Gringos and suspicious compatriots, both, were thirsting for his blood. She had been told that she herself was in danger of arrest for complicity in robberies at Gila Bend--she, who had overheard the plot to meet the stage, murder the passengers and rob the mails, at least that was what the woman whom she was bidden to respect as her stepmother had fearfully told her and asked if there were no way in which she could warn Blake. How was she to know, poor child, what would result? How could she help shrinking from sight of the officers she had watched with such eager interest at Sancho's, when she was later told they were seeking her father's life--told that, could they force a confession from her, nothing on earth could save him? Yet here was the gray-haired colonel devoting himself to Inez and being kind to her own trembling self. Here was the Teniente Loring who had been lovely to her, said the stewardess, until he saw her terror, her shrinking from him, and now when she longed to tell him her simple story, he would not come near her. Of the packet and its contents she knew next to nothing. Of their intention to secure it and, if need be, her arrest with it, the moment they reached the wharf at San Francisco, she could not dream. That that fated packet was destined never to reach the Golden Gate, that every plan and project, based on the safe return of the Idaho to port, was doomed to die, no one of her passengers or crew could possibly have predicted this beaming April morning as she cleft the billows on her northward way. Pancha was only wondering how and when Loring's silence would end, when within the minute the end came. CHAPTER XIII.