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Updated: June 29, 2025
He had played fair with them all, and now all of them were set against him. "Devil take the whole outfit!" he cried out passionately. "From now on, Jim Kendric, you feather your own nest and hit the one-man trail for the open." The servingman, whom Zoraida's commands had constituted a sort of master of ceremonies, came to Kendric, his look curious but not unfriendly.
Then he saw that following Rios had come Zoraida and that she stood and looked at them, her eyes filled with mockery and triumph. "Who is it that speaks of what shall be done with that which rightfully is Zoraida's?" she demanded, her voice ringing out boldly. "And you two, who thought to escape me, I have you in a trap!" Kendric swung his rifle about so that the muzzle was towards her.
Such an act he deemed entirely germane to Zoraida's dark methods. "Señor Jim does not care to play?" she asked quietly. Had not Betty chosen to look at him then Kendric's answer would have been a blunt, "No." But Betty did look, and the glance was as eloquent as a gush of stinging words.
Zoraida and Ruiz Rios together in the place of hidden treasure. From afar, reaching them only faintly, came the sounds of men's voices, Zoraida's men clamoring above, mystified and with ample cause. "It may be our chance is now, not tonight," said Kendric. "Although it's but a little way from the house some of them, if not all, will have ridden; their horses will be down in the cañon.
Even to Zoraida's lawlessness there must be a limit; even the cold cruelty looking out of her oblique eyes now could not carry her so far. And yet the laugh with which he answered her was a trifle shaky. "We are talking nonsense," he said abruptly. "And Bruce is expecting you. When you finish distorting facts for his consumption I'd like a word with him." Zoraida's face went white.
He saw Betty so plainly that until he reasoned with himself he felt that she must see him. "A puma will not attack a human being." Kendric sought to speak as though merely contemptuous of Zoraida's entertainment. "They are cowardly brutes." "The puma," said Zoraida, "is starving. Further, he has been driven mad by men who whipped and then appeared to run, frightened of him. Watch."
These with handfuls of dry leaves and grass, perhaps some tenderer shoots from the hillside sage, with Zoraida's cloak spread over them, might make for Betty a couch on which she could manage to sleep. It was too dark for picking and choosing and his range was limited to what scant growth found root on these uplands close by.
The lazy devils taking Zoraida's pay can't make it up this way on horseback, and they're not going to climb on foot up every steep bit of mountainside hereabouts, looking for us." "A year?" gasped Betty. "I hope not." He became conscious of a sudden sense of relief after all that the night had offered and his old joyous laughter shone in his eyes.
If his shot brought Zoraida's men down on him, he would have to fight for it or run for it as circumstances directed. He was an hour in cresting the first ridge. Before him lay a wild country, broken and barren in places where there were wildernesses of rock and thorny bush; in other places scantily timbered and grown up in tough grasses.
For now neither he nor any other man could have failed to understand the silent speech of Zoraida's eyes. It was as though she invited him not so much to look into her eyes as through them and on, deep into her heart; as though these were gates, open to him, through which he might glimpse paradise. Zoraida, her look clinging to his passionately, was seeking to offer the final argument.
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