As a matter of fact, Don Luis knew even less than Seyd of the real reason behind his niece’s departure. Like many another and much more important event, it was brought about by the simplest of causes, which went back to the afternoon when, on her arrival at San Nicolas, Francesca found Sebastien waiting there with the news of his mother’s illness.

First in the sequence of cause and effect which sent her away stands Seyd’s five-peso note; next, Pancho, Sebastien’s mozo, for the conjunction of these two gave birth to the event. Ordinarily, that is, when in full possession of his simple wits, Tomas, Francesca’s mozo, would have suffered crucifixion in her cause, and had he chosen any other than Pancho to assist in the transmutation of Seyd’s note into alcohol at the San Nicolas wine shop the process would have been accomplished without damage to aught but his own head. But when in the cause of their tipplings Pancho began to enlarge on the benefits that would follow to all from the blending of their respective houses by marriage Tomas began to writhe under the itch of secret and superior knowledge. From knowing winks he progressed to mysterious hints, and finally ended with a clean confession of all he had seen that afternoon.

“But this is not to be spoken of, hombre,” he warned Pancho, with solemn hiccoughs, at the close. “By the grave of thy father, let not even a whisper forth.”

As being less difficult to find in a country where parenthood is more easily traced on the feminine side, Pancho swore to it by the grave of his mother. But, though he added thereto those of his aunts, grandmother, and entire female line, the combined weight still failed to balance such astonishing news. Inflamed by thoughts of the prestige he would gain in his master’s sight, he moderated his potations. After he had seen Tomas comfortably bestowed under the cantina table he carried the tale straight to Sebastien’s room.

In this, however, he showed more zeal than discretion, for in lieu of the expected prestige he got a blow in the mouth which laid him out in a manner convenient for the quirting of his life. Not until Sebastien’s arm tired did he gain permission to retire, whimpering, to his straw in the stable; and next morning both he and Tomas trembled for their lives when Sebastien arraigned them before him.

“Listen, dogs!” He struck them with his whip across their faces. “For this piece of lying the tongues of you both should be pulled out by the roots. If I spare you it is because until now you have both been faithful servants. But remember!” He swore to it with an oath so frightfully sacrilegious that both shrank in anticipation of a bolt from the skies. “But remember! If ever, drunk or sober, there proceeds out of either of you one further word ’twill surely be done.”

Leaving them shaking, he passed out and on upstairs to the patio where Francesca was sitting, with Roberta at her knees, in the shade of the corredor’s green arches. The drone of hummers, fluting of birds in the patio garden set her soft musings to pleasant music, and she looked up with sudden vexation at the jangle of his spurs.

“So this is the child that we have renamed in his honor?”

Last night they had parted better friends than usual, for out of the pity bred of her own realized love she had done her best to please him. Love had also sharpened her naturally sensitive perceptions. Divining his knowledge from the concentrated anger of his look, she rose, instinctively nerving herself for the encounter.

“Just so.” He divined, in turn, her feeling. “Between those who understand words are wasted. Send the child away.”

As he said “understand” a surge of passion wiped out the weary lines left by a night of hate. But while the child was passing along the corridor he controlled it and became his usual sardonic self. He was beginning “Thanks to the excellent Tomas – ” when she interrupted with an angry gesture.

“Then it was he! I’ll have him – ”

“Caramba!” He shrugged. “What a heat! But easy – do not blame Tomas for your gringo’s fault. What else could you expect from a peon that found himself enriched at a stroke? The wonder is that he did not proclaim his news from your topmost wall. Be content that he will never whisper one word again.”

“You didn’t – ” she began, alarmed now for her servant.

“No. Pancho, to whom he told it, I flogged for the liar he now thinks Tomas, and Tomas – is trembling for his tongue. Except between us the matter is dead. Yet Tomas served his purpose. Thanks to him, we may now pass words and come to terms.”

“Terms?” She faltered it after a silence.

“Terms!” he repeated, gravely. “That is, if you would save your gringo alive. Supposing this were to escape to the good uncle? Soft as he has been with these gringos of late, supposing that he were to hear of both this and that other night in the hut, how long, think you, would the man last?”

