AT LAST
Marty Day was quite as amazed as his cousin at this meeting, for he,
too, recognized the handsome black-eyed woman on the observation
platform of the Pullman coach. He found his tongue first.
"What do you know about that?" he murmured. "Just like a movie, ain't
it? She is that woman you were traveling with, Janice--the one I thought
tried to swipe your money. And maybe she _did_ try to at that!"
"Hush!" begged his cousin.
"Eet ees the Se[~n]ora General De Soto Palo," hissed Juan. "She a gre't
la-dee--huh?"
For a full minute the black-eyed woman stared at Janice and the latter
wondered if the Se[~n]ora General Palo would admit their acquaintanceship.
They had been so "goot friends" on the train; would the se[~n]ora
acknowledge it now?
"Ach!" exclaimed the woman, her rather stern countenance blossoming into
a smile. "You are a wonderful girl, my dear--soh! You have made your way
here--through this so-strange country and with all against you. Have you
saved your money from robbery, too?" and her black eyes began to
twinkle.
"Oh, Madam!" murmured Janice.
"Our money's safe all right all right," put in Marty.
Madam ignored him. "Come up here, my dear," she commanded in her full
contralto voice, still smiling at the American girl.
Janice tumbled off the burro and hastily mounted the steps to the
platform. The young officer who had led them here, and others of his
ilk, stared from a distance and twirled their _mustachios_. Marty
grinned at Juan.
"I guess we got a friend at court, eh, Juan?" he said in a whisper. "It
takes our Janice to get us out of scrapes--believe me!"
"Of a verity, yes!" agreed Juan.
The black-eyed woman seized Janice Day in a warm embrace the moment the
girl came near.
"Oh, Madam!" cried the latter. "I hope I did not offend you. You left so
abruptly back there at Sweetwater----"
"Ach! it ees nothing," said the woman. "I was hurt--for the moment. You
did not trust me."
"And you were continually warning me to trust nobody," interposed
Janice, flushing.
"It is true!" cried the woman, patting her cheek. "I made you so fear
for r-robbers that you fear poor _me_, eh? But that is past. I was
sorry, later, when I learn' just where my hoosban' is that I did not
confide more in you and you in me, my dear."
"Oh! And you are really the wife of this general who commands here?"
Janice exclaimed. "How wonderful!"
"Yes. General Palo has long been exile from his land. Soh! But now he is
in favor with the government at Mexico City," explained Madam. "Yes! it
was at his request I cut short my season in New York an' join him. He
hope to be made governor of this deestrict when the campaign is over. He
hope soon to settle all controversies and whip these rebel dogs back
into the hills and keep them there."
"But, Madam, you are not Mexican!" cried Janice.
"Not by birth--no, my dear. Yet I am intensely patriotic for my
hoosban's country--_Viva M['e]jico_!"
Janice sighed. She, like Marty, began to wonder at the universal cry for
_la patria_ from those of such conflicting opinions.
"No," said Madam. They were now sitting in a compartment of the Pullman
that was evidently Madam's boudoir. "I am of blood Bohemian--with a
strain of the greatest nation of all time," and she smiled.
"The Hebrew?"
"But yes. I have lived everywhere--on both continents," with a sweeping
gesture. "Under my own name--first made known to the world in Vienna--I
sing. I am of the opera."
"Oh, Madam! I guessed _that_," Janice declared with clasped hands.
"Yes? Well, it iss soh," said the lady sibilantly. "I hear in New York
where I am singing at the Metropolitan that my hoosban' is advance. I
pack and start for Mexico immediate. Contr-r-racts are nothing at such
time, yes? I hasten across the continent to greet and applaud him. After
I join him at San Cristoval I hear of things, and remember things that
you say, my dear, that make me to understand you must be bound for this
same place, too. It is sad you should not have come wit' me."
"My father!" gasped Janice. "Do you know if he is better?"
"I know that he is as yet holding out against the rebels," Madam said.
"He, with a few desperate _compadres_, are guarding his mine buildings,
yes-s!"
"Then he is not seriously wounded?" cried the girl gladly.
"I believe not. We get some information to and from the mine. Se[~n]or
General De Soto Palo declare he will shell the rebels into the hills
to-day, my dear. You have come in season."
Marty, meanwhile, sat comfortably on the car steps in the shade and said
to Juan:
"I guess you can beat it back to town, old man, if you want to. I have
a hunch that, in spite of that gun you swing, and your look like a
picture of a Spanish pirate I saw once, you ain't no fighting man; are
you?"
"As the se[~n]or says," admitted Juan with a toothful grin and his yellow
eyes squinting, "I am a man of peace--by goodness, yes!"
"All right. Here's a dollar--you're welcome to it. You're the only
Mexican I've seen that didn't claim to be a fire-eater," and Marty
chuckled. "You see, Janice knows the commander's lady and I fancy it's a
cinch for us to reach Uncle Brocky now. Da, da, Juan."
