. Oh well, I suppose it is the hour for
larks, too."

And sighing at the sacrifice of an age of slumber, Jacqueline reached
out for the matches. But there was no dainty limbed night table of a
Louis XV. beside her bed, which helped her again to remember where she
was, and if doubts still remained, they were gone when her bare feet
touched the fibrous, prickly native carpet instead of soft furs.

She groped to the door, and opened it enough to take a greasily odorous
candle from a dusky hand outside. As the sickly glimmer awakened the
shadows, she called the woman back in sudden dismay. "My trunk, senora,
kindly have it sent up at once. No," she added, catching a fluffy
garment from a chair, "in five minutes."

There was a brief silence, followed by positive lament. "Nina, it is not
here. I believe, nin-a, it is at the meson, with Don Anastasio."

"F-flute!" cried Jacqueline. The word means nothing at all, but it may
express a lass's exasperation in a wardrobe crisis, and that is nothing
except a catastrophe. "Now just possibly," she soliloquized, "they
permit themselves to imagine that one can wear a white frock two days
together," whereupon she sat herself down despairingly among the crisp
things that had already had their poor little day. To mock her there was
the jaunty handsatchel packed for an hour's shore leave. She let
petulance have sway, and informed herself that she should not go a step,
when the voice in the hall pleaded insidiously that Her Mercy make
haste.

"But I am, senora, I'm making fast haste," and she sat three minutes
longer, communing with her tragedy. "_Oh_, this bitten, biting
country," she cried, gazing ruefully at arms and shoulders, and fiery
blotches on the soft white skin. "Still, if there's a brigand for every
mosquito, it may yet be worth while." Hopefully she rose and called
Berthe from the next room to help her dress.

When the two girls came downstairs, the landlord's wife took their
satchel, and led them over broken sidewalks to the meson, where the
street was filled with torches and laden burros and blanketed shadows.
Murguia's caravan was forming, making a weird, stealthy scene of
activity. Jacqueline picked up a lantern, and searched here and there.

"Now where _can_ it be?" she cried.

The rebosa about the shoulders of the Mexican woman rose. She knew
nothing. But the gesture was an unabridged philosophical system as to
the resignation and the indifference that is seemly w