Free The Fugitive by Max Brand Page B

riders came swirling into the confusion of men. They were gesticulating wildly and pointing behind them.
    â€œConstancia!” gasped Tita. “Tell me before I die . . . what is it? What can it mean?”
    The door of the room was dashed open. Don Rudolfo ran in, girding a cartridge belt about his hips.
    â€œConstancia!” he cried. “Come quickly! There may be little time. They are coming. That devil . . .”
    The uproar outside drowned his voice, and Constancia, clinging fascinated to the window, heard the roar of the charge rush louder and closer. She strained her eyes and saw a long line of shadowy horsemen pouring out of the night. A wild voice went up from them: “Pazos! Pazos! Guadalvo! De los Pazos!”
    Guadalvo. Her mind flashed back to the deck of the old Santa Lucia as it weltered through the warm gulf seas, tossing its rail against the rising moon. Guadalvo had held her hand gently, and spoken as no other man had ever dared to speak to her.
    â€œConstancia!” shouted her father at her ear. “Do you hear? Are you mad?”
    She did not turn her head. She would not lose one iota of the magic scene outside. “We are as safe here as anywhere!” she exclaimed. “Ah, what men.”
    â€œI am coming again. I shall have the horses placed at the rear of the house. Do you hear me?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œCome there instantly.”
    He was gone, racing from the room, and there was only Tita, sobbing convulsively on the floor beside her. But yonder came that line of galloping shadows. They gleamed clearer in the moonshine, and the yelling cut like knives against her ear:
    â€œDe los Pazos! Guadalvo! Guadalvo!”
    Words of magic, it seemed, so far as those heroes who had been drawn together by her father were concerned. They had heaped themselves together, forming in some semblance of solid ranks, like infantry about to receive a cavalry charge, but, under the thunder of those approaching cheers, they began to melt away at the flanks where the men skulked away into the shelter of the house and the sheds.
    As soon as they were a little distance away, fear seemed to leap upon their backs. She saw them throwing down guns and racing off at full speed. The body of horsemen that had been forming staggered as though struck by a tidal wave of terror. Then they, too, wheeled away, wailing:
    â€œAll is lost! All is lost!”
    There was a grim attraction between them and the remaining body of foot fighters. One or two discharged their guns into the air, unaimed, and then, as though their own daring had paralyzed them with fear, the whole mass turned and fled in a screeching body that turned into a churning mass, leaping and scrambling, and falling down, tearing one another to the earth in a wild effort to get first to safety.
    But they would have paid dearly for their stand had it not been that, in front of the wild band of riders out of the night, there rode one taller than the rest and on a taller horse, a creature as beautiful as a glistening black panther beneath the moon. He rode in the lead, a revolver in one hand, his horse perfectly guided by the pressure of his knees apparently. His other hand was raised high above his head as he shouted in a voice that sounded with a wonderful clearness through the uproar:
    â€œNo bullets! No bullets, amigos míos! All is over!”
    At his command guns that had been leveled were lowered, and the horsemen drew rein hard to keep from driving their frantic horses into the tangle of fugitives.
    And that was Valentin Guadalvo.

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Chapter 12
    That fascination left Constancia now, and its place was taken by a grand terror. She raised Tita with a vigorous hand. “Tita, Tita, there is no time for crying and fainting. Run!”
    Tita ran with all her might, her mistress behind her. They found that the halls of the house were already deserted. Truly, they were very late. Only, as they passed the dining room, they saw the