THE COSSACKS AND THEIR TIGER COLONEL

"Ah, Captain, here goes for a fine-drawn bead; There's music around when my barrel's in tune."

--_Song of the Fallen Dragoon._

Din Driscoll tumbled himself over among the rocks. "There, I'm fixed,"

he grunted, as he squatted down behind his earthworks. "Plenty of material here"--he meant the cartridges which he poured from his coat pockets into his hat--"and plenty out there too"--indicating the Hydra heads--"and my pipe--I'll have a nice time." He got to work busily.

In the door of the shack Jacqueline saw the campaign for her possession begin. Don Rodrigo had fled to the corner of the shack, taking his horse with him. The hut of bamboo and thatch was no protection against Driscoll's fire, but the two girls, though inside the hut, were between and afforded a better screen. Jacqueline did not, however, hold that against her Fra Diavolo. To save himself behind a woman was quite in keeping with his sinister role. And she, as an artist, could not reproach him, and as a woman she did not care. But the American's running away--now that was out of character, and it disappointed her.

She heard Rodrigo bellowing forth an order, and she saw five or six guerrillas rise out of the cacti and spring toward her. But the constant shadow of self-introspection haunted her even then. In her despair, and worse, in her disgust, feeling already those filthy hands upon her, she yet appraised this jewel among ecstatic shudders, and she knew in her heart that she would not have had it otherwise.

"Oh, am I ever to _live_!" she moaned in startled wonderment at herself. "Always a spectator, always, even of myself!--G.o.d, dost thou know? It is a robbery of living!" And the vagabonds were twenty paces away!

Something hurt her hand, she opened her clenched palm; it was the horn handle of Driscoll's knife. Had she really thought to defend herself with that inadequate thing? "Poof!" She tossed it from her, vexed at her own unconscious heroics. Then two dark arms reached out, nearer and nearer, and ten hooked fingers blurred her vision. But the arms shot upward, the fingers stiffened, and a body splashed across the doorway at her feet with the sound of a board dropped on water.

"Ai, poor man!"

She was on her knees, bending over him. But a second of the vermin lurched against her, and he too lay still. A pistol report from the cliff was simultaneous with each man's fall. Both were dead. A third sank in the trail with a shattered hip, and another behind knew the agony of a broken leg. The marksman's mercy was evidently tempered according to distance. For, having the matter now under control, he nonchalantly cracked only shin bones. Fra Diavolo from his shelter roared commands and curses, but not another imp would show himself.

Crouched jealously, they chose rather to besiege their lone enemy on the cliff.

"Must have howitzers," muttered Driscoll. The soft lead, bigger than marbles, went "Splut! Splut!" against the rock on all sides of him, flattening with the windy puff of mud on a wall. But he was well intrenched, and as the guerrillas were also, he lighted his pipe and smoked reflectively. But after awhile he perceived a slight movement, supplemented by a carabine. One of the besiegers was working from boulder to boulder, parallel with the trail. He did it with infinite craft. At first the fellow crawled; then, when out of pistol range, he got to his feet and ran. Still running, he crossed the trail at a safe distance beyond the hut, and began working back again, this time along the cliff, and toward Driscoll. When about a hundred yards away, he disappeared; which is to say, he lowered himself into a little ravine that thousands of rainy seasons had worn through from the foothills. But almost at once his head and shoulders rose from the nearer bank, and Driscoll promptly fired. The shot fell short. A pistol would not carry so far; which was a tremendously important little fact, since the other fellow was aiming a rifle. The bullet from that rifle neatly clipped a p.r.i.c.kly pear over Driscoll's head. The strategist certainly knew his business. There was a familiar shimmer of silver about his high peaked hat. Yes surely, he was Don Tiburcio, the loyal Imperialist of the baleful eye. No doubt the malignant twinkle gleamed in that eye now, even as the blackmailer bit a cartridge for the next shot. A victim who had only pistols, and at rifle range, and with not a pebble for shelter from the flank bombardment--it was a.s.suredly a situation to tickle Don Tiburcio.

