"But you must go, on, on!" she protested. "They may not be deceived, no. They may have you to overtake here." She held out her hand. "There, this path, you follow it to Tampico. Good bye. Yes, yes, you have not one minute!" Driscoll took the little gauntleted hand readily enough. He saw that the lines of her face were drawn, but her manner was inexorable. "How do you like your dress?" he inquired. Had she been on her feet, she would have stamped one of them. "Monsieur," she cried, "here is no time to observe the replenishment of a lady's wardrobe. Do you go? I insist. I wish you bon voyage to your own country, monsieur." "But it's so far away. I reckon I'd better rest a spell first. A month or so, prob'bly." She watched him clamber down and tie Demijohn to the low branch of a live oak on the river's bank. "There you are, getting stubborn again," she said. But the lines in her face had vanished. "Of course I mean to see you back to your friends," he explained. "Merci bien. But you will not. You will have this river straight to Tampico. I say yes!" She turned her horse as she spoke, whereat he started to remount his own. "I think, sir----" she began haughtily. "The road is free." "Oh, why have you to be so, so quarrelsome?" "The temptation, I reckon." "You really will go back with me?" "I might be going back along about the same time. It's a public trail." "Then _I_ will stay, and you _must_! I will not permit you to go back there now. I will see that you do wait here so long until Lopez has the time to start to Mexico after you. Then you will be behind him. Have the goodness to hold my bridle. I think I shall take me a rest a little also." Together they sat on a huge live-oak root and watched the sluggish Panuco flow by. "No hurry now," Driscoll observed comfortably. "Our scarlet upholstered colonel won't get away for years yet." Years, at least, were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her quaintly inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned it in London long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her father played France's diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers, then, was as broad as Mayfair, and to the Missourian doubly foreign, and doubly alluring. "I cannot understand," she said, "why it is the Dragoons have not followed you immediately?" "Tibby's the reason, I reckon. That Tibby is a deep one." She made him explain, and he told her. The blackmailing humorist, Tiburcio, had paid him a visit at his dungeon window during the night. Being chief witness for the prosecution, Tiburcio could pass the sentry unchallenged. "Come for your money?" Driscoll had inquired, and Tiburcio seemed hurt. "What is the matter," Tiburcio demanded, "with pointing a revolver at the Senor Americano right now, and making him deliver?" Driscoll had not figured out what the objections might be, but he reckoned some would materialize.