The Missourian

"On stubborn foes he vengeance wreak'd, And laid about him like a Tartar, But if for mercy once they squeak'd, He was the first to grant them quarter." --Orlando Furioso.

A few days later Jacqueline and Berthe attended a performance at the Teatro de Iturbide. It was the first held there since the beginning of the siege, and to the place late foes...

Her gestures, her every word, were an effervescence. There was something near hysteria in the bright flashes of her wit. However gay, joyous, cynical, Jacqueline may have seemed...

At last Jacqueline stabbed a dot after the word "Finis," and so rounded out her chapter on "Failure." Beyond doubt that tiny punctuation point saved many lives. The besiegers we...

It is curious and humiliating, how Nature does not vex herself in the least for the dying of a man. And yet, to the man, the event is so very important! Each breath of spaceless...

Just outside Driscoll's tent, under the stars, a fragrant steak was broiling. The colonel's mozo had learned the magic of the forked stick, and he manipulated his wand with a co...

At the hotel in the City of Mexico where Driscoll stopped, the entrance was big enough for a stage coach to drive through. But as to height, it did not seem any too great for th...

The feathering buckets of the paddle wheels began to turn; and _La Luz_, long, low, narrow, and a racer, moved noiselessly out into the bay. A few yards only, and the loungers o...

The mountain villages were arming. Bronzed men, savagely joyful, poured from under roofs of thatch, strapping on great black lead-weighted belts. In the corrals others lassoed h...

In his bedroom at Buena Vista, the marshal's residence, Driscoll the next day received a personage, and offered him a cigar. Declined, with bow from shoulder. Hoped he would hav...

But the paltry nine thousand were the best army of Mexicans ever yet gathered together. For weeks they kept more than thirty thousand Republicans out of an unwalled, almost an u...

Some years after the events recorded here, there appeared in the Boonville Javelin (post-bellum and revived) a serial of reminiscences, which, behind an opalescent gossamer of r...

It was a long column that undulated over the cacti plain with the turnings of the national highway. Men and horses bent like whitened spectres under a cloud of saltpetre dust. T...

For all his campaigner's instincts, the first of Driscoll's expected troubles came and was gone before he knew that it was trouble. It arrived so naturally, and was so well beha...

Like another Black Douglas, Din Driscoll rose among the crags, the dark tufts curling stubbornly on his bared head. He looked a sinewy, toughened Ajax. But he only spoiled it. F...

The Storm Centre chafed under a mad desire to verify his name, which was not unusual. But it was the first time he had ever craved active danger as an antidote for his thoughts....

Later the same morning there sounded the ineffable swish of silken petticoats along the corridor and the clinking of high heels on the tiles. La Señorita Marquesa d'Aumerle had...

Maximiliano I. of Mexico was dead. His dynasty and his Empire were the frippery of a past time. Yet there was his capital, still holding out against the Republic. Leonardo Marqu...

Just within their own bivouac four Missourians waited with eight horses. Driscoll and Boone, and the small limping shadow of Murguía between them, went on outside the sentry lin...

Into the crowd before the café, the Storm Centre pushed the argument of shoulders, and quickly gained for himself the place which his pseudonym indicated. Then he stopped, and l...

On returning to the capital, Jacqueline did not once set foot in any Imperial palace, but she established her own salon of a grande dame, and there installed herself mid a simpl...

Din Driscoll tumbled himself over among the rocks. "There, I'm fixed," he grunted, as he squatted down behind his earthworks. "Plenty of material here"--he meant the cartridges...

Imagine an abnormally virtuous urchin and an abnormally kindly farmer. The urchin resolutely turns his back on the farmer's melon patch, though there is no end of opportunity. B...

The fierce stranger, however, seemed undecided. His brow furrowed, and for the moment he only stared. Jacqueline peeped through the lashes curtaining her eyes. She wanted to see...

Din Driscoll had never remotely imagined that there could be such intoxication in a horseback ride. The person on the other horse made for the difference. How the joy of her fil...

The Grand Equerry was again the Dignitary of the hour. He held the Emperor's stirrup, while the Emperor, fittingly attired, swung gracefully astride a curvetting charger. Behind...

Colonel Miguel Lopez resented what he took for a patronizing concern. It festered his complacency, for his was the code of the bowed neck to those above and the boot-tip for tho...

"Tall Mose" Bledsoe and the Rev. Mr. Douglas conveyed Don Rodrigo to the back room, and here Driscoll and Boone joined them. They did not disarm the Mexican. It did not occur to...

First, and far in advance, arrived a haughty pack liveried in the royal green of ancient Aztec dynasties. New tenants might have been moving on this bright May day, for the flun...

That unleashed hawk which was the flying column failed to clutch its prey. From the City of Mexico across the far northwestern desert the Chasseurs and cuirassiers rode their sw...

