The Argonauts of North Liberty

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"You've been overtaxing your brain in patent-medicine circulars,
Corwin," he said in a roughly rallying manner, "and you've got rather
too much highfalutin and bitters mixed with your opinions. After that
yarn of yours you must be dry. What'll you take? I haven't got any New
England rum, but I can give you some ten-year-old aguardiente made on
the place."

As he spoke he lifted a decanter and glass from a small table which
Manuel had placed in the veranda.

"I guess not," said Ezekiel dryly. "It's now goin' on five years since
I've been a consistent temperance man."

"In everything but melons, and criticism of your neighbor, eh?" said
Demorest, pouring out a glass of the liquor.

"I hev my convictions," said Ezekiel with affected meekness.

"And I have mine," said Demorest, tossing off the fiery liquor at a
draft, "and it's that this is devilish good stuff. Sorry you can't take
some. I'm afraid I'll have to get you to excuse me for a while. I have
to take a ride over the ranch before turning in, to see if everything's
right. The house is 'at your disposition,' as we say here. I'll see you
later."

He walked away with a slight exaggeration of unconcern. Ezekiel watched
him narrowly with colorless eyes beneath his white lashes. When he
had gone he examined the thoroughly emptied glass of aguardiente,
and, taking the decanter, sniffed critically at its sharp and potent
contents. A smile of gratified discernment followed. It was clear to him
that Demorest was a heavy drinker.

Contrary to his prognostication, however, Mrs. Demorest DID arrive the
next day. But although he was to depart from Buenaventura by the same
coach that had set her down at the gate of the casa, he had already left
the house armed with some letters of introduction which Demorest had
generously given him, to certain small traders in the pueblo and along
the route. Demorest was not displeased to part with him before the
arrival of his wife, and thus spare her the awkwardness of a repetition
of Ezekiel's effrontery in her presence. Nor was he willing to have the
impediment of a guest in the house to any explanation he might have to
seek from her, or to the confidences that hereafter must be fuller
and more mutual. For with all his deep affection for his wife, Richard
Demorest unconsciously feared her. The strong man whose dominance over
men and women alike had been his salient characteristic, had begun to
feel an undefinable sense of some unrecognized quality in the woman he
loved. He had once or twice detected it in a tone of her voice, in a
remembered and perhaps even once idolized gesture, or in the accidental
lapse of some bewildering word. With the generosity of a large nature he
had put the thought aside, referring it to some selfish weakness of
his own, or--more fatuous than all--to a possible diminution of his own
affection.

He was standing on the steps ready to receive her. Few of her
appreciative sex could have remained indifferent to the tender and
touching significance of his silent and subdued welcome. He had that
piteous wistfulness of eye seen in some dogs and the husbands of many
charming women--the affection that pardons beforehand the indifference
it has learned to expect. She approached him smiling in her turn,
meeting the sublime patience of being unloved with the equally resigned
patience of being loved, and feeling that comforting sense of virtue
which might become a bore, but never a self-reproach. For the rest, she
was prettier than ever; her five years of expanded life had slightly
rounded the elongated oval of her face, filled up the ascetic hollows
of her temples, and freed the repression of her mouth and chin. A more
genial climate had quickened the circulation that North Liberty had
arrested, and suffused the transparent beauty of her skin with eloquent
life. It seemed as if the long, protracted northern spring of her youth
had suddenly burst into a summer of womanhood under those gentle skies;
and yet enough of her puritan precision of manner, movement, and gesture
remained to temper her fuller and more exuberant life and give it
repose. In a community of pretty women more or less given to the license
and extravagance of the epoch, she always looked like a lady.

He took her in his arms and half-lifted her up the last step of the
veranda. She resisted slightly with her characteristic action of
catching his wrists in both her hands and holding him off with an
awkward primness, and almost in the same tone that she had used to
Edward Blandford five years before, said:

"There, Dick, that will do."




CHAPTER II


Demorest's dream of a few days' conjugal seclusion and confidences with
his wife was quickly dispelled by that lady. "I came down with Rosita
Pico, whose father, you know, once owned this property," she said.
"She's gone on to her cousins at Los Osos Rancho to-night, but comes
here to-morrow for a visit. She knows the place well; in fact, she once
had a romantic love affair here. But she is very entertaining. It will
be a little change for us," she added, naively.

Demorest kept back a sigh, without changing his gentle smile. "I'm glad
for your sake, dear. But is she not a little flighty and inclined to
flirt a good deal? I think I've heard so."

