand with the knife. I thought my skirt covered it as I waited for him––for the child had told me enough––I––I failed, Ramon! His oath was a curious choked scream as I tried to reach him. I do not know if it was the knife, or the dead girl on the bed made him scream like that, but I knew then the German was at heart a coward.
“José was too strong for me, and the knife could not do its work. I was struck, and my head muffled in a serape. After that I knew nothing.
“Days and nights went by in a locked room. I never got out of it until I was chained hand and foot and sent north in a peon’s ox-cart. Men guarded me until Marto with other men waited for me on the trail. José Perez could have had me killed, yes. Or he could have had me before the judges for murder, but silence was the thing he most wanted––for there is Doña Dolores Terain yet to be won. He has sent me north that the General Terain, her father, will think me out of his life. One of the guards told an alcalde I was his wife, he was sure that story would be repeated back to Hermosillo! These are days in Sonora when no one troubles about one woman or one child who is out of sight, and we may be sure he and Conrad had a well-made story to tell. He knows it is now all over with me, that I have a hate of which he is afraid, so he does not have me shot;––he only sends me to Soledad in the wilderness where fighting bands of the revolution cross all trails, and his men have orders that I am not to go out of the desert alive.”
“I see!” said Rotil thoughtfully, “and––it is all gone now––the love of him?”
“All the love in the world is gone, amigo,” she said, looking away from him through the barred window where the night sky was growing bright from the rising moon. “I was a child enchanted by the glory of the world and his love words. Out of all that false glitter of life I have walked, a blackened soul with a murderer’s hand. How could love be again with me?”
He looked at her steadily, the slender thing of creamy skin and Madonna eyes that had been the Dream of Youth to him, the one devotee at an altar in whom he had believed––nothing in the humanity of the world would ever have faith of his again!