“Ah. So you speak French as well. It explains a lot.” The colonel’s voice was thoughtful, rather than angry. He sighed. “I have a feeling you intend to go on being stubborn. For your sake, as well as your wife’s, I had hoped not.”
“My wife is hardly my concern any longer, monsieur, since you seem to have made her yours. And like your own marriage, ours was a matter of mutual convenience, after all. If all you need from me is my blessing for your little liaison, sir, you certainly have it! I’m an understanding husband—hasn’t she told you?”
“Enough! I didn’t come here to discuss your wife. It is your other activities I’m interested in—your spying, Señor. Who sent you to Mexico? Who is paying you? It could not be Benito Juarez, for he doesn’t have enough money. Why is your government so anxious to topple ours?”
Steve laughed, and saw the gleam of anger in Colonel Devereaux’s eyes.
“But you have all the answers already, Colonel. Why ask me?”
“You have given us a great deal of trouble with your meddling in our affairs here, monsieur! You were becoming quite a hero to a few ignorant peasants. But in a few minutes, that heroic image will, I’m afraid, be dispelled when you squeal under the lash and beg to be allowed to tell all you know! Dammit—I’ll have names from you—you’ll betray all your accomplices—the places where I can find them!”
Colonel Devereaux had begun to pace around, his hands behind his back in the manner of Napoleon, whom he had always admired tremendously. And in spite of the unpleasant position he was in, it was all Steve could do not to laugh at the man again, and drive him into a towering rage. Devereaux looked up again, and it seemed as if he deliberately softened the tone of his voice, so that it was almost pleasant.
“Come now, Morgan—you’re a reasonable man I’m sure. And so am I. What good does it do to lose tempers? You see, I have you. There’s no escape. Still, if you’ll have the good sense to tell me what I must know, you’ll find me a fair and just man. You like danger and action, do you not? You enjoy these things? You enjoy life? You can still have them all, on our side. Yes, we could use a man like you, and once you’ve turned against your Juarista friends, well, then we can be sure you won’t go back to them, won’t we?” The colonel’s eyes had begun to twinkle. “I believe that’s what your Americans would call ‘insurance,’ hein? You’d be well paid, too, if money matters. Believe me, it would be so much better for you if you turned your talents to the right side. I have great respect for your grandfather, you know—think how pleased it would make him to know that at last you’d come around to what he believes in! What do you say?”
Steve drew in a deep breath, half-tempted to say too many things he shouldn’t say. There was no point in uselessly flinging words of defiance, nor in continued fencing. Still, he realized with a feeling of distaste that he actually disliked this pompous, vain-glorious little man who had bedded his wife a few hours ago and now took it for granted he’d jump at the chance to turn traitor in order to keep his hide.
“Colonel—if I betrayed my friends I’d die anyway.” Steve kept his voice flat and even. “You’ve lost the war already, and you know it. It’s a matter of time now, that’s all. And you stand to lose a lot more, personally. You’re finished, as far as the big hacendados go. You were a guest of the Sandoval’s and you arrested a woman. I must admit, she’s very charming when she wants to be, my little wife—perhaps you managed to persuade her you could offer her more than I could—but what will happen when your wife’s family finds out? And whatever happens to me—remember you’ve made an enemy for life in my grandfather. We have our disagreements, he and I, but he’ll never take such an insult to a member of his family. He has enough money, and enough influential friends both here and in France, to have you broken. Your only chance to save your own skin is to apologize for the inconvenience and let me go.”
“Mon Dieu, but your insolence knows no bounds! You dare to threaten me? I made a mistake, I see, in offering you a gentlemen’s agreement, but you are not one—you’re a dirty Juarista dog, a spy—and in case you’d forgotten it, my prisoner! We will see who will break!”
His face crimson with rage the colonel turned on his heel and marched away. Steve shrugged mentally. Well, he’d given it a try. He’d almost hoped that Devereaux’s practical streak might outweigh his stiff-necked military pride. Too bad he wouldn’t be around to see what happened to the colonel himself in the end.
Too bad he had to stand out here in the sun with his muscles strained uncomfortably and painfully, waiting…his only hope now that he would be able to endure their torture without giving way under it. But how did a man know how much pain he could stand until the moment when he was actually required to suffer it? The sunlight felt like a burning brand against his skin. The whip would be worse. Steve licked lips that were already cracked and dry and leaned his forehead against the wooden post, deliberately concentrating on nothingness. It was possible, Gopal had told him in that long-ago time when they had been friends, to isolate the mind and free the body of all sensation. It was necessary, by concentration, to enter a trancelike state.
Steve had tried it, on occasion. Once, when he’d been shot in the shoulder, the bullet lodged against the bone, and no doctor within miles, he thought he’d succeeded. It had been in a bar, and while the bartender had probed clumsily with a knife under the gun of Steve’s friends, he had sat, immobilizing himself, eyes fixed on a crack in the dirty ceiling. And had hardly felt the pain. Not until hours later, when his shoulder had begun to ache and throb agonizingly and he’d had to remain in what was practically a drunken stupor for days.