"She's a young girl who has been severely tried, Richard, and perhaps is
not to blame for endeavoring to forget it in such distraction as she can
find," said Mrs. Demorest, with a slight return of her old manner. "I
can understand her feelings perfectly." She looked pointedly at her
husband as she spoke, it being one of her late habits to openly refer to
their ante-nuptial acquaintance as a natural reaction from the martyrdom
of her first marriage, with a quiet indifference that seemed almost
an indelicacy. But her husband only said: "As you like, dear," vaguely
remembering Dona Rosita as the alleged heroine of a forgotten romance
with some earlier American adventurer who had disappeared, and trying
vainly to reconcile his wife's sentimental description of her with his
own recollection of the buxom, pretty, laughing, but dangerous-eyed
Spanish girl he had, however, seen but once.

She arrived the next day, flying into a protracted embrace of Joan,
which included a smiling recognition of Demorest with an unoccupied blue
eye, and a shake of her fan over his wife's shoulder. Then she drew
back and seemed to take in the whole veranda and garden in another long
caress of her eyes. "Ah-yess! I have recognized it, mooch. It es ze
same. Of no change--not even of a leetle. No, she ess always--esso."
She stopped, looked unutterable things at Joan, pressed her fan below
a spray of roses on her full bodice as if to indicate some thrilling
memory beneath it, shook her head again, suddenly caught sight of
Demorest's serious face, said: "Ah, that brigand of our husband laughs
himself at me," and then herself broke into a charming ripple of
laughter.

"But I was not laughing, Dona Rosita," said Demorest, smiling sadly,
however, in spite of himself.

She made a little grimace, and then raised her elbows, slightly lifting
her shoulders. "As it shall please you, Senor. But he is gone--thees
passion. Yess--what you shall call thees sentiment of lof--zo--as he
came!" She threw her fingers in the air as if to illustrate the volatile
and transitory passage of her affections, and then turned again to Joan
with her back towards Demorest.

"Do please go on--Dona Rosita," said he, "I never heard the real story.
If there is any romance about my house, I'd like to know it," he added
with a faint sigh.

Dona Rosita wheeled upon him with an inquiring little look. "Ah, you
have the sentiment, and YOU," she continued, taking Joan by the arms,
"YOU have not. Eet ess good so. When a--the wife," she continued boldly,
hazarding an extended English abstraction, "he has the sentimente and
the hoosband he has nothing, eet is not good--for a-him--ze wife," she
concluded triumphantly.

"But I have great appreciation and I am dying to hear it," said
Demorest, trying to laugh.

"Well, poor one, you look so. But you shall lif till another time," said
Dona Rosita, with a mock courtesy, gliding with Joan away.

The "other time" came that evening when chocolate was served on the
veranda, where Dona Rosita, mantilla-draped against the dry, clear,
moonlit air, sat at the feet of Joan on the lowest step. Demorest,
uneasily observant of the influence of the giddy foreigner on his wife,
and conscious of certain confidences between them from which he was
excluded, leaned against a pillar of the porch in half abstracted
resignation; Joan, under the tutelage of Rosita, lit a cigarette;
Demorest gazed at her wonderingly, trying to recall, in her fuller and
more animated face, some memory of the pale, refined profile of the
Puritan girl he had first met in the Boston train, the faint aurora of
whose cheek in that northern clime seemed to come and go with his words.
Becoming conscious at last of the eyes of Dona Rosita watching him from
below, with an effort he recalled his duty as her host and gallantly
reminded her that moonlight and the hour seemed expressly fitted for her
promised love story.

"Do tell it," said Joan, "I don't mind hearing it again."

"Then you know it already?" said Demorest, surprised.

Joan took the cigarette from her lips, laughed complacently, and
exchanged a familiar glance with Rosita. "She told it me a year ago,
when we first knew each other," she replied. "Go on, dear," to Rosita.

