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These he tucked in beneath the blankets beside the shivering body. Slowly the heat warmed the invalid. After a time he fell once more into troubled sleep. Billie drove his horse away and pelted it with stones to a trot. He could not keep it with him without risking discovery, but he was almost as much afraid that its arrival in Los Portales might start a search for the hidden fugitives.
Miss Lee's party turned to the right and followed the river-bed in the direction of Los Portales. For the wind was driving the fire down instead of up. Those in the mesquite held a parallel course to cut off any chance of escape. Some change of wind currents swept the smoke toward them in great billows. It enveloped the fugitives in a dense cloud.
Deaths in the street were not uncommon; nearly every morning bodies were found beneath the portales. Starving creatures crept to the market in the hope of begging a stray bit of food, and some of them died there, between the empty stalls. The death-wagons, heavy with their daily freight, rumbled ceaselessly through the streets, adding to the giant piles of unburied corpses outside the city.
It had become a sink for the riff-raff driven out of Texas by the Rangers, for all that wild and adventurous element which flocks to a new country before the law has established itself. The coming of the big cattle herds had brought money into the country, and in its wake followed the gambler and the outlaw. Gold and human life were the cheapest commodities at Los Portales.
Manuel Portales gave an interesting account of native life in Luzon; and Angus Cameron told us about the French habitants and their narrow little strips of farms fronting on the Canadian streams, every farmer wanting a littoral right, if only a few yards wide. Our evening talks were often monologues, anyone with a word to say having attentive hearers, if interesting, otherwise not.
Probably none of its members had ever heard the proverb that beggars ought not to be choosers. The event of the day has been the arrest of M. Portales, the editor of the Vérité. This newspaper, after asserting that the Government has received news from the provinces, asks a series of questions.
He was the only man who wore a dinner coat in Vera Cruz, and each night, at his particular table in the crowded "Portales," at the Hotel Diligencia, he was to be seen, as fresh and clean as though he were in a New York or London restaurant. Each day he was up early to take the train out to the "gap," across which came arrivals from Mexico City.
On the main street of Los Portales one evening Billie met Pauline Roubideau. She came at him with a direct frontal attack. "I've had a letter from Jim Clanton." The sheriff did not ask her where it was post-marked. He did not want any information from Polly as to the whereabouts of her friend. "You're one ahead of me then. I haven't," answered Prince. "He says he didn't do it." "Do what?"
A girl astride a buckskin pony rode down to the river to water her mount. She carried across the pommel of her saddle a small rifle. Hanging from the cantle strings was a wild turkey she had shot. It was getting along toward evening and she was on her way back to Los Portales. The girl was a lover of the outdoors and she had been hunting alone.
Goodheart assented. To go blindly out into the mesquite after the young outlaw would have been as futile as to reach a hand toward the stars with the hope of plucking a gold-piece from the air. "Watch the men he trains with. Keep an eye on the Elephant Corral an' check up on him when he rides in to Los Portales. Spot the tendejon at Point o' Rocks where he has a hang-out.
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