Roads of men thread the world. They thunder with a life flood. They are vibrant with a pulse of affairs. By land and water and air they link to-day to to-morrow. But El Camino de los Muertos (the Road of the Dead Men) is a dim highway leading nowhere but back and back to forgotten yesterdays. Its faint sign-posts once were vivid in lettering of tears and blood. Its stages were measured by the sum of all human hardihood. Faith, valour, reckless adventuring, thirst for gold, love o’ women—these the links in the measuring chain that marked its course through a dead land. And black crosses formed of lava stones laid down in the sand; these abide over all the length of the Road of the Dead Men from Caborca to Yuma to cry to the white-hot sky of slain hopes and faith betrayed in those buried years gone.
The priest-adventurers of New Spain first blazed this trail through an unknown wilderness. Restless pioneers of the Society of Jesus and the Order of St. Francis, men with the zeal to dare, pushed out from the northernmost limits of the Spanish settlements in a new world with their soldier guards and their Indian guides. They fought death in a land of thirst northward, ever northward. The cross fell from the hands of spent zealots at some waterhole where water was not, and other hands followed to snatch up the sacred emblem and push it deeper into Papagueria. North and west through El Infiernillo to the red waters of the Colorado where the Yumas had their reed huts. Thence on to the west through a land that stank of death until at last the end of the trail was smothered in the soft green of Californian valleys—good ground for the seed of Faith.
The overland trail of the padres became the single trail from Mexico to gold when the madness of ’49 called to all peoples. Then the Road of the Dead Men took its toll by the score and doublescore. Then men fought for precious water at Tinajas Altas; many crosses of malapais mark the sands there. Bandits lurked at Tule Wells, ninety miles over blistering desert from the nearest water, to shoot men for the gold they were bringing back from California. The Pock-Marked Woman, mad with thirst—so runs the legend—walked at nights with the Virgin in the flats beyond Pitiquito and found water with celestial candles burning all about the pool.
So passed the wraiths of the gold madness. A railroad was laid down from the Pacific eastward across the desert. What once was called Papagueria had come to be known as Sonora, in Mexico, and Arizona in the Republic of the North. The Road of the Dead Men at its California end became a way through green and watered valleys where bungalows mushroom overnight; along its course in southwestern Arizona and northern Sonora it lapsed to a faint trail from waterhole to waterhole of a heat scourged desert. To-day this forgotten remnant of a high road of adventure and hot romance exists a streak in an incandescent inferno of sand and lava slag, wherein death is the omnipresent fact. Occasionally a prospector putters along its dreary stretches, chipping at ledge and rimrock. A Papago or a Cocopa creeps over caliche-stained flats with baskets of salt from the Pinacate marshes near the Gulf.
That is all. The Dead Men hold their road inviolable. It is dust of the desert.
That is all, did I say? No, the spirit of romance and the shape of illusion have not completely passed from El Camino de los Muertos. Remains that tale which carries itself over a span of a century and a half, linking lives of the present to lives of men and women whose very graves long since have passed from sight of folk. A tale strangely like the desert trail along whose course its episodes of hot passion and swift action befell; for its beginnings are laid in a mirage of an elder day which we of the present can see but dimly, and its ending is beyond the horizon of to-day. Would you know the full story of the Lost Mission de los Cuatros Evangelistas: how the baleful spell of its green pearls of the Virgin worked upon the fortunes of the House of O’Donoju and how the last of that house wrought expiation for the sin of a forbear through heroism and the fire of a great love—would you know the full story, I say, you must see with me the substance of a beginning.
No more can one plump into the middle of this the last of the romance tales of the Road of the Dead Men than could one drop onto the Road itself midway of its length.
