maller, yet not to satisfy
himself it did not contain the missing watch and diamonds, for it was
big enough to hold them. Pancha did not know that the two officers had
agreed upon a plan of action to be put in operation the moment they were
within the Golden Gate. She did not dream that the thoughts of the
silent officer dwelt on her and her past intently as did hers on him.
She was heartsick, lonely and oppressed with anxieties, such as seldom
fall to the lot of maidens of sixteen, yet her heart was beating with
the hope that lives in buoyant health and youth. She had left the father
whom she devotedly loved and had believed all that a father could or
should be, had received his parting blessing at Hermosillo and his
faltering promise to soon be with her--at Guaymas. She had been radiant
with the thought of soon again springing to his arms when the Idaho
stopped there on the northward trip. She had been stunned and stricken
when told it was his wish she should go with her cousins to San
Francisco, dwell with them there, be educated there, and without hope of
again seeing him until he could come to her perhaps late in the summer.
She had then been told that his life was threatened and that hated
Gringos and suspicious compatriots, both, were thirsting for his blood.
She had been told that she herself was in danger of arrest for
complicity in robberies at Gila Bend--she, who had overheard the plot to
meet the stage, murder the passengers and rob the mails, at least that
was what the woman whom she was bidden to respect as her stepmother had
fearfully told her and asked if there were no way in which she could
warn Blake. How was she to know, poor child, what would result? How
could she help shrinking from sight of the officers she had watched with
such eager interest at Sancho's, when she was later told they were
seeking her father's life--told that, could they force a confession from
her, nothing on earth could save him? Yet here was the gray-haired
colonel devoting himself to Inez and being kind to her own trembling
self. Here was the Teniente Loring who had been lovely to her, said the
stewardess, until he saw her terror, her shrinking from him, and now
when she longed to tell him her simple story, he would not come near
her. Of the packet and its contents she knew next to nothing. Of their
intention to secure it and, if need be, her arrest with it, the moment
they reached the wharf at San Francisco, she could not dream.