The Mystery of The Barranca Part 14

The smiling mouth pursed demurely under his whimsical glance. "I am afraid not. You saw my performance at supper. I am the despair of my mother, who would have me more delicate and refined."

"Marriage?"

"No one wants me."

"Don Sebastien?"

It slipped out, and he was immediately sorry, but she only laughed.

"Tut! tut! A cousin?"

Surveying him from under drooping lashes, a glance soft and warm as velvet, she added: "I will confess. There _were_ others. Some too fat, some too thin, all too stupid, here at home. In Mexico they were triflers--or worse. But on the honor of a lone maid, senor, never a man among them." With a sudden relapse into seriousness she repeated, "Among _all_ of them--never a man." Though she was looking directly at him, her glance seemed to go on, fly to some further vision which, for one second, set its reflection in her eyes. Then her long silky lashes wiped it out. When they rose again it was over mischievous lights. "Never a _man_," with a change of accent.

"But he will come--some day," he teased.

"And go--after the fashion of dream men."

"And dream women."

For a while she studied him curiously. "Then she has not come?"

"Yes," he answered, with sudden impulse. "But--"

She softly filled the pause. "'But' and 'because' are woman's reasons."

"Unhappily, sometimes man's," he gravely answered; and, feeling, perhaps, that the conversation was drifting into unsafe lat.i.tudes, he rose and began to pull dry gra.s.s from the under side of the thatch. "For you," he exclaimed, with a glance at the bunk. "I knew you wouldn't care to sleep there."

Having arranged a thick layer at a safe distance from the fire, he gathered another armful, and was going outside when she called him back.

"To make my bed," he answered her question.

"In the wet?"

"Oh, it isn't so bad--here under the eaves."

"Only an inch of water," she answered him, with pretty sarcasm; and, indicating certain small trickles that were coming through the cane siding, she gave him his orders. "You will sleep here--inside."

"But--" he began.

"Senor, I said that you would sleep _inside_."

As a matter of fact, the "prospect" outside was not inviting, and his acquiescence lowered the quick colors his previous obstinacy had raised.

She had already settled down on one elbow; and when, having arranged a bed on the opposite side of the fire, he lit a second pipe, she studied him through the smoke, wondering what pictures were responsible for his earnest gaze. But warmth and comfort presently produced their natural effect, and she began to nod. After a few shy, sleepy glances that showed him still staring moodily into the fire her head sank upon the white fullness of her doubled arm.

As a matter of fact, it was his wife's face that returned his steady gaze from a nest of red coal. Absorbed in bitter musings, he received the first intimation of Francesca's sleep from a sigh which caused him to start as though at the report of a gun. Then while the warm blood streamed through his drumming pulses, every sense vividly alive, he looked down upon her. With all the timid awe that Adam must have displayed when he awoke to the sight of Eve he studied this greatest of masculine experiences, a woman clad in the soft armor of sleep.

For some time his senses dwelt only on the fact, and gave him merely the soft sigh of her sleep, the play of firelight over the unconscious figure. But presently his mind began to work, to compare the broad forehead, oval contours, fine-cut nostrils, delicate chiseling of her features, with the common prettiness of his wife. Even the little foot and slender ankle, freed by relaxation from the jealous skirt, helped to emphasize differences wide as those between a hummingbird and a pouter pigeon. It had required the rigid selection of a thousand generations, the pre-eminence in strength and brains of a line of fighters to produce the one, just as the slacker choice of a commoner breed had created the other; and Seyd, whose own blood had come down through the clean channels of good Colonial stock, recognized the fact. As never before he was impressed with the fatuity of his chivalric rashness. While the firelight rose and fell he strained at the ties which stretched over mountains, desert, plains, binding him to the coa.r.s.e woman in Albuquerque.

His sudden jerk forward was the physical equivalent of his mental strain. Though homely, even slangy, his mutter, "Your cake is baked, son. The sooner you let this girl know it the better," was none the less tragic. The thought was the last in his waking mind.

Before going to sleep he performed one last service. Noticing that she shivered under the wet breath of the night, he took off his coat, tiptoed across, and, after laying it softly across her shoulders, returned with equal caution. She did not stir or even change the slow rhythm of her breath, but he had no more than lain down before her eyes slowly opened. When his deep respirations told that he was fast asleep she rose on one elbow and looked at him across the fire.

In her turn, with glances shyly curious as those with which Eve, newly formed, may have eyed Adam still in "deep sleep," she noted the wide-s.p.a.ced, deep-set eyes, strong nose, the ideality of the brows, the humorous puckers at the corners of his mouth. Though she did not a.n.a.lyze their individual meanings, the totality made a strong appeal to instinct and intuitions formed by the vast experience of the race. Her impression phrased itself in her murmur, "A wholesome face."