A King in Spain once followed a practice of careless munificence. Whenever one of his generals in the great wars appeared worthy of reward His Majesty used to ink the ball of his thumb and with a grand and free gesture he would make a print somewhere on the map of Mexico, then called New Spain. Then the lucky general, taking this patent of royal favor across the seas with him, would hire surveyors to translate the print of Philip’s thumb into terms of square miles of domain. These square miles were his and his heirs’ to govern like little kings, with justice in their hands, the Church to give them countenance and Indians by the hundreds to serve them under a modified code of slavery. No man has lived since as did those magnificent possessors of Philip’s thumbprints.
The Rancho del Refugio in the little known reaches of Papagueria was one of these fiefs of the king. Michael O’Donohue, a wild man of the red Irish who had fought English kings and queens under the banner of Spain, had come by the grant originally and had taken a lady of Granada to the new world to bear him heirs worthy of their inheritance. Michael O’Donohue became Don Miguel O’Donoju, lord of a desert principality and a power at the Viceroy’s court in the City of Mexico. He established two rigid precedents to be followed by the house of O’Donoju: pride of race and jealous conservation of the family principality. It became a rule of the O’Donoju that none of the clan marry outside the pure Castilian blood—Irish excepted if Irish could be found; and a rule that, come what might, no O’Donoju pass title to so much as a foot of the Rancho del Refugio.
It was a day in April, the year 1780, that the clan O’Donoju came to the Mission of the Four Evangelists to lend the dignity of their presence to the solemn service of re-dedication. More than that, Don Padraic O’Donoju, venerable head of the house and master of the Casa O’Donoju in the oasis named the Garden of Solitude, was come to witness a personal triumph. For it had been his money that had gone to the Franciscan College to be used in the rebuilding of the frontier post of God after the Apaches had raided and burned it fifty years before. And one of his own sons, Padre Felice, had been the architect and builder of the restored mission and was to continue the priest in charge. Padre Felice was fourth in a line of O’Donojus to take orders, one from each generation since the establishment of the grant.
The O’Donojus—grandchildren, cousins and kin by marriage—had ridden five days and upwards from various sections of the Rancho del Refugio, up and out through the Altar desert to this remote sanctuary of God in the country of the Sand People. They came by the way called the Road of the Dead Men. Its asperities were softened by the quick desert spring which tipped each thorny cactus cone with candelabra tufts of golden and carmine flowers. The desert’s usual heat was tempered by the snows that lay in unnamed mountains to the north.
They came in a lengthy caravan of horses and burros, with half naked Indians to herd the goats and the yearling steers that were to be barbecued for the secular feast to follow the religious rites; with a half-company of foot soldiers from the Presidio del Refugio to guard the company against roving Apaches; Indian maids on mule back to serve the needs of their mistresses, regally mounted on ponies of the Cortez strain; baggage porters, cooks, roustabouts. Fully a hundred of the clan O’Donoju and satellites on pilgrimage over the Road of the Dead Men.
All of the O’Donoju were there but one, El Rojo—the Red One. The “Red One” was he because of the throw-back to the red Irish strain of his fighting ancestor Don Miguel. Red with the pugnacious red of Donegal was his hair; his cheeks had none of the sallow tan of the Spanish but were dyed with the stain of Irish bog winds; his eyes were blue lamps of the devil. A fatherless grandson of old Don Padraic, El Rojo had played the wild youth in the City of Mexico with only occasional visits of penance to the Casa O’Donoju in the desert country of the north until, when the tang of youth still was his, he had tainted his name with scandal. Followed his formal expulsion from the clan at the hands of the old aristocrat, his grandfather, and the closing of all doors of his kindred in Papagueria against him. El Rojo had ridden out to the wide world of sand and mountains an outcast but with a laugh on his lips; this a full year before the gathering of the family at the Mission of the Four Evangelists.