Now Driscoll's point of view was less amusing. To change his position, he must expose himself to a fusilade from across the way. And if he tried to rush his friend of the gully, the brigands meantime would carry off the two girls. A gentleman's part, therefore, was to stay where he was and be made a target of. But he varied it a little. At Don Tiburcio's second shot, he lunged partly to his feet and fell forward as though mortally wounded. He lay quite still, and soon Don Tiburcio came creeping toward him. Don Tiburcio was thinking of his lost toll-moneys that should be on the corpse. Driscoll waited, his nerves alert, his pistols ready. But just beyond range, the blackmailer paused.

"Go for the women, you idiots," he yelled. "The Gringo's dead."

The idiots verified the t.i.tle straightway, for up they popped from behind their boulders and started for the shack.

"'Possuming's no use," Driscoll muttered, then fired. The guerrillas got back to cover quickly enough, and so did Don Tiburcio, grinning over his stratagem. In his arroyo again, he proposed to make the Gringo as a sieve. Each bullet from his carabine tw.a.n.ged lower and lower. "Ouch!"

e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Driscoll. One had furrowed his leg, and it hurt. He looked anxiously, to see if the Mexican were lowering his aim yet more. An inch meant such a great deal just then. But a tremendous surprise met him.

For Don Tiburcio had changed his mind. The rascal was firing in another direction entirely, firing rapturously, firing at his very allies, at the little imps themselves among the boulders and nettles. And the little imps were positively leaping up to be shot. They ran frantically, but straight toward the traitor, and on past him up the trail. The Storm Centre could not shoot lunatics any more than he could babies. He only stared at them open mouthed.

"Los Cosacos!--El Tigre! Los Cosacos!" they yelled, scrambling out upon the road, bleeding, falling, praying, and kissing whatever greasy amulet or virgin's picture they owned.

Then there beat into Driscoll's ears the furious clatter of hoofs. It deafened him, the familiar, glorious din of it. The blood raged in his veins like fiery needle points. To see them--the cavalry, the cavalry!

Then they were gone--a flashing streak of centaurs, a streamer of red in a blur of dust, maniac oaths, and pistol shots, and sweeping sabres.

Hacked bodies were sucked beneath the swarm as saplings under an avalanche. Driscoll sprang up and gazed. Through eddying swirls he still could see red sleeved arms reach out, and lightning rays of steel, and half-naked fleeting creatures go down, and never a jot of the curse's speed abate.

"Lordy, but Old Joe should 'a seen it!" he fairly shouted. He was thinking of Shelby, of the Old Brigade back in Missouri; daredevils, every one of them.

Don Tiburcio had sighted the vengeful horde from afar, and had recognized them, since he was, in fact, one of their scouts. They were the Contra Guerrillas, the Cossacks, the scourge wielded by the French Intervention and the Empire. And they were Don Tiburcio's cue to loyalty. For seeing them, he began firing on his late friends, the brigands. Yet he spared their Capitan. At the first alarm Fra Diavolo had vaulted astride his black horse, and Tiburcio darting out, had caught his bridle, and turned him into the dry bed of the arroyo. Others of the fugitives tried to escape by this same route, but Tiburcio fought them off with clubbed rifle, and in such occupation was observed by him who led the Cossacks, who was a terrible old man, and a horseman to give the eye joy. At the gully he swerved to one side, and let the hurricane pa.s.s on by.

"Sacred name of thunder," he cursed roundly, "a minute later and----"

"Si, mi coronel," the faithful Tiburcio acknowledged gratefully, "Your Excellency came just in time."

The colonel of Contra Guerrillas frowned a grim approval for his scout's handiwork of battered skulls. He was a man of frosted visage, a grisly Woden. The hard features were more stern for being ruggedly venerable.

His beard was wiry, h.o.a.ry gray, through whose billowy depth a long black cigar struck from clenched teeth. If eyes are windows of the soul, his were narrow, menacing slits, loopholes spiked by bristling brows. Two deep creases between the eyes furrowed their way up and were lost under an enormously wide sombrero. This sombrero was low crowned, like those worn farther to the south, and ornately flowered in silver. His chest was crossed with braid, cords of gold hung from the right shoulder to the collar, and the sleeves were as glorious as a bugler's. His brick-red jacket fell open from the neck, exposing the whitest of linen.