Her eyes told. After a pause her mouth opened with a small gasp. “You – oh! you will not?”

“Not if you obey. Now see you, Francesca.” He dropped into a tone of grave confidence which was really winning. “If I had not known that his death at my hands would place you forever beyond me the man had never seen the dawn of another day. Whether he sees its setting depends on you. If you will go with my mother to Europe – ”

“Si– if – I – go?” It issued between pauses of pain after a long silence.

“He lives. I will even protect him till he arrives at the end of his fool’s rope.”

“And – then?”

“There will be no ‘then.’ I know these gringos. They will disappear like their vanishing gold.”

Her slight flush indicated defiant unbelief. But knowing that this was in deadly earnest, that Seyd’s life hung by a hair, she let him go on. “Let there be no misunderstanding. I shall require your promise, on the word of a Garcia, not to attempt communication.” He added, turning away, perhaps in pity for the misery of her face: “There is no hurry. Take time to think it over – an hour, two if you wish.”

He could easily afford, too, the concession, for her love was playing into his hands. None knew better than she that a contrary answer would make of Seyd an Ishmaelite with every man’s hand raised against his life. He could never escape. With that dread fact staring her in the face she could give but one answer; and while, later, she spent hours pacing her bedroom in restless strivings to find a way out, she reached her decision before he gained the end of the gallery.

“I will go.”

CHAPTER XVI

“Really, I don’t know what to make of it. That last car load of machinery rusted for a month in the damp heat of the Tehuantepec tropics before we got it traced. It has happened so often now that I’m almost tempted to suspect a design.”

Seyd’s complaint to Peters, the agent, nearly a year later summed the exasperating experiences which had retarded the building of the new smelter. Beginning before the end of the last flood, the failure in deliveries had multiplied as the work of construction proceeded, until it seemed to Seyd that his material had been distributed on a thousand side tracks by an impartial hand. While two high-priced American mechanics had spent their expensive leisure shooting and fishing he had spent most of his own time tracing the shipments, and now, with the rains almost due again, another month would be required to finish the work.

“You have sure had your share of bad luck.” While sympathizing with him, Peters discouraged the idea of premeditation. “You don’t know these Mexican roads. Our charter calls for the employment of sixty-five per cent. of Mexican help, and, if you’ll believe me, that means six hundred per-cent. of inefficiency. Take this mozo of mine. He’s been with me six years. But, though I show him the correct way to do a thing a thousand times, the moment my back is turned he’ll go at it in some fool wrong-headed way of his own. The wonder to me is not, that your freight goes wrong, but that it ever arrives. Nevertheless, you’ve had, as I say, your fill of bad luck. If I were you I’d just jump the up train – she’s due in twenty minutes – and call on the general traffic manager in Mexico City. He can do more for you in five minutes than I can in ten days.”

It was sound advice. Quick always to perceive advantage, Seyd answered, “Give me a ticket.”

Because of his isolation, the agent’s wells of speech were always brimming, and while waiting for the train he delivered himself of several pieces of news. “By the way, Don Luis went up yesterday to lodge a protest with the government against the dam a gringo company is building across the valley fifty miles north of San Nicolas. It is located just below the Barranca de Tigres, a cañon that drains all the watershed west of the volcano. They have cloudbursts up there, and when one lets go – well, old Noah’s deluge isn’t in it. When I was hunting jaguar in the cañon a couple of years ago I saw watermarks a hundred and fifty feet up the mountainside. Boulders big as churches were piled up in the bed of the stream like pebbles, and if that dam was built of solid concrete instead of clay they’d go through it like it was dough. Though I’d be the last man to go back on my own folks, I’m bound to confess that we do carry some things with a bit too high a hand. If that dam ever breaks, the wave will sweep the barranca clean between its walls. But, Lordy! that won’t cut any figure with the paint-eaters that hedge in Diaz. To secure a rake-off they’d see all Guerrero drown, and I’m doubting that the General’s kick will do any good.”

