Saying which the Presidente left his desk, clapped his hands for the

orderly, and seated himself near the window. To the orderly he said, "Go

to the diligence office across the Plaza. Ask for Colonel Driscoll, the

American officer who commands the escort of the two lawyers. Say that I

wish to see him here at once."

When Driscoll appeared, Juarez put to him this question, "Colonel--I'll

say 'General' whenever you decide to be a citizen among us--Colonel, can

you reach Queretaro early to-morrow morning by riding all night?"

"Not with my own horse, sir. He's getting old, and deserves better."

"Then it's all right, senor. You will take any horse you want. I have

telegraphed to stop the execution, but there's been no reply. You must

therefore see General Escobedo yourself. Look on my desk. Do you find a

packet there?"

"Yes."

"Sealed? Well, break it open. Now read the contents to my visitor here."

Driscoll unfolded a long sheet of foolscap, and began to read. Murguia

the while fidgeted in an agony, but listening further, his limbs grew

tense, and a hideous joy overspread his face.

"'But at sunrise of the nineteenth you will execute the sentence already

approved.'"

The prisoners were not to be deceived by false hopes. There would be no

further appeal. The last, the final decision, had been made.

"I have signed it, I believe, Colonel Driscoll?"

"Yes."

"Then seal it again, and hurry! Good-bye, sir, good-bye."

When Driscoll was gone, the Benemerito of America turned to the grinning

hyena-like old man who was his visitor. His own dark features were

passionless, impenetrable.

"You observe, senor," he said, "that Justice does not require

corrupting, nor even a memory. So let El Chaparrito add this to his

philosophy, that he need not boast again of an infallible spur to civic

loyalty, for he will never find it, nor I. And yet--there is

patriotism."

CHAPTER XIX

IN ARTICULO MORTIS

"The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty

of the soul.... Man cannot be happy and strong until he lives

in the present."--_Emerson._

For Maximilian it was the eve of execution. The soul feels that there is

much to decide at such a time, but under the nettling merciless load the

soul will either flounder pitifully and decide nothing, else lie numb

and in a half death vaingloriously believe that it has decided

everything. So may the condemned be open-eyed or blind. Or, according to

the police reporter, be either coward or stoic. But it really depends in

large measure on whether realization be dulled, or no.

Maximilian had too late come to understand that his anointed flesh was

violable at all. He learned it only when the death watch was actually

set on his each remaining breath. And now he was _en capilla_, in

the chapel of the doomed; he, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of

Austria, Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, Count of Hapsburg, Prince of

Lorraine, Emperor of Mexico, even He!

They had given him the tower room of Queretaro's old Capuchin church,

and against the wall was an improvised altar. But the sacrament waited.

The tapers on the snow-white cloth were as yet unlighted. Instead the

Most Serene Archduke--Emperor no longer--read from a battered volume of

Universal History, which, with a book's queer vagaries, had strayed into

his cell. He read how Charles of England had died, then he paused,

blinking at the two candles on the rough table. They were vague shapes,

they were horrors, which he now began to see, as the visions of Truth so

often are when hazily perceived.

He bitterly envied that unhappy Stuart, who, before his palace window,

among Cavaliers and Roundheads, had died in majesty, the bright central

figure in a tragedy of august magnitude. But for the Hapsburg how

sordid, how mean, it all would be! He could see already the gaping,

yellow faces, sympathetic in their stupidity. _They_ would not

really know that a prince was dying. The very guard with shouldered

bayonet outside his door was a deserter, and it was this man, more than

aught else, that gave him to chafe against his ignoble lot. The fellow

never uttered a word, indeed; but he had a heavy, malignant eye, and

each time he passed the large inner window that opened on the corridor

he would look into the cell, as though to locate his prisoner. Then

Maximilian could feel the insolent, mocking gleam upon himself, until

for rage he clenched his fist.

Thus the Most Serene Archduke's first perception of calamity was not

that royal blood was to flow, but that it was to flow obscurely. Even

the ancient raven curse, the curse of the Habicht which had given his

House its very name, was now fulfilled by unclean buzzards. He saw them

each day, perched on the neighboring roofs.

He sighed and turned to his book. Universal History? Yes, but for

hundreds and hundreds of years that history of millions and millions of

people was no more than the record of his own little family group. Such

a course of reading for such a man held a terrible grandeur, and it must

have been a unique sensation of pride that touched the golden-bearded,

ultra-refined viking prince. A spoilt child he was, and though so

cruelly reproved by Life, he yet could learn no lesson in the passing

footnote that _he_ would add to that family record. He could not

see that the light which made the printed characters so dazzling, yet

distorted them. He could not know that the commonest man of the millions

and millions might read that Universal History by quite a different and

a calmer light. But he was aware of the sentinel's tread back of him,

and aware too of the fellow's coarse, familiar leer.

One consolation he felt he might have had, and this was the dignity of

martyrdom. But no one, alas, seemed to regard him as a martyr at all. He

had begged that he alone should suffer. But the play at knightly

generosity was too shallow. For at the time Maximilian believed that he

would not suffer in any case. Later, though, when he knew that he must

die, then with simple earnestness he had pleaded for Miramon and Mejia,

and forgot himself altogether. But Juarez had hardly more than

acknowledged the telegram, and now in the cell next him Miramon was

confessing, and in the cell on his other side Mejia waited. Each of

these two men would leave a wife and child.

Someone knocked. "No, father, not yet," Maximilian answered gently,

although his mood was impatience. The confessor sighed in protest

against the waste of precious time, but he did not move away, as he had

already twice before during the night. Instead he came and stood at the

corridor window. His lip trembled pityingly. There was news, he said.

Maximilian pushed back the book, and was on his feet. The priest meeting

his eager look, shook his head sadly.

"It comes from--from Miramar."

Maximilian fell back. One hand groped out involuntarily, as in appeal

before a blow. "News of Charlotte?" he asked faintly.

Charlotte was dead, the priest told him.

During a long time, after the priest had gone, his head lay on his arms,

between the two candles. He heard no more the sentry challenges, nor

sensed the menace in every slightest sound of the dark night outside.

There was something else. "Death?" At first he did not consciously

strive for an answer. But the question kept falling, and falling again,

as a lash. The vulgar hands which plied the scourge, the stupid yellow

faces, these no longer mattered. He felt the blows themselves, only the

blows.

She had died, the poor maniac! She had died, a thing for the lowliest

pity. And this was true of the haughty child of Orleans because she had

wanted a throne. Slowly her husband raised his head; and staring at the

wall, his tear-dimmed eyes opened wider and wider. Because she had

wanted a throne? Because she had wanted a dais above the meek and lowly,

above those who now pitied her! His eyes fell on the Universal

History--the family record, and there grew in his eyes a look of

detestation. Groaning suddenly, he buried his head again in his arms.

At dawn he too was to die, and because he too had craved a sceptre. Yet,

and yet, he had meant to be an instrument of good. Born of kings,

anointed by the Vicar of Christ, he had come as agent from the Almighty.

But God had failed to sustain him, God had--again the blue eyes raised,

but dry now, and stark in terror. "Yes, yes, yes," so his reeling soul

cried to him, "there _is_ a God! There is, there is!" One sharp

breath, and the mortal fear passed. In ghastly panic he crept back from

the brink, either of the atheist's despair or of the madman's chaos. But

the cost was heavy. Since God did exist, and God yet had failed him,

then it was the man's Divine Right that must be false. He, only a man,

had mistaken his Destiny. Nay, had he a Destiny? Or why, more than

another man? Here, then, was the cost. To keep his hope of Heaven, he

stepped down among the millions and millions. His Divine Right,

crumbling under the grandeur of partition among the millions, became for

himself the most infinitesimal of shares, neither greater nor less than

that of any other human being. But glorified now by the holy alchemy of

Charity, the tiny grain became divine indeed, and he beheld it as a

glowing spark, his own inalienable share in the rights of man. So, for a

moment, the poet prince knew again his old-time exultation. Even Truth,

he now perceived, had her sublimities.

But the pall of horror fell again. To-morrow he was to die. He was to

die because his life long he had sought to rob others of the tiny grain,

of their God-given dignity as men, and that too, even as they were

awaking to its possession. The vanity, the presumptuous, inconsistent

vanity of it all! Under the dark mediaeval cloak he had planned

enlightenment, he, who had tried to rule without parliament, without

constitution! He would have made a people believe in God's injustice, in

God's choice of a man like them to be a demigod over them. Hence the

blasphemous demigod had now to answer to human law. And it was meet and

right. Purgatory was beginning on the eve of his death.

He, the torch of Progress! Maximilian smiled scornfully on himself. He

was only a clod of grit caught in the world's great wheels. The foreign

substance had wrought a discordant screech for a moment, and then was

mercilessly ground into powder and thrust out of the bearings. He

pondered on the first days of the Family Group, when there was

extenuation; more, when there was necessity, for a king. At any rate the

monarch then earned, or could earn, his pomp and state by services

actually rendered. And now? The Hapsburg decided that there was not a

more contemptible parasite on the body politic. The crowned head was

simply the first among paupers. He had his bowl of porridge, which was

the civil list.

The doomed prince sank to a depth of shame that may not be conceived. He

was humanity's puny infant. He had dawdled among men centuries older

than himself. His whole being was out of harmony with the universe. Fate

had held his soul fast during those Dark Ages when he might have striven

nobly, and now had cast it forth, an anachronism. It was a soul

misplaced in eternity. The dire realization grew and grew, and with it

the tragic agony, until with a sudden and the bitterest of cries he

flung up his arms and fell heavily across the table.

"My life!" he moaned in piteous begging for something he might not have.

"My life, to live my life over again!"

In the first light of morning Escobedo came. The Republican general

unfolded a paper, and began to read. But instead of the death sentence,

it was reprieve. President Juarez had postponed execution for three

days.

"Three days?" Maximilian repeated, wearily shaking his head. "If your

Republic could give me as many centuries, but three days!--Three days,

in which to _live_ my life!"

CHAPTER XX

KNIGHTHOOD'S BELATED FLOWER

"Trusting to shew, in wordes few,

That men have an ill use

(To their own shame) women to blame,

And causeless them accuse."

--_The Nut-Brown Maid._

Later the same morning there sounded the ineffable swish of silken

petticoats along the corridor and the clinking of high heels on the

tiles. La Senorita Marquesa d'Aumerle had obtained permission to visit

His Most Serene Highness. The sentinel of the evening before was again

on duty, and his evil crossed eye seemed to lighten with vast humor as

he presented arms for the lady to pass. She met his insolence with a

searching, level gaze.

Maximilian hastened to the door of his bare cell, and took both her

hands in his. "I am beginning to recognize my friends," he said simply.

"I know, I know," he added, "you come to tell me that you failed to get

the pardon. But you do bring reprieve."

He would have her believe that he valued that.

Jacqueline regarded steadily the tall, slight figure in black, with the

pinioned sheep of the Golden Fleece about his neck, and she sighed. She

was disappointed in him. She had thought that pride of race, if nothing

more, would give him character during these last moments. She allowed,

too, for the grief, and the remorse, in the blow of Charlotte's death.

But she was not prepared for the roving eyes, the disordered mind, the

feverish unrest of the condemned prince. Had his soul, then, been a

cringing one throughout the night just past? It was the first time she

had seen him, except at a distance, since the day she arrived in

Queretaro, for she had chosen, and perhaps maliciously, to disconcert

the tongue of slander. Hence she could not picture the ravages of

sickness and anxiety, until now when she beheld his haggard face. It was

one to bring a pang. The cheeks were hollow, the lines sharply drawn,

and the skin was white, so very white, with never a fleck of pink

remaining. And staring from the wasted flesh were the eyes, large and

round and faded blue, and in them an appealing, a haunted look. But they

softened at sight of her, as though comforted already.

