Remember the Alamo [35]
"Oh, Roberto! My husband! My soul! My life! Leave me not."
"I am going for my arms. I will take them a hundredfold from
those who have robbed me. I swear I will!"
"You do not love me. What are these Americans to you? I am
your wife. Your Maria--"
"These Americans are my brothers--my sons. My mother is an
American woman."
"And I?"
"You are my wife--my dear wife! I love you--God Almighty
knows how well I love you; but we must part now, at least for
a short time. Maria, my dear one, I must go."
"Go? Where to?"
"I am going to join General Houston."
"I thought so. I knew it. The accursed one! Oh that I had
him here again! I would bury my stiletto in his heart! Over
the white hilt I would bury it! I would wash my hands in his
blood, and think them blessed ever afterwards! Stay till
daylight, Roberto. I have so much to say, dearest."
"I cannot. I have stayed too long. And now I must ride
without a gun or knife to protect me. Any Indian that I meet
can scalp me. Do you understand now what disarming means,
Maria? If I had gone with my boy, with my brave Jack, I could
at least have sold my life to its last drop."
"In the morning, Roberto, Lopez Navarro will get you a gun.
Oh, if you must go, do not go unarmed! There are ten thousand
Comanche between here and the Brazos."
"How could I look Lopez Navarro in the face? Or any other
man? No, no! I must win back my arms, before I can walk the
streets of San Antonio again."
He took her in his arms, he kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her
lips, murmuring tender little Spanish words that meant,
oh, so much, to the wretched woman!--words she had taught him
with kisses--words he never used but to her ears only.
She clung to his neck, to his hands, to his feet; she made his
farewell an unspeakable agony. At last he laid her upon her
couch, sobbing and shrieking like a child in an extremity of
physical anguish. But he did not blame her. Her
impetuosities, her unreasonable extravagances, were a part of
her nature, her race, and her character. He did not expect a
weak, excitable woman to become suddenly a creature of flame
and steel.
But it was a wonderful rest to his exhausted body and soul to
turn from her to Antonia. She led him quietly to his chair by
the parlor fire. She gave him food and wine. She listened
patiently, but with a living sympathy, to his wrong. She
endorsed, with a clasp of his hand and a smile, his purpose.
And she said, almost cheerfully:
"You have not given up all your arms, father. When I first
heard of the edict, I hid in my own room the rifle, the powder
and the shot, which were in your study. Paola has knives in
the stable; plenty of them. Get one from him."
Good news is a very relative thing. This information made the
doctor feel as if all were now easy and possible. The words
he said to her, Antonia never forgot. They sang in her heart
like music, and led her on through many a difficult path. The
conversation then turned upon money matters, and Antonia
received the key of his study, and full directions as to the
gold and papers secreted there.
Then Isabel was awakened, and the rifle brought down; and
Paola saddled the fleetest horse in the stable, and after one
solemn five minutes with his daughter, Robert Worth rode away
into the midnight darkness, and into a chaos of public events
of which no man living could forecast the outcome.
Rode away from wife and children and home; leaving behind him
the love and labor of his lifetime--
"The thousand sweet, still joys of such
As hand in hand face earthly life."
For what? For justice, for freedom of thought and action, for
the rights of his manhood, for the brotherhood of race
and religion and country. Antonia and Isabel stood hand in
hand at the same lattice from which the Senora had watched her
son away, and in a dim, uncertain manner these thoughts
connected themselves in each mind with the same mournful
inquiry--Is it worth while?
As the beat