"Your fate?" he demanded.
"I am now a spy confessed. But enough of that when we reach Chihuahua! Until then we shall have no cause for complaint. We go under the escort of Malgares, than whom there is no truer gentleman under the sky."
Pike shook his head doubtfully.
But the next day I had the great pleasure of introducing him to Malgares, who promptly talked himself into the Lieutenant's good graces, and entertained us that evening by ordering a fandango to be danced in our honor by the prettiest girls of the vicinity.
Of our southward journey, which we began on the ninth of March, I will mention only that the first stage alone carried us some three hundred and fifty miles down the valley of the Rio del Norte, to El Paso. The most prominent features of this trip were a notorious arid desert called the Jornada del Muerto, or Journey of the Dead Man, which we avoided by a long detour, and two ranges of mountains to the eastward of the river,—the glittering, snow-clad Sierra Blanca and the Sierra de los Organos,—in whose fastnesses lurk the murderous Apaches, said by Spaniards to be the most terrible of all Indians.
The second day south of El Paso we had to toil across a region of shifting sand hills similar to those at the west end of our pass through the Sangre de Cristo. The stop that evening was made at the Presidio of Carrazal, where, for the first time since our meetings with Governor Allencaster, we were received without the effusive hospitality to which we had become accustomed. When Malgares introduced us to the Commandant, the latter bowed with utmost coolness, and muttered in Spanish an ungracious statement to the effect that Malgares was welcome to his quarters, but that los hereticos could lodge themselves, together with their privates of infantry, in the common hovel provided for travellers.
Malgares bowed his grandest. "Perdone, señor!" he replied. "I could not bring myself to trouble your hospitality. What is good enough for my friends is good enough for me."
Such was Malgares's stateliness of manner that the Commandant, although his superior officer, was bowing in most apologetic fashion before our friend had ceased speaking.
"Perdone, hermano!" he murmured. "I erred most deplorably in imagining that los señores Americanos came as persons under constraint. Con permiso, I hasten to rectify my error by urging them to honor my humble abode with their presence."
"I fear that the Señor Commandant will have to excuse los Americanos," I said.