"A reprieve is best," he said. "You cannot think that I want a pardon,

now that, that _she_ is dead!"

"But sire----"

"'Sire'? Ah, my lady, you are a little late, by something like a few

hundred years. You see our American was right after all; a letter no

longer makes a king."

It was a bon mot that Maximilian had always enjoyed, it being his own,

but this time he was most zealously in earnest.

"Monsieur, then," she said, in no mood for reforms of etiquette. "Only,

let me talk! We have three days, three days which are to be used. Your

Highness must escape!"

But now she understood him less than before, for he only smiled wearily.

It was, then, something else than fear that had broken him so.

Escape? And that guard in the corridor? Passing, ever passing, the

diabolical humorist seemed to chuckle inwardly, as though to stand

death-watch were the most exquisite of jokes.

"That man?" whispered Jacqueline. "Why, that's Don Tiburcio. He was

driven out of the Imperialist ranks by Father Fischer. But from his

lips, this very night, Your Highness will hear that the road is open to

Vera Cruz. Ah sire--monsieur--we have been working, we others. There

will be horses ready, there will be a long ride, and then, you will

safely board an Austrian ship waiting for you."

Maximilian slowly shook his head. "No," he said, "I am ready to die,

as--as ready as I shall ever be."

"But the remaining years of your natural life, Your Highness counts them

as nothing! Yet you might live twice your present age!"

"My life--over again," he murmured dreamily.

"Of course, why not?"

"One year to redeem each year that has gone."

"Years of Destiny!" she cried, thinking to touch him there.

"No!" he exclaimed, so harshly and quick that it startled her. "But for

me they will be years of dearest mercy. Wait, tell me first, Miramon and

Mejia----"

"Yes, yes, we will save them too. Only, the risk is greater."

"Bien!" He had almost accepted, but he smothered the word, and starting

up, began to pace the room. At last he stopped. "The risk must be

lessened, for them," he said. "_I_ will remain."

"H'm'n," the girl ejaculated, "Hamlet declines? Then there will be no

play at all, at all."

Maximilian knew how stubborn she could be; and so, reluctantly, he

joined the plot.

"I have deserved Marquez and Fischer and Lopez," he sighed. "But why

there should be friends, even now, that I cannot understand."

Yet she told him bluntly why she wanted his safety. It was on France's

account. Still, his gratitude was no less profound. She who would give

life to others, what was her life to be henceforth? The mellowing

sorrow, which her vivacity could not hide, smote him again, as it had

that evening in Mexico when he came to her for counsel. He remembered.

Out of a useless ambition for her country she had squandered her name,

blighted her future. He remembered how, looking on her saddened face, he

had been exalted to a pure devotion, and had burned with knightly fervor

to do her some impossible service. But what was the service? There his

memory failed, and he despised the chivalrous ardor which could be

quenched with feeding on itself. After the fearful vigil of the night

before, he had found a suit of armor beside him. In a word, he had

forgotten self. Simple compassion was enough. That service? that

service? If he could only remember. But he must. And in hot anger he

strode back and forth, while Jacqueline sat and gazed in wonder. Once,

turning from the corridor window, he paused. The guard had stopped a

man, who now was evidently waiting until the prisoner should be

unoccupied. Unseen himself, Maximilian recognized in the man the

American named Driscoll. And then he remembered. He remembered

Jacqueline's secret, betrayed to him that evening in Mexico. He

remembered that her happiness was lost in the loss of this man's

respect. Here, at last, lay the impossible service!

Maximilian glanced toward her stealthily. No, from where she sat she

could not see the corridor, could not see the waiting American. A moment

later Maximilian stood behind her; and when he spoke, she thought it odd

that he should change from French to halting English.

"Miss d'Aumerle," he began, in distinct if nervous phrasing, "yes, it

was for France, all, all of which you haf done. Therefore is it that you

haf come to this country, and here to Queretaro, whatever is to the

contrary said."

"De grace," she laughed, rising abruptly, "there's enough to do to-day

without discussing----"

But he intercepted her even as she opened the door.

"Will Your Highness kindly let me pass?"

"And I know, I alone, that nefer haf you toward myself once felt, once

shown, that which----"

A sharp, indignant cry escaped her. Following her gaze he saw the

American pass on down the corridor and out of hearing.

"Now who," exclaimed the chagrined prince, "would ever have imagined

such delicacy of breeding!"

"And don't ever again," cried Jacqueline furiously, "imagine that

_I_ stand in need of being righted!" Wherewith she too was gone,

leaving her clumsy knight staring blankly after her.

A few moments later Driscoll knocked.

It was the first meeting of these two men since the memorable afternoon

at Cuernavaca, when Driscoll had surprised Jacqueline listening to

royalty's shameless suit. Now he beheld Fatality's retribution for that

day's bitterness. Retribution, yes. But it was not restitution. The girl

he loved had just passed him in the corridor with a slight casual nod,

and he would not, could not, stretch forth a hand to stop her. Instead,

the smile so ironical of Fate had touched his lips.

"I was sent by Senor Juarez, sir," he addressed the archduke in the tone

of military business. "The President is afraid your three days of

reprieve will be misunderstood. He sent for me as I was leaving San Luis

yesterday, and I--I was to tell you----"

"You need not hesitate, colonel."

"Well, that you must not hope for pardon, for the sentence will

positively be carried out day after to-morrow. That--I believe that is

all."

"But--" Maximilian called, staying him. "Dios mio, such news merits a

longer telling. It seems to me too, Senor Americano, that you should

enjoy it the more, since it was partly you who brought me to this."

"I don't know as I'd thought of that. How?"

"You ask how? Do you forget how you took the traitor Lopez to Escobedo,

the night I was betrayed?"

Driscoll swung bluntly round on his questioner. "No I don't," he

replied. "But you see, there was such a lot of bloodshed scheduled for

the next day?"

"Isn't that rather a curious reproof from a soldier? Loyal hearts would

have bled, yes, and gladly. Noble fellows, they would have saved their

Emperor!"

Driscoll half snorted, and turned on his heel. But he stopped, his lips

pressed to a clean, hard line. "What of those townsmen in the trenches?"

he demanded. "It wasn't their fight."

Maximilian's eyes opened very wide, and slowly his expression changed.

The thick lower lip drooped and quivered. Suddenly he came nearer the

American, a trembling hand outstretched.

"I was saved that," he murmured earnestly.

"They were," the grim trooper corrected him.

"The townsmen, yes. But I--I was kept from murder. God in heaven, I

would have murdered them! Ah, senor, if I could put to my account a

night's work such as yours, that night, when you used the traitor! I

could almost thank Lopez. I do thank you."

Still Driscoll failed to notice the proffered hand. He might have, had

he seen his suppliant's face, and the tense anguish there.

"Those innocent non-combatants, then," Maximilian went on, "so they

counted more than a prince with you?"

"Of course, there were a thousand of 'em."

The other's haggard look gave way to a smile, half sad, half amused, and

taking the American by the shoulder in a grip almost affectionate, he

said, "Colonel, did you ever happen to know of one Don Quixote of La

Mancha? Well, lately I've begun to think that he was the truest of

gentlemen, though now I believe I could name another who----"

"And," interrupted Driscoll, "did you ever try to locate the most

dignified animal that walks, bipeds not excepted? Well, sir, it's the

donkey. Take him impartially, and you'll say so too."

The strain was over. Maximilian laughed. "If Don Quixote had only had

your sanity!" he began; "or rather," he added, charmed with the conceit,

"if knighthood had had it, then the poor don would never have been

needed to be born at all."

Ignoring the sincerity of the Hapsburg's new philosophy, and how

tragically it was grounded, Driscoll only smiled in a very peculiar way.

Knighthood? The word was supercilious cant, and irritated him. During

that very moment, while listening to Chivalry's devotee, the young

trooper thought of a little ivory cross in his pocket, a cross which was

stained with a girl's blood. Murguia had given it to him, to give to

Maximilian on the eve of execution. But Driscoll had not promised, and

yet Murguia had implored him to take it, even without promising. The old

man held faith in vengeance as a spring to drive all souls alike, and if

Maximilian's last earthly moment could be embittered with sight of a

cross, then, he firmly believed, the American needed only to be tempted

with the means to do it. Moreover, in a sudden impulse, Driscoll had

taken the holy symbol, "to do with as he chose." There was no message,

Murguia had explained. The Senor Emperador would read the graven name,

"Maria de la Luz," and that would suffice.

Looking now on the cultured gentleman caressing his beard, Driscoll

thought again how hellishly distorted was the sign of salvation then in

his pocket. But he left it there. He, too, had a king's pride, incapable

of low spite. Charity alone, though, would have held him, if he had but

known that Maximilian was ignorant of the dead girl's fate.

The archduke for his part had been amiable and conciliatory, because

there was a certain delicate question he wished to ask.

"Oh by the way, mi coronel," he said abruptly, "I must extend my excuses

for keeping you waiting in the corridor just now. But there was another

visitor here. And as we happened to be talking of--well, of a rather

personal matter, not intended for outside ears----"

"Do not worry. When you raised your voice, I turned and left."

"But perhaps," said Maximilian slowly, "it would have been better if you

had overheard, either you or another knowing the cruel rumors

which--which link my recent visitor's name with my own. Then the truth

would have been made known. That truth, senor," he hastened to add,

despite a hardening frown between the American's eyes, "means first that

I have been honored, indeed, in my visitor's----"

He got no further. A broad hand closed over his mouth.

"Another word of that, and I'll--I'll----"

The threat was left unfinished. Gasping in the chair where he had

fallen, Maximilian found himself alone. He was vaguely nonplussed. There

had been so many revelations of late that he thought this one simply a

further re-adjusting of himself to the modern world of men. The present

instance had to do with the critical juncture where the woman enters.

But he had learned something else, too. The American loved her, and that

was important. Yet lovers were very contrary beings, he mused

lugubriously.

"Still, I shall try again," he decided. "One humble success against my

career of distinguished failures should not be too much to expect."

The night that followed, a black, favorable night, was the time planned

for escape. Horses ready saddled waited outside the town under the

aqueduct. Certain guards were bribed, among them Don Tiburcio. The

humorous rascal had driven a hard bargain, but only because the money

was to be had. He would have sold himself as briskly for the cream of

the jest.

Late the same night there came a frantic pounding at Driscoll's door,

where he was quartered in the sacristy of the old Capuchin church.

"Well?" he muttered, alert already.

"Hurry, mi coronel!" a cracked voice blended with the knocking. "Hurry,

you are wanted!"

"Murgie!" Driscoll exclaimed, flinging wide the door. "Back from San

Luis, and prowling round here as usual, eh? Well, what's the matter?"

"Quick, senor! Maximilian is sick. Go, go to him!"

Partly dressed, bootless, unarmed, Driscoll shoved the old man aside,

and sped through the church, hopping over half awakened soldiers as he

went. Once in the street, he glanced up at the tower room, which was

Maximilian's, and thought it odd that no light streamed through the

narrow slits there. The sentinels, too, were gone. But he ran up the

steps and darted along the corridor, only to strike his head against a

heavy wooden door that was ajar. He rushed inside the cell, and with

arms outspread quickly covered the space of it, in the utter dark

smashing a chair, crashing over a table, cursing a mishap to his toe.

But he found no one.

