“What! Hasn’t he told you? Señor the ranger is to be hanged at the dawn unless he finds his tongue for Governor Megales. Ho, ho! Our birdie must speak even if he doesn’t sing.” And with that as a parting shot the man clanged the door to after him and locked it.
“You never told me, Bucky. You have been trying to deceive me,” she groaned.
He shrugged his shoulders. “What was the use, girlie? I knew it would worry you, and do no good. Better let you sleep in peace, I thought.”
“While you kept watch alone and waited through the long night. Oh, Bucky!” She crept close to him and put her arms around his neck, holding him tight, as if in the hope that she could keep him against the untoward fate that was reaching for him. “Oh, Bucky, if I could only die for you!”
“Don’t give up, little friend. I don’t. Somehow I’ll slip out, and then you’ll have to live for me and not die for me.”
“What is it that the governor wants you to say that you won’t?”
“Oh, he wants me to sell our friends. I told him to go climb a giant cactus.”
“Of course you couldn’t do that,” she sighed regretfully.
He laughed. “Well, hardly, and call myself a white man.”
“But—” She blanched at the alternative. “Oh, Bucky, we must do something. We must—we must.”