"Berthe," mademoiselle at that instant called, "oh you little ninny, are you coming ever?" The maid obeyed. "Just the same," she sighed, "God bless her!" "And did I," Driscoll had begun angrily, but she was already gone, and he finished it to himself, "did I once intend to leave you?" He leaped astride his buckskin horse, who trotted with him briskly to the head of the caravan. Behind was Anastasio Murguia, a quaint combination of silk hat, shawl, and ranchero saddle. The two Frenchwomen followed, and behind came the straggling file of burros and pack horses. Yet the American was as a solitary traveller leaving a town for the wilderness at the first touch of dawn. The road soon narrowed down to a trail as it wound through the undergrowth of the Huasteca lowlands, then westward toward a bluish line of mountains. At each cross trail the American would turn in his saddle to force an indication of their course from Murguia. Then on he would ride again, the while sinking deeper and deeper into his thoughts; thoughts of why he had come, of how he might succeed, and of the Surrender at that moment perhaps a fact. For him, though, there was his sabre yet, dangling there under his leg. And there were the sabres of comrades that likewise would not be given up, for to save them that shame was he in Mexico. Riding there, so much alone, and lonely, he was a rough, savage, military figure. But in his meditations, so grave and unwonted in the wild, hard-riding trooper lad, there was nothing to indicate a second nature in him, an instinct that was on the alert against every leafy clump and cactus and mesh of vine. CHAPTER VIII THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH MAY BE PRODIGIOUSLY LONG THOUGHTS "And many a Knot unravell'd by the Road; But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate." --_Omar._ Another young person, Jacqueline herself, was also pondering rather soberly this morning. And her thoughts fitted as oddly with her piquant, lightsome, cynical youth as the gloomily patriotic ones of the Storm Centre did with his youth, which was robust and boyish and swashbuckling. To judge from the way their brains worked now, both young people might have been grave wielders of state affairs, instead of the lad and the lass so heartily and pettily scorning each other a short hour before.