The Popular Magazine/Volume 23/Number 2/Guns—and a Girl

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Guns—and a Girl

By Robert Welles Ritchie
Author of “Under Strange Stars,” “Gibbs' Footnote to History,” Etc.

A sidelight on the Mexican revolution, with three finely drawn characters to absorb your interest—Split-nose Gonzales, chief of the gun-running junta; Pelton, of the secret service, on mission to protect the neutrality of the Texas border; and—the girl.

THE band of the Third Regiment of Zapadores was playing the “March Benito Juarez” there in the little band stand sprouting from the cannas in the middle of the plaza. Around and around the graveled walks on the four sides of the plaza strolled the caballeros and the señoritas of Nuevo Laredo. The young men marched in groups of twos and threes, always from right to left. The laughing, half-veiled girls, daring to cast eyes and flick their fans flirtatiously, paced the four walks of the plaza in an opposite direction. Quick whispers were passed, sly glances exchanged when group passed group.

Mammas and duennas sat on the benches in the shadows. Their eyes were never once beguiled by the studied carelessness of the señoritas on parade. Nor did the little airs of bravado, the covert glances of the young caballeros who passed in opposite formation escape them. The gallant of Nuevo Laredo, as of all Mexico, is ever under fire of a battery of eyes.

So the band played the “March Benito Juarez”; then, finishing the quick time, slipped into the languorous, halting measures of a waltz—all fire, seductive, breath of orange flowers and acacia. Music and laughter were there in the plaza of Nuevo Laredo, yet out in the mesquite wilderness, only fifteen miles away, lay six hundred men of the revolution, awaiting precious guns for the attack upon the town.

Out there under the dust of summer stars José and Gabriel de los Santos, the jackals of the Maderistas in Tamatlipas State, waited, ready to strike if only the guns would come from over the border. There in Nuevo Laredo a block from the plaza stood the dingy cuartel, in which General Bernardo Alvarez Garcia, the old lion of Puebla, held some three hundred and fifty soldiers of Diaz in iron grip—waiting.

Thus it had been for two weeks. The mesquite wilderness delayed launching its crop of steel and death at the town. The little cuartel guarded close its ranks of defenders. Not a rifle was seen outside its loopholed walls. Only a bugle sounded muffled within its hidden barricades night and morning to tell Nuevo Laredo that Porfirio Diaz was still supreme commander of that town at least.

Pelton sat on one of the benches with the mammas and the duennas while the band played and the chattering señoritas passed and repassed. He sat with his feet sprawling out and his hands in his pockets. His battered straw hat was pushed back from his forehead, and on his bony, deeply etched face there was not a flicker of expression. He smoked one corn-husk cigarette after another languidly.

Nobody could know better than Pelton that his attitude was not correct. He would not have sprawled that way in the lounge room of the University Club back on Fifth Avenue. But Joseph Warren Pelton, B. A., Harvard, Rumpty-umph, in the lounge room of the University Club in New York was one man, and Pelton, secret agent, treasury department, U. S. A., on a plaza bench in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, was quite another. Why Joseph Warren Pelton, of Harvard, should have elected to be Pelton of the secret service on mission to protect the neutrality of the Texas border is purely Pelton's business, and does not enter here.

One might reasonably wonder what right a secret agent of the treasury department had to sit on a plaza bench over the river in Mexico. In his capacity of secret agent none, to be sure. His province ended on the north side of the international monument in the middle of the bridge linking the Laredo of Texas with the Laredo of Tamaulipas; the Rio Bravo was his boundary. But when Pelton had come to Laredo of Texas, more Mexican in its partisanship than Mexican Laredo itself, he crossed the bridge one night, and had a little confab with old General Garcia in the cuartel. The lion of Puebla was naturally enthusiastically in sympathy with Pelton's mission, which was to prevent gun running from the Texas shore of the river, and so, any night he pleased, Pelton was privileged to put his straddling legs in front of a bench on the plaza, even though he wore a queer silver shield pinned to one suspender band.

As the brass music sobbed in waltz measure and the shuffling streams of promenaders passed him, Pelton cast an occasional glance at the lighted clock dial over the Palace of Justice. When the minute hand slipped past the hour of nine-thirty, he stopped smoking his corn-husk cigarettes, and sat tensely alert. The clock pointed nine-forty, nine-fifty-five, ten. Pelton's eyes had been the more keenly scrutinizing the passing faces during the latter moments. When the last stroke of ten sounded, he rose, pulled his gangling frame together with an odd, hitching movement of the shoulders, and slouched off through a bypath until he was out of the circle of the paraders and in one of the dark side streets.

There the secret agent quickened his pace, and walked surely through a tangle of narrow streets until he came out upon a road ending abruptly at the bluff's edge over the river. Across the black Rio Bravo the lights of Laredo shone. The huge arc of the international bridge blurred the star glow.