Thus encouraged, Dona Rosita began, addressing herself first in Spanish
to Demorest, who understood the language better than his wife, and
lapsing into her characteristic English as she appealed to them both.
It was really very little to interest Don Ricardo--this story of a silly
muchacha like herself and a strange caballero. He would go to sleep
while she was talking, and to-night he would say to his wife, "Mother of
God! why have you brought here this chattering parrot who speaks but of
one thing?" But she would go on always like the windmill, whether there
was grain to grind or no. "It was four years ago. Ah! Don Ricardo did
not remember the country then--it was when the first Americans came--now
it is different. Then there were no coaches--in truth one travelled
very little, and always on horseback, only to see one's neighbors. And
suddenly, as if in one day, it was changed; there were strange men on
the roads, and one was frightened, and one shut the gates of the pateo
and drove the horses into the corral. One did not know much of the
Americans then--for why? They were always going, going--never stopping,
hurrying on to the gold mines, hurrying away from the gold mines,
hurrying to look for other gold mines: but always going on foot, on
horseback, in queer wagons--hurrying, pushing everywhere. Ah, it took
away the breath. All, except one American--he did not hurry, he did not
go with the others, he came and stayed here at Buenaventura. He was
very quiet, very civil, very sad, and very discreet. He was not like
the others, and always kept aloof from them. He came to see Don Andreas
Pico, and wanted to beg a piece of land and an old vaquero's hut near
the road for a trifle. Don Andreas would have given it, or a better
house, to him, or have had him live at the casa here; but he would not.
He was very proud and shy, so he took the vaquero's hut, a mere adobe
affair, and lived in it, though a caballero like yourself, with white
hands that knew not labor, and small feet that had seldom walked. In
good time he learned to ride like the best vaquero, and helped Don
Andreas to find the lost mustangs, and showed him how to improve the old
mill. And his pride and his shyness wore off, and he would come to
the casa sometimes. And Don Andreas got to love him very much, and his
daughter, Dona Rosita--ah, well, yes truly--a leetle.

"But he had strange moods and ways, this American, and at times they
would have thought him a lunatico had they not believed it to be an
American fashion. He would be very kind and gentle like one of the
family, coming to the casa every day, playing with the children,
advising Don Andreas and--yes--having a devotion--very discreet, very
ceremonious, for Dona Rosita. And then, all in a moment, he would become
as ill, without a word or gesture, until he would stalk out of the
house, gallop away furiously, and for a week not be heard of. The first
time it happened, Dona Rosita was piqued by his rudeness, Don Andreas
was alarmed, for it was on an evening like the present, and Dona Rosita
was teaching him a little song on the guitar when the fit came on him.
And he snapped the guitar strings like thread and threw it down, and got
up like a bear and walked away without a word."

"I see it all," said Demorest, half seriously: "you were coquetting with
him, and he was jealous."

But Dona Rosita shook her head and turned impetuously, and said in
English to Joan:

"No, it was astutcia--a trick, a ruse. Because when my father have
arrived at his house, he is agone. And so every time. When he have the
fit he goes not to his house. No. And it ees not until after one time
when he comes back never again, that we have comprehend what he do at
these times. And what do you think? I shall tell to you."

She composed herself comfortably, with her plump elbows on her knees,
and her fan crossed on the palm of her hand before her, and began again:

"It is a year he has gone, and the stagecoach is attack of brigands.
Tiburcio, our vaquero, have that night made himself a pasear on the
road, and he have seen HIM. He have seen, one, two, three men came from
the wood with something on the face, and HE is of them. He has nothing
on his face, and Tiburcio have recognize him. We have laugh at Tiburcio.
We believe him not. It is improbable that this Senor Huanson--"

"Senor who?" said Demorest.

"Huanson--eet is the name of him. Ah, Carr!--posiblemente it is
nothing--a Don Fulano--or an apodo--Huanson."

"Oh, I see, JOHNSON, very likely."

"We have said it is not possible that this good man, who have come to
the house and ride on his back the children, is a thief and a brigand.
And one night my father have come from the Monterey in the coach, and it
was stopped. And the brigands have take from the passengers the money,
the rings from the finger, and the watch--and my father was of the same.
And my father, he have great dissatisfaction and anguish, for his watch
is given to him of an old friend, and it is not like the other watch.
But the watch he go all the same. And then when the robbers have made a
finish comes to the window of the coach a mascara and have say, 'Who
is the Don Andreas Pico?' And my father have say, 'It is I who am Don
Andreas Pico.' And the mask have say, 'Behold, your watch is
restore!' and he gif it to him. And my father say, 'To whom have I the
distinguished honor to thank?' And the mask say--"

"Johnson," interrupted Demorest.

"No," said Dona Rosita in grave triumph, "he say Essmith. For this
Essmith is like Huanson--an apodo--nothing."

"Then you really think this man was your old friend?" asked Demorest.

"I think."

"And that he was a robber even when living here--and that it was not
your cruelty that really drove him to take the road?"

Dona Rosita shrugged her plump shoulders. "You will not comprehend. It
was because of his being a brigand that he stayed not with us. My father
would not have object if he have present himself to me for marriage in
these times. I would not have object, for I was young, and we have knew
nothing. It was he who have object. For why? Inside of his heart he have
feel he was a brigand."