When El Rojo had turned lone wolf, a sadness that was not the sadness of shame settled upon the heart of one of the O’Donoju. Frecia Mayortorena, a cousin, one of the flowers of girlhood that caused old Hermosillo to be named the Little Garden, sat behind her barred windows on many a night with heart wild to hear once more the love song only El Rojo knew how to sing. Frecia Mayortorena, all fire under the cold ice of her schooled and decorous features, knew that the reckless devil with the flame-blue eyes had but to come and strum a love call on his guitar; she would go with him into banishment and worse. So on this pilgrimage to the shrine of the four holy men the girl, who rode with her father and brothers, allowed her imagination to frame the figure of a phantom horseman on every ragged mountain top. At each camp fire along the Road of the Dead Men, when the vast sea of desert round about was stilled under the stars, Frecia Mayortorena sat with tiny pointed chin cupped in a propping palm and seemed to hear in the clink of a mule’s hobble chain the opening chord of that song of songs,
The cavalcade came to the mission with the firing of guns and with shouts. The reed-and-mud huts of the Sand People beyond the cloisters disgorged their shouting savages to welcome the travellers. Padre Felice, a gaunt man with the face of an ascetic above the folds of his rough brown cowl, hurried out from the doors of the new sanctuary to meet and give embrace to his father, Don Padraic, and then in turn to all his next of kin; behind him followed his two novitiate priests who were, with Padre Felice, the only white men in all the stretch of Papagueria from the Rancho del Refugio westward to the Sea of Cortez. Five days’ travel were they from the nearest of their kind, and to west and north stretched unguessed leagues of the desert. Only the Road of the Dead Men linked them with the first of the Californian missions thirty days over the western horizon.
Missionary to the Sand People was Padre Felice—to that branch of the Papago tribe of tractable Indians who lived about the east shore of the Sea of Cortez and on eastward throughout the desert of Altar. The rebuilt mission stood in the middle of a small oasis which was fed by a stream down out of the burnt mountains not a mile behind; one of those rare and furtive desert trickles of water which hides in the sand most months of the year. The diminutive mission building, with its rounded dome of sun-burned brick, lifted in sharp outlines above the vivid and water-fed greenery of the oasis mesquite and palo verde; but the whole—oasis and house of God—was dwarfed by the bleak immensity of the flanking mountains leaping sheer from the plain to push their fire-scarred summits against the sky.
Before the choir of Indian voices intoned the opening prayer of the dedication service the packs of the O’Donoju caravan yielded precious things. There was a monstrance of heavy gold studded at its tips with precious gems; this was the personal offering of old Don Padraic to the shrine of the Four Evangelists. A chalice of gold, a great altar crucifix of gold inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a pair of candelabra wrought of chased silver and a communion service of the same metal represented the pious contributions of the rest of the clan O’Donoju.
But most precious of all the altar treasures was that double string of the pearls of the Virgin which by a miracle had been saved from plunder of the Apaches when the savages from the north had come burning and murdering fifty years before. For a half-century the lucent rope of moonbeam green had lain in the treasure vaults of the Franciscan College in the City of Mexico awaiting this hour of restoration. Green pearls fetched from the shell beads of the Sea of Cortez by Indian converts. Pearls hinting of caves of ocean by their shimmering, changeful lustre. Pearls to fire the lust of covetousness even from their hallowed place about the throat of the Virgin.
Padre Felice held the glinting rope of lights high in dedication, and as reverently he draped them upon the bosom of the sacred effigy the clan O’Donoju and all the dark-skinned children of the mission sang a gloria.
An untoward incident jarred the merriment of the feasting that followed the re-dedication of the mission. When whole beeves were being lifted from the roasting pits and the skins of wine and tequila were passing from table to table beneath the flowering mesquite trees a column of dust strode across the desert from the east and spawned two horsemen upon the oasis. One, a naked Indian of the stature of a giant, reined in his horse at the far fringe of the mesquite as befitting a servant. The second rode boldly into the circle of the tables. Silver clinked from bridle and stirrup leathers of his magnificent white thoroughbred. The rider’s silver-trimmed hat came off with a sweeping bow to include all there, and the red of his hair was like molten copper in the sun.
“El Rojo!” was the startled cry on every lip. Men scrambled to their feet as if to combat some overt move of an enemy.
“God be with you all,” came the Red One’s speech of polite greeting, made all the more ironical by the reckless upturn of his lips in a grin and the steely lights that flashed from his blue eyes.