Pelton stopped before the last adobe house at the road's end. He stepped into the shadow of the thick wall that surrounded the house, and whistled once very lightly. No sound but the gurgling of the river over its sand bars. Pelton waited a full five minutes, then pushed open the garden gate, and entered.

A short path, bordered by sunken beer bottles, led through the beds of hollyhocks and marigolds to the door of the adobe dwelling. There was no light in the two front windows. The door, half opened, cut a slice out of the deeper blackness of the interior. The American started up the path toward the door. A sudden metallic glint of light struck up from one line of the bottle border near where a little wilderness of rank hollyhock stalks fringed the path. Pelton stopped, and looked down.

A bared human foot and portion of ankle rested stiffly on the butts of the sunken bottles. Pelton knelt with a sharp intake of the breath, and touched the foot. His hand jumped away, smeared and sticky. He fumbled for a match. The flame split the shadows cast by the hollyhocks.

The foot that he saw was shod with a mule's shoe. The steel was clamped tightly to the sole. Nail points protruded through the flesh over the arch.

Another bare foot, from which a mule's shoe sprung grotesquely, was drawn up under the ankle of the first. Both feet sprouted abruptly from the jungle of the hollyhocks.

Pelton seized the ankles, and pulled a body out onto the path. It was that of a Mexican youth, maybe eighteen years old. A black silk handkerchief was bound tightly over the mouth. The eyes were opened wide, pupils rolled far back. Pelton felt for the heart. It was thudding at crazy intervals. He unbound the gag, and as he did so he felt the crackle of paper under his fingers.

Another match. Pelton saw a little wisp of paper protruding from one nostril. He pulled it out, and the flare of the match showed traces of script on it. With quick fingers, he unrolled the paper tube, and held the light close. This was written there:

The gringo's little messenger will not be at the plaza to-night to tell what he knows. He is going far away, and he needs shoes for the hard roads of hell. Viva Madero! Viva revolution! Split-nose Gonzales.

As if in hasty afterthought, this line was added beneath the signature:

Shoes like this will fit the gringo if he does not keep out of Mexico.

Pelton was not a man of squeamish nerves, but the sight of those steel-shod, bloody feet, propped on the butts of the mule shoes, sent a sudden chill spasm sweeping down his back. Instantly his mind reconstructed a scene of agony there before the darkened adobe house—a handkerchief muffling screams; the clink-clink of a hammer driving steel nails through tortured flesh and bone; brutal hands holding a writhing body still until the work of bitter jest should be completed.

So this had been the way of Split-nose Gonzales, chief of the gun-running junta across the river, to convey evidence of his disfavor of Pelton's business along the Rio Bravo! Manuel had been made to pay—Manuel, the colorless little roustabout of the Eagle Hotel over in Laredo, who had been easily persuaded to play the informer for a little, a pitiful little, of the treasury department's money. Pelton's hand once more reached to feel the labored tapping of Manuel's heart. He lit another match, and looked carefully at the turned back eyes.

“Nearly out,” he muttered; then he slipped the sinister note of Split-nose Gonzales into his pocket. He caught the sound of voices and a girl's laughter from over the wall. At the gate he met a girl and an elderly woman. At sight of him the girl started, and smothered a scream with a hurried gesture of her mantilla-draped arm. Pelton stumbled blindly in his beginner's Spanish.

“Do not scream, señorita—I am a friend—I am—it is——”

“Speak in English, Señor Americano,” interrupted the girl; “I understand it more better than I speak.” Her voice was rich with the peculiar contralto timbre of the Mexican woman's speech. Excitement strained it, but it did not break.

“Manuel Rosarios, he is your brother?” Pelton strove for words to make softer the thing he had to tell.

“Si, señor, and thees, hees mother—our mother. But what——”

“Tell your mother, señorita, to go in to him—there on the garden path. He——”

“Ah, señor—señor—not—he ees not dead!” Pelton felt a hand clutch his sleeve, and even in the darkness the whites of two startled eyes shone below his. The elder woman, catching only the hint of fear in the speech she did not understand, began to supplicate the Virgin.

“He is hurt—badly hurt,” Pelton said. “You cannot help him except to take me to a doctor. No, no; don't go in! Come with me for a doctor.” Pelton took the girl by the shoulders, and turned her away from the gate when she made a step to enter. Instantly she whirled on him.

“Gringo, your hands on me!” The words cut like a whipcord. Then came instant repentance. “My pardon, señor”—the voice was low and pleading—“come, we go for thees doctor.” She spoke a few hurried words to the mother, who pushed open the gate. Pelton took the girl's arm, and hurried her down the dark street.

“Madre Dios!” The shrill scream rasped out of the dark behind them terribly. Señorita Rosarios sobbed and clung with both shaking hands to Pelton's arm. She asked no questions, but as they stumbled together over the uneven road toward the lights of the town, she murmured choking prayers in Spanish.

