CHAPTER XVI

GEORGIE GETS LOST

Three days after the gay ball at the military quarters of the _Carrancista_ detachment a little Mexican girl wept disconsolately in the doorway of the priest’s home. The priest was not there; he had never returned since the first morning the little girl had presented herself. But she persisted in coming back. The housekeeper was quite annoyed. She had fed her, and now the ugly, rawboned child was crying. Roughly she swept her back into the house.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“I wait for my big brother. Has he been here since I came yesterday afternoon?” The little girl wiped a smudged face.

“Your big brother? How do I know who is your big brother? Many men and boys come, but none ask after an ugly little girl. Here, take this for your dinner and don’t come back for a week.” And she thrust the child out through the door, with a palm leaf basket full of tortillas, sweet cakes and fruit.

George Washington Daniels retired into a quiet lane behind the church and gorged himself with food, topping off with figs and grapes that drooped conveniently over the wall. It was the first really full meal in three days. Comforted, he dropped asleep, and when he woke the grief of the past few days had left him, shaken off with that miraculous ease with which youth divests itself of sorrow too long held.

There was no use waiting here longer for Rakie. She must have got away to El Escondido. The last he’d seen of her was that flapping pink skirt as she shot past a window, and though he’d followed the hammer of the pinto’s hoofs for several miles--well, anyway half a mile--it turned out to be the lieutenant and not Rakie at all, and he’d had to escape in the other direction. There were soldiers there and the sentry had calmly made him get down and sent him off without his horse. It was Custer’s pony--the best of his string. What would he say? By golly, the horse thief! He’d get that animal back some way!

So Georgie had lived in the streets and haunted the padre’s house. On this night, however, he started out determined first of all to get rid of this hated girl’s dress. The bundle of clothes he had thrust entire into Raquel’s saddle pocket.

But he had not completely stripped off his own possessions, although he had no money; for round his waist was a belt with a knife, and several little treasures from which he never parted--a pocket compass, his watch, a burning glass. Now at dusk he was able to make a trade with a lad about his own size whom he found in the street, and shortly thereafter he emerged from behind a wall, clad like any other Mexican youngster, with a wide straw sombrero, calico pantaloons, and a blue gingham shirt, while the pink gingham dress lay in a huddle behind the wall.

He stepped forth into the orchid twilight of the little Mexican city, whose dusty streets, flat roofs and goats laden with water-filled skins, might have been those of a village on the Nile, though he did not know it. The quiet dusk was broken only by the screeching of the parakeets and the twitter of the birds in the court yards of the larger houses.

Georgie wandered along till he stood before a picturesque building with wrought-iron balconies. It was the hotel. Here the officer in charge of the troops sat at dinner. Georgie could see him through the window, a large fellow, coarse and drunken.

“What can the _Americanos_ expect in the way of protection?” The words of the fiery-eyed miner up in the mountains came back to him. No use asking for any help up to the border from him. He pressed his face miserably up against the gratings and stared through unseeing.

Where was Raquel?