“—And God, or his gentle vicar, Padre Felice, give me place at table with my noble kin,” El Rojo added lightly. “I have travelled far to have my cup here on this day of celebration.”
The laughing horseman let his eyes dance over the circle of faces until they came to rest for just an instant upon one. He saw cheeks flaming, eyes filled with wonder and full lips parted to give a heart its song. Frecia Mayortorena was seeing a vision in the life. Quickly El Rojo’s glance leaped on as if to shield the girl from contamination. The venerable Don Padraic, head of the clan O’Donoju, was on his feet now and trembling.
“We know you not, sir! We must ask you to begone!”
El Rojo caused his horse to rear perilously. Before hoofs touched the ground hardly two paces from the old man the rider again had made his full-armed bow. He spoke with mock respect.
“Sanctuary, my grandsire! I and my servant claim sanctuary of Holy Church. We have ridden far, and good Uncle Felice can not deny us the charity of his order.”
Don Padraic was being swiftly mastered by his rage when the friar to whom the unwelcome horseman had appealed pushed his way to the side of the older man.
“He speaks the truth, sire,” urged the man in the brown habit. “Here on God’s ground we can not be guilty of uncharity.” Then, looking up into the laughing blue eyes of his nephew, “I ask you to descend, sir, and refresh yourself and your servant until such time as you take the road.”
So all merriment in the oasis of the Four Evangelists was stilled. There in the single green spot on all the leagues of the Road of the Dead Men was wrought a comedy; a prelude it was to swift tragedy. The clan O’Donoju, its satellites and retainers ate and drank in silence, and apart from this company sat El Rojo and his naked copper giant alone. From time to time El Rojo lifted his cup as if in ceremonious health to his kin. Only Frecia Mayortorena read the glint in the blue eyes which told that the toast was to her—and to what would eventuate.
Near sundown El Rojo and his Indian rode off to the west, but not until the outlaw had spent a few minutes alone in the mission. Padre Felice saw him at prayer before the altar of the Virgin and was deeply touched that the spirit of religion had not altogether departed from the family’s scapegrace.
In the dark of midnight Frecia Mayortorena, who had cried herself to sleep, was awakened by the touch of a hand stretched under the side of the tent where she slept with the women of the party. A silver embroidered hat was slipped under the tent to rest on her arm. The girl dressed herself in a folly of love and terror and stole outside. The waiting figure of El Rojo’s giant Indian detached itself from the shadow of the mesquite, motioning her to a tethered horse. Blind infatuation for a hero lover brooked no questioning on the girl’s part. She mounted and followed her guide through the alleys of heavy shade.
A single dreadful cry sounded from out the opened door of the mission. A minute later a vague horseman spurred to her side and stopped the beating of her heart with flaming kisses. The silent desert swallowed three phantom shapes on horseback.
Dawn brought revelation and the beginning of that cycle of tragedy and dreadful pursuit of Nemesis which was to overwhelm the clan O’Donoju. Padre Felice murdered at the altar of the Virgin, where he had tried to stay the hand of impiety. The green pearls of the Virgin gone. A daughter of the house of O’Donoju flown with a thief and a murderer.
One word more and this mirage of years long dead fades. The curse that all Papagueria saw descend on the clan O’Donoju spared not even the sanctuary of the Four Evangelists. A year to the night of the Virgin’s despoliation the Apaches came again to this frontier post of the Church, and after a spiteful siege they slew the white priests, burned the mission and carried the Indian converts over the mountains into slavery. The Franciscans dared not rebuild on such accursed ground. Winds of the desert, which move sand mountains in their eternal sweep, played upon the ruined mission year on year to blot even a vestige of it from the eyes of man. God’s hand—so the Indians had it—shook the mountains behind the little oasis so that the source of the tiny life-giving stream was blocked. The green vanished like a mist, and scabrous desert cacti crept in on prickly feet.