They found a doctor. Pelton whispered to him apart, and he fetched his instrument case, his face puckered in horror. The house was alight when the three of them returned. Neighbors were standing in silent groups before the adobe wall. A priest in black cassock hurried through the gate ahead of them.

Pelton passed through and down the path before he relinquished the girl's arm. As she stepped into the shaft of light streaming from the opened door for the first time, he glimpsed her face. Just in that second he caught the picture of two great, black eyes, wide with terror and the look of pleading of a child that fears a hurt; a rounded cheek, over which fugitive tendrils of black hair had slipped; full lips parted in the nerve strain of excitement; a strong, well-molded throat and neck, the color of rose on ivory. Then the shutter of darkness snapped over the picture. Pelton was alone in the garden.

Some undefined sense of remorse for the part he had carelessly played in this eerie tragedy, an impelling recognition of the fitness of things, kept him in the garden until the end he knew to be inevitable should come. He found his way to a rude seat under the black shadows of a fig tree, from one limb of which a great olla hung. The swaying water jar looked like some body in chains on a gallows tree.

Pelton caught himself whispering the grim lines of Villon's “Epitaph” as he sat near the round bulk. He felt the significance of that night's horror poignantly. The threat against himself he ignored completely; only the devilish humor and cowardly retaliation of this Gonzales—Split-nose was the familiar sobriquet of the ex-brigand and smuggler along all the Texas border—were things which Pelton pondered there in the black garden.

During the month that he had been at Laredo, groping blindly to find the secret channels of the junta's gun trafficking, at every turn the sinister shadow of Split-nose Gonzales had faded just beyond the grip of his hands. Now he was in secret conference with the revolutionaries in José Bodega's saloon in Laredo; now he was slipping through the mesquite wilderness and over some ford of the Rio Bravo to carry a message to the brothers De los Santos on the Mexican side. Always he was so near, yet his face—his brutally marked face—Pelton had never seen.

Fortuitously little Manuel Rosarios, who blacked shoes at the Laredo hotel, had dropped a random word that gave Pelton his only ally. Manuel cared nothing for politics, but he knew much, and silver dollars were so large in Manuel's eyes that he could not see around their milled edges. Manuel had been so unobtrusive, so innocent in his nocturnal ramblings from meeting place to meeting place of the Laredo plotters. Through his reports, Pelton had finally begun to know the men and the haunts of those with whom he had to deal.

It had been Manuel who, between dabs of the blacking brush, had that very morning sent Pelton's heart pounding at double time. The secret agent recalled now the bobbing black head of the youth and the words that had been jerked cautiously from the roustabout's mouth:

“Guns are coming, señor—two hun'erd—I know everything—to-night—to-night, señor—at plaza. Be there, ha' pas' nine.”

Pelton spoke aloud:

“But to-night Manuel is shod for the rough roads of hell—and he knows everything—he knew everything!”

For more than an hour he sat by the hanging olla, watching the occasional figures that passed the single lamplit window visible to him, hearing the low murmur of neighbors' voices outside the wall and the occasional poignant outburst of women's wailing within the house. Then he saw the white dress of the Señorita Rosarios in the yellow light at the door. The girl clung weakly to the doorposts, her eyes striving to search the blackness of the garden. Pelton arose quickly, and hurried to her.

“Do you want—me, señorita?” He stepped into the path of light hesitatingly. The girl's eyes jumped to his. One hand went to her throat as if to still the torture of grief that stopped her speech.

“Yes, you,” she answered, in a dulled monotone, “Come—away from these eyes—of people.”

Pelton led her to the seat under the fig tree. For a minute she strove to check the sobs that slacked in her throat. Then: “Why were you here—in the garden—to-night?” she asked.

Pelton was choosing the words of his explanation. It had been the necessity of this explanation that had kept him there, yet now he stumbled.

“Senorita—I—your brother——”

She did not wait.

“Who did thees things? You know.”

“Yes, I know, señorita.”

“Queekly—queekly——” There was a catch of hysteria in the heavy contralto of the girl's voice. “Before he ees dying I will know.”

“It was Gonzales,” Pelton answered slowly—“Gonzales, called Split-nose.”

“Ah!” Pelton felt her two hands grip his arm. He felt them tremble. Rather clumsily he covered both of them with one of his.

“Gonzales, el Diablo!” she whispered. “And why, señor? Why?”

Then Pelton told her. He found the task difficult, embarrassing to mortification. In the telling he sensed a burden of responsibility pressing down and down, ever more ponderously. He did not try to justify himself; simply told her of how he had hired Manuel to do spy work. The girl sat very still until he had finished, even to the finding of the boy in the hollyhocks.

Then she rose suddenly, and stood facing Pelton. He saw her eyes, very wide and luminous in the dark. He saw her two hands clenched and flattened against her breast.

“Murderer!”