"This here's a jail-break," he mumbled under his breath. "Dam' that

Murgie, he's roped me in to stop 'em!" Whereat, all unconsciously, he

smiled again at Fatality.

Groping his way back to the corridor, he felt rather than saw three dim

figures steal past the door. Silently, swiftly, he gave pursuit. He

heard a fervent whisper just ahead.

"Hasten, dear friends, and may God----"

The next second he was grappling with someone. But his unknown captive

did not resist.

"There, senor, loosen your fingers. I am not escaping. I am returning to

my cell. But I had to make the other two think that I was with them."

The voice was Maximilian's.

"Hark! Ah, poor souls, they have failed!"

The prince spoke truly. A fierce "Alto ahi!" sounded below. Then there

were musket shots and the confusion of many scrambling feet. Murguia had

routed out the church barracks. And when torches were brought, the

soldiers discovered that they had hands on Miramon and Mejia. But the

false sentinels were gone! In leaving the road clear they had used it

themselves, already.

"You fools!" suddenly a half crazed wail arose. "Fools, _he_ has

escaped! He----"

"Oh dry up, Murgie," said Driscoll, coming down the steps. "He's gone

back to his room, I reckon."

CHAPTER XXI

THE TITLE OF NOBILITY

"Hear, therefore, O ye kings, and understand."

--_Wisdom of Solomon._

One more sunset, one more sunrise! And then?...

Maximilian again confronted the ghostly enumeration. But this time his

last day should be the day of a man's work, in simple-hearted humility.

He no more searched the skies to find a supernal finger there. He let

Destiny alone, and did his best instead. For a man's best is Destiny's

peer.

The fiery June sun was dying in its larger shell of bronze over the

western sierras, and the self-same blue that vaults beautiful Tuscany was

taking on its richer, darker hue, when a foreigner in the land, Din

Driscoll, walked under the Alameda trees, his pipe cold in his mouth, he

perplexed before his heavy spirits. For he no longer had war to

distract, to engross.

Maximilian's physician, an Austrian, found him in his reverie. Would the

Herr Americano at once repair to His Highness attend? The senor's

presence would a favor be esteemed, in reason that a witness was greatly

necessitated.

Wondering not a little, Driscoll hastened back into the town. As the

physician did not follow, he arrived alone. But in the door of the

archduke's cell he stopped, angry and embarrassed. For his eyes

encountered a second pair, which were no less angry, which moreover,

were Jacqueline's. Maximilian and Padre Soria, the father confessor,

were also there, but Driscoll at first saw no one but Jacqueline. As

with him, she had been vaguely summoned, without knowing why. A last

testament was to be signed, she imagined, but in his choice of witnesses

she thought that Maximilian might at least have shown more delicacy. As

to cruelty also, she would not confess, but cruelty it was,

nevertheless. To see again this American was to know memory quickened

into torture, and days afterward there would still be with her, vividly,

hatefully, the beloved awkwardness of his strong frame, the splendid,

roguish head, now so forbidding, and more than all, the way he smiled of

late. It was a smile so cold, so cheerless, a something so changed in

him since the old, piquant days of their first acquaintance. Despise

herself as she might, Jacqueline knew how the sight of the man halted

there would leave her whole woman's being athirst and panting.

Maximilian's thin white face lighted eagerly when he perceived that

Driscoll had come. The haggard despair of two days before had given way

to a serene calm, like that which soothes a dying man when the pain is

no longer felt. In a gentleness of command that would not be denied, he

rose and brought the American into the room.

"Colonel Driscoll," he began, "you know, of course, that a witness is

the world's deputy. He is named to learn a certain truth, but afterward

he must champion that truth, even against the world. So you find

yourself here, but first I wish to thank----"

"Please don't mention it," Driscoll interposed. "I'm willing to do

anything I can."

"Then remember," said Maximilian, "that you are a witness, and a witness

only. Can you bear that in mind, senor, no matter what you may hear?"

Driscoll nodded, but the very first words all but made him a violent

actor as well. Maximilian had turned to Jacqueline. For a moment he

paused, then with a grave dignity spoke.

"Mademoiselle," he said, "reverently, prayerfully, I ask your hand in

marriage."

She gasped, and so sharp and quick that certainly she was the most

dumbfounded there. Her utter stupefaction amazed Driscoll as much again

as the question itself. He stiffened as though struck. If this were a

revelation? If it could be--if it could be that she really knew no

reason why she should marry Maximilian?

The archduke observed them both, and his eyes shone with kindliness. But

making a gesture for patience, he hurried on. "Father Soria here," he

said, "will come in the morning, just before the--the execution, to

perform the ceremony. A judge of the Republic will come too, for the

civil marriage. As to the banns----"

"But why--_why_, parbleu?"

Jacqueline stood before him, stung from her speechless trance by fury.

Behind narrowed lids the gray eyes hardened as points of steel.

"You shall know, mademoiselle," he answered softly. "It is a boon I ask

of you, the greatest, and the only one before I go----"

"Why? Tell me why!"

"Because it is _the_ boon a true knight may crave. It is to right

before the world the noblest woman a knight can ever know----"

"Sire!"

The word was rage and supplication both. It was a hurt cry, piteous to

hear. Then the glint dying from her eyes blazed to tempestuous life in

those of the Missourian. But the priest's hand touched his arm, and the

priest's voice, low and gentle, stayed him.

Maximilian, though, had seen the outburst. "Ah yes, senor, I remember,"

he said, and smiled, "one may be slapped upon the mouth, yes, yes, for

even breathing my lady's name when one talks of rumor."

Jacqueline darted at them a puzzled glance. She did not understand at

first. Then she divined. And then, wide and gloriously, her eyes opened

on Driscoll, her defender. But in the instant they sought a safer

quarter. She could not, and would not, forgive him for being there at

all.

"However," the obdurate prince continued, "our witness must bear with me

this time, for I will--_will_, I tell each of you--speak plainly.

The false scandal does exist. Deny it, dear lady, if you can.--Nay,

senor, _you_ believe it, or did. So, now, as the world's deputy

here, you must be armed to foil those venomous tongues. But there is

only one way. You shall tell them that they talk of Maximilian's

widow----"

"But----"

Jacqueline, Driscoll, both spoke at once. But the girl flashed on the

man an angry command for silence.

"Enough, enough!" she cried, "Let me speak, then end it. Whatever others

may think, Your Highness extends me his respect? Bien, but that gives me

a certain right, which is the right to consider just one thing in

answering the question of Your Highness--just one lone, little thing."

"And that?"

"Is--is whether or not I have the honor to love Your Highness. Oh, the

shame in such sacrifice, the shame you put on me! You should have known

my answer already."

Her answer? Driscoll stirred uneasily. What, indeed, was her answer?

"Yet later, mademoiselle," pursued her inflexible suitor, "when others

aspire to your hand, there might come one for whom your answer would be

favorable. How then, if this suitor, when pausing to hear what the world

says of you----"

"He'd choke it down the world's throat!" Driscoll burst forth. "He alone

need know it's a lie."

Jacqueline started as she heard him speak, but the glad and unintended

look she gave him changed as quick as thought to haughty resentment.

After all, he was still there.

"But how else," Maximilian persisted, "can such a man know so much?"

Then, a captive absolute to his lofty idea, the poet prince pleaded for

it as one inspired. All things worked, as by Heaven's own will, to

sanction what he proposed. There was Charlotte's death. There was his

own. Dying, he was still a Mexican, and might wed in any station he

chose. While if he lived, as an archduke of Austria he could not. But he

detested life. With it he had bettered no one. Yet by his death he hoped

to save more than life to another. This other was the girl before him.

He had wrecked her dearest ambition. For France's sake she would have

lured him from peril. For that, and that alone, she had sacrificed her

name. Such accounted for their interview at Cuernavaca. Such accounted

for her coming to Queretaro. Yet through his own blind weakness she had

failed. France had lost Mexico, he his life, and she--her happiness. But

the last could yet be restored. And why not purchase it with his death,

since he must have died in any case?

"Must have," Driscoll interrupted, "must have died in any case?"

The American had listened perplexed, now with a quick, eager start, now

with crinkled brows. First of all the old mystery and its anguish had

assailed him. The hideous, gloomy tangle would wound him round again.

Did Jacqueline care for this prince? Surely, because he had seen the

evidence. But why had she intrigued against his Empire, why had she

turned Confederate aid from him?

Then, as the ruined monarch spoke, the other man saw. He saw the truth.

Truth that reconciled all contradictions. That explained what even the

theory of her wanton heart had only half satisfied before. Explained

everything by that heart of purest gold. The lover knew now why she had

delivered him to Lopez and the Tiger, two years ago, though with the act

so perversely confessing her love for him. He knew why, at Boone's

Cordova plantation, she had tempted him to hold her for his own, though

even then she was returning to the capital, to Maximilian. No, it was

not wanton sport. It was not contradiction. But it was conflict. In the

contemplation of that conflict he stood unnerved. It was the conflict

between a wild yet altogether French scheme of patriotic endeavor and

her own good woman's love. His eyes wandered to her, half afraid, and

the chill of months about his heart was gone, as some great berg of ice

sinks in the warmth of sunny waters. From siren alluring flesh whose

touch was woe, she was become a sceptred angel, far, far away, so

tantalizingly far away!

Thus Driscoll listened on, happy in his soul of a man, yet abashed as a

boy. But listening, at the last he was perplexed anew, though for

another reason.

"Must have died, sir?" he repeated again. "But that wasn't what you

thought last night. No sir, last night you thought you could escape. But

just the same you turned back. You chose to die!"

"His Highness," spoke the gray-haired priest, "returned for the

senorita's answer."

"My answer?" cried Jacqueline. "You mean, father, for my sake?"

"Yes."

Driscoll started violently, perplexed no longer. "By God, sir," he

swore, and clapped Maximilian on the shoulder, "but you are a man!"

The prince recoiled, his instincts of breeding in arms against the

savage equality. But then, slowly, a smile that was almost beatific

touched his lips, and without knowing it, he straightened proudly, as

majesty would.

"A man?" he murmured, breathing exaltation. "Then am I, at my last

moment, come into harmony with God's own ordering of the universe. For

he made man on the sixth day, not a Hapsburg. Man, and after His Own

Image--Oh, but that is the title the hardest of all to win! You--you

don't think, senor, that you would like to take it back?"

Driscoll reddened inexplicably. Murguia's ivory cross was still in his

pocket.

"No!" he blurted out with sudden defiance. "It's the truth!"

"Then," said Maximilian solemnly, "on your word I stake my faith.

To-morrow, at the judgment-seat, I shall hope to hear myself called so."

"Your Highness," questioned Jacqueline in a kind of daze, "Your Highness

did not _intend_ to escape last night?"

"No, he did not," Driscoll answered for him. "He got Miramon and Mejia

started all right, and then, without knowing that your plot had failed,

he turned back to this cell here, alone."

"Your Highness, you did that for--for----"

Her voice broke, and she stopped abruptly and went to the narrow window.

With her back to them, she groped for the dainty bit of cambric that was

her handkerchief.

"So you see, my daughter," said the priest, drawing near her, "what he

would have given, what, before Heaven, he has given, to tell you what

you so hotly resent. Do you resent it now?"

The beautiful head shook slowly. She was touching her eyes with her

handkerchief.

"Then you will not let his sacrifice be in vain? You will marry him?"

Impetuously she turned, and faced them. There were blinding drops, clear

as diamonds, on the long lashes. "Oh Your Highness, Your--Oh, there is

something you can tell me that is--that is inexpressibly better?"

"Let me know what it is."

