ve you alone. I'll leave you alone because--I know I
_can_ leave you alone." She seemed to have forgotten Carter's presence.
She held up the hand which wore the old Italian ring with the hidden
blue stone of constancy. "I'm 'holding hard,' Jimsy."

Soon after dark Yaqui Juan came. He had been waiting for three hours,
trying to get past the sentries; it had been impossible while there was
any light. He was footsore and weary and had only a little water in his
canteen, but he had found the telephone wires still up at the second
_hacienda_, the owner had got the message off for him, and help was
assuredly on the way to them. There was the off chance, of course, that
the soldiers might be held up by another wing of the _insurrectos_, but
there was every reason to hope for their arrival next day. Jimsy King
sent the Yaqui up to Honor with the canteen, and the Indian returned to
say that the Senorita had not touched one drop but had given it to the
master.

Carter dragged himself away to his room and Jimsy and Yaqui Juan talked
long together in the quiet _sala_. It was a cramped and halting
conversation with the Indian's scant English and the American's halting
Spanish; sometimes they were unable to understand each other, but they
came at last to some sort of agreement, though Juan shook his head
mutinously again and again, murmuring--"_No, no! Senor Don Diego! No!_"

It was almost midnight when Jimsy called them all down into the _sala_.
They came, wondering, one by one, Carter, Mrs. King,--Richard King had
fallen asleep after his half dozen swallows of water--and Honor, and
Josita, her head muffled in her _rebozo_, her brown fingers busy with
her beads.

Jimsy King was standing in the middle of the room, standing insecurely,
his legs far apart, the decanter in his hand, the decanter which had
been more than half full when Honor left the room and had now less than
an inch of liquor in it. Yaqui Juan, his face sullen, his eyes black and
bitter, crouched on the floor, his arms about his knees.

Honor did not speak at all. She just stood still, looking at Jimsy until
it seemed as if she were all eyes. _"It comes so suddenly_,"--Carter had
told her--"like the boa constrictor's hunger ... _and then he was
just--an appetite_."

"Ladies'n gem'mum," said Jimsy, thickly, "goin' shing you lil' song!"
Then, in his hoarse and baffled voice he sang Stanford's giddy old saga,
"The Son of a Gambolier."

They all stiffened with horr