The white face was thrust forward so close that Pelton could see the teeth under the lips curled back.

“Murderer of my brother! Gringo, buyer of boys' souls for money! When he—with nails in hees feet—when he ees finished dying, it will not be Gonzales with bloody hands—ah, no—no—no!

“Gringo, your hands are making red! Gringo, your silver pesos are bloody—with Manuel's blood!”

The girl swayed and caught at the hanging olla to steady herself. Her words, checked but an instant, volleyed forth again, burning, vibrant:

“Two weemen are left alone, gringo! They are two weak weemen, having none of your pesos to buy blood. Look at me! I am thees one of them to make a cross from Manuel's blood on you. See me; I do it now!”

The girl raised her white arm, and against the blackness of the garden her hand, with a pointing finger, moved swiftly in making the sign of the cross.

“Now, go!” she said.

Pelton had no word to answer. He left the garden, left a white-blurred figure standing alone by the hanging olla.

A telegram lay under his room door in the Eagle Hotel. It read:

Two hundred marked Laredo Farm Implement Company left Galveston last night billed harrows car No. 13,136, way bill No. 760,510. Look out! Gaines.

Gaines was division superintendent of the secret service along the border, with his office in San Antonio.

Pelton studied the telegram. Two hundred coming, said Gaines. Two hundred rifles billed as harrows shipped ostensibly to Laredo; yes, but to be dropped somewhere off in the brush at a flag station. Gonzales and his men would be there to spirit the rifles through the mesquite, over a ford in the Rio Bravo, and out to the camp of the De los Santos. But where, when would those guns be dropped; what would be the secret path through the miles square wilderness of the eternal mesquite to feel the touch of laden horses' hoofs; what shallow, sandy bar in the river would offer a safe passage over the border on a black night?

Aye, but Manuel knew—and Manuel was——

Pelton shook his head in weariness as he lay in his ovenlike room for dragging hours, before his eyes the picture of a white arm puncturing a black curtain of darkness to trace up and down, right and left, a cross.

Two nights had passed since his bitter hours in the garden. On this, the third, Pelton was desperately ranging the streets of Laredo, hoping against hope that out of the blank walls of the adobe houses, from the heavy thickets of the scented oleanders some whisper, some sign might come to give him a clew to action. The freight clerk at the depot, the telegrapher, both Americans and sympathetic aids in this strangely un-American town, he had interviewed. They knew nothing of the whereabouts of those rifles, billed as harrows, No. 769,510, that were coming slowly down through the night somewhere off there where the low-hanging Texas stars made a white line of the horizon.

Pelton turned down into the single lighted main street which passes up the hill from the international bridge to skirt the plaza, duly laid out there when Laredo was a town of the old Mexican State of Tejas. The cathedral is on one side of the plaza; on another are the little stalls and booths of the Mexican hucksters, lighted by sickly flares at night; a moving-picture theater, which in summer is just a tin-roofed inclosure with canvas sides and fitted with rough benches like a circus arena.

Sole retreat of entertainment in the town, this moving-picture establishment was the center of night life. Between films row upon row of well-pleased spectators would pass out, grabbing return checks at the door, to line up before José Bodega's bar next door. The revolutionary junta had its unofficial headquarters in a back room of José Bodega's cantina, and its members amused themselves o' nights in the film shed. Every gun runner who was not out in the brush could be found after dark in one or the other of the two places. Bodega's was barred to Pelton for obvious reasons of policy; the moving-picture show was his chief reconnoitering place, therefore.

This night he sat far back on an obscure bench off a side aisle, whence in the periods when the lights were on he could see who passed in and out. Two stories of wild life on the plains, as conceived and executed in Sheepshead Bay, New York, had rippled past on the sheet, and the lights went up again. A man and a woman rose from seats far down_in front, and began to walk up the aisle, passing Pelton's seat. The electric clusters overhead threw a strong light on their faces.

The woman was Señorita Rosarios. The man with her, who walked with an exaggerated swagger and clicked his spurs at every step, wore a wide-springing black mustache, waxed and curled. The nose above the mustache was splayed and flattened against the face; a white scar ran from the tip up over where the bone of the bridge should have been and on the length of the retreating forehead to the shadow under the wide sombrero. A devilish insolence was in the narrow black eyes.

There was but one such face on the border. This was Split-nose Gonzales.

As Pelton watched the two approach, his surprise tensing all his nerves, he saw Gonzales slip his hand under the girl's arm with a patent air of proprietorship and whisper in her ear. Señorita Rosarios nodded and smiled.

Pelton turned his face away as they approached him. His precaution was unnecessary, for the lights flicked out that instant, and the spidery figures began to dance across the sheet. In the dark, Pelton rose, and followed the two. He lingered on the fringe of the crowd about the ticket seller's window long enough to see Gonzales and his companion cross over to the plaza and disappear in the shade of the magnolias.