"But you might have reformed him in time," said Demorest.

She again shrugged her shoulders. "Quien sabe." After a pause she added
with infinite gravity: "And before he have reform, it is bad for the
menage. I should invite to my house some friend. They arrive, and one
say, 'I have not the watch of my pocket,' and another, 'The ring of my
finger, he is gone,' and another, 'My earrings, she is loss.' And I am
obliged to say, 'They reside now in the pocket of my hoosband; patience!
a little while--perhaps to-morrow--he will restore.' No," she continued,
with an air of infinite conviction, "it is not good for the menage--the
necessity of those explanation."

"You told me he was handsome," said Joan, passing her arm carelessly
around Dona Rosita's comfortable waist. "How did he look?"

"As an angel! He have long curls to his back. His moustache was as
silk, for he have had never a barber to his face. And his eyes--Santa
Maria!--so soft and so--so melankoly. When he smile it is like the
moonlight. But," she added, rising to her feet and tossing the end
of her lace mantilla over her shoulder with a little laugh--"it is
finish--Adelante! Dr-rrive on!"

"I don't want to destroy your belief in the connection of your friend
with the road agents," said Demorest grimly, "but if he belongs to
their band it is in an inferior capacity. Most of them are known to
the authorities, and I have heard it even said that their leader or
organizer is a very unromantic speculator in San Francisco."

But this suggestion was received coldly by the ladies, who
superciliously turned their backs upon it and the suggester. Joan
dropped her voice to a lower tone and turned to Dona Rosita. "And you
have never seen him since?"

"Never."

"I should--at least, I wouldn't have let it end in THAT way," said Joan
in a positive whisper.

"Eh?" said Dona Rosita, laughing. "So eet is YOU, Juanita, that have the
romance--eh? Ah, bueno! 'you have the house--so I gif to you the lover
also.' I place him at your disposition." She made a mock gesture of
elaborate and complete abnegation. "But," she added in Joan's ear, with
a quick glance at Demorest, "do not let our hoosband eat him. Even now
he have the look to strangle ME. Make to him a little lof, quickly, when
I shall walk in the garden." She turned away with a pretty wave of her
fan to Demorest, and calling out, "I go to make an assignation with my
memory," laughed again, and lazily passed into the shadow. An ominous
silence on the veranda followed, broken finally by Mrs. Demorest.

"I don't think it was necessary for you to show your dislike to Dona
Rosita quite so plainly," she said, coldly, slightly accenting the
Puritan stiffness, which any conjugal tete-a-tete lately revived in her
manner.

"I show dislike of Dona Rosita?" stammered Demorest, in surprise. "Come,
Joan," he added, with a forgiving smile, "you don't mean to imply that
I dislike her because I couldn't get up a thrilling interest in an old
story I've heard from every gossip in the pueblo since I can remember."

"It's not an old story to HER," said Joan, dryly, "and even if it were,
you might reflect that all people are not as anxious to forget the past
as you are."

Demorest drew back to let the shaft glance by. "The story is old enough,
at least for her to have had a dozen flirtations, as you know, since
then," he returned gently, "and I don't think she herself seriously
believes in it. But let that pass. I am sorry I offended her. I had no
idea of doing so. As a rule, I think she is not so easily offended. But
I shall apologize to her." He stopped and approached nearer his wife in
a half-timid, half-tentative affection. "As to my forgetfulness of the
past, Joan, even if it were true, I have had little cause to forget it
lately. Your friend, Corwin--"

"I must insist upon your not calling him MY friend, Richard,"
interrupted Joan, sharply, "considering that it was through YOUR
indiscretion in coming to us for the buggy that night, that he
suspected--"

She stopped suddenly, for at that moment a startled little shriek,
quickly subdued, rang through the garden. Demorest ran hurriedly down
the steps in the direction of the outcry. Joan followed more cautiously.
At the first turning of the path Dona Rosita almost fell into his arms.
She was breathless and trembling, but broke into a hysterical laugh.

"I have such a fear come to me--I cry out! I think I have seen a man;
but it was nothing--nothing! I am a fool. It is no one here."

"But where did you see anything?" said Joan, coming up.

Rosita flew to her side. "Where? Oh, here!--everywhere! Ah, I am a
fool!" She was laughing now, albeit there were tears glistening on her
lashes when she laid her head on Joan's shoulder.