"It is if--if you can forgive me.--Mon Dieu, why did you need to heap

this terrible sacrifice on me? Why could you not remember that I tried

to drive you from your empire? That I plotted against you? That----"

"Hush, you would have saved me."

"Oh, only incidentally, and you knew it. Yet you must----"

"Don't! There's nothing to forgive.--But wait, we will grant that there

really is, but only that I may exact my price of forgiveness."

"The price? Name it."

"That you will marry me, here, to-morrow morning, before I die."

Jacqueline raised her head. "Has Your Highness," she demanded, smiling

shyly behind her tears, "has he forgotten the woman's, rather my

consideration, before such a question?"

Driscoll straightened, squared his shoulders to take a blow. To his

blindness her manner looked like awakening love for the other man--and

for the man himself, not for the prince! His sense of loss, his agony,

were extreme. But of the old bitterness he now knew nothing. His rival

was putting the question. "And according to that consideration,

mademoiselle?"

Driscoll did not see her swift glance toward himself. He was hurrying

out lest he might hear her answer. And she let him go--till he reached

the door. But there, like one frozen, he halted rigidly.

"Helas, I do not love you, sire," Jacqueline had answered, very quietly.

Maximilian, however, did not seem heart broken.

His attention was all for the mere witness. He saw the effect on that

witness. In Driscoll's glad face he read his own triumph, his own

purpose achieved. Jacqueline was righted at last.

"No," he agreed, "I could not hope for so much.--But another might."

Then apropos of nothing, he went and flung his arms about Driscoll. The

astounded trooper could only grip his hand, just once, without a word.

Then he was gone.

Maximilian watched him go. The priest turned to Jacqueline. She, too,

stood poised so long as his spurs rang through the corridor. At last

silence fell on them. For a moment she hesitated. Then, trembling, her

eyes moist, she held out her hand. "Good-bye," she whispered. But,

impulsively, she raised her arm and touched the doomed man's forehead

lightly with her finger tips, making a blurred sign of the cross. And,

not daring an instant longer, she too fled.

Maximilian was alone with the priest. The room was growing dark. It was

the last night.

"Now, father, light the tapers, there on the altar. Yes, I am ready.

Ready? Blessed Mother in Heaven, it is more than I had thought to be!"

CHAPTER XXII

THE ABBEY OF MOUNT REGRET

"O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest,

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars

From this world-wearied flesh."

--_Romeo and Juliet_.

It is curious and humiliating, how Nature does not vex herself in the

least for the dying of a man. And yet, to the man, the event is so very

important! Each breath of spaceless night, each twinkle from the

firmament, though but the phantom of a ray quenched ages before,

everything, he teases into anxious commentary on his own puny end. There

could not be more ado if the Universe were in the throes, writhing

against a reconquering Chaos. Harassed creature, what ails him is only

the pathetic fallacy, which is a soothing melody and stimulating to

mortal pride. But the lapses into healthier realization are very, very

hard to bear.

How cold it was, when Maximilian awoke! The chill seemed creeping nearer

his heart, nearer the citadel. And how black the night, before the dawn!

But where, now, were his matches? He had the same monotonous trouble of

any other morning in getting one to light. Then the two candles guttered

fitfully, sordidly, just as they had always done. The white cloths of

the last communion seemed a ghostly intrusion on what was of every day.

Maximilian drew his cloak about him. The chill was simply of the

plateau, of the night, not the portent of death. The world without was

dark and desolate, but that had no reference to the tomb. The world was

merely taking its normal sleep. The heavy cloak ought to answer--but, it

did not.

He took up the snuffers, coaxing the yellow flames to brighter promise,

then set the candles before him on the table. A piece of dripping tallow

fell upon his hand, and the hand jerked back. The man pondered. So, even

his flesh was part of Nature too, and heeded trivial pain, with no

thought of the bullets to drive through it shortly.

He wrote two or three letters yet remaining, to friends, to his brother,

the Emperor of Austria. He penned words of farewell, yet even as the

tears welled in his eyes, he needed to stop and make sure that he had

indeed not more than three hours yet to live. It was difficult, though,

with the candles spluttering there, in the ordinary, every-day fashion.

He signed the last letter, to his mother. He gazed at the signature, of

characters squarely formed. He might have written it yesterday, or the

year before. It looked the same. But the pen he had just dropped had

dropped forever. No, no, that should not be! And he snatched it up

again, and wrote, scribbled, covered paper, fearing to stop. But at last

he did stop, with a shivering laugh. He must face this thing, he

decided. And over and over again he told himself, "I have written my

last. Yes, my last!" and steadfastly resisted the taunting, airy quill

lying there. So, what was harder than farewell to loved ones, he nerved

himself to end the small actions of his daily existence.

Maximilian had his life long been a dreamer, ever gazing wide-eyed as a

child on the wonderful fantasies that came, whether entrancing or

dreadful. But the child's fantasies are kindred with man's philosophies.

Often, as he lay awaiting sleep, there was one particular thought that

would bring him quickly, stark, staring awake. And this thought was, how

certain things always came to pass. No matter how far away, nor how very

slow their approach, making vague the hope or horror of them, yet the

actual, present hour of their happening always struck at last. There was

the eve of the day when he should be of age. Oh, but he had longed for

that day! He had longed until he craftily suspected it never would

arrive. And yet, despite those leaden-footed oxen, the minutes, arrive

it did, in very fact. The eve of that day was a happy bed-time; but over

his ardent reveries, over the vista of future achievements, there

suddenly, darkly loomed another thought, a foretoken and clammy shroud,

which smote the young prince with trembling. For would not the day of

his death, however far away also, sometime be the present, passing

moment, as surely, just as surely, as this anniversary of his birth?

Here was a terrifying glimpse of mortality.

When, not fifteen years later, Maximilian opened his eyes in the black

Capuchin cell, and comprehension grew on him of the present day's

meaning, he recalled how the fantasy of a morning of death had first

come to him. He was a boy, and he was to go on a voyage. The boy had

awakened when there was scarcely light as yet, and heard his mother at

the door. "It is time, dear." She spoke low, not liking to break his

slumber. But in the silence of all the world her voice was clear, and

very sweet, and the words stood forth against his memory ever afterward.

He was to be gone from her for a time, and this was in her mind as she

called him. The boy, though, could think of nothing except that his

little excursion among new and strange adventures was to begin, actually

to begin. But then, quite unaccountably, there fell over his eagerness

a chilling gloom. The delightful sprite named Expectation, who had

whispered so piquantly of this same eventful morn, had basely changed

herself into a hideous vampire, and she muttered at him, in frightful,

raucous tones. Yet the hag's snarls were true promises. There was

to come, surely, inexorably, a certain other eventful morn, and

he would awake, and without his mother's calling him, he would

know--_know_--that it was time!

Back in that childhood hour he had lain for a while quite inconsolable,

until his mother came again, and rested her hand on his head, and told

him--"Why, one would think the little goose was going away forever!" It

was broad daylight by now, too; and wholly comforted, he had sprung up,

joyfully alive. Eternity did not worry him any more for a week.

But the awakening of this later morning, in a Mexican prison! And when

he understood that the old familiar fantasy was become a fact! When he

remembered how once he had been consoled in his boyhood! For a moment

the sense of loss and of helplessness was stifling, and he

yearned--yearned frantically, as he never had as a boy--for the touch of

his mother's hand, for her voice, so low and sweet. The horrid cruelty

he could not, during that moment, bear. He felt that he must cry out for

her, like a very child. And though he wept, it was the man, and the

man's despair that his was not now the boy's need of comfort.

But when they came in the first dawn and knocked at his door, they found

him serene, untroubled, and only the wonted shade of melancholy on his

brow. He greeted them courteously, and was desirous that they should

have no unnecessary difficulties on his account. Being dressed already,

punctiliously, and in black, he himself went to call Miramon and Mejia,

and brought them to his own cell, where they received the last sacrament

together.

Later the three condemned were at breakfast--bread, chicken, a little

wine and a cup of coffee--when horses' hoofs rang abruptly in the street

below, and as abruptly ceased under their window. There was a command,

and sabres rasped against their scabbards to gain the light. Maximilian

raised eyes filled with pity to his two companions. Mejia, an Indian

thoroughly, made a gesture of impatience. The handsome Miramon, of

French blood, shrugged his shoulders. Then both glanced timidly in their

turn at Maximilian, and each finding a hand stretched forth, grasped it

silently. But the priests of the condemned, who were waiting apart, felt

their blood turn to icy beads. For them the quick metallic gust of

strident life down in the street had the merciless quality of hammering

upon a coffin lid.

Troops filed up the stairs, and along the corridor. They halted, faced

the door, grounded arms. An officer stepped out, fumbled with a

document, and read the death sentence. Maximilian gently released

himself from one and another of those present, and turning to the

Austrian physician, handed him his wedding ring. "You will give it to my

mother," he said. Father Soria's eyes filled with tears, one plump fist

clenched pathetically. Maximilian passed an arm over the good man's

shoulder, and with him walked out among the soldiers. He nodded to them

encouragingly, and so started on his little journey.

Three ramshackle public hacks, set high over wabbling wheels, and drawn

by mules, waited at the door. Maximilian smiled an apology as he

motioned Father Soria to precede him into the first. The troops used

their spurs. A whip cracked. The springs jolted. Everywhere, on the

curbs, in windows, on housetops, there were people. The archduke had the

impression of breath tensely held, and of eyes, eyes strained, curious,

and awed, like those of children who witness suffering and cannot

understand.

Passing the convent of Santa Clara, Maximilian peered upward at the

windows; and, as he hoped, he saw Jacqueline. She was leaning far out,

and tremulously poised. Tender compassion was in every line of her tense

body, but as their gaze met she tried to smile, bravely and cheerfully,

and until the hack swung round the corner, there was her hand waving him

farewell. The little journey might have been, a fete, and somehow, he

was comforted.

"I wonder," he mused, "if I've done very much for her, after all. Or for

that American, named Driscoll? Will she--" He shook his head, and

sighed. "No, she is not the lass to have him, not after my little scene

of last night. But, the choice does rest with her, now. And for a girl,

that is everything.--Alas, poor young man!"

His rueful prophecies were that moment interrupted by a woman's scream.

It rose piercingly over the clatter of their march. Maximilian put out

his head and looked back. The woman was running beside Mejia's hack,

panting, stumbling through the dust, her black hair streaming. She held

a babe in her rebosa, but with her free hand she clutched weakly at the

spokes. To the clumsy, pitying soldiers who would force her away, she

cried again, "Mercy ... Mercy ... Mercy...." A low murmuring grew on

every side. Maximilian flung open his cab door. But the same instant it

was slammed against him. He sank to his seat, with a stare of dumb pain

in his eyes that the priest beside him never afterward forgot. The woman

back there was Mejia's wife. And Maximilian had had one glimpse of the

husband's face. It was a face stretched to agony, deadened to the color

of lead.

"May I, may I--_pay_ for this!" moaned the one-time Emperor. "O

God, grant Thou that I do pay for this, hereafter!"

Beyond the last hovels of the suburbs, at the foot of the Cerro de las

Campanas, the condemned were told to alight. Here again there was a

throng, hundreds and hundreds of swarthy faces, blank in awed pity. One

gaping fellow pointed wonderingly.

"Look, there they are! There--los muertos!"

Maximilian overheard, and a cold shiver crossed his spine. To be

identified already as "the dead one!"

Then he beheld his coffin, there, the longest of the three being borne

up the hill. They were boxes of cheap wood, unpainted inside, smeared

with black on the outside. A wavy streak of carmine simulated the

drooping cord and golden tassels of richer caskets. It was the pomp and

circumstance that pertains to the humblest peon clay.