He became aware of the shuffling of feet, of muffled whispers, nervous movements, the rustling noise made by the skirts of women. A child began to cry and was hushed almost immediately. He didn’t have to open his eyes to know there were people surrounding him now. The damned French! Always having to make an example out of something. In this case, he was it. His screams were supposed to have a demoralizing effect on any of the poor devils here who might think about going over to the Juaristas. Let them all witness how the French treated their prisoners, and beware! God, what a farce this was turning into.
The soldiers, with their passion for orderliness were marshalling the unwilling spectators into rows. Feeling something like the prize exhibit at a zoo, Steve let his eyes rove casually over them—those that he could see, anyway. Anything to keep his mind off what was coming…
His eyes moved, stopped and came back to a particular pair of dark eyes. Without knowing he did so, he frowned. That woman with a black rebozo wrapped around her head, in the second row…he could have sworn—their eyes met, hers wide and dark and wet with the sheen of tears; his flashing a warning as he recognized her. Steve groaned inwardly. Concepción! Now who was the idiota? She had no business coming here, and for her own sake she’d better not have some wild scheme in mind. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he could escape now, under the guns of a whole platoon of French Legionnaires. He hoped she wouldn’t do anything stupid—these French would take pleasure in torturing her, too.
Booted feet marched up behind him. Stopped. Rough hands took hold of his shirt at the neck, ripping it away to bare his back. This was it, then. Now. No more waiting. Only a few seconds left of ghastly anticipation, and then the pain, wiping out everything else.
Steve felt his heart begin to pound, and the sweat that popped out on his body suddenly seemed cold. He was afraid. He was suddenly sick to the pit of his stomach with primitive, animal fear.
Tom Beal’s sneering voice, filled with a barely held-in gloating, sounded from behind him.
“You ready, Morgan?” Steve sucked in a deep breath, and was not able to prevent the involuntary shudder that ran through his body. Was a man ever ready for something like this, when it was inescapable and inevitable? He had seen what a bullwhip could do to a man and he suddenly knew he would not be able to stand it. In spite of all his resolutions, he wasn’t strong enough to stop this crazy
, cringing fear that came from nowhere, urging him to cry out, to tell them to shoot him instead…
He heard Beal laugh and knew the man had sensed what was in him now. Beal knew, and Beal enjoyed the feeling of power it gave him.
“You still got time to change your mind, if you ain’t feelin’ as brave now as you pretended to be a while ago. See where the colonel is? Up on that balcony, with your wife. Guess she didn’t want to miss the show either. Watch his arm, Morgan. He’s gonna give a little speech to your sympathetic friends here, an’ then when he raises his arm, I go to work. Reckon it won’t take me more than a few minutes to have you beggin’ for mercy, will it? We both know how scared you are right now—I kin smell fear, you bastard, an’ you’re scared shitless, ain’t you? Ain’t so brave without them guns, are you?”
The crowd stirred uneasily as the French soldiers came to attention. In spite of himself, Steve had glanced upward and to his right, where Colonel Devereaux stood in the full regalia of his exalted rank. It was too far away for him to be able to read expressions, but he needed to be blind not to know that the woman who stood close beside Devereaux was Ginny. Her shiny ball dress looked oddly out of place here, and her hair, still worn loose, glittered with a fire all its own under the sun.
The colonel had begun his speech, his best parade-ground voice carrying clearly across the now-silent courtyard. Steve didn’t hear him. So she really hated him that much, did she? She had to watch, to gloat over his punishment. I’ll be damned before I give the bitch that much satisfaction, he thought suddenly, feeling the determination he thought he’d lost come back to stiffen him. Deliberately he looked away and met Concepción’s eyes again. She looked terrified, and he smiled at her encouragingly, seeing her mouth open in a soundless gasp of concern. “Don’t worry, chica,” he wanted to tell her, “it’s not going to be that bad. And don’t do anything foolish. Try not to let them see you’re upset.”
In this instance, Colonel Devereaux did not bother with a long speech. Like Tom Beal, he was anxious to get started.
Warned by the sudden stillness and Concepción’s widening eyes, Steve Morgan clamped his jaws together as he heard the whistling sound of the whip, just before it landed, with sickening force, across his bare shoulders.
The pain was worse, even, than he had expected. Liquid fire, writhing snakelike over his cringing flesh. And before Steve had been able to catch his breath the biting strip of leather had slashed downward again, tearing into his flesh so that drops of blood flew into the air. “God!” he muttered, his body shuddering involuntarily, and Beal hearing, laughed wickedly.
“Whatsa matter, Morgan? Beggin’ already?”
