"He will find Charlotte instead? But he must not detain her."
"Tonnerre!" exclaimed the Cossack chief. "Why not? She goes to Europe to sustain the Empire, while we French----"
"All the same, let her go. She will gain nothing there. Listen to me, monsieur. She leaves that he may _not_ abdicate, while if I stay, she fears that----"
"Your wits, mon colonel, are entirely satisfactory. And so she invited me to go with her, and as first lady of her household, I could not refuse. I wonder, now, if Fra Diavolo would deign to capture just me, alone!"
The sharp look which Dupin gave her from behind the streams tumbling off his sombrero was the sixth of a half-dozen. But it was this last one that seemed to satisfy him.
"Put up the window, mademoiselle," he said, "you're getting wet."
Ten minutes later Jacqueline felt the coach lurch heavily and sink to the hub on one side.
"Go on with your nap, Berthe," she said to her one companion. "They'll pull us out, as usual."
The customary yelling and straining began, and men grunted as they heaved against an axle. After a long séance of such effort there came a sharp exclamation, like an oath, and the confusion fell to a murmur of dismay. Someone jerked open the door, and Dupin's grizzled head appeared.
"Mademoiselle, I regret to have to announce that a wheel is dished in."
Jacqueline's gray eyes regarded him quizzically. The sardonic old face spread to a grin, but deftly readjusted itself to the requisite despair.
Not a carriage except the wrecked one was in sight. Only the Tiger's whelps, by the hundred, surrounded her.
"The others did the sensible thing. They know that you will catch up with them when they themselves are mired. Her Majesty, being ahead, is probably still in ignorance of your accident."
Dupin caught her expression. "It will take six hours," he said mercilessly.
"There's a settler's cabin a mile from here. If you will accept my horse, and Mademoiselle Berthe can mount behind----"
"Poor Berthe," sighed Jacqueline. But she nodded eagerly.
"Achilles absent was Achilles still."--_The Iliad._
Colonel Dupin helped first one and then the other of his charges upon the same horse and wrapped them about in the same gaudy serape till only two pair of pretty eyes peeped forth at the rain. The Vera Cruz highway clung to the mountain side, but the Contra Guerrillas took a venturesome little bridle path which dropped abruptly down into the rich valley of a thousand or more feet below. Emerging from the dense tropical growth of the highland, they beheld a vast emerald checkerboard of cultivation, field after field of sugar cane, and set in each bright square a little house of bamboo with a roof of red piping. After the dreary black gorges behind them, the light of the sun seemed boxed in here under a leaden cover of cloud. Coming suddenly out of the chill and mist, the two girls felt the very rain gratefully warm and the fragrant smells of the wet earth a thing of comfort. As the beauty and the cheer of it subtly gladdened her mood, Jacqueline thought that here at any rate was an adequate mise-en-scène for whatever tremors might befall.