His boots were yellow, his spurs big Mexican discs. Altogether the blend in him of the precise military and the easy ranchero was curiously picturesque. But Colonel Dupin, the Tiger of the Tropics, was a curious and picturesque man. His medals were more than he could wear, and each was for splendid daring. But on a time they had been stripped from him.

It happened in China. He had made a gallant a.s.sault on the Imperial Palace, but he had also satiated his barbarian soul in carnage and loaded his shoulders with buccaneering loot. And though he wondered at his own moderation, a court martial followed. However, Louis Napoleon gave him back his medals, and sent him to Mexico to stamp out savagery by counter savagery.

"There were two accomplices in this business," the Tiger was saying, "one a trader, Murguia----"

"Killed him my very first shot," lied Tiburcio. He would save his golden goose of the golden eggs.

"And the other, an American?"

"Got away with the others, senor." Again Tiburcio's reason was obvious.

The American, if taken, might tell things.

"And"--Dupin gripped his cigar hungrily--"and Rodrigo?"

For answer the scout waved a hand vaguely up the trail.

"None went that way?" and the Colonel jerked his head toward the ravine.

"No, none. Your Mercy saw me driving them back."

"Quick, then, on your horse! We're losing time."

Don Tiburcio was reluctant. He had not yet recovered his money from the American. "But the women, mi coronel? They are there, in that shack. Hadn't I better stay----?"

"Jacqueline, you mean? Of course the little minx is in trouble, the second she touches land. But you come with me. She shall have another protector."

Tiburcio knew the Cossack chief. He obeyed, and both men galloped away after the chase.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "COLONEL DUPIN"

"The Tiger of the Tropics ... the chief of Contra Guerrillas"]

They had not gone far when they pa.s.sed Michel Ney swiftly returning. He was the protector Dupin had in mind. He had seen Jacqueline in the doorway of the hut as he stormed past with the Contra Guerrillas, but he had been too enthusiastic to stop just then. He was a Cha.s.seur d'Afrique, and to be a Cha.s.seur d'Afrique was to ride in a halo of mighty sabre sweeps. And Michel had fought Arabs too--but the good simplicity of his countenance was woefully ruffled as he turned back from that charge of the Cossacks.

"Michel!" cried Jacqueline, stepping over the forms of men before the hut, and forgetting them. The natty youth was torn, rumpled, grimy. The sky-blue of his uniform was gray with dust. But to see him at all proved that he had escaped Fra Diavolo's web in Tampico. And the relief! It made her almost gay. "Ah, Michel--le beau sabreur!--and did you enjoy it, mon ami?"

He alighted at her feet, and raised her hand to his lips.

"Monsieur," she demanded quick as thought, "my trunk?"

"Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, I did well to bring myself."

"You should have brought my trunk, sir, first of all. Deign to look at this frock! No, no, don't, please don't. But tell me everything. What could have happened to you last night? Why did you not meet me this morning?"

His story was brief. Of his contemplated strategy at Tampico, there had been a most lugubrious botching. The night before, when he started to the fort for aid, Fra Diavolo's little Mexicans had waylaid him, bound him, and dragged him back to the cafe, where Jacqueline that very moment reposed in slumber. And there, in a back room without a window, he had gritted his teeth until morning. As for the sailors, who were to return to the ship for her trunk; well, more little Mexicans had fired on them from the river bank. The small boat, riddled with shot, had sunk, and the sailors, splashing frantically to keep off the sharks, had gained the sh.o.r.e opposite. But they could neither get word to the ship, nor cross back to Tampico.

"Yet," demanded Jacqueline, "how could you know all this, there in your prison room?"

"Am I saying I did, name of a name? Well, those poor sailors wandered about all night in the swamps across the river, and this morning they ran into Colonel Dupin and his Contras, and the colonel was frothing mad. He had only just stumbled on the bodies of Captain Maurel and some of his men, who had been ambushed and murdered. Poor Maurel was dangling from a tree among the vultures. Others were mutilated. Some had even been tortured. And all were stripped, and rotting naked. Mon Dieu, mon dieu, but it's an inferno, this country!"