In the wide out-of-doors, under the unbelievably blue sky and the stinging sun, with Jimsy and Yaqui Juan, life was sound and whole again. The Indian, tall as a pine, looked at her with eyes of respectful adoration and smiled his slow, melancholy smile, as she swung off with the boy, down the path which led to the old well. "Juan approves of me, doesn't he?" said Honor, contentedly. "Of course; you're my woman!" She loved his happy impudence. "Aren't you, Skipper?" They had passed the twist in the path--the path which was like a moist green tunnel through the tropic jungle--which hid them from the house and she halted and went swiftly into his arms. "Yes, Jimsy! _Yes!_ And--I've been stingy and mean to you but I won't be, any more. Carter must just--stand things." "_Skipper!_" He wasn't facile with words, Jimsy King, but he was able to make himself clear. "Jimsy, isn't it wonderful--the all-rightness of everything? Being together again, and----" "Going to be together always! And my job waiting! Isn't the old boy a wonder? I saw him, just now. He says he's heard from Mexico City and it's O. K. to start Thursday. They're going to send the escort." "In two days," said Honor, blissfully, "we'll be on our way home! Jimsy, in two days!" But in two days dizzyingly, terrifyingly much had happened. The pleasant little comedy of life at _El Pozo_ had changed to melodrama, crude and strident. They had been attacked by a band of _insurrectos_, a wing of Villa's hectic army, presumably; the _peons_, with the exception of the house servants and Yaqui Juan, had gone gleefully over to the enemy; Richard King had been wounded in his hot-headed defense of his _hacienda_, shot through the shoulder, and was running a temperature; the telephone wires were cut; infinitely worse than all, the besiegers had taken possession of the well and they were entirely without water.