he street; and cotton
curtains, some of crude drawn work, hung outside the windows. All the
poor finery of the Indians was on exhibition to do honor to a gorgeous
Old World court. But the fiesta air had already gotten into the
susceptible native lungs, and that alone, with only a trumpet's blare,
would make for a hurrah in genuine fervor.

The roomy porch of the old mansion was crowded with the chief people of
the hacienda, clerks, foremen, house servants, besides the administrador
and the chaplain. Behind a remote column were the three wanderers in the
wilderness; the Storm Centre, the Marchioness, and the Maid. They were
to have been gone by now, and yet it was not the coming of the emperor
that had stopped them. The cause was nearer at hand. Smoking a long
black cigar, "grizzled and fierce, as ornate in braid and decorations as
a bullfighter," Colonel Dupin had delayed them.

His Cossacks thronged the colonnade. The brick-red of their raw leather
jackets splotched every other color with rust. The Contra Guerrillas
were many things. They were Frenchmen and Mexicans. They were Americans,
Confederate deserters, Union deserters. They were Negroes and Arabs.
They were the ruined of fortune, now soldiers of fortune. They were
pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters, gamblers, swindlers.
They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from the
guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was
not a softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity
could lead them, could hold them.

They surrounded the Missourian on the hacienda portico. If only for his
debonnaire indifference, they knew him for a "bad man" such as none of
them might ever hope to be. And they watched him like lynxes, though he
was unarmed. Yet he did not look "bad." He merely looked bored. He was a
prisoner, but not the only one. Anastasio Murguia fidgetted among the
Cossacks on his own porch. His restless eyes roved incessantly over the
crowd, seeking his daughter, but they were steadily baffled.

Down in the valley, where the Rio Moctezuma joined its course with the
Panuco, a dusty mist moved nearer along the old Spanish highway, and
faintly there came the sound of clarions. An eager murmuring arose from
the throng on the hillside. It swelled more confidently to a buzz as the
far-away dust lifted at the ford and revealed the beaded stringing of a
numerous company. The distant bugles rang clearer on the pu