er hands.

"Michel, your horse!" she cried. "Quick, quick! Now hold the stirrup!"

But Tiburcio was the quicker. He bent his knee, on it she stepped, and
up she jumped, and kicked her heel as a spur. The charger leaped, and
down the road clattered girl and horse, she swaying perilously.

It was a hundred yards to the pasture gate, and as much again to the
adobe inside. When her horse rose in his gallop, she caught glimpses
over the wall. The Dragoons were drawing up before the carcel. Sentinels
tugged at the huge wooden door, and Lopez goaded them on. He saw her
coming, and would have it over with before she could interfere. He
bellowed an order, and the shooting squad threw up their guns at aim.
They would not wait. They would fire on their victim the second the door
opened. The heavy oak began to give. But that moment swinging in through
the gate, Jacqueline could see only the carcel's blank adobe wall. Yet
she pictured the man just behind. She pictured the door opening.
And--too late! Dieu, the muskets had volleyed already!

But--what made the shots scatter so? Scattered and flurried, they
sounded. And no wonder! She saw a miracle in the doing. It was the most
astounding sight of all her life long. Straight through the blank adobe
wall, for all its two feet of thickness, she beheld a man on a
great-boned yellow horse, both man and horse plunge mid a sudden cloud
of dust, plunge squarely into the light of day.

The dumfounded shooting squad had blazed crazily against the half-open
door; and for the critical quarter minute following, their weapons were
harmless. Other Dragoons ran wildly out into the pasture, and as wildly
fired at the horseman. Only one of the sentinels had happened to be on
the side of the magic exit, but as the solid wall dissolved into a
powdered cloud and the apparition hurtled past him, down upon his head
crashed a gigantic water jar filled with earth. He who had sympathized
with pagan ablutions the night before stood now with mouth agape. Some
heathen god was having a hand in this, he knew.

Jacqueline wheeled to Driscoll's side as he dashed toward her. He was
coatless. His woolen shirt was open at the neck, the sleeves were rolled
to the elbows. His slouch hat sat upon the back of his head. The short
cropped curls, gray with dust, fluttered against the brim. She had never
seen a face so buoyantly happy.

"Morning, Miss Jack-leen! Race you to the river?"

They galloped through the gate t