THE LAND OF THE MONTEZUMAS
“Father Crawford, do read that newspaper! The war has begun! They are fighting great battles on the Rio Grande! Oh, how I wish you hadn’t sent Ned to Mexico! He may get killed!”
She was a woman of middle age, tall, fine-looking, and she was evidently much excited. She was standing at one end of a well-set breakfast table, and was holding out a printed sheet to a gentleman who had been looking down at his plate, as if he were asking serious questions of it.
“My dear,” he said, as he took the paper, “I knew it was coming, but I didn’t think it would come so soon as this. I don’t really see that Ned is in any danger. Captain Kemp will take care of him.”
“But,” she said, “the Goshawk may be captured.”
“No,” replied Mr. Crawford, confidently. “She hasn’t sailed across prairie to the Rio Grande. There won’t be any fighting at Vera Cruz for ever so long. There can’t be any on the sea, for Mexico has no navy. The Goshawk is entirely safe, and so is Ned. It’ll be a grand experience for him.”
“I don’t want him to have so much experience at his age,” she said, anxiously. “I’d rather he’d be at home,—if there’s going to be a war.”
“I’ve often wished that I could see a war,” replied her husband, as he glanced over the black-typed headings of the newspaper columns. “I’ve travelled a good deal in Mexico, and I wanted Ned to learn all he could of that country. He will hardly have any chance to do so now.”
“He might see too much of it if he were taken prisoner,” she exclaimed. “I can’t bear to think of it! Oh, how I wish he were at home!”
Mr. Crawford was silent, and again he appeared to be thinking deeply. He was not a pale-faced man at any time, but now his color was visibly increasing. His face was also changing its expression, and it wore a strong reminder of the look which had come into his son Ned’s countenance when the fever of Mexican exploration took hold of him. People say “like father, like son,” and it may be that Ned’s readiness for a trip into the interior belonged to something which had descended to him from a father who had been willing to educate his son for the southern trade by sending him to sea with Captain Kemp. The United States has had a great many commercial men of that stamp, and there was a time when almost all the navy the nation possessed was provided by the merchant patriots, who armed and sent out, or themselves commanded, its fleets of privateers. Very likely the Crawfords and a number of other American families could point back to as adventurous an ancestry as could any Spaniard whose forefathers had fought Moors or won estates for themselves in Mexico or Peru. As for Mrs. Crawford, she was hardly able to drink her coffee that morning, after reading the newspaper, and she might have been even more willing to have Ned come home if she had known what had become of the Goshawk, and in what company he was a couple of hours after she arose from her table.