THE PERSON ON THE OTHER HORSE
"Yet am I sure of one pleasure,
And shortly, it is this:
That, where ye be, me seemeth, parde,
I could not fare amiss."
--_Ballad of the Nut Brown Maid._
Din Driscoll had never remotely imagined that there could be such
intoxication in a horseback ride. The person on the other horse made for
the difference. How the joy of her filled him that instant of his
bursting through the black prison wall into the bright morning of the
world! She, the splendid first thing to gladden his eyes! Could liberty
be really so glorious? Ravishing horsewoman, she was coming to save him.
He had supposed her on her way to Mexico, and 'twas she whom he saw
first of all.
And now, she rode beside him. They two, they were riding together,
alone. The smell of the wild free air of the universe thrilled them both
with an exquisite recklessness. Vague, limitless, subtle in mystery, the
seduction of it was ineffable. Out of the corner of his eye he peeped at
her. But wasn't she perched entrancingly on that dragoon saddle, wasn't
she, though? The richly heavy coils of burnished copper had loosened,
and they were very disconcerting in their suggestion of flowing wealth.
If they _would_ but fall about her shoulders! And the lace from the
slanting hat brim, and the velvet patch near the dimple--the velvet
patch called an assassin. And--what dress was that? Flowered calico?
Yes, and light blue. His cheeks burned as of one surprised in crime, but
the self-possessed young woman herself was oblivious. So was it this, a
blue flowered gown, that made her so suddenly tangible, so tangible and
maddening? The haughty Parisienne of imperial courts was gone. In fact,
she had become so distractingly tangible that--well, he didn't know. But
a lump got into his throat. She might be a Missouri girl, this moment.
And there came to him the vision of one, of a Missouri girl molding
biscuits, patting them, and her arms were bared, in a simple piquancy
just like Jacqueline's now. He even saw the pickaninnies in the shade of
the porch outside, worshiping the real Missouri girl from the very
whites of their eyes. How he had loved to tease her! He could not help
it; she was so daintily prim. That he should thus think of his sister,
the while gazing on the one-time gilded butterfly--to say the least, it
was a pertinent comment on the transmuting magic that lurks in blue
flowered percale.
They slowed to a trot.
"Monsieur is my prisoner, yes," said she in her wonderful English.
He took the other meaning. "I don't know--_yet_," he returned
soberly.
She laughed, and he realized that he had spoken aloud.
He turned on himself in dismay. "What's the matter with me?" he
muttered.
"I think, monsieur," said Jacqueline demurely, "that I have the guess."
"You haven't--you can't guess either! I don't know myself."
"Just the same, I wish I knew so well my chances for heaven."
"But you're mistaken, I tell you. I'm not!"
"Not what, monsieur?"
"In, in--w'y, in love."
Jacqueline's laughter was the merriest peal. In the end he half grinned.
Little use trying to convince the little witch! He had much to do
convincing himself.
On the farther slope of a hill where coffee grew and the giant
sheltering banana hid the road, they paused at a trail that crossed the
highway and wound on down toward the Panuco river, where tropical stuff
for Tampico was transferred from burros to dugout barges. Jacqueline
listened. There were no sounds of pursuit as yet, nor was there any one
in sight. Making up her mind, she changed to the path. Driscoll
followed, with a delight in this new leadership over him.
When they gained the river, she stopped again, and he did too.
"But you must go, on, on!" she protested. "They may not be deceived, no.
They may have you to overtake here." She held out her hand. "There, this
path, you follow it to Tampico. Good bye. Yes, yes, you have not one
minute!"
Driscoll took the little gauntleted hand readily enough. He saw that the
lines of her face were drawn, but her manner was inexorable.
"How do you like your dress?" he inquired.
Had she been on her feet, she would have stamped one of them.
"Monsieur," she cried, "here is no time to observe the replenishment of
a lady's wardrobe. Do you go? I insist. I wish you bon voyage to your
own country, monsieur."
"But it's so far away. I reckon I'd better rest a spell first. A month
or so, prob'bly."
She watched him clamber down and tie Demijohn to the low branch of a
live oak on the river's bank.
"There you are, getting stubborn again," she said. But the lines in her
face had vanished.
"Of course I mean to see you back to your friends," he explained.
"Merci bien. But you will not. You will have this river straight to
Tampico. I say yes!"
She turned her horse as she spoke, whereat he started to remount his
own.
