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Updated: May 31, 2025
They'll just plunder and gorge themselves with food, and then they will have Manuelito to amuse themselves with. It is getting too late in the day for them to attempt to follow us. They have got too much to occupy themselves with anyhow. Don't you worry, old girl; if they do come this way, as they may to-morrow morning, we'll give them a dose that will make them wish they had never seen a Yankee."
"Ah, our Manuelito."... But a gruff voice discoursed jovially, "Care not, Manuel. What of Paquita with the broken tooth? Is she not left to thee? And por Dios, hombres, in the dark all women are alike." "I will cram thy unclean mouth with live coals," Manuel drawled spitefully. They roared with laughter at this sally.
In ten minutes Black Jim, roused by vigorous kicks, was silently but briskly hitching in his team, Manuelito silently but suddenly buckling the harness about his mules. Irish Kate, aroused by the clatter, had poked her head from underneath the canvas to inquire what was the matter, and, at a few words from the captain, had shrunk in again, stricken with fear, but obeying implicitly.
The night was still as the grave; the skies cloudless and studded with stars. One of these came shooting earthward just after he took his post, and seemed to plunge into vacancy and be lost in its own combustion over towards Jarvis Pass behind him. This gave him opportunity to glance backward again, and there was Manuelito still cowering over the fire.
Off it came, both nervous hands working rapidly, and then when he had about determined to cut off the lines of one of Jim's mules and so throw suspicion on him, his African mate, he was aware of his captain striding through the trees toward him. He could almost have run away. But the next words re-assured him. "That you, Manuelito?" challenged Captain Gwynne in low, hoarse tones. "All right!
Unluckily, he had with him only a light, short-ranged pair of glasses, and he could not distinctly make out what they were; but believing that they could be nothing but Manuelito and the mules, he put spurs to his weary horse, and pushed rapidly in pursuit wondering, however, how it was that the Mexican, with the slow-moving mules, could have got so far to the front.
The corporal continued to gaze as though fascinated until the leading mule got almost under him, and then he gave a groan of helplessness and misery as he exclaimed, "My God! My God! It's Manuelito!" For ten minutes Pike remained at his post of observation on top of the rock, watching the Indians as they slowly and cautiously moved down the Pass in the direction of the abandoned camp.
The awful groans and cries of Manuelito were still ringing in his ears, and, to himself, the old soldier confessed that his nerve was not a little tried by the fearful sights and sounds of the early evening.
Ordinarily Manuelito was wont to show his white teeth, and touch the broad, silver-edged brim of his sombrero, when "el capitan" reined back to see how he was getting along. To-day there was a sullen scowl for the first moment, and then, as though suddenly recollecting himself, the dark-skinned fellow gave a ghastly sort of grin and the captain felt certain that Pike's idea was right.
A hundred yards off the road they halted and Gwynne called back into the darkness: "How's Manuelito getting on, Pike?" No answer. The captain stepped back a few yards and listened. Not a sound of hoof or wheel. "Pike!" he called. "Where are you?" No answer at all.
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