"Strange there's no motion," thought Jacqueline the next morning, rubbing her eyes. "Why, what ails the old boat, I wonder?" Then she remembered. She was in the Tampico hotel wh...

The same evening, though two hours later, a public hack entered an outlying quarter of the City of Mexico called San Cosme, and drew up before a white mansion with beautiful gar...

The flame of lofty resolve burned with a high, present heat in Maximilian's dreamy eyes. But the thing was not statesmanship. The danger dial pointed to some latest darling phan...

Maximilian again confronted the ghostly enumeration. But this time his last day should be the day of a man's work, in simple-hearted humility. He no more searched the skies to f...

An hour before nightfall the guerrillas attacked. Jacqueline was standing at the window, when she heard a jubilant din and saw a tawny troop charging through the fields toward t...

Early one morning a month later, a solemn little group of uniformed men climbed to the roof of Buena Vista, the imperial wedding gift to Marshal Bazaine, and nerving themselves,...

Jacqueline was protesting to a worried personage in Grand Uniform. The personage was the Cerberus of the Emperor's antechamber, and he barred her way. He was newly a personage,...

Jacqueline was a gentlewoman of France. But there was usually mischief in her handsome head, for all its queenly poise. Just now, she was running away from the ship. Captain and...

Colonel Dupin helped first one and then the other of his charges upon the same horse and wrapped them about in the same gaudy serape till only two pair of pretty eyes peeped for...

shone on his face. He became aware that the gray eyes were upon him, taking conscious note of his hair, his mouth, his chin, as though she were really seeing him for the first t...

A wide country road swept up the slope of the hill, curved in toward the low outer wall of the little town on the brow, then swept down again. The portico of the hacienda house...

Stealthily Éloin drew aside the bushes, and peered through. The tiny pond with its crystal surface sunk deep in foliage, its flowering island in the centre, looked not unlike a...

As Maximilian crossed the pasture, he suddenly had to jump aside with considerable sprightliness. A brace of horsemen came swerving through the gateway from the highroad and tor...

The torpid, sordid and sun-baked port of Tampico gave little promise of aught so romantic and rare and exotic as the young French woman's coveted thrill of ecstasy. There was fi...

For the moment, Colonel Dupin had established headquarters in the granary, which was a long, low adobe among the stables, with a pasture between it and the House. The pasture op...

"Mesón" is Spanish for hostelry. In the ancient caravansaries, like the one at Bethlehem sacred to the Christ child, the same accommodations were meted out to man and beast alik...

After half an hour's sharp canter, Maximilian dismounted at La Teja, his suburban hacienda. He had come quickly from Jacqueline's, for his heart was light. The stress and storm...

"... and I think I shall begin to take pleasure in being at home and minding my business. I pray God I may, for I finde a great need thereof." --_Pepys's Diary_.

That garish daub which was sopped up from the burning homes of men and bespattered over the forest's dark crest was already mellowing under the gentler touch of dawn, when the t...

There were two dresses, one for each girl. The native seamstresses had slyly taken stock of mademoiselle the day before, only to discover that a "simple" frock from Paris was a...

For Maximilian it was the eve of execution. The soul feels that there is much to decide at such a time, but under the nettling merciless load the soul will either flounder pitif...

Everybody he met seemed to twist Driscoll's business into a vital personal issue, and it did not take him long to place M. Éloin. The supercilious Belgian of the rancid brow, as...

The Storm Centre looked round, about and above. He was as a fly in a bottle. A massive rough-hewn door, jammed tight, sealed him within adobe walls two feet thick. There was one...

She gained her room, and worked till late on a cipher dispatch to Napoleon. Its purport was, that now, if ever, Maximilian must be discouraged absolutely. Following on what she...

Another young person, Jacqueline herself, was also pondering rather soberly this morning. And her thoughts fitted as oddly with her piquant, lightsome, cynical youth as the gloo...

Jacqueline had wrought close to success during that May twilight on the edge of the Cuernavaca pond. She had won a promise of abdication. Yet in the end it was not the Emperor t...

Jacqueline had divined in Bazaine another obstacle to her mission. And yet it seemed preposterous that he should not be her staunchest ally, since Napoleon had found a marshal's...

Back once more at the hacienda, Driscoll recovered his coat still hanging over the dungeon window. Lopez would have called it insolence, had he been there instead of scouring th...

I. Meagre Shanks 273 II. The Black Decree 284 III. As Between Women 293 IV. The Lacking Coincidence 298 V. The Missourians 306 VI. If a Kiss Were All 315 VII. A Crop of Colonels...

I. A Wilful Maid Arrives 3 II. A Fra Diavolo in the Land of Roses 11 III. The Violent End of a Terrible Bandit 18 IV. _La Luz_, Blockade Runner 27 V. The Storm Centre 34 VI. A B...