The Mission de los Cuatros Evangelistas became legend.
The Golden Sunset Limited, Pacific Coast bound, snaked its way through a cleft in mountains and came sighing to a stop at the man’s town, El Paso. A patchwork crowd spilled out from the station platform to push around the ladders of the car icers to the train steps. Swarthy Mexicans under sombreros, with their black-shawled women and their little tin trunks, scrambled and clogged at the approaches to the oven-like day coaches forward. Pullman passengers sauntered over frogs and switches to plush and rosewood at the train’s end.
Among these was Grant Hickman, civil engineer, New York, lately captain in the First Division overseas. Arizona bound and west of the Ohio River for the first time in his thirty years, Hickman had broken his journey by a day’s stopover in El Paso. He had given Juarez a whirl, decided the kind of life he saw across the International Bridge was spurious and of little worth, and now was entraining again for his destination some four hundred miles to the westward. He gave the porter his bags to stow for him according to the directions scribbled on his Pullman ticket and began a lazy pacing of the platform, his eye alert for the colour and the bustle of it all. The blending of two races, of widely differing civilizations, here in this sturdy city gave Hickman’s restless imagination a smart fillip. He saw men with gaily coloured blankets worn as cloaks over their shoulders like prayer shawls in a synagogue; Indians with ornaments of beaten silver and raw turquoise hasps on their belts had their shoulders planted against solid brick walls with a grace born only of perfect indolence. All great stuff—regular musical show background.
On his first lap down the platform the New York man’s eyes rested momentarily on two figures standing in the drip of one of the car icers’ laden pushcarts. A girl and a man; she hatless as she had left the car for a stroll, the man all gesticulating hands and eloquently moving shoulders. Hickman caught a scrap of the man’s fervid speech as he strolled past; it was in a foreign tongue, liquid—almost lisping—with its softly rolled r’s and a peculiar singing intonation at the upward lift of each period. Spanish undoubtedly. Just an over-shoulder glimpse of a thin, dark face in sharp profile confirmed Grant in his guess at the speaker’s nationality. The girl’s bared head attracted his appreciative eye; it bore a glory of wondrously burning red hair, coiled in great masses, vividly alive.
Grant turned his corner at the platform’s end and began to retrace his steps, consciously bearing in the direction of the beacon hair. When he was still twenty paces off he saw that the swarthy man had gripped one of the girl’s wrists and that his hawk face was pushed close to hers in what might have been an access of fury or of pleading. Grant quickened his pace instinctively; he did not like the looks of that man’s talon grip on a girl’s wrist. He paused a decent distance from the twain and made a pretence of lighting a cigarette while his eyes glanced steadily over his cupped palms.
Then a surprising thing. The girl launched some verbal javelin at the man who gripped her wrist, at the same instant looking down at the clamping fingers as if to emphasize what must have been a command to release her. No answer but a flash of white teeth beneath a toy moustache. The girl’s free hand shot to a great coil of hair over the nape of her neck, came away with twin prongs of thin steel—anchorage of some hair ornament—showing below her clenched fingers. A lightning jab downward, and the Spanish-speaking man dropped the imprisoned hand to whip his own to his mouth. He snarled something in sharp falsetto. The girl with the red hair tilted her chin at him, and the laugh that slipped between her grudging little teeth was thin and sharp as the double dagger points she had used.
She turned, took three steps to a stool below the Pullman’s steps, mounted with a quick swirl of skirts and was gone. Grant thought he saw a half-formed determination to follow flash into the Spaniard’s eyes. Without knowing why he did it, the New Yorker hastily put one foot upon the lower Pullman step and bent his body so as to block access to it. Very painstakingly he unloosed the knot on his low shoe, straightened the tongue in place and began taking in slack on every loop of the strings.
A grunt of exasperation from behind Grant. When at last he straightened himself and looked around the Spanish gentleman was gone. He chuckled.
“Now that, señor, should teach you not to play rough with a red-head.”
