He took them from the man, set their heads towards the road, loosed them. Then he kicked the stomach of each in turn, and they galloped away. As he guessed, they knew the road and would surely make for it.
As he and Emmie ran off in the opposite direction, he heard the men firing. Then evidently they mounted their mules and started on a stern chase of the galloping hoofs.
Presently he dived with her down a sharp slope until they lodged themselves in a horizontal ravine. They waited there for sunrise, and then worked their way back along the hillside, far below the now silent camp, and onward till they came to the high road. Trudging down the road, they met almost immediately a Chilian officer with a couple of gendarmes. Their troubles were over.
The officer, courteously turning, took them to a place that was at once post-house and barracks, and there provided them with a two-horse wheeled conveyance which he grandiloquently called a carriage. He told Dyke that two troops of cavalry had gone up to the hills, and spoke hopefully of those pests, those disgraces to civilization, being sooner or later cornered and caught. He said that they had been too long permitted. He promised that within a few hours the innkeeper and his wife should be rescued from their precarious situation, that they should suffer no reproaches for any indiscreetness of which they might have been guilty as compelled accomplices of the gang, and that he would hold as a sacred charge the money that Dyke gave him for their future use.
The travellers drove away then, after breakfast, in their carriage—jolting, bumping, making the dust and the stones fly, as they whirled downward side by side; downward, with feathery tree-tops rising to enchant their eyes, green meadows, sparkling streams, brilliant many-coloured flowers—downward into the kindly smiling paradise that nature has spread out between the foot-hills and the sea.
“Oh, for a bath, Emmie! And what price a bed with sheets? That’s what I always tell people. If you want to enjoy—But, by Jove, I’ve forgotten something. The revolver! I must make quite sure.” And he opened the breech of the weapon and emptied the six chambers. “Yes,” he said, “just as I thought.” Three of the cartridges were intact, the other three had been fired. “You saved my life! You killed Martinez.”
And suddenly he burst into tears. The tears ran down in rivulets, melting the dirt, whitening his cheekbones, bringing out the red here and there on his dusty beard. “You killed him,” he sobbed, “dead as mutton. How the devil you missed me in doing it, I don’t know. All—all the more to your credit. Oh, Emmie—my little fragile, delicate girl—the, the bravest creature that ever lived, as well as the most divinely precious. Oh, Emmie, Emmie.”
Miss Verinder, herself affected by emotion with her arm round his neck soothed and quieted him.