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Colonel Kate at once sent a note to Barbara's lover, telling him what had happened. But the messenger, being a small boy, met other small boys on the way, and by the time the young officer read the news the Indian girl was well on her way toward home. Lieutenant Wemple applied for leave of absence, and as soon as possible he followed old Ambrosio.
Wemple finished giving orders to the sleepy peons to remain and care for the place, occupying their spare time with hiding the more valuable things, and was calling around the corner to Miss Drexel the news of the capture of Vera Cruz, when Davies returned with the information that the horses consisted of a pair of moth-eaten skates that could be depended upon to lie down and die in the first half mile.
Half a dozen scattered shots from farther along the street seemed to draw away the mob, for the neighborhood became comparatively quiet. A whistle came to them through the open windows, and a man's voice calling: "Wemple! Open the door! It's Habert! Want to talk to you!" Wemple went down, returning in several minutes with a tidily-paunched, well-built, gray-haired American of fifty.
Wemple found his way to Ambrosio's door, where the old chief was sitting in the early sunlight. As he stopped his horse Barbara came up the street, her tinaja poised on her head. One swift and frightened flash of her black eyes was all the recognition she gave him as she hurried into the house. Briefly the Lieutenant told the old man that he loved Barbara and wished to marry her.
She did not look at him, but shook her head and went back into the house. Lieutenant Wemple turned his horse and with head hanging on his breast rode slowly, very slowly, back toward the long declivity leading to the plain below. If he had not ridden so slowly this tale might have had a different ending. Ambrosio went into the house and began telling his wife what had happened.
And while the Dutch superintendent, in execrable Spanish, shouted affirmations of Dutch neutrality into the menacing dark, across the gunwale of Chill II they found the body of the tow-headed youth whose business it had been not to die. For the first hour, talking little, Davies and Wemple stumbled along the apology for a road that led through the jungle to the lodge.
He, too, in a fit of anger, springing to his feet when he had changed clips in his pistol, burst out with mouth-filling profanity. "They had an American flag in the dirt, stamping and spitting on it. And they told me to spit on it." Wemple and Davies regarded him with silent interrogation. "Oh, I know what you're wondering!" he flared out. "Would I a-spit on it in the pinch?
Then followed a series of gayeties in which Barbara was the central figure, and Lieutenant Wemple her constant attendant. Whether it was a dinner, or a reception, or a picnic party up the canyon, or a horseback excursion to the turquoise mines, he spent as much time by her side as the other people allowed.
"Isn't she the spunky devil!" Drexel exulted. "Say, she could climb the side of a house if she could get traction." "Better put on that silencer again, if you don't want to play tag with every soldier in the district," Wemple ordered, as they helped Mrs. Morgan in. The road to the Dutch gusher compelled them to go through the outskirts of Panuco town.
"Here! what are you up to!" Wemple demanded suddenly of Drexel, who had exposed himself to fish a rifle out of the car. "Going to show the skunks what shooting is," was his answer. "No, you don't," Wemple said. "We're not here to fight, but to get this party to Tampico." He remembered Peter Tonsburg's remark. "Whose business is to live, Charley that's our business. Anybody can get killed.