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Frances got up, shivering a little at the unfriendly look of the morning. She thought she heard a cautious foot stealing away from the window, and turned from it with contemptuous recollection of Chadron's threat to set spies over her. Frances left the house with no caution to conceal her movements, and went to the barn. Alvino was hobbling about among the horses with his lantern.
It was dark yet, only a little grayness, like murky water, showing under the rim of the east, but she knew where the antlers hung above the mantel, with the rifle in its case, and the two revolvers which Alvino had brought to his mistress from the wounded foreman in the bunkhouse. But the antlers were empty. She felt them over with contracting heart, then struck a match to make sure.
"Go and fetch me Chance's guns out of the bunkhouse," she ordered. Alvino hitched away, swinging his stiff leg, with laborious, slow gait. "You couldn't do anything against a crowd of desperate men they might kill you!" Frances said. "Let 'em kill me, then!" She lifted her hand, as if taking an oath.
"And there is that Alvino, a cunning man in a garden. You should see how he charms the flowers and vegetables but you have seen, it is his work here, all this is his work." "If there is ever a home of my own if it ever comes to that happiness " "God hasten the day!" "Then there will be room for both of you, Maggie."
Alvino let Frances out through the gate at the back of the garden, for it was her intention to follow the abductor's trail as far as possible without being led into strange country. Somebody, or some wandering herd of cattle, might pass that way and obliterate the traces before pursuers could be brought there. The tracks of the raider's horse were deep in the soft soil.
There was no man about the place except crippled old Alvino, and wounded Dalton lying in the men's quarters near at hand. Neither of them was serviceable in such an emergency, and Banjo, willing as he would be, seemed too badly hurt to be of any use. Frances pressed her to dismiss this intention. Even if they knew which way to ride, it would be a hopeless pursuit.
"That has nothing to do with my going into the room." "It has much," Maggie declared, whispering now, treasuring her plot. "The old one is upstairs, sleeping, and she will not wake until I shake her. Outside the soldiers make their fires and cook, and Alvino in the barn sings 'La Golondrina' you hear him? for that is sad music, like his soul. Very well.
He had stopped to light a lantern, in his peculiar Mexican mode of estimating the importance of time and occasion, and came flashing it in short, violent arcs as he swayed to swing his jointless leg. Frances led out the other horse and was waiting to mount when Alvino came panting up, the belt with its two revolvers over his arm. Mrs.
I'll go to 'em myself, honey I didn't think of them." "I'll go with you." "Wait till Alvino comes with them guns I can use 'em better than I can a rifle. Oh, why don't the man hurry!" "I'll run down and see what " But Alvino came around the corral at that moment.
But in the presence of his short, square figure, his orange tawny hair, his twinkling gray eyes, and retrousse nose, even that dominant woman withheld his title. It was currently reported at Red Dog that a distinguished foreigner had one day approached Mulrady with the formula, "I believe I have the honor of addressing Don Alvino Mulrady?"
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