He walked down to the Pullman his ticket called for and climbed aboard. Just as the conductor’s bellow, “Bo-oa-rd,” sounded, Grant, looking through the glass of the vestibule, saw the Spanish gentleman with a grip flying for the train out of the baggage room of the station.
Passing into the body of the car he found his bags piled upon a seat midway of its length. As he seated himself he was the least bit startled to see flaming coils of hair above the top of the seat across the aisle and one beyond his. Grant was not displeased. Girls with spirit always walked straight into his somewhat susceptible affections; and a girl who carried a home-made fish spear in her coiffure—
“’Scuse me, Cap’n; ef I could jes’ have a look at youah berth ticket. This gentmum says he reckons you-all’s settin’ in his seat.” Grant looked up to see the porter shifting uneasily before him and with a deprecatory grin on his face. By him stood the waspish Spanish gentleman; the latter inclined himself in a stiff bow as Grant’s gaze met his. Out of the tail of his eye Grant thought he saw a slow turning of the sunset cloud against the high seat-back ahead.
“This is my section,” Grant drawled with no show of inclination to arbitrate the matter. “I always buy a section when I travel.”
“But, pardon, sir—” The Spanish gentleman extended a pink slip. “The agent at the station has but now sold me this lower berth.”
“Indeed?” A slow ache of perversity began to travel along Grant’s spine. He had no love for a man who will manhandle women. “Indeed. The agent at El Paso sold me mine yesterday.”
“Ef I could see youah ticket,” the porter began feebly.
“You couldn’t,” Grant snapped. “Perhaps the Pullman conductor may.”
A cloud began gathering over the finely chiselled features of the Spaniard. His toy moustache went up. He spoke to the porter:
“The señor is not what we call sympatico. Have the kindness to fetch the conductor.”
The darkey disappeared. Grant turned to look out of the window, ignoring completely the standing figure in the aisle. But he did not ignore the reflection a trick of the sun cast on the double glass of the window. He saw there just the faint aura of a fiery head which refused to turn, though the compelling gaze of the standing man strove mightily to command it. Faintly in the magic of the dusty glass was carried to this bystander, whose neutrality already was considerably strained, the silent battle of wills.
The Pullman conductor bustled up to Grant’s seat. To him the Spaniard appealed, offering the evidence of the berth check. Grant vouchsafed no comment when he passed his own up for inspection. The man in blue compared them.
“Some ball-up somewhere,” he grunted. Then to Grant: “When was this ticket sold to you?”
“Yesterday morning at ten-fifteen o’clock,” came the prompt answer. The waspish Spanish person admitted he had purchased his only a minute before the train started. The conductor waved at Grant.
“Then I guess the seat belongs to this gentleman. I’ll have to find you one in another car.”
“But, señor, I have special reason for remaining in this car.” The Spaniard’s carefully restrained wrath began to bubble over. Grant looked up at him and smiled frankly.
“So have I,” he declared levelly. The other’s eyes snapped and his lips lifted over small white teeth in what was meant to be a smile.
“Señor,” he began with a shaking voice, “your courtesy deserves remembrance. I hope some day it may be my pleasure to show you equal consideration.”
“Until then—au revoir,” Grant caught him up. With the porter preceding him, the loser walked down the aisle to the far door of the car. As he passed the seat where the girl was he half turned with a sulky smile. But it was lost. She was looking out at the procession of the telegraph poles. Grant, catching this final passage in the little comedy, grinned.
“There’s going to be lots of paprika in this Western hike,” joyfully he assured himself—“or do we call it chili?”
Grant Hickman was not one of that tribe dignified by the name of he-flirts. He abominated the whole slimy clan with the loathing of a clean man. When he had seized upon the part of studied rudeness toward the Spaniard it was not with the ulterior purpose of winning a smile or paving the way for acquaintance with a pretty woman; Grant’s vivid recollection of the sidewalk cafés of Paris in war time and their hunting women left him cold toward the type that is careless of men’s approaches. In flouting the foreigner and preventing his scheme to gain a place in the car with the girl he had bullied on the station platform the New York man had acted merely on instinct; he had protected a girl from annoyance. Yet now that he had won through by dint of crass boorishness—and the young man’s conscience gave him a twinge over the substance of his discourtesy—he suffered a not unreasonable curiosity regarding the possessor of that glorious beacon in the seat across the aisle.