"I think, sir----" she began haughtily.
"The road is free."
"Oh, why have you to be so, so quarrelsome?"
"The temptation, I reckon."
"You really will go back with me?"
"I might be going back along about the same time. It's a public trail."
"Then _I_ will stay, and you _must_! I will not permit you to
go back there now. I will see that you do wait here so long until Lopez
has the time to start to Mexico after you. Then you will be behind him.
Have the goodness to hold my bridle. I think I shall take me a rest a
little also."
Together they sat on a huge live-oak root and watched the sluggish
Panuco flow by.
"No hurry now," Driscoll observed comfortably. "Our scarlet upholstered
colonel won't get away for years yet."
Years, at least, were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her
quaintly inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned
it in London long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her
father played France's diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers,
then, was as broad as Mayfair, and to the Missourian doubly foreign, and
doubly alluring.
"I cannot understand," she said, "why it is the Dragoons have not
followed you immediately?"
"Tibby's the reason, I reckon. That Tibby is a deep one."
She made him explain, and he told her. The blackmailing humorist,
Tiburcio, had paid him a visit at his dungeon window during the night.
Being chief witness for the prosecution, Tiburcio could pass the sentry
unchallenged.
"Come for your money?" Driscoll had inquired, and Tiburcio seemed hurt.
"What is the matter," Tiburcio demanded, "with pointing a revolver at
the Senor Americano right now, and making him deliver?"
Driscoll had not figured out what the objections might be, but he
reckoned some would materialize.
"But," said Tiburcio, "I'm not doing it, and why? Simply because I want
to know if you care to escape?"
"W'y," returned Driscoll, "I'll think it over, and let you know in the
morning," at which lack of confidence Tiburcio was more hurt than ever.
"What's the use," Driscoll objected, "they'd catch me again?"
"Not if I fixed their horses, and if I do, will you promise to get out?"
And thus the bargain had stood, and thus it was fulfilled, though at the
last the anxious Tiburcio had called in Jacqueline to help.
"Now," said the marchioness, settling herself for a treat, "I
_must_ know. Tame for me the miracle, explain it. I cannot longer
hold my curiosity. But it was fine--exquis--however you have done it!"
"Weren't they a surprised lot, though?"
"But the miracle, monsieur! The miracle!"
"Well, it was this way. Being on the yawning brink--as old Meagre
Shanks, friend of mine, would say--I figured it out that lacking in
godliness, I'd try to get the next best thing."
"Please, monsieur!"
"That I'd try to get a bath."
"Of dust and mud, for example?"
At that Driscoll ceased all miracle taming and brushed himself off. But,
putting him back into his dungeon, one will recall how he plotted to
obtain two jars of water. This water he used simply to soften the hard,
sun-baked adobes. First he hung his coat over the window. A suspicious
guard naturally wanted to know why, and Driscoll appeared at the bars
stripped to the waist. To keep out the cold air while he bathed, he
said, and his teeth chattered. Then he went back to work. He handled his
precious water with desperate economy. He began at the exposed end of
one adobe brick, soaking it as needed and digging it out with a chip of
earthenware knocked off one of the jars. The wall was two adobe lengths
in thickness, but after he had gotten out his first brick, it was easy,
by tugging and kicking, to tear out the others of the inside tier, since
luckily they did not dovetail in with the outer ones. Soon he had an
arch-shaped niche in the wall almost as high as his head when mounted on
Demijohn. The really tedious part remained, and it was an all night job.
To deepen the niche without breaking through, he had to scrape it out
piecemeal, wetting the dried mud as he toiled. He measured carefully
just how much of the thickness to leave, because the weed stalks in the
adobe could not be trusted to hold too thin a crust, and also he had to
take care that the water did not soak entirely through and make a
tell-tale blot on the outside when daylight should come. It was an
infinitely laborious task, and even with completion at last, there was
yet the question--which would break first, bone or masonry?
But he would learn when he should dash his horse's skull and his own
against the shell that remained. He saddled Demijohn, filled an empty
jar with the soft earth of his excavations, and waited. His dramatic
appearance at the instant of the door's opening was not a coincidence.
It was minute calculation. Already mounted, he faced the wall, with the
heavy jar poised over his head in both hands, his spurs drawn back to
strike. He waited until sentinels and shooting squad had gathered at the
door. He waited to draw their fire, to empty their muskets. But he did
not wait until the door should open enough to give them unimpeded aim.