Only the cleft chin seemed to carry a special meaning. Surveying it, a gleam of mischief shot through the soft satisfaction of her look, and she murmured beneath her breath in Spanish, "Oh, fickle! fickle! Thy wife will need the sharpest of eyes."

The thought brought a little laugh, and for a minute thereafter she sat, a finger upon her lip, listening for a break in his breathing. When it did not come she rose slowly, stole like a mouse across the floor, and laid his coat, light as a feather, over his unprotected shoulders. Back again on her own couch, she looked across at him again; a glance nave in its enjoyment of the romantic impropriety of the entire proceeding.

Then, curling up under her raincoat, she fell fast asleep.

CHAPTER XII

Thoroughly f.a.gged out by six weary nights on the train, Seyd slept like the dead, and did not awaken until a sudden clatter of pots aroused him to knowledge of a golden cobweb of light streaming in between the flimsy siding of the hut. Through the open doorway he obtained a glimpse of a bejeweled world, resonant with the song of birds. After informing him of these facts, his eyes reintroduced him to the young lady in the tan riding habit who had ousted the pretty peona of last night from her command over fire and dishes. The satisfying odor of hot coffee completed the verdict of his senses.

"Breakfast all ready? I must have slept like a log."

"You did." She laughed. "I rattled the dishes in vain. I was just about to throw something at you."

Now, his last waking thought had outlined a purpose to inform her at once of his marriage, and while they were eating breakfast it recurred again. But not with the same force. That which, when imbued with the sentimental values of firelight and silence, appeared necessary and right somehow appeared almost absurd when viewed in broad day. Checking sentiment, too, by its very friendliness, her manner did not invite confession.

"It would be impertinent," he concluded. "She has no personal interest in me."

If he had observed her only an hour earlier re-entering the _jacal_ after a shivering exchange outside with the peona he might not have been quite so sure. Once or twice she had indulged in softer thought, whose key was to be found in her murmur just before she tried to awake him:

"_Adios_, Rosario."

Also the morning had brought its own problem to fill his mind. He could not but see that their appearance at the inn in the Barranca so early in the day would be a confession of their breach of the most rigid of Spanish conventions. But how to broach the subject without offense?

Though he racked his brains while saddling the horse and, later, when it was carrying them double upon their way, he had come to no conclusion up to the moment that she settled it herself with a little cry.

"Now I know where I am." She was indicating an outcropping of rock on a sterile hillside. "We strayed miles away from our trail. We shall soon come to a path that leads past a rancho where I can borrow a horse."

Almost as they spoke the cattle track they had been following joined a trail, and shortly after she spoke again, laughing. "And now, Senor Rosario, I must bid you good-by. This good beast has done n.o.bly, but we shall gain time if one rides forward to the rancho and sends back a horse. Which shall it be?"

But he was already on the ground, hat in hand. "Rosa, _adios_."

Laughing, she rode on while he sat down on an outcropping of rock to wait, for he was not minded to wade through the wet gra.s.s and brush of some woods at the foot of the hill. Until she pa.s.sed from sight he sat watching, then, feeling a little lazy, he fitted his angles into a sort of natural couch in the rock and fell to musing, reviewing again the incidents of the night. He had not intended to sleep. But what with the warmth and stillness, he presently pa.s.sed quietly away, was still unconscious when the stroke of a hoof on a rock awoke him to the sight of two hors.e.m.e.n with a led beast.

"For me," he thought. Then, as he recognized Sebastien Rocha in the second horseman, he whistled his consternation. If the hacendado had not actually met Francesca he must surely have pumped the _mozo_ dry, and now the sight of him, Seyd, would fully reveal their case!

"Now for a big fat row," he told himself. But, greatly to his surprise, Sebastien pa.s.sed on with a nod, and presently turned from the trail, following their fresh hoof tracks over the hill. The _mozo_ had already gone on to retrieve Francesca's saddle from the dead horse, and, irritated and alarmed, Seyd mounted the led beast and rode on at a gallop. But, quickly realizing that his further company was not likely to improve the girl's case, he presently pulled the beast back to a walk. Lost in frowning thought, he rode on slowly until, an hour later, there came a beat of galloping hoofs, and Sebastien rode up from behind.

His reiteration of the thought "Now for the row!" was colored by the way in which the hacendado's hand went to his holster. But Seyd's hand, which moved as quickly to his own gun, dropped, and he blushed crimson as the other held out his brier pipe.

"Merely _this_, senor." He glanced meaningly at Seyd's gun. "For _that_ you would have been too late. I could have shot you through the back.

After this do not let your foolish Yankee pride stop you from looking behind."

Though both angry and alarmed, the cold impudence of it made Seyd laugh.