The Missourian Part 48

"Theft of their country, I mean, and as your accomplice I owe rest.i.tution. Leaving after a victory ain't so bad, but if I'd known that I was fighting for that Black Decree, I'd of dropped out before the fight. But look at it anyway you please. _How_ it looks be d.a.m.ned!"

"Senor, lay down your pistols and sabre, there, on that table, because, by Heaven, I shall stop you! But if you are armed, I--I shall have to shoot you, too."

"Hang it, Mendez, you're a good fellow! But--I can't help it."

"Lay them down, you renegade!"

Driscoll removed his sabre and gravely placed it on the table.

"The guns are my own," he said. "Dupin had them returned to me.

_He_ took them. Suppose _you_ take them, Colonel Mendez!"

He was in the doorway, and from there he faced them. The day was hot, and Mendez had taken off his belt with his weapons. But the others were armed. Yet they hesitated. They were brave enough for death, but before the certainty of death for at least one among them and the uncertainty of which one, they paused. Driscoll had not touched the black six-shooters under his ribs. That would have snapped the psychological fetter. As he expected, Mendez sprang first. This put an unarmed man between himself and the others. In the instant he wheeled, was in the saddle, and clattering down the street.

Back in the room Mendez saw his blunder and made way. Ney pa.s.sed him first, reached the door, aimed and fired. But someone behind him touched his arm, and the ball sped high. Ney turned, and saw Tiburcio filling the door against the others, and regarding him with evil challenge in his eye.

"Oh, don't think that I hold it against you," Ney cried gratefully.

Tiburcio half laughed.

"A man who don't want prisoners shot is better with the enemy than dead," he said.

Tiburcio's chuckle was prophetic. The enemy invariably executed Exploradores, and would certainly do as much for Don Tiburcio if they caught him.

Ney heard the hoof beats, already far away.

"May the G.o.d of fools look after him too," he murmured heavily.

The fugitive swept round the first corner of the street and on through the town. None thought to stop him. Soldiers and townsmen supposed him on the Empire's urgent business, and when they knew better, there was no longer hope for their ponies against the great Missouri buckskin, now a diminishing dusty speck mid cacti and maguey.

"The devil of it is," Driscoll muttered ruefully, "I don't know where there's anybody to desert _to_!"

However, he was feeling much better.

CHAPTER III

AS BETWEEN WOMEN

"A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market."--_Lamb._

Jacqueline had wrought close to success during that May twilight on the edge of the Cuernavaca pond. She had won a promise of abdication. Yet in the end it was not the Emperor that left Mexico, but the Empress. And Jacqueline was to accompany her, to leave despite herself the scene of her labors. Such was the case precisely, and it all came to pa.s.s in this wise.

Maddened by the distance which his temptress kept, also goaded to it by the sorry state of his empire, Maximilian thought only of abdication.

Napoleon responded to Jacqueline's cipher dispatch with orders to Bazaine. But Bazaine, urged thereto by Empress and marechale, ignored the orders, and advanced Maximilian more money. And Maximilian, having no longer his excuse to quit, stayed on to spend the money. Jacqueline sighed, and--began all over again. Consequently Bazaine, hearing once more from Napoleon, found himself a defaulter, and virtually recalled.

Consequently, Napoleon set dates for evacuation. Consequently the rebellion sprang into new life, and the Empire lost armies and cities, and thousands of men by desertion. But the darkest cloud was formed by one hundred thousand Yankees ma.s.sed along the Rio Grande. Napoleon took heed. He ordered that the French troops should leave at once, unless half the Mexican customs were turned over to the French administrator.

This was during the summer of 1866, only six months after the bright hopes embodied in the Black Decree of general amnesty. Utterly appalled, Maximilian took up his pen again to sign his abdication.

But there was Charlotte. Even yet she pettishly clung to her crown. The Mexican agents in Paris had availed nothing with Napoleon. Bien, she would herself go to Paris. She would get the ultimatum recalled, and Bazaine as well, because Bazaine no longer advanced money. The imperial favorites, among them the sleek-jowled padre recommended by eloin, seconded her intention. And as they all talked so well, Maximilian quaffed of hope. With a spite hardly n.o.ble though entirely royal, he predicted that soon the marshal would find himself in a sadder fix than himself, the Emperor.

Suddenly, secretly, a little after midnight, Charlotte left the capital.

Maximilian bade her good-bye with a solemn promise to rejoin her in Europe if she failed. Three days later Dupin and his Contra Guerrillas met her in the Tierra Caliente, and offered to join her French cavalry escort. The Empress took his presence as an affront. Of late small things excited her to a feverish agitation which she was unable to control. The Tiger bowed over his saddle, and kept his gray hair bared to a torrential downpour while her carriage pa.s.sed on. It was the tropical rainy season. The clouds hung low around the mountain base and truncated the more distant peaks, while the valley below was a bright contrast in wet, tender green. The wheels sank deep, and mired in the black, soggy earth. Men tugged constantly at the spokes, and the steaming mules reared and plunged under the angry crack of whips.

The Tiger of the Tropics waited as carriage after carriage toiled past him and creaked and was forced on its way. Behind the dripping windowpane of the very last he saw a face he knew, a beautiful, saddened face, puckered just now by some immediate ill-humor. She frowned on recognizing the French barbarian, but unlike Charlotte, she did not jerk down the shutter. Instead, she lowered the gla.s.s by the length of her pretty nose.

"Is it dotage already, monsieur? Then put on your hat!"

"Name of a name, yet another petulant grande dame!" But the Frenchman turned his horse and rode beside her coach.

"Did Her Majesty pout, then?" inquired the lady within.

"Almost as superbly as Mademoiselle la Marquise."

"Thank you well, but I have a superb reason for it."

"Because you return to Paris, surely not? Yet, if that is the reason, you need not quite despair."

"Why, what--what do you mean?"

"Only brigands, mademoiselle. When everyone is looking for abdication, a cortege mysteriously leaving the City must be the Emperor who goes back to Austria. The news travels like wildfire. The Indito runners go as fast as when they brought Moctezuma fresh fish from the Gulf. I rather think they have carried the news to an old friend of ours. It's my chance to catch him."

"Not my Fra Diavolo--Rodrigo Galan?"

"None other. But Rodrigo is stirred by more than patriotism these days.

Upon it he has grafted a deep wrong, and he swears lofty vengeance by a little ivory cross such as these Mexican girls wear. The conceited cut-throat imagines there is a blood feud between himself and His Majesty. So if he hears that Prince Max comes this way----"

"He will find Charlotte instead? But he must not detain her."

"Tonnerre!" exclaimed the Cossack chief. "Why not? She goes to Europe to sustain the Empire, while we French----"

"All the same, let her go. She will gain nothing there. Listen to me, monsieur. She leaves that he may _not_ abdicate, while if I stay, she fears that----"

"He _will_ abdicate?"

"Your wits, mon colonel, are entirely satisfactory. And so she invited me to go with her, and as first lady of her household, I could not refuse. I wonder, now, if Fra Diavolo would deign to capture just me, alone!"

The sharp look which Dupin gave her from behind the streams tumbling off his sombrero was the sixth of a half-dozen. But it was this last one that seemed to satisfy him.

"Put up the window, mademoiselle," he said, "you're getting wet."

Ten minutes later Jacqueline felt the coach lurch heavily and sink to the hub on one side.

"Go on with your nap, Berthe," she said to her one companion. "They'll pull us out, as usual."