Onward, guided by distant peak and pass, they thread the trail.
No word is spoken save some gruff order. Maxime's captors have the
hang-dog manner of the Californian. They loll on their mustangs,
lazily worrying out the long hours. A rest is taken for food at
noon. The horses are herded an hour or so and the advance resumed.
Nightfall finds Valois in a squalid adobe house, thirty miles from
Gavilan Peak. An old scrape is thrown him. His couch is the mud
floor.
The youth sleeps heavily. His last remembrance is the surly wish
of a guard that Commandante Miguel Peralta will hang the accursed
Gringo.
At daybreak he is roused by a carelessly applied foot. The dejected
"pathfinder" begins his second day of captivity. He fears to
converse. He is warned with curses to keep silent. In the long day
Maxime concludes that the Mexicans suspect treachery by Captain
Fremont's "armed exploration in the name of science."
These officials hate new-comers. Valois had been, like other
gilded youth of New Orleans, sent to Paris by his opulent family.
He knows the absorbing interest of the South in Western matters.
Stern old Tom Benton indicated truly the onward march of the
resistless American. In his famous speech, while the senatorial
finger pointed toward California, he said with true inspiration:
"There is the East; there is the road to India.
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