He arrived at the edge of the plaza's shadows just in time to see the two pass under the single sputtering arc light at the opposite corner of the square and turn into the black angle of Cathedral Street.

Pelton followed at a safe distance, keeping well within the shadow line of the adobe houses and guided, now by the sound of Gonzales' quick laughter, now by the flash of the girl's white dress, when light from an open door cut her figure out of the superlative darkness.

Two yellow points of light moved down the street many blocks away, and the clatter of horses' hoofs sounded. Even as the secret agent let his anxiety overcome caution and quickened his steps, the advancing yellow lights stopped a block ahead. Pelton just caught the glimmer of lights on carriage wheels, saw the señorita's white dress flick under the feeble radiance, and heard the slam of a carriage door. He was under an overhanging oleander bush not thirty feet away.

“Por el Nido, Francisco!” It was Split-nose Gonzales' voice.

The hack turned and rolled up a dark lane. Pelton did his best to keep up. He saw one yellow side light as the vehicle swung around the next corner; then the driver urged the horse into a trot, and Pelton stopped, panting. Against the wall of a low store building beside him was a wooden sign. “Calle Rio Bravo,” it read. It marked the river road that runs east and south from Laredo, out into the mesquite wilderness and skirting the river mesa.

Down the river road at night and with Split-nose Gonzales, Señorita Rosarios was riding—and “por el Nido”—“por el Nido.”

“Nido—Nido; what the devil does 'Nido' mean?” Pelton furiously strove to flog his imperfect knowledge of Spanish into answering. Here he was on the edge of getting something—he had it, and he didn't have it, and the moments were racing by.

“'El Nido'—the dog house? Certainly not. Well, then, the—the—el hencoop—el—— Something to do with a roost, a perch all right! Hey! El Bird's Nest!”

Out of the dark the printed line in his “Spanish for Beginners” hit Pelton squarely in the face. There it was, in black-face type, “El nido”; in italics, “the bird's nest.” No doubt about it. “See the bird's nest, children,” and all that rot.

“For the Bird's Nest, Francisco.” That was the direction Gonzales had given the driver.

As Pelton walked back through the dark streets toward the still-lighted plaza, his mind wrestled with the sharp problem of contradictions that had suddenly popped out of the moving magic of the film shed. This girl, sister of little Manuel with the steel-shod feet, the girl who had called him murderer there in the garden and promised vengeance upon him, riding out into the night with the ruffian who had tortured and slain the brother! Why—why? And what was the Bird's Nest? Where was it? How could he——

A chance—a single, desperate chance! The inspiration came in a flash. Could he do it? Yes, if luck was with him. Hot with the desire to dare everything, Pelton hurried over to where the crowd was just beginning to eddy out from the moving-picture theater. Three dilapidated hacks were at the curb directly in front of José Bodega's cantina, their drivers half asleep over the reins. Pelton opened the door of one from the street side so that he could not be seen from the sidewalk, and as he slammed the door with unnecessary violence he called:

“Por el Nido, 'Tonio!”

A query came in a sleep-heavy voice from the box.

“Si, por el Nido!” Pelton answered sharply. There was a heavy minute of suspense, and then the hack began to move. Pelton took a long breath. “It worked,” he murmured.

The hack swayed and rattled through the narrow streets of town, and then in a few minutes its wheels sank into the muffling dust of the country road. The fare filled its black interior with the smoke of many corn-husk cigarettes, while his mind raced ahead down the starlit road to where somewhere in the mazes of the mesquite a healthy night's adventure awaited the coming of a special agent of the treasury department. What he would discover; what he would do when he did discover—these were entertaining speculations that kept Pelton company through the dark. He slipped a holster around from under his jacket so that the big heavy butt of a forty-five rested handily to the front. So the journey continued for the better part of an hour.

Suddenly the hack stopped with a jolt. Pelton heard an exclamation from the driver, and he put his head out of the side window. Far up the road and approaching with wild pitching and yawing were two yellow lights. A faint clangor of chain traces and thudding of hoofs was audible. Pelton jumped down to the road. The driver addressed him excitedly in Spanish. Then out of the near darkness the two lights brought the bulk of a flying hack. A man stood on the driver's seat, holding the reins far out over the dashboard and yelling at a horse, which plunged in a clumsy gallop, head wagging from side to side at each straining leap.

“Asesinato! Asesinato!” The driver of the careening rig bellowed to the stars as he pulled his beast back on its haunches. Pelton's driver yelled back interrogatives in excited staccato, then turned and addressed some blurred Spanish to Pelton. As he did so he caught sight of the long, white face of the secret agent in the circle of lamplight, and his jaw dropped. Pelton went over to the driver of the flying specter.

“What's the trouble?” he asked.

The man gurgled in his excitement, and pointed back to the black interior of his hack. Pelton's driver, spurred by contagion of the other's hysteria, brought one of his carriage lamps, and held it with a shaking hand up over the sill of the cab-window space. Then Pelton looked in.