Seyd nodded. “No, the times are against him – both in this and his other efforts to hold back civilization. So far, he and Sebastien have succeeded pretty well in checking it here in Guerrero. But it is creeping in around them – some day will flow over their heads. They might as well stand in the path of a barranca flood.”

The naming of Sebastien brought the second piece of news. “That reminds me – you almost had him for a fellow traveler. I forwarded a cable message last night that his mother had died in France. I rather thought that he’d be in for this train.”

“Then she is coming back?”

Seyd meant Francesca. But Peters misunderstood. “Yes, they’ve shipped her by a German line that runs to Havana and Vera Cruz. By mistake the cable was sent to another Rocha somewhere up in Sinaloa, and, being a Mexican, he slept on it a week before replying that his mother was there, quite lively and frisky at home. So it arrived here ten days late – long enough to put Miss Francesca and her mother into Vera Cruz. Yes, the señora was there – had just joined them – luckily, for death is too grim a thing for a young girl to face by herself.” Just then the train drew into the station, and as Seyd climbed on, he added: “If you could find time to pass the word on to Don Luis he’d surely appreciate it. He puts up at the Iturbide.”

Seyd’s nod was purely automatic, for the news had loosed once more bitter tides which had lain dormant these last few months under the weight of his business cares. Unconscious, too, of the import that events would presently give to such apparently trivial consent, he nodded again when Peters asked permission to look through a batch of American papers which had come for him by yesterday’s mail.

For that matter, it would have been difficult to discern anything unusual or alarming in the spectacle of Peters as he sat in his office after the departure of the train, heels on the table and chair comfortably tilted, while he slit, one after the other, the covers of Seyd’s papers. Yet while he smoked and read his way down through the pile he unconsciously but surely prepared the way for the event which was approaching at the top speed of Sebastien’s horse. Had he read, or Sebastien ridden, a little faster or slower things had gone differently. But, just as though it had been predoomed and destined, eyes and hoofs kept perfect time. Just as Peters opened Seyd’s Albuquerque paper Sebastien walked in.

“Left – an hour ago.” Yawning, Peters laid down the Albuquerque paper on top of the pile, and as the train usually ran from two to twelve hours late three hundred and sixty-five days in the year he lent a sympathetic ear to Sebastien’s vitriolic curses.

“I can wire for a special,” he suggested. “They could send an engine and car down from Cuernavaca in little more than an hour.”

“If you will be so kind, señor.”

In all Guerrero, Peters was the one gringo with whom Sebastien was on speaking terms, and he now accepted both a cigar and a paper to while away the time. After one glance had shown it to be a gringo sheet he would have cast it aside, but the one word “Mexico!” in scare heads caught his eye. Setting forth the international complications that were likely to come from the lynching of a Mexican in Arizona, it held his interest. He not only read it to the bottom of the column, but followed over to the next page, upon which heavy ink lines had been scored around a local article.

As the heading caught his eye he started, looked again, then bent over the paper and read to the end. For a few seconds thereafter he sat thinking. A stealthy glance showed Peters at the key clicking off the call for the special. Quietly folding the paper, he slid it beneath his coat.

CHAPTER XVII

With Seyd and his cargo of reflections aboard, the train meanwhile puffed steadily up the four-per-cent. grades which carry the railway eleven thousand feet high to the shoulder of the old giant volcano, Ajuasoa. While he stared out of the window the vivid panorama of the hot country, the green seas of corn or cane which surged around white-walled haciendas, the chocolate peons behind their wooden plows, and the pretty brown girls at the stations gradually gave place to volcanic lava fields and gloomy woods of piñon, and these again merged into the innumerable hamlets which spread brown adobe skirts around Mexico City unseen by him.

“She is coming back! She is coming back!” It ran all the while in his mind, and formed the undertone of his conversation with Don Luis in the patio of the Iturbide that evening. When the old man stated his intention of taking the night train down to the Gulf it was only by a powerful effort that Seyd avoided the lunacy of offering to accompany him. All that night he burned in a flame of feeling, and as a consequence he rose tired out and presented such a picture of meekness when ushered into the office of the general manager, one so opposite to the usual fiery mien of the wronged shipper, that the stony heart of the official was melted within him.