Four thousand serried bayonets squared the base of the hill, and made a

compact, bristling hedge to hold back the common people. Through it

marched the doomed Imperialists, each with his confessor and a platoon

of guards, and so toiled on up the slope. The archduke looked about him.

There were many privileged spectators within the cordon, but nowhere did

he see a former friend. All, all, had kept away, and in his heart he

knew that it was better so. He could not ask that much of them. But

stay--yes, a remembered figure caught his attention; a shriveled

decrepit figure. Here, too, mid every color Republican, he beheld in the

man's garb a last surviving uniform of the vanished Empire. It was,

however, scarcely to be distinguished as such. The red coat was

threadbare, and soiled with dust. The ragged green pantaloons, held by a

knotted rope, were grotesquely faded. Yet the prince, who had once

gloried in dashing regimentals and mistook them for power, was deeply

touched. He recognized a lone unit of what had been none other than the

Batallon del Emperador. He paused, to have a word with the miserable

derelict.

"So, you would be near me, even now?" he said. "Ah, ever faithful little

old man, but are you brave enough for the horror of it? Are you?"

Red eyeballs rolled upward in their sockets, and for a space met the

archduke's kindly gaze. Then the steady repellant hate in them seemed

disconcerted, and the withered form cowered under the touch of the pale

white hand. Inaudible words rattled in the old man's throat, and he

trembled, as though to turn and run. Maximilian regarded him

benevolently, thinking it a crisis of emotion.

"There, there," he said, "go if you wish. It's not well, you see, to

think of me so much. But you must not imagine that I am ungrateful. When

you believed yourself unseen, certainly when you had no hope of reward,

throughout my misfortunes, you have always hovered near me, on the

battlefield, and more lately under my prison window. Yes, yes, I have

seen. And now, and now I thank you." The bloodshot eyes roved the

ground, but did not lift again. "As humble, as loyal as a dog,"

Maximilian murmured as he turned away.

They indicated to him that he should take his place before a wall of

adobe blocks which had been piled together near the crest of the hill,

only a little lower than those very fortifications built by the

Imperialists themselves. With a gesture of assent, he complied. The

priests fell sorrowfully back behind the soldiers, and he and Miramon

and Mejia were alone together, three tragic isolated figures in a little

oblong patch of bare rocky hillside. One end of the oblong was the adobe

shield. The other three sides were walls of living men, massed shoulder

to shoulder, with bayonets pointed outward against the jostling peering

crowd. The three who were to die could now see no human being beyond the

dense, double row of soldiery. The remainder of earth for them was the

hollow square, bounded by the slouching backs clothed in blue, by the

white flats of the kepis, by the line of light playing over the thorns

of steel. Beyond was the early morning sun; above, the mystery of space.

Through the gap of an instant the shooting squads tramped in, nearer and

nearer, until they halted opposite the condemned. Maximilian then

perceived which squad was to be his own. It numbered seven tiradores and

a yellow, beardless officer. The seven were low, cumbersome, tawny, and

they shuffled awkwardly. Their stripling chief thrust out his stomach,

and he handled his large sword with an unaccustomed flourish. The

pompous severity was, after all, only insolence. He had need to keep

guard on his importance; he did not wish to hear the pounding of his

heart. Yet his muscles twitched unbecomingly, which jerked his mouth,

and sometimes his head.

Maximilian stepped forward and addressed them. To each he gave a gold

piece bearing his effigy. It was his last expenditure in that coin. He

requested them earnestly, gently, to aim at his body, not at his head.

He was thinking of his mother. He would not have her see him with

mangled features. Then with a final reassuring word, he turned back to

the wall.

They were going to place him between the other two, but with a smile and

shake of the head, he would not have it so. His last act was for

precedence. Affectionately he drew Miramon to the place of honor, so

that Mejia was on the right, and himself on the left.

Then the _fiscal_ of the Republic appeared, and read the military

law. For any who should ask the lives of the condemned, death was

prescribed. But if there was anything the condemned themselves wished to

say....

Maximilian removed his hat. "Mexicans," he said, "may my blood be the

last to be spilled for this country's welfare. Long live Independence!

Long live Mexico!"

He spoke the words calmly, gravely, and having concluded, he carefully

adjusted a large handkerchief, so that his beard might not be burned by

the powder. Then he crossed his arms on his breast, and gazed steadily

into the barrels of the leveled muskets, waiting.

A wave of motion, of tendons stiffening, passed along the thick wall of

flesh. Against it the tide without swelled higher, stronger. Tension

strained upward to the supreme crash. The quiet of a multitude is pain.

But the other two Imperialists had not spoken yet. Mejia shook his head

passionately. He saw only his young wife with her babe, panting,

stumbling through the dust. He held a crucifix, and would not take it

from his lips. Miramon, however, raised his voice to protest against the

charge of treason. Of that crime he died innocent. But he pardoned, as

he hoped for pardon. Then he cried, "Long live Mexico! Long live the

Emperor!"

Maximilian started. These were the words that he thought he should like

to hear. But now they grated. They recalled the mistake he had lived,

the anachronism of his life. They were scorpions. They stung like the

needle in an ulcer. He turned sharply, in tearful reproach. But a sword

flashed, the volley came, and the three men fell, as under a crushing

rock, one against the wall; his head broken over upon his breast. The

pert young officer pointed his blade at three convulsive bodies, and

through each a last bullet sped, burying itself in the earth beneath.

The crowd pressed, surged, stood on tiptoe.

* * * * *

There was one other among the spectators, but keeping himself hidden,

whom Maximilian would have been concerned to see there. He was Driscoll.

He came to watch the shriveled derelict, Murguia. He came to stand guard

over a soul, Maximilian's. What peace that soul had found should not be

destroyed. And so he screened himself in the crowd, holding ready to

crush a viper whose fangs were heavy with poison. When Maximilian paused

and spoke to the old man, Driscoll was very near, near enough to hear,

and to strike. But the old man had only wheezed and mumbled. Though why

that old man did not utter a first word, though why he could not, will

never be explained. But this much is true, that the ambushed soul,

moving so calmly toward eternity, then stepping so near the coiled

serpent, was yet its own guardian, unwittingly.

Until the very end Driscoll staid there alert. The old man, baffled,

insatiate, might yet cry out what he knew. Driscoll's gaze never

relaxed. He felt as though he watched a murderer while the murder was

being done. But the old man only listened. Unable to see within the

hollow square, he listened, and waited. His lower jaw hung open, and

over his lip a white froth grew and grew, until it broke and trickled

down his chin. The red eyeballs gleamed ravenously, as still he waited.

"When this is over," Driscoll said to himself, "he'll plump down in a

fit and blow out. Else he'll go raving crazy. Lord, that look!"

When it _was_ over, Driscoll went to him. He had but to reach forth

a hand and fasten on his shoulder. He held him against a scurrying of

spectators, whom the tragedy's close had that instant brought to life.

"Here, Murgie, here's something that belongs to you," he said. "Well,

what's the matter? Take it, I don't want it."

The old man looked up. An ivory cross was dangling from the other's

fingers. The cross still showed bloodstains; no later flowing of blood

had washed _them_ away. But the father of Maria de la Luz stared,

stared vacantly at the trinket. The masterful, consuming rage of two

years past was gone out of his eyes. Instead they were watery and

senile. The brows, and even the lashes, had turned as white as the thin

strands of hair, and contrasted gruesomely against the yellow, mottled

skin, which stretched like clouded parchment over the bony death's head.

At last the old man put out his hand and took the cross, not

comprehending.

"No, I didn't give it to him," Driscoll explained bluntly. "I told you I

wouldn't."

Yet no spasm of chagrin distorted the weazen face.

"This chain here, it's--it's _gold_!" the old man cried.

Then he sputtered, choked. What had he betrayed? Would the strange donor

reclaim the gift, knowing it was gold? He leered craftily at Driscoll,

and with a hungry, gloating secrecy--his old slimy way of handling

money--he smuggled the holy symbol under his jacket. But from cunning

the leer changed to suspicion and quick alarm. He delved into his

pockets, one after another. He searched greedily, wildly, until the last

coin on him lay in his palm. Quaking in every feeble bone, he counted

his poor wealth again and again. There was very little left. He glared

at Driscoll. He glared at townsmen, officers, blanketed Inditos, all

swarming past to gaze on the three corpses. He cried "Thief!" first at

one unheeding passer-by, then at another.

"I had more than this!" he whined. "More--more than this! There was my

hacienda, my peons, my cotton, my mills, my canvas bags. There was my

blockade runner. She was Clyde-built, she was named _La Luz_, she

cost twenty thousand English gold pieces. Who has taken these things

from me? Who--where----Curse you, do _you_ know?"

Dissipating his hoards, sacrificing his last chattel, all that was now a

blank. But his hoards, his chattels, were all that were now worth while,

and the miser clamored for them, and them only. Vengeance, however, is

an ironical bargainer. Vengeance kept her pay, and "abhorred Styx, the

flood of deadly hate," had dried and left a stranded soul, parched by

avarice. Driscoll was moved by a pity half ashamed.

"Look here, Murgie," he threatened terribly, "Do you say _I_ stole

your----By the Great Horn Spoon, I'll----" He flung his hand to his

revolver.

The counter-irritant had instant effect. All moisture died out of the

rat eyes, leaving them two little horrible beads. The miser shrank,

groveled, in mortal terror of some physical hurt.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE CONTRARINESS OF JACQUELINE

"Much adoe there was, God wot;

He wold love, and she wold not."

_--Ballad of Phillida and Corydon._

Maximiliano I. of Mexico was dead. His dynasty and his Empire were the

frippery of a past time. Yet there was his capital, still holding out

against the Republic. Leonardo Marquez, the Leopard, spitefully refused

to capitulate. But why he would not, no one knew, neither the starving

City, nor the patient besieger outside. No one, unless it was

Jacqueline. The very day of the triple execution she called on Escobedo,

commander in chief at Queretaro. She desired to return to the capital,

and she wanted a pass through the Republic's lines there. She mentioned,

in case it were any inducement, that the place would fall within

twenty-four hours after her arrival. Jacqueline had difficulty to speak

at all. She could not endure the general's monstrous flaps of ears, his

rabbinical beard, his cruel black eyes.

"Maria purisima," he exclaimed, "you cannot mean, senorita, that you,

all alone, will deliver the City of Mexico into our hands?"

"It will certainly be an incident of my stay there," she replied.

The hard, Jewish features lighted cunningly. "Then, por Dios, you are as

wonderful as I've always heard! But may--may one be allowed a little

curiosity?"

"I _might_ say," and Jacqueline forthwith said it, "that I have

just had a cipher telegram from Louis Napoleon."

"Which," breathlessly demanded the other, "will interest Marquez, eh?

Will disappoint him? Will cause him to surrender?"

"Your Excellency is of course entitled to his own conjectures."

But the commander-in-chief was satisfied. "We must hasten your going by

every means," he declared. "You shall have an escort. You----"

"Then I choose the Gray Troop--because," she added carefully, "they're

the best."

Now, why, by all that's feminine, was she surprised next morning when

the Gray Troop gathered round her coach, as though that were a

coincidence? At least she arched her brows, and lifted one shoulder

petulantly, and unmistakably showed that she expected a tedious time of

it. The sunburned colonel of the Grays beamed so with happiness too, as

he drew rein to report to her. They met for the first time since

Maximilian's embarrassing little scene for their express benefit.