The shape of a man lay sprawling between the seat and the floor. His face, thrown back against the cushion, was yellow-white, and the mouth beneath a wide-springing black mustache was twisted into the grisly caricature of a grin. Pelton shifted the light, and looked closer. He saw a splayed nose and a blue-white scar that bisected the forehead.

“Split-nose Gonzales!”

“Si—si, señor,” the hackman gasped. “Señor Gonzales, asesinado!”

The light from the carriage lantern sparked against something silver white that stuck out from the middle of the velveteen jacket. Pelton moved the lamp down. The silvery stalk sprouting from the jacket was the pearl handle of a dirk, over the heart. Pelton turned, and looked into the wide eyes of the driver.

“The girl—where is she?”

The cochero's eyes suddenly narrowed, and his face became blank under the level gaze of the American. Pelton caught his own driver flashing a message to his fellow Mexican with a quick hand.

“The girl who was in this hack—where is she?” Pelton repeated the question sharply.

Then the Mexican fell back upon the old subterfuge: “No sabe Ingilessa, señor. Dispense me—no sabe!”

“But you sabe this?” Pelton patted the stock of his gun. “Now you turn around and drive back to el Nido, and”—this to his own driver—“you drive behind him—pronto!”

The Mexicans exchanged quick glances, but Pelton stood in the road with the thumb of his right hand crooked over his belt very near the butt of the .45. That was potent argument. The driver of the murdered Gonzales turned his hack with much effort, and started back on the road down which he had so recently come on the gallop. Then the secret agent climbed into his own conveyance, choosing this time to sit with the driver, and the little procession moved off up the aisle of the feathery mesquite.

After about fifteen minutes of traveling, the leading hack turned off into a still narrower alley through the brush. The two hacks twisted, and turned between barricades of the rank cactus, black and menacing in the starlight, and the plumes of the mesquite whipped the sides of the ancient structures. All the while Pelton sat with his elbow in his driver's ribs, and his hand on the grip of his revolver where the driver could see it if he chose.

Abruptly a long, low house lifted from the black wilderness. It stood in a little clearing, and the rails of a horse corral crisscrossed the star field on a little rise behind the house. Not a light anywhere along the shadow bulk of the house front; not a sound. The two hacks stopped on the edge of a clearing at some distance away, and Pelton's driver turned and looked at him with insolence scarcely veiled.

“Well, señor?”

“You and your friend get down,” Pelton ordered. “You tell him. There, all right. Now come with me. And walk ahead of me up to the house.”

The two obeyed with a surly show of indifference. They crossed to the house, and Pelton pounded with his revolver butt on the front door. No answer. He tried the wooden shutters that covered the two front windows; they were secured from within. Just as he stepped off the low porch, the saw-tooth voice of a burro out in the corral was lifted in lamentation. The sound shattered the silence uncannily.

After a moment's thought, Pelton started toward the corral, still enforcing the ungracious company of the two Mexicans with a significant hand on his weapon. As he topped the rise of the little hill, he saw a half mile or so away the dim, black ramparts of the river mesa on the Mexican side, and below them, running black as a stream of tar, the river itself. Nearer at hand were a dozen and more strange shapes, all sharp blocks and angles, which stirred and shifted restlessly in a dim line along the rail fence of the corral. A horse whinnied. A bell tinkled softly.

In another minute Pelton was at the fence. There he found, tethered all in line, a string of pack burros. They were all packed; the bulks of long boxes overtopped the ears of the little beasts, and gave each a distorted, bizarre appearance as if he had been built out of dominoes.

A sudden ejaculation caused Pelton to turn his head; the Mexicans were conversing together in excited whispers. The American's pulse was pounding hard, and a strange sense of exultation gripped his heart as he struck a match and held it to the end of one of the roped boxes on a burro's back.

“Remington” was stamped there in black.

Joseph Warren Pelton, of Harvard, never did quicker thinking than at that moment. Here were the guns; there, a half mile away, was the river—and beyond, Mexico! But where were the gun runners who had made everything ready for the quick dash over the river? Was it that—yes, by everything beautiful, it must be! They had gone ahead to cross the ford and get in touch with the insurrectos across the river. Gonzales—Gonzales back there in the hack—was the one who had been delegated to take the pack train down to the river and over to the Mexican side. They must be waiting for Gonzales, even now off there in the dark.

Pelton pulled his resolver from the holster, and dropped the play of armed truce between himself and the two cocheros.

“Go find that horse we heard, and bring him to me,” he commanded.

The one who had been his driver quailed at the sight of steel, and hurried down the line of tethered beasts. He was back in a moment, leading a saddled broncho. Pelton swung into the saddle, and, sitting there with the long snout of the revolver across the pommel, he spoke again with dry incisiveness.