Who was she? What circumstances had led to that scene on the platform which had ended with the unexpected dagger thrust of the steel hair ornament? Was this little black-and-tan whipper-snapper a lover—a brother—blackmailer? Grant’s galloping imagination built up flimsy hypotheses only to rip them apart. And his eyes dwelt upon the soft involutions of flame coloured hair, which were the only physical indices of personality granted him thus far.
Once the object of his conjectures shifted her seat so that a profile peeped out from behind the wide seat arm. Grant’s eyes hungrily conned delectable details: one broad wing of hair sweeping down in a line of studied carelessness over a forehead somewhat low and rounded; fine line of nose with the hint of a passionate spirit in the modelling; mouth that was all girlish, mobile, ready to reflect whims or laughter. The sort of mouth, Grant reflected, that could load a laugh with poison—even as he had seen it done that tense instant on the platform at El Paso—or freight it with sweetness for a favoured one. A world of fire and seduction untried lay in the full round lips, yet a chin with the thrust of will in it warned that the promise of those lips was jealously guarded.
A broad sheaf of sunlight lay across her cheek. Grant saw that hers was not the usual apple tint of the red-haired, the characteristic skin so delicate as to suggest translucence. Rather a touch of the sun had spread an impalpable film of tan, warm as the colour of old ivory, over cheek and throat. Duskiness of a southland dyed cheek and throat despite the anomaly of the burning hair, quite Celtic.
The afternoon waned with no favouring fortune throwing Grant’s way opportunity to study the girl closer. When the sunset was in the sky he walked through the train to the observation platform. As he drew near the glassed-in end of the observation car he noted with a little leap of elation that the girl was sitting under the awning beyond the screen door. He saw, too, the objectionable Spanish gentleman. His midget body was packed into a chair, one neatly booted foot under him; like some hunting cat he sat in watchful patience inside the body of the car, his eyes never leaving the figure of the girl beyond the screen door.
Grant passed through to the platform, not giving the Spaniard so much as a glance. As the door slammed behind him the girl looked up quickly. Grant saw her eyes were blue, saw, too, a fighting gleam quickly pass from them. Evidently he was not the one they expected to fall upon. A pretty confusion which tried to deny recognition swiftly replaced the strained look. Grant allowed himself to be bold to the extent of tip-tilting his cap. The girl evidently decided that to overlook a service done would be pushing decorum too far; she gave Grant a quick, shy smile which might have carried a hint of gratitude mingled with naïve humour.
“You were very kind,” she said as Grant took the camp-stool next to her, “and very amusing. The high hand—you possess the art of using it, sir.”
“I should be ashamed of my rudeness,” he answered with a quick smile. “But somehow I am not. Your way of repelling attack has its advantages, too—” His eyes strayed to the silver comb, whose concealed steel had been so efficacious on the El Paso platform. The girl reddened prettily.
“Always one must be—prepared against—persuasion,” was the answer that put a period to all reference which might be distasteful. Grant would have liked to know more of circumstances that had pushed this radiant young person into the grip of a bullying little civet cat of a Spaniard, but he dared not risk rudeness by further questioning. Reward enough was his already; he had it in the swift play of laughter across delicate features, in the sweetly resonant quality of her voice, all of a part with the engaging exotic character of the girl. For American she assuredly was not, though her trim tailoring was impeccably the mode of the moment. Her speech had a rippling musical lilt to it suggestive of a mother tongue less harsh than Anglo-Saxon; her enunciation was too perfect to be American. There was a trick of the eyes, something almost vocal, which was an inheritance from mothers whose speech is sternly hedged about by conventions but who find subtler ways of expression.