“You certainly have a kick coming,” he admitted. “A big one, at that. I’ll look into this myself, and if you’ll please return at four I hope to have news of your freight.”

In their passage down through the departments, however, his inquiries soon came to a stop. “So this is the fellow who has been bucking old General Garcia in the Barranca de Guerrero?” he commented to his third assistant; and his further remarks were equally enlightening. “Well, politics are politics, but this has gone far enough. I like the boy’s looks, and this railroad isn’t going to be used to fight the General’s battles any longer. After this, Mr. Chauvez, see that Mr. Seyd gets his freight. Where is that last car?”

The third assistant’s shoulders executed the Latin equivalent of “Search me!” At last news, peon “brakies” on the Nacional had been using it as a roller coaster on the mountain grades going down to Monterey. If Providence had intervened before it ran off into the sea Mr. Chauvez opined that it would most likely be found on that city’s wharves. All of which, after some clicking and humming of wires, culminated in the manager’s report to Seyd at four.

“It seems that your freight was switched by mistake over to Monterey. If you leave it to us” – his stern eye loosed a twinkle – “you’ll probably get it sometime in the next six months. But if you’ll take these passes for the evening train and hunt it up yourself you can have it tagged onto the train that leaves to-morrow night.”

Though the vicissitudes of thirty years’ railroading had almost petrified his heart, the organ stirred faintly as Seyd returned hearty thanks. Watching him go out, he even muttered: “It’s a damned shame! But I’ll take care that he’s bothered no more.”

More grateful on his part than he had any legal right to be, Seyd would have been better pleased had the passes read to Vera Cruz. Knowing that Francesca must pass through Mexico City on her way home, he would have preferred even to stay where he was. But the thought of Billy fretting himself thin at the mine reinforced his naturally strong sense of duty, and he took the train out that night. And his steadfastness made for his good. During his three days’ absence the flame of feeling which was consuming his resolution and blinding his thought burned itself out. The morning after he had seen his car billed through to his own station he rose with his mind clear and a renewed purpose to do the right thing.

“At the first favorable opportunity I shall tell her,” he told himself, in the coach going down to the station. With the thought strong in his mind he stepped on the train and – came face to face with Francesca herself.

“Oh! it is you!”

“I – I – thought you were already gone!”

While he blushed and stammered confusedly his senses, nevertheless, took cognizance of the fluttering rush of her hands, the happy eyes in the midst of her flushes, other things that answered, without words, several questions which had greatly perplexed him. Whatever the cause behind her long silence, it was neither the resurrection of her racial pride nor, as he had sometimes suspected, her discovery of his marriage. Indeed, her very next words gave him an inkling.

“You must have wondered why I did not write? But I – could not help it.” She glanced at her mother, who, with eloquent hands, was telegraphing him welcome from the other end of the car. “I will tell you later – all.”

In his surprise and gladness his mind still clung to his resolve, and, nearly as possible, he kept his pact with himself. “I also have something to tell.”

She looked up quickly. But his eyes indicated no diminution of the old feeling. Satisfied, she asked, with a little sigh: “The mine? Something gone wrong? You will tell us – now.”

The señora, who had caught the last sentence, added her word. “Si, for we, you know, are your friends.” Making room for him by her side, she punctuated his tale of the summer’s mishaps with pitiful exclamations, and comforted him at the end with maternal solicitude. “Si, at the first glance I saw it, that you had suffered. But, courage, amigo, it will make for your greater enjoyment in the end.”

Francesca had taken the seat opposite, and, catching her eye just then, Seyd saw, along with the sympathy and understanding, a gleam of exultation. “You suffered, si, but I’m glad for – ’twas for me.” Her glance said it plainly as words, and he ached to answer it; but, in accordance with the honest course he had laid out for himself, he refrained, and went on talking to her mother.