Driscoll noted her disdain, and it is likely that he only grinned. He

did that because he knew how helpless he was, and how merciless she

could be. For she was not only beautiful, she was pretty--a demure,

sweet, and very pretty girl. Some vague instinct of self-defense guided

him. His broad smile was exasperating in the last degree, and it was not

she, but the other young woman in the coach, whom he addressed.

"I got some side saddles, Miss Burt," he announced, "and a few extra

mustangs, whenever anybody gets tired of traveling behind curtains."

Curiously enough, both girls wore riding habits. "Oh, by the way," he

inquired suddenly, "how's Miss Jack'leen this morning? Is she well

and--docile?"

Jacqueline's chin dropped in astonishment. She seized the old canvas

window flap and jerked it down. But at once she raised it again, and

thoughtfully contemplated the trooper.

"I wonder," she mused aloud, in that quaint accenting of the English

which cannot be described, "when is it that you are going to grow up,

_ever_?"

"I did start to," Driscoll informed her soberly, "but it got tiresome as

all creation, and I reckon I've backslided just since"--a world of

earnestness came into his lowered voice--"well, just since we had that

talk with poor Maximilian."

The old canvas curtain fell for good then, and very abruptly.

A moment later, however, she was avenging her flushed cheeks on Mr.

Daniel Boone, who rode at the other side, also sunburned, also effulgent

with happiness.

"If it isn't the _animal disputans_!" she exclaimed. "Look Berthe,

and rejoice; our sighing Monsieur le Troubadour!"

Driscoll hovered near a moment, then reluctantly rode ahead of his

battered dusty warriors. So he and the wilful maid from France began a

second journey together, yet far, far apart. But only after many

torturing hours did his first joy consent to perceive the distance

between them.

Now and then, though rarely, and never when he hoped for such a thing,

she would ride with him. And then he usually stirred up hostilities

before he knew it, and notwithstanding all that was tender and humble

which he meant to tell her. There was, however, cause enough for

savagery. She made him the least of the troop, though he arranged each

detail of speed and comfort, laid out tempting noon-day spreads,

improvised cheer in the cheerless hostelries, and all with a forethought

showing pathetically how his every thought was of her. But if she

divined the inwardness of this, which of course she did, outwardly she

contrived to be oblivious. She thanked him sincerely and simply, the

while that he craved repayment, as the heart repays. He yearned for only

a chance to speak his mind, and to force hers. But now craftily she

would bring the others flocking round, to decide for her if they did not

think monsieur absurdly mistaken in this or that! The same instant she

would conjure up the most trivial of arguments, and be vastly shocked

over the ridiculous contentions which she herself assigned to Driscoll.

She grew honestly fond of the other Missouri colonels, with their ranger

uniforms, and brawn scarred by weather and battle, and they and the

marchioness became great friends. She was a dainty flower among them,

but they were prime comrades, and she, the mad-cap tomboy her life long,

took to them in the impulse that here were her own kind. Driscoll was

proud to see it, without need of being generous. She gathered Berthe, as

a soberer sister, into the merry communion, and she rode with Clay of

Carroll, with Carroll of Clay, with Reub Marmaduke, with Crittenden,

with cherubic Old Brothers and Sisters, with Hanks the bugler, and she

mocked Meagre Shanks, that disputatious animal, because he tried to

monopolize Berthe and would not dispute at all. She asked them

questions. She asked Harry Collins if his tribe were the same as that of

ces Missouriens-la, and the Kansan confessed that the two tribes had

been a bit hostile of late, but what with raiding, razing, and

murdering, he guessed they'd laid the foundation for a mutual

self-respect, as behooved valiant redskins. So she often got strange

answers for her inquisitiveness, but she had grown wary among

Westerners, and she usually paid them back. They were a happy party. But

Driscoll wanted a more definite focusing of the joy. And at times,

indeed, yielding to temptation herself, she permitted him to lose his

heart deliciously over again. Shadows were lifted now, and she was just

a lovable girl, just sweet Jacqueline. And he loved her with the boy's

young strength of adoration and diffident awe. Precisely in which state

she made him suffer exquisitely. No one could be more contrary and

capricious than the lovable girl of a moment before. Whereat storms

brewed within him.

There was one of the rare times when the Missourian and the maid rode up

and down the winding white ribbon of a Mexican highway, and for awhile

both were quiet. This once they dared the risk--she did, rather--which

lurks in the silence that requires no words. For him it brought the old

time, and the rides of that time, when he wondered what was the matter

with him, and she knew all along. And he thought how during the hard

winter in the Michoacan mountains and swamps, he had caught himself

almost crying aloud, that he wanted her, that he wanted her--wanted

again the subtle comradeship of those silences which require no words.

And here, at last, here she was, riding beside him!

He looked at her furtively. She was in profile. He looked again, to be

sure that it was not memory, but the breathing girl herself. Yes, for a

fact, it was the girl herself. And here was her own queenly head, here

its regal poise, here the superb line of the neck to the shoulder.

Reverence grew on admiration, for as he gazed he beheld her character

revealed, of lines as stately, as womanly, and withal as flexible, too,

before the cheery glow of each moment's life. He stirred, and was

vaguely restive, and perhaps a little frightened also, because of the

deep mystery of something within himself which he could not understand.

The classic outline of her features was softened now in the warmth of

flesh. Her vivacity was off guard, in the forgetfulness of reverie. The

pure white of the little tip of ear was tinged with pink. Her eyes were

lowered to the saddle horn. They were melting. They were almost blue.

"Jack'leen!" He burst out fervently, before he thought, with an arm half

lifted toward her.

The drooping lashes raised. The eyes were gray again. She regarded him

for awhile without speaking.

"Why don't you quarrel?" she asked finally.

The spell was broken. Her pounding heart had vent in a nervous laugh of

raillery. She touched her horse with the riding crop in her gauntleted

hand. Somehow she would not leave that dumb brute, the horse, in peace.

Driscoll's old Demijohn, however, was used to the game by now. He

pointed his ears, and checkmated that last move by bringing his master

once more to the lady's side.

"You used to," she went on, as though there had been no interruption,

"nicely. You were of an interest then. In fact, I reck-_on_--I know

no one that I had rather have quarreled with."

But still he would not, though that "reckon" from her lips was most

alluring. She stole a mischievous glance at his face, but the fixed look

there made her lift _her_ hand toward _him_. Perhaps, if he

had seen and had spoken then--But he did see.

"Eh bien, since monsieur won't fight, won't, _won't_," she cried,

"then it's more fun to----"

Evidently to seek livelier company. For she wheeled the mustang, swerved

from a grasp at her bridle, and went galloping back to the coach. He

twisted in his saddle, pushed his sombrero higher on his head, and

dubiously watched her flying from him, a lithe, trim figure in snug

Hungarian jacket, the burnished tendrils fluttering on the nape of her

neck, the soft white veil trailing like a fleecy cloud from her black

_amazona_ hat. He bent a perplexed gaze to the road. "It's 'way,

'way beyond me," he told himself. Then he grew aware of a sense of

warmth on his forearm. Yes, he remembered. For an instant she had laid a

hand on his sleeve, and he had thrilled to the ineffable token of

nestling. He was never immune from her tantalizing contradictions. He

felt this one yet.

Hoofs pounded behind, and Mr. Boone drew up alongside. "She came back,

and made me get away from the coach," he announced. "Prob'bly she wanted

to cry some; she looked it."

Yet another of her contradictions!

"Then why in the nation," Driscoll demanded, "do you keep hanging round

that coach for? Look here Shanks, you make me plum' weary. The idea of

you falling in----"

"No more'n you, you innocent gamboling lamb of an ol' blatherskite." But

Daniel's steel blue eyes had softened to their gentlest. "Say Jack," he

added, "she's going back to Paris."

"Don't I know it? Lord A'mighty!"

"Go on, never mind me," said Mr. Boone. "Groan out loud, if you want to.

For she sho'ly is, yes, back to Paris. Now Buh'the"--The Troubadour's

_r's_ always liquefied dreamily with that name--"Buh'the has been

telling me a few things, and I'm sure reporter enough to scout out the

rest of the story, and it's just this--Jack, she's fair broken-hearted."

"Miss Burt?"

"No, no, the marchioness. She staked out a campaign over here, and it's

panned out all wrong, and it wasn't her fault either. Poor girl, no

wonder she might like to cry a little. She's lavished everything she had

on it too, ancestral chateau, and all that."

"But," said Driscoll quickly "she'll not suffer. There's her title----"

"Title?" exclaimed Daniel. "W'y, she's going to give that up too, not

having any chateau any more, and she'll trip blithely down among the

people again, where she says it's more comfortable anyhow. Title? Well,

you've suhtinly noticed that she always did take that humorously. Her

grandfather--Buh'the says--was right considerable of a jurist, used

scissors and paste, and helped make a scrap-book called the Napoleonic

code, and Nap the First changed him into a picayunish duke. But wasn't

the nobility of intellect there already? Sho'ly! Miss Jacqueline,

though, likes the father of her grandfather the best. He never was

noble, technically I mean. His was the nobility of heart, and he'd have

scorned to be tagged. He just baked bread, and fed most half of Saint

Antoine for nothing at times, while the Dauphin at Versailles was

throwing cakes to the swans. Howsoever," Mr. Boone added hastily, as sop

to his softness for princes, "I reckon that there Dauphin was noble too.

Both of 'em fed the hungry mouths that were nearest."

"But," demanded Driscoll, "doesn't her title carry some sort of a--a

compensation?"

"Not a red sou. The majorat--that's the male line--died out with her

father, which means that the annuity died out too."

"W'y, Great Scot, she's----"

"She's tired and disheartened, that's what she is, and she's going back

to Paris, and you--" Boone paused, and glared at his companion, "--and

you mean to let her!"

Old Demijohn felt a spur kicked against his flank, and he lifted his

fore feet and sped as the wind. It was fully an hour later when Meagre

Shanks caught up with horse and rider again. Rather, he met them coming

back. His conversation was guileless, at first.

"Do you know, Din," he began, "those two girls are only half educated?

Yes sir, gastronomically, they are positively illiterate, and it's a

shame! W'y, they don't know hot biscuits and molasses. They don't know

buttermilk. They don't know yams. Nor paw-paws, nor persimmons. They

don't even know watermelon. Now isn't France a backward place?"

"Don't, Shanks!" Driscoll begged. "You'll have me heading for Missouri

in a minute. You didn't, uh, mention peach cobbler?"

"_And_ peach cobbler, big as an acre covered with snow. And just

think, it's roastin' ea'ah time up there now, _now_!" How Daniel's

voice did mellow under a tender sentiment! "And to think," he went on,

"of the marchioness living on in such ignorance! It's a thing that's

just got to be remedied, Jack."

"Then suppose you take her to Missouri," growled his friend, "and let me

alone."

"_I_ take _her_? Oh come now, Din, I see I've got to tell you

something which is--" The Troubadour's accents grew low and fond, and

the other man respected them, with something between a smile and a sigh

for his own case. "Which is--well, nobody's noticed it, but the fact is

that Buh'the, that Miss Buh'the----"

"Dan," interrupted Driscoll severely, "you're not going to tell me any

secret. You mean that you weren't mistaken when you mistook her for a

queen."

"That--that's it!" ejaculated Daniel. "Of coh'se," he added soothingly,

"the other one is a--a mighty nice girl, but----"

"Oh, _is_ she? But Miss Burt is _the_ one you want to take to

Missouri? Well Dan, why don't you?"

"Because," was the doleful reply, "those two are just like orphan

sisters together, and--well, she won't desert. She _is_ a queen, by

God, sir! Miss Jacqueline might make her, but I haven't got the heart to

ask it. Now, uh, if--if you would just bring along the other one?"

