Adventure Magazine Cover — page 117: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

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But I was out on the mesa, fearful to come in lest Metztli should surmise I had visited you. “Far off in the grass, I saw Temalacoatl the courier topple over. When I went to him and heard the news from his parched lips and swol- len tongue I was filled with a blind Berserker rage. I would not believe you nor Metztli nor any one. But now Metztli has told me all you said and I fear, sevor caballero, that perhaps I> judged you too harshly.” She lifted her head and looked at me. I was astounded to note that her eyes were smolder- ing between the dripping lids like lakes Seething with anguish. “Oh, sevorl” she appealed to me, her cheat throbbing like the tender throat of abird. ‘We are two alone among savages that can not feel And I thought you so kind and sym- pathetic, so much the heart of gold! Cabal- lerete, tell me that all you said to Metztli is truth and not lies!”’ There was no sound for an interval but the crunching of sand under the plowing hoofs, the slight creaking of the silver-chased saddle and girth on the stallion. I was struck alto- gether dumb by this intensity of distress in her who but a few minutes gone had seemed so scornfully vitriolic. “Mariquita,” I at last found voice, “I do not lie to you. To me you have been everything that is kind and considerate. This man Mor- ley and his wife, whom I believe to be with the _ Japanese, are no friends of mine. And no more a friend of mine is that fellow Dicenta whom I do not know, whom I swear I never have seen, for whom I have not an atom of regard or res- pect. Of all concerned you only are my friend, mi senorital” ; “But you do not understand!” she cried chokingly, her lips trembling uncontrollably, but her eyes unable to flood, beyond the mercy of tears, burning hot and dry. ‘Because fate made me a Mexican and fortune decreed me to live in a time of rebellion and chaos you judge me to be like any brown peona of the pueblos, a weak petal in the swirl of destroying armies, a mere baggage, insanely jealous now of this other woman. “You tell me this man is not Serafin Dicenta, but a sevor named Morley, that the woman is his wife, thinking that will ease my distress Ah, sevor, nothing can ease my distress, lighten my cross of suffe ring, bring back to me the home and hearts I loved!”’ Her eyes were burning on, hot and dry, like flaming cressets in a marble wall. “Who was it,” she exclaimed, “that beat to frightful death with thorny stems of cactus, old Aunt Chonita, the good little foster mother of me? Who was it harassed my poor dear father to his early purgatory and then came to the colegio, with the three pebbles in the kerchief and his tongue in his cheek, to hound me with his fiendish Colorados, rob me of home and hap- piness and, had it not been for the intervention of good Padre Pio, to wreck and lay waste my | whole life? Ah, sevor, never can you realize one-half what a skulking footpad is this little rat called Serafin Dicenta!” CHAPTER XXI THE THREE PEBBLES "TAs was Mariquita’s story as, to the creak- ing of the saddle, the constant crunch of hoof-plowed _ sand, I drew it from her then amid sharp breakings of voice and soft choked sobs, but no soothing release of tears. Her name was Mariquita Cristine Arillaga. Perhaps its Spanish mellifluence sounded so beautiful in my ears because I was looking at the girl, entranced by her eyes that were dry and hot as sere brown leaves, her speaking lips that were like the under-petals of a rose. Her mother, who had died when Mariquita was yet a little girl, had been of Austrian ex- traction, born in Mexico, where in a spur of the great Sierra Madre, the Durazno range, the maternal grandfather had owned valleys and mesas and mountain-tops that were partly in the northern end of Sinaloa and Durango, but mostly along the southwestern border of Chihuahua. The maternal grandfather, one Wenceslas Jirasek, would havé taken violent umbrage had you called him, she subtly qualified, a German or an Austrian. She remembered him dimly as a broad pink-faced bewhiskered old man, gruff and dour but with a heart of gold. In his youth he had incurred the wrath of Vienna and been banished from the homeland of Bohemia because of his efforts with other pa- triots, toward the furtherance of equal rights for his countrymen and national language, his seeking to reestablish from desuetude the an- cient constitution in mcdernized form. He had essayed to achieve what it required a world war to produce—autonomy for Czecho-Slovakia. The Mexican estancia of her grandfather was called the Hacienda del Cazadero because when the exiled Jirasek had purchased it, with the money he had smuggled out ere the confisca- tion of his Bohemian estates and at only a few paltry pesetas the acre, it was but a wild moun- tainous place for pursuing game. By the time Mariquita was a mifa, it con- sisted of fertile valleys planted to wheat and beans, sugar, cofiee, tobacco, maize and cotton. COMmICLOO Sat