She did not stir. "I think I'll stay with you, Jimsy."
His voice was ugly now. "When I don't want you? When I tell you I'd rather be alone?"
Honor was still for a long moment. She rose and went to the door but she turned to look at him, a steady, intent scrutiny. "All right, Jimsy. I'll go. I'll leave you alone. I'll leave you alone because—I know I can leave you alone." She seemed to have forgotten Carter's presence. She held up the hand which wore the old Italian ring with the hidden blue stone of constancy. "I'm 'holding hard,' Jimsy."
Soon after dark Yaqui Juan came. He had been waiting for three hours, trying to get past the sentries; it had been impossible while there was any light. He was footsore and weary and had only a little water in his canteen, but he had found the telephone wires still up at the second hacienda, the owner had got the message off for him, and help was assuredly on the way to them. There was the off chance, of course, that the soldiers might be held up by another wing of the insurrectos, but there was every reason to hope for their arrival next day. Jimsy King sent the Yaqui up to Honor with the canteen, and the Indian returned to say that the Señorita had not touched one drop but had given it to the master.
Carter dragged himself away to his room and Jimsy and Yaqui Juan talked long together in the quiet sala. It was a cramped and halting conversation with the Indian's scant English and the American's halting Spanish; sometimes they were unable to understand each other, but they came at last to some sort of agreement, though Juan shook his head mutinously again and again, murmuring—"No, no! Señor Don Diego! No!"
It was almost midnight when Jimsy called them all down into the sala. They came, wondering, one by one, Carter, Mrs. King,—Richard King had fallen asleep after his half dozen swallows of water—and Honor, and Josita, her head muffled in her rebozo, her brown fingers busy with her beads.
Jimsy King was standing in the middle of the room, standing insecurely, his legs far apart, the decanter in his hand, the decanter which had been more than half full when Honor left the room and had now less than an inch of liquor in it. Yaqui Juan, his face sullen, his eyes black and bitter, crouched on the floor, his arms about his knees.
Honor did not speak at all. She just stood still, looking at Jimsy until it seemed as if she were all eyes. "It comes so suddenly,"—Carter had told her—"like the boa constrictor's hunger ... and then he was just—an appetite."
"Ladies'n gem'mum," said Jimsy, thickly, "goin' shing you lil' song!" Then, in his hoarse and baffled voice he sang Stanford's giddy old saga, "The Son of a Gambolier."