Page:The Road to Monterey (1925).pdf/345

 hung over his mouth; his lean jaws were black with a beard-growth of several days. He saw his neighbors strutting around the courtyard under that strange flag, with guns on their shoulders; he saw Don Felipe, grown fierce in a day, looking at him as if to put a pistol behind his ear and blow out his light. Still the rascal had the vanity in him, the foolish confidence in his own cunning, to attempt another tale.

"Now, it was this way, Don Gabriel," he began, setting his voice in confidential pitch. "When Don Abrahan left me there to watch the house of my old friend Pablo, it was a thing that I despised myself for doing. But what was a poor man, whose wife and children were at Don Abrahan's mercy, to do? I wanted to come to your side, always; I swore a vow to Our Señora that I would not lift my hand against you at any man's order again. So the word came that you had caught the cannon, and had hung Don Abrahan to a tree for his crimes. Then I told myself it was the time for me to desert and go to your side, Don Gabriel. But Don Roberto might catch me; he might hang me for a deserter, although I am not a soldier. That would be a small matter to Don Roberto. Is it not so, Don Gabriel?"

Henderson indicated by an impatient movement of the hand that he was to hurry on with his defense. Simon turned a shade paler, and swallowed like a man breathing smoke.

"So I put my back against Pablo's wall and went