So, here was the goal of all of Daniel's manoeuvering!

Driscoll cast a leg over the pommel of his saddle, and faced Boone

squarely. "Shanks," he demanded with tense vehemence, "do you suppose I

need your woes for a prod? Don't you know how much--Lord A'mighty, how

much!--I'd like to oblige you? But--she won't let me--even speak.

There's, there's something the matter."

Boone's lank jaw fell. "What, I wonder?"

"And don't I wonder too?" Driscoll muttered savagely. "But it's

_something_."

From which moment until the end of the journey, and afterward, there

were two men who pondered on what could be the trouble with Jacqueline.

But while one pondered gloomily and fiercely and with a semi-comic grin

under the lash, the other let perplexity delve and ferret into the

mystery. For Mr. Boone had grown aware that an enormous heap of

happiness for four depended on himself alone.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE JOURNALISTIC SAGACITY OF A DANIEL

"Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears

To-day of past Regret and future Fears."

_--Omar._

At last Jacqueline stabbed a dot after the word "Finis," and so rounded

out her chapter on "Failure." Beyond doubt that tiny punctuation point

saved many lives. The besiegers were waxing impatient to assault, and

within the City famine mobs ran the streets, crying, "Corn and wood!

Corn and wood!" Those who could fled to the Republican camp. The

Austrians practically mutinied. Starving and dying thousands clamored

for surrender. Yet the ugly, revolting pigmy who was lieutenant of the

Empire held them back in the terror of his heartless cruelty.

Then the angel of mercy came. From her Marquez the tyrant learned that

his speculation in treachery had collapsed. Louis Napoleon wanted no

more of that stock. Besides, every French bayonet was needed in France.

The rabid Leopard heard, and that night meanly crept away to save his

own loathsome pelt. Bombs had begun to fall into the City, when a

Mexican general worthier of the name took upon himself the heroic shame

of unconditional surrender. The Oaxacans outside marched in, led by

their young chief, Porfirio Diaz, and they fed the people, and of

"traitors" shot only a moderate few.

Renovation became the order of the days that followed. The President of

the Republic was to be welcomed back to his capital. The stubborn old

patriot's heart must be gladdened by every contrast to the dreary, rainy

night years before when he fled into exile. Mexico would honor herself

in honoring the Benemerito of America. So bunting was spread over every

facade, along every cornice, green, white, and red, a festival lichen of

magic growth. Flags cracked and snapped aloft, and lace curtains decked

the outside of windows. Soldiers put on shoes and canvased their brown

hands in white cotton gloves, and military bands rehearsed tirelessly.

Din Driscoll sat on a bench in the shady Zocalo, and contemplated the

Palacio Nacional and the Cathedral in process of changing sides from

Empire to Republic. Innumerable lanterns being hung along their massive

outlines were for incense to a goddess restored. The Mexican eagle had

prevailed over monarchial griffins, and held her serpent safely in the

way of being throttled. The blunt homely visage of Don Benito Juarez,

luxuriously framed, looked out from over the Palace entrance. It was a

huge portrait, surrounded by the national standards. Among the emblems

there was one other, the Stars and Stripes. The gaze of the

ex-Confederate was fixed. It was fixed steadily on the Stars and

Stripes. Now and then he felt a rising in his throat, which he had

difficulty to swallow down again.

"Well, Jack?"

Boone stood over him. Driscoll's eyes were oddly troubled as they turned

from that flag opposite.

"Sure it's hard," said Boone quietly, "mighty hard, to forgive our

enemies the good they do."

"What enemies?"

"W'y, them," and Daniel pointed to a flag as to a nation. "Yes sir, the

Yanks have kept faith. Do you see a single one of their uniforms down

here? Do you notice anywheres that Yankee protectorate we were

predicting? No sir, you do not! The Yanks--" But the term was damning to

eloquence. Mr. Boone found another. "The _Americans_, I repeat,

have hurled back the European invader. They have given Mexico to the

Mexicans. They have endowed a people with nationality. But they have not

gobbled up one solitary foot of territory. Which is finer, grander, than

your Napoleonic glory! And yet it's selfish, of coh'se it is. But listen

here, there'll never be any Utopia, Altruria, Millennium, or what not,

that don't coincide with self-interest. And first among the races of the

earth, the Americans have _made_ 'em coincide, and I want to know

right now if the Americans are not the hope of the world!"

The orator paused for breath. He had to. And then surprise the most

lugubrious unexpectedly clouded his lank features. "Darn it, Jack," he

exclaimed in alarm, "if I ain't getting Reconstructed, right while I am

standing here!"

"_Talked_ yourself into it," Driscoll observed scornfully. "But

Dan, you can just put the South along with your Americans. The French

laughed at the North alone, but later, when--Well, just maybe it's a

good thing we did get licked."

Mr. Boone gasped. Sparks of indignation darted from his steel blue eyes.

The recoil needed a full minute to spend itself. Then a greater horror

appalled him, a horror of himself. "The Lawd help me," he burst forth,

"but you're right, Din Driscoll! You are! It _was_ for the best.

But don't you ever think I'm going to admit it again, to nary a living

mortal soul, myself included. W'y, it would, it would knock my editorial

usefulness--all _to_ smash. There," he added, "that's decided,

we're going back. The colonels want their mamas. They've been men long

enough, and they're plum' homesick. All the old grudges up there must be

about paid off by now, so's an ex-Reb can live in Missouri without train

robbing. _Libertas et natale solum_--It's our surrender, _at_

last."

Driscoll rose abruptly. "Lay down your pen, Shanks," he said. "You're

only trying to convert the converted. Of course I'm going too. That

there flag, being down here, did it. And don't you suppose _I've_

had letters from home too?"

Meagre Shanks jumped with relief. He straightened throughout his spare

length. As the smell of battle to the war charger, the pungent odor of

printer's ink wet on galley proofs assailed his nostrils. There were

visions, of double-leaded, unterrified thunderbolts crashing from the

old Gutenberg, back in Booneville.

"Missouri," he breathed in fire, "Missouri will sho'ly stay Democratic."

Both men glowed. They were buoyant, happy. But these two could not so

soon be quit of the enervating Land of Roses. A pair of countenances

fell together. Daniel voiced their mutual thought.

"And Miss Jacqueline?" he queried boldly, with the air of meaning to

persist, no matter what happened.

Driscoll showed weariness, anger.

"And Miss Burt?" he parried.

"She won't desert, I told you once."

"You mean that she's going to Paris too? I say, Shanks, they're leaving

to-morrow."

Shanks knew that much, quite well enough.

"Have you _tried_ to stop her?" he demanded sternly.

Driscoll only looked disgusted.

"But have you--_asked_ her?"

Driscoll's head jerked a nod, of wrath ascending.

The inquisitor wisely swerved. What her answer had been was, to say the

least, palpable. But her reason for it was _the_ question with

Daniel.

"Is it," he pursued, "is it because she hasn't any dot? You know, Jack,

that in France, when a young lady----"

"No, it's not that. I know it's not."

"Oh ho," said Daniel, "so you've been guessing too! And how many guesses

did she give you? No, let me try just a few more. It ain't because,

because she's an aristocrat?"

"But I _want_ an aristocrat," cried the young Missourian, "one to

her finger tips, enough of one to be above aristocracy. And _she_

is."

"Then," said his friend in despair, "it's because she don't, just simply

don't care for you?"

"You're a long time finding that out."

"What! You don't mean----"

"Fact," said Driscoll. "Even I guessed it at last. I told her I had been

reckoning that she----"

"Cared, yes?"

Driscoll made a wry face. "And she said I mustn't jump at conclusions, I

might scare 'em."

The Troubadour chuckled heartlessly. Neither was Driscoll's sense of

humor entirely gone.

"'Oh, awful goddess! ever dreadful maid!'" Mr. Boone quoted.

"She's sure a wonder," the other owned gloomily.

"And you are a blind dunce, Jack."

"Don't talk axioms at me," said Driscoll, with a warning light in his

eye. "I don't need 'em."

"Well, now," drawled Mr. Boone, "I can't help it if I associate with you

any longer, so I'll just mosey round to the flower market. As they leave

to-morrow, they'll be wanting some violets."

And he went, and Din Driscoll sat down again and hated him.

Daniel wended his way slowly, an attenuated ranger in gray mid carriages

and blanketed forms. "Sho'", he mused, "that girl's heart is fair

bleeding for him, can't _I_ see! Her eye-lashes, they're

_wet_, every now _and_ then. And whatever the matter with her

is, it's nothing. But nothing is the very darndest thing to overcome in

a girl. There's got to be strong measures. It's got to be _jolted_

out of her. _Archimagnifico, there's_ the point!"

Mr. Boone drew out a black cigar, and mangled it between his teeth. He

pondered and pondered, absent-mindedly kicking at natives he bumped

into. "Kidnap 'em!" he cried at length. "N-o," he reflected, "they go in

the public stage, and what with the escort, somebody'd get hurt. We

don't want any dead men at this wedding. Old Brothers and Sisters would

balk anyhow, and our ecclesiastical officiator is the boy we _do_

need. Now what the everlasting----"

He meant what salutary jolt he _could_ invent, barring holdups, but

in the same breath he meant also a most startling scene which revealed

itself as he turned the corner.

A deafening crash of musketry was the first thing, and he looked up. He

had come into a small plaza before a church, and against the church's

blank wall a scene was taking place before an awe-stricken throng. He

understood. Another proscribed "traitor" had just been caught; and

executed, naturally. But no, not executed! For as the officer of the

shooting squad approached to give the stroke of mercy, the prostrate

victim raised himself by one hand and knocked aside the pistol at his

head. Then he laughed in the officer's face, the most diabolical and

unearthly mirth any there had ever heard. There was not a stain of blood

on him. He had dropped in the breath of eternity before the bullets

spattered past. But his uplifted face, with chin tilted back, was

swollen, black, distorted, corded by pulsing veins, and one of the

eyes--a crossed eye--bulged round and purple out of its socket, and

_gleamed_. The demon of pain was tearing at the man's tissue of

life, but by grip of will unspeakable the agony in that grimace changed

to a smile.

"Yes, poison! Vitriol!" he chattered at them hideously. "Adios,

imbeciles. It's my last--jest!"

Whereat he fell, writhing as the acid burned to his soul. Before the

astounded officer could shoot, he had grown entirely quiet.

Boone strained and pushed against the crowd until he reached the spot.

The cadaver was in tight charro garb of raw leather. His sombrero lay

near, on which was worked a Roman sword, meaning "Woe to the conquered!"

Boone turned inquiringly to the officer. The man, who was pallid,

touched his thumb to his cap, recognizing the uniform of the Grays.

"You should know him, mi coronel," he explained. "His name was Tiburcio.

He deserted from the Imperialistas at Queretaro, but afterward he joined

the plot for Maximilian's escape. We had his description, and I found

him. He wanted to take me to Marquez and Fischer, whom we would also

like to find. He said that he risked himself here, to spy on them, and

that he knew where they had fled, the Leopard disguised in the padre's

cloak. But of course I paid no attention. I did not delay even to tie

his hands. As Your Mercy observes, I had the honor to do my duty, at

once."

"I see," replied Boone dryly. "Lawd, this _is_ a jolt!"

Then he got himself away from there.

"A jolt," he muttered to himself again. "But shucks, it can't--Yes, it

can," he decided fervently, "it can be used. We've got to have something

terrifying, and poor cock-eyed Don Tibby won't care. He'd appreciate it.

