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Ray has already scrambled from the shallow breach where his brother alone found bottom; waiting hands assist Beltran; but as she lingers that moment shivering on the brink, blindly remembering the double movement of that arm beneath the ice, she silently asks, with a thrill, if he suffered Ray to save himself because he was a boy, and could, or because because she was Vivia!
And just then Beltran has no word for Ray, the customary smiling word always waited for, since his eyes are on the vision at his feet, and straightway the child springs down, springs where he can intercept Beltran's view, seems to rise in his wrath a head above the girl, and, looking at Beltran all the while, slaps Vivia on the cheek.
But a barbarian was here who could not long be terrified. Caonabo sent half his horde against Guarico, but himself had come to La Navidad. That painted army rallied and overtook the fleeing men. Shouting, making his swung sword dazzle in light, Diego de Arana raced down path, and Diego Minas and Beltran the cook and Juan Lepe with him.
A month of rushing over land and lake, of resting at the very spots where he and Beltran had stayed together three years ago, of repeating the brief strolls they took, of reading again and again that last note, and Ray had crossed the great river of the West, and reached the headquarters of his regiment.
'In truth have I, replied Beltran. 'I envy you, said Walter; 'nothing would please me more than such an enterprise. 'Nevertheless, rejoined the renegade, 'it is somewhat irksome, and requires much patience. But the Arabs have a proverb, that patience is the price that must be paid for all success, and act accordingly.
Luis de Ariega, afterward famous as the defender of the fort at Magdalena; Diego Velasquez, the future conqueror of Cuba; Vega, Abarca, Gil Garcia, Marguéz, Maldonado, Beltrán and many other doughty warriors, whose names had been the terror of the Moors during the war in Granada.
I opened my eyes and sat up, but found that my arms were bound to my sides. "We aren't dead, and that's some comfort, Doctor, as the cock said to the other cock in the market pannier!" It was Beltran the cook who spoke and he was bound like me. Around us lay the five dead.
"Do you mean to say," cried Ray, springing up, while string and all fell into the coals, "that Beltran, my brother" "Is a Rebel." "Then I am a rebel, too," said Ray, chokingly, sitting down again, and mechanically stooping to pick up the burning string, "a rebel to him!" "You won't be a rebel to him, if you'll listen to reason, his reason." "He's got no reason. It's only because he was there."
The house was a barrack; now down in her Maryland peach-orchards the black muzzles of Federal cannon yawned, and under the flickering shadows and sunshine the grimy gunners, knee-deep in grass and dew, brushed away the startled clover-blooms, as they touched fire to the breach. Beltran was a Rebel. Vivia was a Rebel, too! She ran down-stairs into her little parlor overflowing with flowers.
Vivia looked on all the tender loveliness of the dying year with a listless eye: waiting, weary waiting, makes the soul torpid to all but its pain. It was long since there had been any letter from Ray. In all this oppression of summer and of autumn there had come no report of Beltran. Her heart had lost its proud assurance, worn beneath the long strain of such suspense.
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