“General Pesita wishes Señor Capitan Byrne to report to him at once,” said the man.
“Sure Mike!” replied Billy, and made his way through the pandemonium of the camp toward the headquarters tent.
As he went he slipped his hand inside his shirt and loosened something which hung beneath his left arm.
“Li’l ol’ ace-in-the-hole,” he murmured affectionately.
He found Pesita pacing back and forth before his tent—an energetic bundle of nerves which no amount of hard riding and fighting could tire or discourage.
As Billy approached Pesita shot a quick glance at his face, that he might read, perhaps, in his new officer’s expression whether anger or suspicion had been aroused by the killing of his American friend, for Pesita never dreamed but that Bridge had been dead since mid-forenoon.
“Well,” said Pesita, smiling, “you left Señor Bridge and Miguel safely at their destination?”
“I couldn’t take ’em all the way,” replied Billy, “cause I didn’t have no more men to guard ’em with; but I seen ’em past the danger I guess an’ well on their way.”
“You had no men?” questioned Pesita. “You had six troopers.”
“Oh, they was all croaked before we’d been gone two hours. You see it happens like this: We got as far as that dry arroyo just before the trail drops down into the valley, when up jumps a bunch of this here Villa’s guys and commenced takin’ pot shots at us.
“Seein’ as how I was sent to guard Bridge an’ Mig, I makes them dismount and hunt cover, and then me an’ my men wades in and cleans up the bunch. They was only a few of them but they croaked the whole bloomin’ six o’ mine.
“I tell you it was some scrap while it lasted; but I saved your guests from gettin’ hurted an’ I know that that’s what you sent me to do. It’s too bad about the six men we lost but, leave it to me, we’ll get even with that Villa guy yet. Just lead me to ’im.”
As he spoke Billy commenced scratching himself beneath the left arm, and then, as though to better reach the point of irritation, he slipped his hand inside his shirt. If Pesita noticed the apparently innocent little act, or interpreted it correctly may or may not have been the fact. He stood looking straight into Byrne’s eyes for a full minute. His face denoted neither baffled rage nor contemplated revenge. Presently a slow smile raised his heavy mustache and revealed his strong, white teeth.
“You have done well, Captain Byrne,” he said. “You are a man after my own heart,” and he extended his hand.
A half-hour later Billy walked slowly back to his own blankets, and to say that he was puzzled would scarce have described his mental state.
“I can’t quite make that gink out,” he mused. “Either he’s a mighty good loser or else he’s a deep one who’ll wait a year to get me the way he wants to get me.”
And Pesita a few moments later was saying to Captain Rozales:
“I should have shot him if I could spare such a man; but it is seldom I find one with the courage and effrontery he possesses. Why think of it, Rozales, he kills eight of my men, and lets my prisoners escape, and then dares to come back and tell me about it when he might easily have gotten away. Villa would have made him an officer for this thing, and Miguel must have told him so. He found out in some way about your little plan and he turned the tables on us. We can use him, Rozales, but we must watch him. Also, my dear captain, watch his right hand and when he slips it into his shirt be careful that you do not draw on him—unless you happen to be behind him.”
Rozales was not inclined to take his chief’s view of Byrne’s value to them. He argued that the man was guilty of disloyalty and therefore a menace. What he thought, but did not advance as an argument, was of a different nature. Rozales was filled with rage to think that the newcomer had outwitted him, and beaten him at his own game, and he was jealous, too, of the man’s ascendancy in the esteem of Pesita; but he hid his personal feelings beneath a cloak of seeming acquiescence in his chief’s views, knowing that some day his time would come when he might rid himself of the danger of this obnoxious rival.
“And tomorrow,” continued Pesita, “I am sending him to Cuivaca. Villa has considerable funds in bank there, and this stranger can learn what I want to know about the size of the detachment holding the town, and the habits of the garrison.”
IX
Barbara in Mexico
The manager of El Orobo Rancho was an American named Grayson. He was a tall, wiry man whose education had been acquired principally in the cow camps of Texas, where, among other things one does not learn to love nor trust a greaser. As a result of this early training Grayson was peculiarly unfitted in some respects to manage an American ranch in Mexico; but he was a just man, and so if his vaqueros did not love him, they at least respected him, and everyone who was or possessed the latent characteristics of a wrongdoer feared him.
Perhaps it is not fair to say that Grayson was in any way unfitted for the position he held, since as a matter of fact he was an ideal ranch foreman, and, if the truth be known, the simple fact that he was a gringo would have been sufficient to have won him the hatred of the Mexicans who worked under him—not in the course of their everyday relations; but when the fires of racial animosity were fanned to flame by some untoward incident upon either side of the border.
Today Grayson was particularly rabid. The more so because he could not vent his anger