And anyhow, I don't seem to be able to stir up inspirations to-day, and

this is the only thing."

He was as pallid as the shooting squad he had just left.

"No matter," he reflected, "I'll need just this ghastly state of mind.

But here, goodness gracious, I've got to be in a sweat," with which he

began to run, a lank knight in gray dented armor.

"Worse luck," his thought pounded along with him, "this here's the first

time I've ever faked. And it's a heap the hottest story I've ever

handled, too. Our little Parisienne will get a frisson all right, all

right, and such a one she'll not be wanting any of again very soon.

Dixie Land, I mustn't smoke, I'm to be too excited."

He came into the Zocalo, and drew up before Driscoll, who was still

there and still ruminating.

"Listen here," Boone panted, "here's your cue.--In ten minutes--to the

second--arrive--knock at her door--appear!"

"With violets?" inquired Driscoll.

"Oh shut up!--Quit, don't stop me, I'm getting cooled off!--Only do what

I say.--In just ten minutes--that is--if you want the girl."

And Daniel was off again, "with high and haughty steps" towering along.

"That Meagre Shanks, there, isn't a fool," Driscoll mentally recorded,

and he took out his watch.

The two girls were stopping at a hotel in Plateros Street, for

Jacqueline had returned to find her beautiful residence, salon and all,

ruthlessly dismantled, looted, robbed by Marquez while she was in

Queretaro, which was a manner of levying contributions not unfamiliar to

the Lieutenant of the Empire.

In the balcony room of their hotel suite the two girls strove valiantly.

Crisp gowns and dainty allied mysteries lay spread over the upholstery.

They were vanishing into cavernous trunks, with crushing indifference if

Jacqueline seized on a garment, but gently when Berthe rescued it, which

she always did. Through the double glass doors of the balcony the street

sounds below rose to their ears, clarion notes and vivas, hurrying feet

and prancing hoofs, and the National hymn a few blocks away in the

Zocalo.

Suddenly a grim apparition loomed before the glass doors on the balcony.

Berthe half screamed, in dismay clutching at ruffles and laces to hide

them, when into the sweet-scented confusion strode Mr. Daniel Boone. He

was the grim apparition. Jacqueline withheld her opinion, but she had

one. The intruder's spurs were iconoclastic of carpeting, his abrupt

presence of feminine sensibilities. But the lean, perspiring face drove

away all thought of the conventions. Jacqueline snatched up a fleecy

bank of petticoats, making room for him on the sofa. Daniel stared

vacantly. The two girls looked very pretty. They were just flurried

enough, and they wore white lawn, with sleeves short to the elbow. His

fingers groped, and soon they closed over a small, instinctive hand. He

kept hold upon that hand for strength, at the same time collapsing on

the sofa.

"Now, if you please," said Jacqueline calmly, "what----"

"O Lawd!" Boone gulped, fighting for breath. "It don't matter

much--maybe--to you all, but--O Lawd, I got to tell somebody!"

"Tell us, tell us!" cried she of the captured hand.

Daniel had sufficient presence of mind to retain it.

"You know that--that poor devil Tiburcio?" he gasped.

"Yes, yes!" But what anti-climax was here?

"Well, he--he's dead. I saw him.--Lawd!"

"Oh!" It was a little cry of relief.

"But some were--were killed--taking him." Boone noted Jacqueline's

intake of breath, her first tremor of alarm. "He fought like a--a

wildcat. He had a knife--and a machete--and a pistol--and----"

"_Who_ was killed? Monsieur--Oh, mon Dieu, what _can_ you have

to tell me?"

Daniel almost repented, there was that in her gray eyes.

"Among them was my--" He nerved himself to it, some way--"my best

friend, that peerless----"

"Who?" Her command was imperious, her white teeth were set.

"Din Driscoll!"

The man blurted it out like a whipped schoolboy. He could not look up.

He could only feel that she stood there, stricken, suffering.

"Where is he?"

He could not believe that this was her voice. It was hardened, tearless,

without emotion.

"Monsieur--where is he?"

The girl at his side sprang up with a sharp cry to her who questioned.

Then he raised his eyes. Jacqueline was unaware of the sobbing girl who

clung to her. Her face was changed to marble, her body as rigid.

"Take me to him," she spoke again, still with that deathly authority of

the grave.

The man stammered before what he had done. The great beads stood out on

his forehead. "You would not--you must not--you----"

"He is mine," she said simply. "Wait, I shall be ready, at once." She

passed into an inner room, the portieres falling after her.

"She's--she's getting on her hat," Boone muttered inanely. "Buh'the,

she's got to be stopped! She's--God, why don't he come? It's shuah ten

minutes. It's--What's that?"

Someone had knocked. In the instant Boone had the hall door ajar.

"Round to the balcony window, hurry!" he whispered.

Then he turned, caught Berthe by the hand, and drew her quickly out into

the hall. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the portieres

rustle, but he dared not look back.

Jacqueline stepped into the room, and her hat was upon her head. It was

of straw, with a drooping brim. She had thrown a long cloak over her

thin dress. There was ice in her veins on this tropical June day. She

paused, for she saw that the room was deserted. But no--there was a

shadow between her and the balcony door. She stared at it, and her eyes

grew big. The cloak slipped to the floor, and her fingers worked in the

tapestry behind her. She fluttered weakly, like a wounded dove on the

ground. Her knees trembled under her. And the man there? He was gazing

about him in a puzzled way, for the glare outside still blinded him.

Then he saw. He reached her, and caught her as she sank. He felt two

soft arms, but icy cold, drop as lead around his neck. The white form he

held was rigid, and he thought of shrouds and the chilled death sweat.

With savage despair he crushed her to him. After a time her body slowly

began to relax.

"Oh, oh, my lad, my lad!" he heard her crying faintly, in a kind of

hysteria.

He touched her hair dazedly, with unutterable tenderness.

"There, there--sweetheart!"

The word came, though he had never used it before.

Blood awoke, and coursed, sluggishly at first, through her being, until

her heart tripped and throbbed and pounded against his own. Her head lay

on his breast, the hat hanging by its ribbons over her back, and with

the pulsing life the head and her whole body nestled closer. The soft

arms grew warm against his neck, and tightened fiercely, to hold and

keep him. Gently he forced up her chin, and her eyes, wet with hottest

tears, opened under his. He bent and kissed the long lashes. But a small

moist hand flattened against his brow and pushed back his head, and she

raised on tiptoe. He understood, and--their lips met.

"Tu sais," she murmured deliriously--nothing but her own dear French

would answer now--"tu sais, que--oh, mon coeur, que je--que je

_t'aime_!"

The oddest contrasts fall over life's most sacred moments. The tone of

her words thrilled him, set every fibre tingling, yet he thought of dry

conjugations and declensions, conned over and over again in school, and

he was conscious of vague wonderment that those things really, actually,

had a meaning. Meaning? He believed now that no words in English could

tell so much. He did not have to understand them. They bore the flesh

and blood, the passion and the soul, of a woman who told him that she

loved him.

With a hesitant gentleness which bespoke the deep and reverent awe in

his yearning, he pressed her head back against its resting place. A man

can do without words of any kind. She grew very quiet there. The tense

quivering ceased, and she crept closer, and at last she sighed,

purringly, contentedly.

But of course there was more which she simply had to say. And this time,

when she raised her eyes, they were calm and earnest, and her beautiful

forehead was white and very grave. "Do you know, dear," she said, "I

should not care to live, I would not have lived, if what he said

were--were--" But the eyes filled with tears, and angry with herself,

she planted her fists against him to be free, and as impulsively crying,

"Oh, my--my own dear lad!" she flung her arms about his neck again. "Oh,

oh," she moaned, "he said that you were dead!"

For the first time it dawned on Driscoll that all this must have had a

cause, and for the first time since entering the room he remembered

Boone.

"_He_ told you--He----"

But Driscoll did not finish. Putting her from him he sprang to the door

and flung it open. There he waited. Boone was outside, and Boone walked

expectantly in. Without a word Driscoll raised his fist, drew it back,

his cruel arm muscled to kill. Jacqueline saw his anger for her,

terrible in murder. She threw herself upon him, got hold of the knotted

fist, got it to her lips. Another woman, too, had darted between him and

the other man, and she faced him. The gentle Berthe was become a little

tigress.

"Not that, not that!" It was Jacqueline's voice. "Listen, mon cheri,

I--I thank him. Au contraire, I do! And--and you must, too!"

Driscoll stared at all three, first at one, then at another. He

floundered, stupefied. Here was this loving girl, clinging to him as

though he might vanish, and he had left her that morning a disdainful

beauty. Then here was this Meagre Shanks with his mysterious ten

minutes, and here was this dumfounding product of those ten minutes.

Driscoll put forth an open hand.

"Dan," he muttered incoherently, "you're a--a wonder, too!"

Boone clenched the proffered hand in his own. "I never once thought,

Jack," he said earnestly, contritely, "never once, that she cared so

ever-_lastingly_ much."

"Well," said Driscoll, "don't do it again."

"Not unless," ventured Boone, "not unless she should ever want a little

antidote for ennui. By the way, mademoiselle, do you thank me for the

quaver of emotion, for the frisson?"

"Frisson?" she repeated scornfully, with loathing. For once she had been

unaware of the prized knife-like tremor. In the fear of losing one dear

she had lost consciousness of self. She had _lived_ the tremor, the

agony, and it was too dreadful, "No, monsieur," she said, "I want no

more of art. I--I want to _live_!"

"You needed something, though," said Berthe, "to make you find it out."

Driscoll looked curiously at the two girls.

"Yes, J-Jack'leen"--how quaintly awkward he was, trying her old tomboy

nickname without the "Miss!"--"Yes, what was the matter with you,

anyhow?"

"Parbleu, I forgot!" cried Jacqueline in dismay. "I was not to have

monsieur, no!" And Jacqueline's chin, tilting back with elaborate

hauteur, was meant to indicate that she was in her first mind about it.

Berthe laughed outright, and softly clapped her hands.

"Sho'," declared Mr. Boone, "the matter was nothing, nothing _at_

all!"

But before feminine caprices and scruples it is wiser to bow low into

the dust. Jacqueline turned on the editorial personage with vast

indignation. "You leave the room, Seigneur Troubadour," she commanded,

"and Berthe, you march with him. Haste, both of you!"

They went, meekly. Their attempt to hide content over the dismissal

together was extreme, but transparent.

"What was it?" Driscoll insisted, when he and Jacqueline were alone once

more.

"You mean," she exclaimed, "that you are going to quarrel--now?"

"Jack'leen, what was it?"

"I reck-on," she observed demurely, "that the animal disputans was--was

right, after all. It was nothing, I--reck-on."

He noted mockery, defiance. There was much too much independence after

her late surrender. He went up to her and deliberately reassumed the

mastery. He held her, by force. "Mon chevalier," she murmured softly. So

she confessed his strength.

"Tell me," he said.

"And you did not guess? You--Oh, how I hated you! How I never wanted to

see you, never again! Not after, not after--Mon Dieu, you were two

exasperating idiots, you and poor Prince Max! He virtually _threw_

me into your arms. But I, monsieur, am not a person to be thrown. That

is, unless--unless I do it myself, which--I did, helas!"

The trooper's grip tightened on her arms. "Then you," he said earnestly,

"would have let me lose you?"

She laughed merrily at him.

"And would not you have followed after me?"

"W'y, little girl, I reckon I certainly would of."

"Don't," she gasped. "Let me come--closer. Oh dear, how can the bon Dieu

let people be so happy--s-o happy!"