"He's a centaur, that country boy," observed Jacqueline critically. "The identical break-neck Centaur himself. Really, Berthe, I think we shall have to dub him Monsieur the Chevalier. Why Berthe, how pale you are!" "I? Oh, mademoiselle, is there any danger?" "Danger, child? Nonsense!" "But what made him do that, that way?" "Poor simple babe! That was a pose. Our mule driver knows he can ride, but we did not. And there you are." "But the little monsieur, he looks like a ghost?" Jacqueline laughed. "That, I admit, is not a pose. With the little monsieur, it's become--constitutional." A half-hour later they heard an easy canter behind them, and Din Driscoll reappeared, flushed and happy as a boy pounding in first from a foot race. His left hand covered the bowl of his cob pipe from the wind, the other held his slouch hat doubled up by the brim. As for bridle hand, old Demijohn needed none. Driscoll seized Murguia's silk tile and poured into it from the slouch a shimmering stream of coin and a mass of crumpled paper. "To be robbed while I'm along, now that makes me _mad_," he said. "You won't tell anybody, will you, Murgie?" The old man did not hear. His palsied hands were dipping down, dipping down, bathing themselves in the deep silk hat. The hat was heavy with gold and silver pesos, and foaming with bills. "Greenbacks, Confederate notes," he mumbled. "Some I've paid before--only, lately, the rascals won't take anything but coin." "Why's that, Murgie?" "Why, because these green things are not worth much now, while these gray ones"--he fingered them contemptuously--"would not, would not buy a drunkard's pardon from our cheapest magistrate." The slur on Mexican justice only emphasized his scorn of the Confederate notes. "Give 'em here!" Driscoll snatched them from the yellow, desecrating fingers. "These here are promises," he muttered, "and we've been fighting for four years to make them good. For four years, even the children and old men, and--yes, and the women folks back of us!" The impulsive mood carried him further. He counted and pocketed the despised notes. Then from an humble tobacco pouch he sorted out a number of British sovereigns, and flung them into Murguia's hat. "Prob'bly my last blow for them promises," he murmured to himself. Meantime a burro back of them had become possessed of an idea, which for some reason necessitated his halting stock still directly across the trail to think it over. The caravan behind stopped also, while the arrieros snorted "Ar-re!" and "Bur-ro!" through their noses, and prodded the beast. Jacqueline lost patience. She touched her horse, which bounded out of the trail and galloped past the outfit almost to Driscoll and Murguia. So she had seen the exchange of money and she had heard. She looked thoughtfully at the trooper's straight line of back and shoulder.