"Then by all that's mysterious, _who_ would buy? I cannot."

"Of course you cannot. That is why Marquez wants you out of the way, sire. So he left you here. The Liberals will attend to that for him."

"Then who will buy? Who? Who?"

The blood shot into the girl's cheeks, and one small hand clenched tightly.

"France--possibly," she said.

The Emperor started as from an acute shock. His thoughts raced backward, then forward, gathering the whole heinous truth about the perfidy of Marquez.

"And I," Jacqueline added calmly, though she was still flushed, "I have forwarded his offer to Napoleon."

"You, mademoiselle? You, an accessory?"

"To Your Imperial Highness's downfall? Ah no, sire! Your Highness is no longer a factor. Your August Majesty will be eliminated absolutely before Napoleon can reply to my despatch. As I said, the Liberals around Queretaro will attend to that. Your Highness has merely delayed the profit my country might have had from his abdication. Meantime Your Highness himself has made his own ruin inevitable. But I, sire, I would not see Marquez, nor receive a word from him, until we were actually besieged in the capital, and he beyond the hope of coming to Your Highness here. Now then, if Marquez only holds out until the army of France returns----"

A deep sigh interrupted her. "No longer a factor," murmured the Emperor.

Thus quickly, then, could the world take up its affairs again after his elimination!

"Mademoiselle," he cried suddenly, generously, "you are--superb! Dear little Frenchwoman, you are, you are!"

"Poof!" said Jacqueline. "But don't you see, sire," she hurried on eagerly, "that we will have to fight the Americans? Yes, yes, then they can no longer say they _drove_ us out."

"Indeed they cannot. And I, among the first, and the most heartily, do wish you a warlike answer from that firebrand of a Napoleon. But tell me, why do you come to Queretaro? How did you come?"

"How? Easily. All the guerrilla bands--except one, which I escaped--are concentrated either here or with Diaz."

"And Marquez let you come, you who are so important to him now?"

"As though he could help it, parbleu! My message to Napoleon was in my own cipher, and after he had sent it by a scout to Vera Cruz, I informed him that in it I had directed Napoleon to send his answer to me at Queretaro. Otherwise Marquez would have kept me in prison rather than let me go. But as it was, he a.s.sisted me through the Republican lines by a secret way he has arranged for his own escape, if need be. So----"

"But why did you wish to come at all?"

"Ma foi, as if I knew! A matter of conscience, I suppose."

"Matters of conscience are usually riddles."

"Like this one? Bien, I am still trying to get Your Highness to leave the country. But this time, sire, it is to save you."

"To save me?"

"Of course, on account of France."

"Oh, on account of France?"

"Why else? If--if anything happens to Maximilian, France will be blamed.

Oh why, why did you not escape this morning, while the road was open?"

For the first time during the interview the fire of high resolve leaped into the prince's eyes. "But could I, in honor?" he demanded sternly.

"Think of the townspeople, abandoned to the Liberal fury. Their Emperor, mademoiselle, means to face the end with them, here, in Queretaro."

The dignity of his catastrophe was already beginning to appeal to him, to exalt him, even as the vision of a Hapsburg winning his empire had so often done before.

"But," protested the girl, "if they capture Your Highness, if they--if they hold you for trial?"

She stopped, for Maximilian was laughing, and laughing heartily. The idea of hands laid on him, an Archduke of Austria--ha, he was grateful to her. Its very absurdity had given him the first relaxation of a laugh in months.

"Nevertheless," persisted Jacqueline, whose heritage of a revolution was an obstinate bundle of these same absurdities, "nevertheless, I had hoped to save Your Highness with my news, since it is news that leaves no hope. Why not, then, escape? Treat for terms, do anything, only save your followers and--yourself, sire?"

But she found it impossible to sway him from this, his latest conceit.

His new role, the more desperate it looked, only ensnared him as the more worthy. He contemplated the end serenely. As a military captain he was culling laurels against theatric odds. His heroic loyalty to a lost cause, with perhaps a little martyrdom (of personal inconvenience), how these would count and be not denied when he should return to his destiny in Europe!

His was even a mood to consort with lofty traits in others, and in a kind of poetic ecstasy he thought of Jacqueline's steadfast devotion to her country's glory. And he was moved again by the vague, chivalrous longing to bend the knee, to do her some knightly service. But--yes, he seemed to remember, there _was_ such a service to be done, yet and yet--no, he had forgotten.

Then quite curiously, yet still without remembering, he dwelt in reverie on that man named Driscoll who had so filled the morning with valiant deeds.

CHAPTER XVI

VENDETTA'S HALF SISTER, BETTER BORN

"When private men shall act with original views, the l.u.s.tre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen."

--_Emerson_.

Just outside Driscoll's tent, under the stars, a fragrant steak was broiling. The colonel's mozo had learned the magic of the forked stick, and he manipulated his wand with a conscious pride, so that the low sizzling of flesh and flame was as the mystic voice in some witch's brew. There were many other tents on the plain, a blurred city of whitish shadows against the night, and there were many other glowing coals to mark where the earth lay under the stars, and the witching murmur, the tantalizing charm of each was--supper. In this wise, and thinking themselves very patient, men were waiting for other men to starve to death. The besieged had tried, but they had not again cut through to food.

In Driscoll's tent there was a galaxy of woolen-shirted warriors, a constellation of quiescent Berserkers. For they were Missouri colonels, except one, who being a Kansan, required no t.i.tle. They were tobacco-chewing giants, famous for expectoration. Except Meagre Shanks, who tilted his inevitable black cigar now toward one eye, now toward the other. Except the Storm Centre, who fondly closed his palm over his cob meerschaum and felt its warmth and seemed far away, a dangerous poet.

Except Old Brothers and Sisters, most austere of Wesleyans, who had neither pipe nor quid. He was cleaning his pistols. They were men hewn for mighty deeds, but--cringe must we all before the irony that neither life nor romance may dodge--it was not a mighty deed which that night was to exact of them, which yet they were brave enough to do, though sorry the figures they thought they made.

Politics was their theme, since men, though busy with war and death, must yet relieve their statesmen, especially after supper, and neatly arrange the Tariff, Resumption, or whatever else. Like oracles the ex-Confederates held forth that the Yankees had only driven out the French to march in themselves, and so tutor the Mexicans in self-government. To which the Kansan ventured a minority opinion, though being thus a judge of the bench, as it were, he had no need of the oaths he took.

"Why G.o.d help me and to thunder with you, the United States ain't aiming at any protectorate. You unreconstructed Rebs simply cain't and won't see good faith in the Federal government!"

"Carpet bags?" Driscoll murmured sweetly. It was the majority opinion.

"Yes sir'ee," and Daniel took the cue as a bit in the mouth, "there's blood on the face of the moon up there, _acerrima proximorum odia_, by G.o.d sir! Look at the troops at our elections! Look at the Drake Test Oath! Look at----" Mr. Boone was fast getting vitriolic, in heavy editorial fashion, when a famished face, a wolfish face, appeared between the flaps of the tent. "Look at--_that!_"

Politics vanished, war and death resumed their own.

The whole mess stared.

"Sth-hunderation, it's an Imperialist!" lisped Crittenden of Nodaway. He pointed at the newcomer's uniform, which was of the Batallon del Emperador.

"Well, bring him on in," said Driscoll to the pickets gripping the man by either arm.