“Now, you, "Tonio, you'll leave your hack here and come with me to show me the way back to the river road. Then you'll come back here, and you and the other fellow will stay here until morning. Both of you stay here, sabe? And if you follow me, I'll have to shoot you; that's all.”

“Si, señor; but Gonzales?”

“Oh, they”—Pelton pointed over to the river cañon—“they'll tell you what to do with him when they come back. Now cut those burros loose, 'Tonio; bring the bell burro to me, and then you trot ahead as fast as you can down to the river road. And, 'Tonio, look here! Remember this will be pointing at you all the way—at your back. So don't play any tricks!”

The burros were cut loose; the bell burro trotted at the end of the tether rope behind Pelton's broncho, and so, at a trot, the weird procession of misshapen beasts passed the yellow eyes of the hacks, passed Split-nose Gonzales smiling under his black mustache, and was swallowed up in the maw of the thicket.

Pelton rode close behind the Mexican, who, half running and with his head bent against the flailing of the mesquite, found the trail. Pelton heard his rasping curses, and kept him closely covered. He rode with every nerve at wire tautness, fearing that each moment would bring a challenge out of the dark, the whanging of revolvers.

Nothing but blind chance, he said, to himself, could order it that this stealing of the guns from under the very noses of the junta's coyotes should be accomplished. He strained his eyes at the dark, and believed that he could already see horsemen, puzzled at Gonzales' delay, swinging their horses from the river brink, and putting them to the trail back to the hacienda to learn the cause. Then pursuit would follow.

Gray light tipped the mesa when the Mexican stopped, panting, and pointed to the broad wheel tracks of the river road. Pelton nodded, and as he marshaled his pack train into the road he waved his hand back toward el Nido.

“Remember,” he called, “you'll get shot if you follow.”

A rock struck Pelton's straw hat, and sent it spinning into the dust. The Mexican had the last word.

As fast as the little bell burro's feet could pace, Pelton urged his broncho. He turned in his saddle, and looked back. Twelve grotesque little peaks, sharp-cornered and high-topped, bobbed and swayed behind him. The light was strong enough now to let him see the nodding heads and pronged ears of those nearest. He laughed.

“Now, if I could only turn the corner into Sherry's and get each of these checked at the door. Hey—up there, Alcibiades!”

But Pelton's hilarity was more hysterical than genuine. The swift reel of events that night had brought tragedy and menace; menace was pressing close yet. And mystery; yes, mystery as sinister as Gonzales' smile.

Pelton attacked the rebus of that night. Why had the Señorita Rosarios chosen to go out into the dark with a cutthroat, the murderer of her brother, if it was not to kill him? But did she kill him? How did she disappear, then? When did the driver discover that a dead man nodded alone in his hack? Did the driver connive at murder; had he hidden the girl, or was it possible that she herself had met death in the dark?

The brooding dawn, gray-white and stealthy in approach, made mystery tangible, clothed bush and cactus skeleton with garments of the unreal. And on the road behind the grudging shadows cloaked—what?

“Hup! Hey—hup there, Alcibiades!”

The east was banded now with pale stripes of rose; they blushed to cherry, to garnet, and the nearer stars burned out. Night was pushed hack like a curtain. The morning scent of dew on flowers hung low over the green wilderness, and the mourning dove sent a hail to the new day. The single horseman in the dawn turned again and again to look back to where the ribbon of road led out into the pale radiance. Did shadows move back there against the sky line, or were those dots that rose and fell, rose and fell over the wall of the mesquite, only the nodding flower clusters of the yucca?

“Hooey, back there! Hump yourself!”

Pelton rounded a sharp bend in the road, and his horse shied. A girl, clad in white, jumped to her feet from a bank of purple lupines by the roadside, and stood irresolute, seeming ready to run into the near-by thicket, yet daring to stay. Her face, turned over one shoulder, was chalk white and haggard.

“Señorita Rosarios!” Pelton reined in, and sprang to the girl's side.

“Santa Maria! You, Señor Americano?”

Terror was in her voice, and, too, a broken, helpless note. The girl hid her eyes with her arms, and her body shrank before Pelton's approach.

“Away from me! Away from me!” she cried chokingly.

“Listen, señorita”—Pelton spoke hurriedly, and with a hard note of command. “They are behind—Gonzales' men. They are riding to catch me—and you. They know—I know—about Gonzales”—the girl sobbed and crossed herself—“and they will kill you and kill me if they catch us. Come!”

Pelton took her arm, and started to pull her toward his horse.

“But—but—I would like to keel you once.” The girl was wrestling to free herself. “Heem—Gonzales—first, an' then you.”

With no other word, Pelton suddenly caught Señorita Rosarios in his arms, and lifted her to the saddle. He swung up behind her, and with one arm he kept the struggling girl on the horse, while he groped with the other behind him for the bell burro's tether rope.