In the second of its opening he drove back the spurs, hurled the jar
against the wall, and--crashed through his dungeon as easily as breaking
a sucked egg.
"But," demanded Jacqueline eagerly, "how is it you did feel?" She was
disappointed that the personal equation had had so little prominence.
"I don't recollect," said Driscoll, puzzled, "there was nothing hurting
especially."
"No, no! Your sensations facing death, then escaping?"
He brightened. "W'y yes," he replied, happy to catch her meaning. "I
felt toler'ble busy."
She sighed despairingly. Yet there was plenty left her for wonderment,
and in it she revelled.
"Ingenuity!" she mused. "I declare, I believe the first human being to
stand up on his hind legs must have been an American. It simply occurred
to him one day that he didn't need all fours for walking, and that he
might as well use his before-feet for something else."
"And a Frenchman, Miss Jack-leen?"
She flung up her hands.
"_He!_" she exclaimed. "If ever a compatriot of mine had gotten
that idea into his--how you say?--pate, would he not carry it out to the
idiotic limit, yes? He? _He_ would try to walk without any feet
whatever, and use _all_ of them for other things. Already you have
seen him doing the, the pugilat--the box--with every one of his fours.
Voila!"
But time was passing. Lopez had certainly repaired his girths by this
time. Driscoll arose. "There's a shorter way back," he announced. "The
river junction can't be far down stream, and I'll wait for you there,
Miss Jack-leen, while you scout on ahead to the hacienda house. If all's
clear, you signal and I will advance with the heavy cavalry."
"C'est bien, mon colonel."
"Whatever that means, I hope it ain't mutiny."
At best it was only mock compliance. Jacqueline also knew that time was
passing, but she had not mentioned the fact. Now the reason transpired.
She harked back on their separation, with a grave earnestness and a
saddened air of finality. He was to leave her here, she said. He was to
go back to his own country. How badly had his reception fared so far?
Why not, then, leave Mexico to ingratitude, and have done? The romantic
land of roses was notoriously a blight to hopes. Why should he seek to
thrive despite the mysterious curse that seemed to hover over all things
like a deadly miasma?
Driscoll shook his head. "You know I have come to see Maximilian."
"But you are under sentence. You will lose your life."
"Miss Jack-leen, you said a while back that I was your prisoner. You
have the Austrian escort. All right. You will deliver me to the
Emperor," and he waved his hand as though the matter was arranged.
"But monsieur," she cried, "may not others have plans as vital as yours?
And, perhaps--yes, you interfere."
He did interfere, in grimmest truth. Leaving the Sphinx of the
Tuileries, she had come with her mission, and with an idea, too, of the
obstacles that must be vanquished. But here, almost at landing, she
encountered a barrier left out of her calculations, and which alone,
unaided, she had to surmount. It was the surrender of the Confederacy,
and what this upsetting complication meant against her own errand was
embodied in the man before her. For in him lay the results of the
Surrender as affecting the Mexican empire. In a word, he brought aid for
Maximilian at the moment when Maximilian might be discouraged enough to
give way to France; when the forgetful prince might gladly leave all to
the generous nation which had placed him on his throne and which by him
was cheated of the reward of its costly empire building. Should the
French threaten to withdraw, should they in reality withdraw, still he
would not abdicate, not with Confederate veterans to replace the
pantalons rouges. Like the dog of the fable, Maximilian would cling to
the manger.
"Oui, oui, monsieur," she repeated sharply, "you interfere!"
"In that case," said Driscoll quietly, "I will leave you at the river
junction. When I see that you are safely at the hacienda----"
"You will go back to America?"
"That need not worry you."
"Then you are _not_ going back, back to your own country?" He would
keep on to the City alone. She would have no chance to intercept him.
After all Fate had been good to her--no, cruel!--to cast him in her
path. "You might find the Austrian escort safer than going alone," she
said enticingly.
He hesitated. What all this was about, he could not imagine. He knew
nothing, naturally, of the dark intrigues of an enigmatical adventurer
far away in the Tuileries, nor how they could affect him. And so he put
away as absurd the fancy that she in her turn might interfere with him.
Besides, he was tempted.
"It's a go!" he said.
She for her part was thinking, hoping, rather, that perhaps she was
mistaken. Perhaps he only bore the offer of a paltry few hundred, a
handful of homeseekers from his regiment. She hoped so. She would have
prayed for it, had praying occurred to her.