"It was some fancy--some resemblance you saw in that queer cactus," said
Demorest, gently. "It is quite natural, I was myself deceived the other
night. But I'll look around to satisfy you. Take Dona Rosita back to the
veranda, Joan. But don't be alarmed, dear--it was only an illusion."

He turned away. When his figure was lost in the entwining foliage, Dona
Rosita seized Joan's shoulder and dragged her face down to a level with
her own.

"It was something!" she whispered quickly.

"Who?"

"It was--HIM!"

"Nonsense," groaned Joan, nevertheless casting a hurried glance around
her.

"Have no fear," said Dona Rosita quickly, "he is gone--I saw him pass
away--so! But it was HE--Huanson. I recognize him. I forget him never."

"Are you sure?"

"Have I the eyes? the memory? Madre de Dios! Am I a lunatico too? Look!
He have stood there--so."

"Then you think he knew you were here?"

"Quien sabe?"

"And that he came here to see you?"

Dona Rosita caught her again by the shoulders, and with her lips to
Joan's ear, said with the intensest and most deliberate of emphasis:

"NO!"

"What in Heaven's name brought him here then?"

"You!"

"Are you crazy?"

"You! you! YOU!" repeated Dona Rosita, with crescendo energy. "I have
come upon him here; where he stood and look at the veranda, absorrrb of
YOU. You move--he fly."

"Hush!"

"Ah, yes! I have said I give him to you. And he came, Bueno," murmured
Dona Rosita, with a half-resigned, half-superstitious gesture.

"WILL you be quiet!"

It was the sound of Demorest's feet on the gravel path, returning
from his fruitless search. He had seen nothing. It must have been Dona
Rosita's fancy.

"She was just saying she thought she had been mistaken," said Joan,
quietly. "Let us go in--it is rather chilly here, and I begin to feel
creepy too."

Nevertheless, as they entered the house again, and the light of the
hall lantern fell upon her face, Demorest thought he had never but once
before seen her look so nervously and animatedly beautiful.




CHAPTER III


The following day, when Mr. Ezekiel Corwin had delivered his letters of
introduction, and thoroughly canvassed the scant mercantile community of
San Buenaventura with considerable success, he deposited his carpet-bag
at the stage office in the posada, and found to his chagrin that he had
still two hours to wait before the coach arrived. After a vain attempt
to impart cheerful but disparaging criticism of the pueblo and its
people to Senor Mateo and his wife--whose external courtesy had been
visibly increased by a line from Demorest, but whose confidence towards
the stranger had not been extended in the same proportion--he gave it
up, and threw himself lazily on a wooden bench in the veranda, already
hacked with the initials of his countrymen, and drawing a jack-knife
from his pocket, he began to add to that emblazonry the trade-mark of
the Panacea--as a casual advertisement. During its progress, however,
he was struck by the fact that while no one seemed to enter the posada
through the stage office, the number of voices in the adjoining room
seemed to increase, and the ministrations of Mateo and his wife became
more feverishly occupied with their invisible guests. It seemed to
Ezekiel that consequently there must be a second entrance which he had
not seen, and this added to the circumstance that one or two lounging
figures who had been approaching unaccountably disappeared before
reaching the veranda, induced him to rise and examine the locality. A
few paces beyond was an alley, but it appeared to be already blocked by
several cigarette-smoking, short-jacketed men who were leaning against
its walls, and showed no inclination to make way for him. Checked, but
not daunted, Ezekiel coolly returned to the stage office, and taking the
first opportunity when Mateo passed through the rear door, followed him.
As he expected, the innkeeper turned to the left and entered a large
room filled with tobacco smoke and the local habitues of the posada.
But Ezekiel, shrewdly surmising that the private entrance must be in the
opposite direction, turned to the right along the passage until he came
unexpectedly upon the corridor of the usual courtyard, or patio, of
every Mexican hostelry, closed at one end by a low adobe wall, in which
there was a door. The free passage around the corridor was interrupted
by wide partitions, fitted up with tables and benches, like stalls,
opening upon the courtyard where a few stunted fig and orange trees
still grew. As the courtyard seemed to be the only communication between
the passage he had left and the door in the wall, he was about to cross
it, when the voices of two men in the compartment struck his ears.
Although one was evidently an American's, Ezekiel was instinctively
convinced that they were speaking in English only for greater security
against being understood by the frequenters of the posada. It is
unnecessary to say that this was an innocent challenge to the curiosity
of Ezekiel that he instantly accepted. He drew back carefully into the
shadow of the partition as one of the voices asked--