“Get a-going, Al, old boy! Quick there, you bell rabbit!”

The girl ceased to struggle, and tried to sit very stiffly away from Pelton. He could see her shoulders shake with an occasional spasm of sobbing, but she said nothing; nor did he.

There was dust against the face of the dawn behind them, and he had seen it!

Five long minutes passed; ten. No sound but the jangle-jangle of the bell and the padding of many little hoofs on the road.

“Halt!”

A cavalryman in brown khaki turned his horse out into the road from the bushes, and the muzzle of his carbine bore on Pelton.

“Don't make a move until I come up to you!”

The trooper whistled, and three other brown campaign hats blossomed from the mesquite as horses moved from cover out to the road.

“Open my coat in front here”—Pelton's voice thrilled in spite of himself—“and you'll find my badge. I am an officer of the treasury department. This outfit here is guns. I took them back there in the mesquite on the river mesa.”

The trooper did take a squint at Pelton's badge, and a very frank look at the girl, who was on the saddle in front of him. The others were crowding around him by this time, congratulating in high-pitched, eager voices and estimating the number of guns in the cases the burros carried.

“Your outfit sure did advertise itself, brother,” a lengthy, weather-tanned corporal said. “We was a-comin' out from the post to ride the river road, lookin' for just what you picked up, and we heerd you comin' lickety-split. So we natch'ly laid low, and allowed we was going to do a little ambushin' of you.”

Hurriedly Pelton told then of the pursuers who, he was certain, were on his back road. The corporal told off two cavalrymen to ride slowly along the road and see what they could see.

“And now,” Pelton concluded, “I'll leave the guns for you to take in to the post. Tell Colonel Glynn with my compliments that I'll be around later in the morning to report of them. I have—that is, this young woman helped me make the raid, and I must take her to her home.”

The corporal took the lead rope of the bell burro, grinning understandingly; then Pelton kicked the flanks of the broncho, and he and the girl were soon by themselves again.

 

During the brief colloquy, Señorita Rosarios had sat stiffly erect, her head turned away from the troopers. Pelton had seen the blood mount to her cheek when she had been referred to; so close she was to him that the ripples of the red flush on her neck and cheek played like sunlight through fragile porcelain right under his eyes. Nor did she turn her eyes to his or speak, now that they were again on their way. He respected her silence, and said nothing. It was the girl who finally. broke silence.

“Señor”—her voice was low and vibrant; her eyes held resolutely to the front—“Señor, what now do you do with me?”

“I will take you over the ford, the second ford below town,” Pelton answered, “and then I will leave you—in Mexico. It will not be far to your home.”

Many minutes passed. The sun popped over the mesas behind them of a sudden, and the rosy light struck through the girl's thin white gown. The tint of her neck and shoulders—tint of rose on old ivory—deepened and warmed.

“You take me to Mexico, señor; you—do not arres' me?” Still the voice came low, but her head did not turn. “I am—I did—I have keel Gonzales. You know I do thees thing—an' you do not arres' me?”

“No, señorita. Nobody knows but I and the cochero, and he does not know your name, your face, even.”

They had turned from the river road, and were descending the trail to the river. The roofs and white walls of the two Laredos, a mile away, were all green and red gold in the new sunlight.

“But—but——” The girl's voice broke for an instant, then steadied. “You, señor, also I was make my vow to keel—for Manuel's death. First Gonzales—then you, as I tole you.”

“Yes.”

“An' you are taking me to Mexico—you de-liver me, señor?”

Pelton made no response. He put the sturdy little broncho to the shallow ford, and when the water rose to the saddle girth he lifted the girl in his arms so that she should be dry, and thus he held her for many minutes. She steadied herself with an arm that passed around his neck, first haltingly, and then with simple assurance. The broncho's footing was sure. He climbed to the low, sandy shore where the feathery mesquite dipped its branches to the yellow current. There was a trail leading from the bank by zigzags up to the top of the mesa. Pelton jumped off the saddle, and raised his hands to assist the girl to the ground.

Her face was turned to his now for the first time. It was flushed. Her eyes, purple black like the fruit of the aguacate, seemed filmed and misty with a sudden passion of longing, of half-formed resolve. Morning light made more red the lips parted for speech that would not be voiced. She took Pelton's hands, and dropped lightly to the ground. Still she held his hands with a tightening grip. She swayed toward him ever so slightly, then caught herself, and the rose on her cheeks grew deeper.

“Señor—Señor Americano—I—I cannot say—I cannot——” A subtle note of pleading and of tenderness crept into her voice. “Plees, señor, plees—I may kees you—for go'by?”

Her arms flashed up, and her hands locked behind his neck. She drew his face down, and she kissed him fair upon the mouth. Then, blushing scarlet, she turned and ran up the trail.

Pelton saw a flash of her white skirt through the greenery, heard the clatter of a pebble loosened—then he was alone.