The Missourian Part 33

"Who runs away with a convict. A fit commander, por Dios!"

Off came the Frenchman's gauntlet, but he paused in the gesture of striking. Too quick at this, and not enough at wits, he might ruin her plans.

"As fit," he retorted instead, "as another who lets prisoners escape. I advise Monsieur the Colonel to look to his girths."

CHAPTER XXV

THE PERSON ON THE OTHER HORSE

"Yet am I sure of one pleasure, And shortly, it is this: That, where ye be, me seemeth, parde, I could not fare amiss."

--_Ballad of the Nut Brown Maid._

Din Driscoll had never remotely imagined that there could be such intoxication in a horseback ride. The person on the other horse made for the difference. How the joy of her filled him that instant of his bursting through the black prison wall into the bright morning of the world! She, the splendid first thing to gladden his eyes! Could liberty be really so glorious? Ravishing horsewoman, she was coming to save him.

He had supposed her on her way to Mexico, and 'twas she whom he saw first of all.

And now, she rode beside him. They two, they were riding together, alone. The smell of the wild free air of the universe thrilled them both with an exquisite recklessness. Vague, limitless, subtle in mystery, the seduction of it was ineffable. Out of the corner of his eye he peeped at her. But wasn't she perched entrancingly on that dragoon saddle, wasn't she, though? The richly heavy coils of burnished copper had loosened, and they were very disconcerting in their suggestion of flowing wealth.

If they _would_ but fall about her shoulders! And the lace from the slanting hat brim, and the velvet patch near the dimple--the velvet patch called an a.s.sa.s.sin. And--what dress was that? Flowered calico?

Yes, and light blue. His cheeks burned as of one surprised in crime, but the self-possessed young woman herself was oblivious. So was it this, a blue flowered gown, that made her so suddenly tangible, so tangible and maddening? The haughty Parisienne of imperial courts was gone. In fact, she had become so distractingly tangible that--well, he didn't know. But a lump got into his throat. She might be a Missouri girl, this moment.

And there came to him the vision of one, of a Missouri girl molding biscuits, patting them, and her arms were bared, in a simple piquancy just like Jacqueline's now. He even saw the pickaninnies in the shade of the porch outside, worshiping the real Missouri girl from the very whites of their eyes. How he had loved to tease her! He could not help it; she was so daintily prim. That he should thus think of his sister, the while gazing on the one-time gilded b.u.t.terfly--to say the least, it was a pertinent comment on the trans.m.u.ting magic that lurks in blue flowered percale.

They slowed to a trot.

"Monsieur is my prisoner, yes," said she in her wonderful English.

He took the other meaning. "I don't know--_yet_," he returned soberly.

She laughed, and he realized that he had spoken aloud.

He turned on himself in dismay. "What's the matter with me?" he muttered.

"I think, monsieur," said Jacqueline demurely, "that I have the guess."

"You haven't--you can't guess either! I don't know myself."

"Just the same, I wish I knew so well my chances for heaven."

"But you're mistaken, I tell you. I'm not!"

"Not what, monsieur?"

"In, in--w'y, in love."

Jacqueline's laughter was the merriest peal. In the end he half grinned.

Little use trying to convince the little witch! He had much to do convincing himself.

On the farther slope of a hill where coffee grew and the giant sheltering banana hid the road, they paused at a trail that crossed the highway and wound on down toward the Panuco river, where tropical stuff for Tampico was transferred from burros to dugout barges. Jacqueline listened. There were no sounds of pursuit as yet, nor was there any one in sight. Making up her mind, she changed to the path. Driscoll followed, with a delight in this new leadership over him.

When they gained the river, she stopped again, and he did too.

"But you must go, on, on!" she protested. "They may not be deceived, no.

They may have you to overtake here." She held out her hand. "There, this path, you follow it to Tampico. Good bye. Yes, yes, you have not one minute!"

Driscoll took the little gauntleted hand readily enough. He saw that the lines of her face were drawn, but her manner was inexorable.

"How do you like your dress?" he inquired.

Had she been on her feet, she would have stamped one of them.

"Monsieur," she cried, "here is no time to observe the replenishment of a lady's wardrobe. Do you go? I insist. I wish you bon voyage to your own country, monsieur."

"But it's so far away. I reckon I'd better rest a spell first. A month or so, prob'bly."

She watched him clamber down and tie Demijohn to the low branch of a live oak on the river's bank.

"There you are, getting stubborn again," she said. But the lines in her face had vanished.

"Of course I mean to see you back to your friends," he explained.

"Merci bien. But you will not. You will have this river straight to Tampico. I say yes!"

She turned her horse as she spoke, whereat he started to remount his own.

"I think, sir----" she began haughtily.

"The road is free."

"Oh, why have you to be so, so quarrelsome?"

"The temptation, I reckon."

"You really will go back with me?"

"I might be going back along about the same time. It's a public trail."

"Then _I_ will stay, and you _must_! I will not permit you to go back there now. I will see that you do wait here so long until Lopez has the time to start to Mexico after you. Then you will be behind him.

Have the goodness to hold my bridle. I think I shall take me a rest a little also."

Together they sat on a huge live-oak root and watched the sluggish Panuco flow by.

"No hurry now," Driscoll observed comfortably. "Our scarlet upholstered colonel won't get away for years yet."

Years, at least, were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her quaintly inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned it in London long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her father played France's diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers, then, was as broad as Mayfair, and to the Missourian doubly foreign, and doubly alluring.

"I cannot understand," she said, "why it is the Dragoons have not followed you immediately?"