e cursed gold of Diaz?" said Vera to the comrades.

They elevated their brows and could not decide. And Felipe Rivera, the
scrubber for the Revolution, continued, as occasion arose, to lay down
gold and silver for the Junta's use.

And still they could not bring themselves to like him. They did not know
him. His ways were not theirs. He gave no confidences. He repelled all
probing. Youth that he was, they could never nerve themselves to dare to
question him.

"A great and lonely spirit, perhaps, I do not know, I do not know,"
Arrellano said helplessly.

"He is not human," said Ramos.

"His soul has been seared," said May Sethby. "Light and laughter have
been burned out of him. He is like one dead, and yet he is fearfully
alive."

"He has been through hell," said Vera. "No man could look like that who
has not been through hell--and he is only a boy."

Yet they could not like him. He never talked, never inquired, never
suggested. He would stand listening, expressionless, a thing dead, save
for his eyes, coldly burning, while their talk of the Revolution ran
high and warm. From face to face and speaker to speaker his eyes
would turn, boring like gimlets of incandescent ice, disconcerting and
perturbing.

"He is no spy," Vera confided to May Sethby. "He is a patriot--mark me,
the greatest patriot of us all. I know it, I feel it, here in my heart
and head I feel it. But him I know not at all."

"He has a bad temper," said May Sethby.

"I know," said Vera, with a shudder. "He has looked at me with those
eyes of his. They do not love; they threaten; they are savage as a wild
tiger's. I know, if I should prove unfaithful to the Cause, that he
would kill me. He has no heart. He is pitiless as steel, keen and cold
as frost. He is like moonshine in a winter night when a man freezes to
death on some lonely mountain top. I am not afraid of Diaz and all his
killers; but this boy, of him am I afraid. I tell you true. I am afraid.
He is the breath of death."

Yet Vera it was who persuaded the others to give the first trust
to Rivera. The line of communication between Los Angeles and Lower
California had broken down. Three of the comrades had dug their own
graves and been shot into them. Two more were United States prisoners
in Los Angeles. Juan Alvarado, the Federal commander, was a monster. All
their plans did he checkmate. They could no longer gain access to the
active revolutionists, and the incipient ones, in Lower Ca