Page:The Road to Monterey (1925).pdf/203

 accusation of treason against Helena. It startled him with a greater concern for her safety than for his own.

"Yankee in blood and heart only, Gabriel. Her father was a citizen, like that old lizard Toberman, and Toberman was a traitor. They say this Helena plotted with Toberman to deliver the country to the Yankees—as if there were Yankees enough in the world to take it out of our hands!"

"Have they arrested her? Is she here?"

"She is here, with that little fat hen Doña Carlota. There, if you could lift yourself up to the window, you could see the one that this red-headed traitor looks through upon the sun that they say will soon stop shining for her eyes."

"Don Abrahan's prisoner, not the State's? That seems a strange situation."

Henderson turned this thought aloud, hardly considering the presence of Simon. But Simon, sharp in more ways than one, had made observations of his own.

"Don Abrahan wishes her to sign a certain little paper," he said. "My Josefa listened yesterday outside the door and heard. I tell you this, for it is all right to tell a dead man anything, and you are the same as a dead man, Gabriel."

"Certainly, Simon. A little paper, you said?"

"Don Abrahan promised her if she would sign this trifling deed to her lands and all that she owns, he would give her another certain little paper that speaks the proof of her plotting with the Yankees,