“Clumsy gringo! Great big stupid! I should say you did hurt me, and you manage a lassoo as badly as possible.... But never mind! As long as you caught that bad man with me, and as long as I said that you’d have to catch me that way if you wanted me ... here I am!”
And puckering up her lips she blew him a kiss, as a kind of promise of what his reward would be when later they should find means of being alone.
At dusk the expedition reached La Presa, after a short halt at the Rojas ranch where they found Sebastiana. The half-breed, at sight of her young mistress, burst out into loud exclamations of joy, which later were transformed into cries of indignation when she saw the marks on Celinda’s face. In the midst of her indignant vituperations, the marquesa’s name escaped her, in spite of Robledo’s commands to her that she be discreet. And finally she ended up by telling Rojas all that she knew of the interview between the “señorona” and Manos Duras, and of all that she suspected it signified.
Sebastiana, quite as a matter of course, decided to remain at the ranch, and did not consider it necessary to ask don Carlos’ permission to do so. The rancher himself, however, urged Watson to stay with him until the following day, when he would accompany his guest to town.
“I have some urgent business to attend to at La Presa, just a few things to say to a certain person there,” said don Carlos in a voice so soft it was terrifying to hear. Robledo divining his intentions tried to dissuade him from the trip.
“Leave me alone, don Manuel. I’m going to see that woman. You know what she tried to do to my girl. All I want is to pick up her skirts and give her a thrashing with this whip of mine, so....”
And he snapped the leather thong of his short riding-whip.
Convinced finally that there was no deterring don Carlos from his purpose, Robledo finally consented to being accompanied by him to the settlement. The fury of his combat with the gaucho had not yet abated in Celinda’s father, but Robledo hoped that within a few hours it would have subsided a little.
When they reached the main street, the rescue party found nearly the whole population of La Presa assembled to meet them. The men, riding ahead, gave out the news of the skirmish as they passed by the different groups and their words sped through the crowd with startling rapidity. There was general and frankly expressed rejoicing at the death of Manos Duras, as though the town had by that event been freed from a dangerous menace. Some of the men went so far as to lament the fact that the comisario should have left the three prisoners under guard at Dead Squaw ranch until they could be conveyed to the prison of the territory. With that ferocity which always manifests itself in a crowd when finally it has been liberated from something that it feared, the men and women who had gathered to hear the news would have liked to tear these friends of the dead gaucho’s to pieces, in order to be avenged for the terror he had inspired in them when he was alive.
Suddenly the throng caught at something that promised the satisfaction of its most ferocious instincts. A few of Sebastiana’s words were repeated, and in a twinkling the whole story was out. So it was the great señora, the “señorona” who, with Manos Duras, had planned this terrible act of vengeance! A vengeance which seemed more like the horrible things they had heard tell of, or that they themselves had seen in the movies, than anything they had ever witnessed in actual life. To think that that white-skinned gringa had tried to kill the ranch girl, their own Flor de Rio Negro, daughter of the land and the friend of every one of them!