His Cossacks thronged the colonnade. The brick-red of their raw leather jackets splotched every other color with rust. The Contra Guerrillas were many things. They were Frenchmen and Mexicans. They were Americans, Confederate deserters, Union deserters. They were Negroes and Arabs. They were the ruined of fortune, now soldiers of fortune. They were pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters, gamblers, swindlers. They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from the guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was not a softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity could lead them, could hold them. They surrounded the Missourian on the hacienda portico. If only for his debonnaire indifference, they knew him for a "bad man" such as none of them might ever hope to be. And they watched him like lynxes, though he was unarmed. Yet he did not look "bad." He merely looked bored. He was a prisoner, but not the only one. Anastasio Murguia fidgetted among the Cossacks on his own porch. His restless eyes roved incessantly over the crowd, seeking his daughter, but they were steadily baffled. Down in the valley, where the Rio Moctezuma joined its course with the Panuco, a dusty mist moved nearer along the old Spanish highway, and faintly there came the sound of clarions. An eager murmuring arose from the throng on the hillside. It swelled more confidently to a buzz as the far-away dust lifted at the ford and revealed the beaded stringing of a numerous company. The distant bugles rang clearer on the pure air. "Yes, he comes," the people cried, "There! Seest thou, hombre?--_There!_ Viva el Senor Emperador!" For Colonel Dupin the cloud of dust would shortly evolve into a staying hand of mercy, into the exasperating stupidity of mercy. He had captured the American not ten minutes before, and here was interference in a gauzy haze of dust. He signed to one of his men to follow with Murguia, and he himself placed a gauntleted hand on Driscoll's shoulder. "Now," he said. But a white figure of Mexican rebosa and silken instep moved swiftly from behind a column and touched the Tiger's arm. Both Jacqueline and Berthe had been watching the Cossack chief rather than the spectacle in the valley. And as he turned on his prisoner, Berthe half screamed and clutched at the bosom of her dress. It was Jacqueline who gained his side. She addressed him sharply as one who hates to reopen a tedious argument. "Monsieur Dupin," she cried, "have I not already permitted myself to tell you--yes, I repeat, you are mistaken. He is in no sense whatever an accomplice of Rodrigo Galan."