"_Adios_, se[~n]or," responded the man and kicked the burro to start that
peacefully grazing animal back along the railroad bed.
Suddenly the distant sound of firing disturbed the placidity of the
scene about the "headquarters." The little group of officers began to
show excitement.
"Sounds like a lot o' ginger-beer corks popping," thought Marty. "Must
be something doing." He immediately grew eager himself.
When a little pudgy man in a red and green uniform, a plume in his hat,
and yellow gauntlets, came from the forward car and mounted a horse held
for him obsequiously, the boy knew he was viewing General De Soto Palo
in all his dignity and glory. Truly it _was the_ magnificent Madam's
fate to be admired by the "so-leetle" men--her husband not excepted.
"Hi tunket! I'd like to go with 'em," muttered Marty, as the cavalcade
of officers rode swiftly away. "But I s'pose I got to stay on the job
and guard Janice. Sometimes girls are certainly a nuisance."
There was a jar throughout the short train. The couplings tightened.
With a squeal of escaping steam the locomotive forged ahead, dragging
the general's headquarters car and Madam's living car with it.
Janice ran to the door. "Oh, Marty!" she cried. "Are you all right?"
"Right as rain," he assured her.
"We are going up nearer the battle-line. Oh, Marty! think of it! I may
see daddy to-day!"
"Great!" he responded. "I hope the fight ain't all over when we get
there."
They were yet ten miles from the Alderdice Mine and the train was more
than an hour pulling that distance. They stopped often; and when the
train did move it was at a snail's pace.
All the time the machine guns rattled like shaking pebbles in a
cannister, the rifles popped and the shells exploded resonantly. Now and
then they descried smoke above the tree tops. Occasionally they passed
burning buildings.
And then appeared--more hateful sight than all else--the dead body of a
man lying beside the railroad track, face down, the back of his head all
gory.
He was a little man. His hand still grasped a brown rifle almost as tall
as himself.
The laboring train halted directly beside the dead man. Marty dropped
down from the rear step and went to the corpse. He turned it over with
curiosity.
And then suddenly there shot through the boy from the North a feeling of
such nausea and horror that he was destined ever to remember it.
This was not a man that lay here. It was a boy--a little, yellow-faced,
barefooted fellow not as old as Marty himself, with staring eyes which
already the ants had found--and a queer, twisted little smile upon the
lips behind which the white teeth gleamed.
Marty stumbled blindly back to the car, sobbing. "He's--he's laughing,"
he stammered to Janice. "I--I wonder if that's 'cause he's found out now
how foolish it all is?"
They saw the end of the battle; by then it was mid-afternoon. A stream
of wounded had been carried past the train on stretchers--back to a
little temporary hospital somewhere in the woods out of sight of the
belligerents. For the half-wild Indians from the hills respect no Red
Cross.
They saw the last scattering, ragged horde limp away from the mesa on
which were the buildings of the Alderdice Mining Company, driven to
cover by the cheering troops of Se[~n]or General De Soto Palo.
Here for some time the rebels had besieged the corrugated iron huts of
the mining company, in which a handful of men held out tenaciously.
The lack of machine guns on the part of the Mexican rebels had made this
defense of the mining property possible. The bursting shells from the
heavier guns of the government forces had quite thrown them into panic.
The men guarding the mining property had finally retreated into a cellar
under one of the store-sheds. The ore-raising machinery had been
dismantled and hidden in the mine, and little of real value belonging to
the mining company had been destroyed.
Now these guards appeared--not more than two dozen of them;
powder-stained and unwashed, but a grim group prepared to keep up the
fight if necessary.
The same young aide-de-camp who had "captured" Janice and Marty when
they approached the headquarters of the general in command, now came to
the Madam and her guests.
"If the se[~n]or and se[~n]orita wish to go forward, all is now quiet," he
announced, bowing low before Janice and the Madam. "I will do myself the
honor to conduct them to Se[~n]or B-Day. He is in the cellar."
"The cellar!" gasped the girl.
"With other wounded. Quite safe, I assure the se[~n]orita," added the
aide-de-camp hastily.
"Oh! let us hurry!" cried the eager girl.
Her hasty feet took her in advance of the others. She reached the group
of shacks where the window-lights were blown out and much wreckage
strewed the ground. Before an open cellarway stood a ragged and
barefooted soldier. He presented arms most grotesquely as the party came
near.
"My father--Se[~n]or B-Day?" Janice asked.
At the sound of her voice a cry answered from within and a gaunt figure
staggered up the stone steps into the sunlight.
"Janice! My Janice! Can it be possible?" cried the man, gazing in wonder
at the girl. "Janice!"
"Daddy! Oh, Daddy!" she screamed, and ran toward him, her arms
outstretched, her face all aglow.
"Hey, Janice!" called Marty right behind her. "Don't forget his arm's in
a sling."