ng. He feared to tell. Driscoll
caught his bridle. "Which way, or by--by--Never mind, you'll pay toll to
me, too! I'll just learn this toll-taking trade myself."

Murguia saw a six-shooter sliding out. "You also!" he cried.

"Also?" laughed Driscoll. "There, I knew it, they were robbers."

He wheeled and rode back with the fury of a cavalry charge, heedless of
Murguia's cries to stop by all the saints, heedless of the saints too.
Murguia did not care what happened to his guest, but he cared for what
might happen to himself, afterward, at the hands of Don Tiburcio and
partner. He frantically called out that he was jesting, that Driscoll
owed him nothing. But Driscoll had already turned into the side trail,
and was following the hoof prints there. Murguia could hear the furious
crackling of twigs as he raced through the timber. But in a little while
he heard and saw nothing.

"He's a centaur, that country boy," observed Jacqueline critically. "The
identical break-neck Centaur himself. Really, Berthe, I think we shall
have to dub him Monsieur the Chevalier. Why Berthe, how pale you are!"

"I? Oh, mademoiselle, is there any danger?"

"Danger, child? Nonsense!"

"But what made him do that, that way?"

"Poor simple babe! That was a pose. Our mule driver knows he can ride,
but we did not. And there you are."

"But the little monsieur, he looks like a ghost?"

Jacqueline laughed. "That, I admit, is not a pose. With the little
monsieur, it's become--constitutional."

A half-hour later they heard an easy canter behind them, and Din
Driscoll reappeared, flushed and happy as a boy pounding in first from a
foot race. His left hand covered the bowl of his cob pipe from the wind,
the other held his slouch hat doubled up by the brim. As for bridle
hand, old Demijohn needed none. Driscoll seized Murguia's silk tile and
poured into it from the slouch a shimmering stream of coin and a mass of
crumpled paper.

"To be robbed while I'm along, now that makes me _mad_," he said.
"You won't tell anybody, will you, Murgie?"

The old man did not hear. His palsied hands were dipping down, dipping
down, bathing themselves in the deep silk hat. The hat was heavy with
gold and silver pesos, and foaming with bills.

"Greenbacks, Confederate notes," he mumbled. "Some I've paid
before--only, lately, the rascals won't take anything but coin."

"Why's that, Murgie?"

"Why, because these green things are not worth much now, while these