"And so will you be," Wemple assured her, "before you get back to Tampico. Are you ready?"
"Heavens, Beth, don't waste time!" exclaimed Wemple. "Jump in and grab up what you want."
"Make a start--make a start," chanted Davies. "Hustle! Hustle!--Charley, get the rifle you like best and take it along. Get a couple for us."
"Is it as serious as that?" Miss Drexel queried.
"The Mexicans are tearing loose," Davies explained. "How they missed this place I don't know." A movement in the adjoining room startled him. "Who's that?" he cried.
"Why, Mrs. Morgan," Miss Drexel answered.
"Good heavens, Wemple, I'd forgotten _her_," groaned Davies. "How will we ever get her anywhere?"
"Let Beth walk, and relay the lady on the nags."
"She weighs a hundred and eighty," Miss Drexel laughed. "Oh, hurry, Martha! We're waiting on you to start!"
Muffled speech came through the partition, and then emerged a very short, stout, much-flustered woman of middle age.
"I simply can't walk, and you boys needn't demand it of me," was her plaint. "It's no use. I couldn't walk half a mile to save my life, and it's six of the worst miles to the river."
"Then you'll ride," said Davies. "Come on, Charley. We'll get a saddle on each of the nags."
Along the road through the tropic jungle, Miss Drexel and Juanita, her Indian maid, led the way. Her brother, carrying the three rifles, brought up the rear, while in the middle Davies and Wemple struggled with Mrs. Morgan and the two decrepit steeds. One, a flea-bitten roan, groaned continually from the moment Mrs. Morgan's burden was put upon him till she was shifted to the other horse. And this other, a mangy sorrel, invariably lay down at the end of a quarter of a mile of Mrs. Morgan.
Miss Drexel laughed and joked and encouraged; and Wemple, in brutal fashion, compelled Mrs. Morgan to walk every third quarter of a mile. At the end of an hour the sorrel refused positively to get up, and, so, was abandoned. Thereafter, Mrs. Morgan rode the roan alternate quarters of miles, and between times walked--if _walk_ may describe her stumbling progress on two preposterously tiny feet with a man supporting her on either side.
A mile from the river, the road became more civilized, running along the side of a thousand acres of banana plantation.