“Don Luis,” she answered his question, “is in the front car with Sebastien – in attendance on our dear friend, his mother.”

He knew that he had no part in their grief, and, tentatively, he began, “If I can be of any help – ”

Divining his feeling from the pause, she answered at once: “You are very kind. Francesca, poor niña, has been under a great strain. ’Twill be a mercy if you will stay here and talk.”

Now that her first blushes had died, he could see it for himself. Her smile added the soft confession, “You did not suffer alone.”

Under her look Seyd felt his resolution weaken; to save it he looked out of the window, whereupon it gained strength from the thought of his impending confession. But it relaxed again the next time their glances met; and, as love is an anarchist who scoffs alike at law and death, their communications proceeded with alternate thawings and freezings, while, in reverse order, the black lava fields and gloomy piñon gave place to the painted hamlets, pink churches, and villages of huts in green seas of corn. Yet, if a little worse for wear, his resolution held. Indeed, it found definite expression when the train stopped at last at their station.

“I must see you soon!” he said, as they went out. “I have something very serious to say.”

Once more she looked up quickly. “We shall be at El Quiss, Sebastien’s place, for three days. After that you will find me at home. But do not come alone!” The hasty addition threw more light on the causes behind her sudden departure. “As you value your life – nay, you were always careless of that – promise, for my sake, that you will not come alone? When you go out anywhere take with you at least one man.”

“Is it so serious as that?” But he stopped laughing when he saw she was hurt. “There! I promise!”

She paid him, alighting, with a clasp of her hand that left its soft clinging pressure tingling after she disappeared in the crowd of rancheros and hacendados, Sebastien’s retainers and friends, who filled the station. His sharp gray eye had already singled out his car on a side track, and while he waited for the agent Sebastien and Don Luis passed, walking behind the coffin.

He was seen, moreover, by them, and after they had mounted and were riding side by side at the head of the funeral procession Sebastien spoke. “Your gringo was at the station.”

Don Luis nodded. “Si, he came down on the train.”

After a silence Sebastien spoke again. “It seems that he has been having trouble with his freight.”

Ignoring the subtle suggestion conveyed by the accent, Don Luis laconically answered, “He is not the first.”

“But will be the last. Ernestino Chauvez, my second cousin, is in the department of freights. Yesterday he told me that, by special order, there are to be no more miscarriages of this man’s freight.”

The heavy brown mask refused even a sign. “This had better happened a year ago.”

“Then he is near the end of his rope?” Sebastien leaped to the conclusion.

“His first note of hand to me is due next month.”

“And – ”

Don Luis’s massive shoulders rose. “How should I know, amigo, what money he has?”

“But if he pay not?”

Again Don Luis shrugged. “Sebastien, how often am I to tell it – that no gringo shall force in on my lands.”

In happy ignorance as yet of the significance implied in their conversation, Seyd at that moment was reading and rereading, with incredulous joy, a newspaper clipping which had been forwarded by a friend in Albuquerque.

MRS. ROBERT SEYD, WIFE OF PROMINENT

MINING ENGINEER, GRANTED DIVORCE

The content below ran as is usual when feminine enthusiasm over its wrongs has been unchecked by fear of a reply, and in handing down his decision the local Dogberry – who was unaware that the notice of the plaintiff’s remarriage would appear in the same issue with his remarks – had pronounced it the most heartless case of desertion in all his experience upon the bench. Reading a second clipping which set forth the marriage, Seyd indulged in a grin. But this quickly faded. Pity and sympathy colored his remark.

“Poor thing! I hope she’ll be happy.” Self reproach vibrated in the addition, “She was not, never could have been, with me.”

With that she passed out of his thought just as she had already gone from his life. His mind leaped to review the consequences. Free! Free! In the first flush of his joy he exulted over the fact that his intended confession was now unnecessary. But later and more sober reflections caused him to shake his head.

“No!” He laid down the law peremptorily for himself. “There’s been enough and to spare of shilly-shallying. You will go to her and tell her – all! And if she refuses you there’ll be no one to blame but yourself.”