Every ounce of stubbornness and willpower he possessed collected in Steve Morgan’s brain, filling him with a dogged determination that almost wiped out everything else. He closed his eyes, teeth gritted, feeling the splinters from the wooden post embed themselves in the skin of his face and chest as he pressed against it. Concentrate, you have to concentrate…the thought pounded at him, blurring even the nauseating crack of the lash every time it cut into his flinching flesh. Beal, disappointed that he hadn’t heard another sound out of his victim, went to work with determination.
The whip sang through the air, slashed through skin and muscle as Beal’s arm worked tirelessly. The man was an expert, no mistaking it, the French sergeant thought with grudging admiration. The only question was, how long could the prisoner last under this merciless onslaught?
The prisoner, had he but known it, was almost beyond coherent thinking. His body now sagging against the post, held erect only by his bound wrists, Steve Morgan fought almost by instinct against the purely animal, primal urge to open his mouth and scream aloud with agony until his lungs burst, if screaming would bring him some relief. The muscles in his arms felt as if they were slowly being torn apart; his wrists were cut so deeply that he felt sure the rawhide strips had already penetrated to the bone. He held his breath, hoping that the lack of air would make him pass out, and then the whip would come down like a crimson explosion of pain, crushing him against the immovable post, driving the breath from his body with a gasp. He couldn’t take this terrible punishment much longer—almost he prayed that Beal would strike harder, let his blows come faster, so as to make an end of it quickly, before he disgraced himself and still retained enough sense to face the bitter knowledge that he was a coward, after all, and just as weak as any other poor wretch who’d had to undergo this same ordeal.
Steve’s mind sought desperately to escape—to detach itself somehow from the helpless agony of his tortured body. There was a dull pounding in his ears—each hammer-blow of his own pulse sending a separate vibration of pain through his entire frame.
Concentrate! For God’s sake, for your own, concentrate on something, on anything other than this! The insistent screaming of his mind seemed almost to come from outside himself. He was on fire, if only he could find coolness somewhere, and peace! He fixed his dulling mind on water, deep and very cold. A spring in the high forest he came to once; so deep it seemed green and bottomless—dappled with pale sunshine filtering through the leaves high above. Rain forests, dripping with moisture; wet, dark—the only sound the steadily falling water. Miraculously, the pain of his racked and bleeding body seemed to be fading away, leaving only a creeping numbness in its place. He knew it, each time the whiplash connected with torn flesh and muscle, but only from the vibration and the helpless, involuntary writhing of his body’s attempts to escape. He saw the icy breakers of the Pacific Ocean at Monterey, tumbling over each other as they foamed their way to oblivion among the wet black rocks. Unconsciousness came at last in great, smothering billows, like fog…
“Monsieur Beal! There’s no use going on, he’s unconscious, he can’t feel anything now. The colonel says you are to stop!”
Tom Beal felt what was almost a kind of madness seize hold of him. His lips drew back from this teeth in a savage snarl of frustration. Dammit! Damn it to hell! This wasn’t going at all the way he’d planned it. Why hadn’t Morgan screamed out loud? Why hadn’t he broken like all the others, begging for mercy, begging to be allowed to tell everything he knew? It wasn’t possible that any man could resist the persuasion of the whip, especially when he, Tom Beal, the expert, was wielding it.
His arm ached—sweat poured down into his eyes, drenched his clothing. He was going to kill this bastard—he’d have them turn him around and tie him with his back to the post this time, so he could really go to work on him. When he got through, if Steve Morgan hadn’t talked, he wouldn’t even be a man.
“What does he think he is, a goddamn hero?” Beal swore aloud. He swung on the stony-faced sergeant. “What in hell are you waiting for? He’s shamming—throw some water over him an’ he’ll be ready for more; and I can guarantee you that this time he’ll start squealin’ like the Juarista pig he is!”
Beal was so maddened with rage that he raised his arm again, wanting to strike, to maim, and he was momentarily disconcerted when Sergeant Malaval’s steely fingers grasped his wrist, stopping his arm on its downward slash.
“I have said—it is the colonel’s orders! It is his place to make the decisions here, and we will wait. You understand?” the sergeant added in a harder voice, watching the expression on Beal’s face.
“Goddammit!” The American’s voice was savage. “I had him—another minute would have done it. Your colonel better damn well make the right decision, or we ain’t gonna be able to show our faces around here. Look at them—bunch of dirty peons starin’ at that spy like he’s some kind of God because he didn’t yell yet. I’m tellin’ you, Sarge—we better not back down, not now, or they’ll all think they can get away with the same thing.”
37
Colonel Devereaux, standing on the small balcony with his hands locked behind his back, felt almost as frustrated as Beal did. Why did this particular man, who had already given him so much trouble, have to prove so stubborn? Beal, as he well knew, was an expert—Esteba
n Alvarado, or Steve Morgan, whatever he chose to call himself—he should have broken a long time ago. And he, Raoul Devereaux would not have found himself in the quandary he did now.
Damnation! He should not, perhaps, have made this “interrogation” so public. But how was he to know? Crazy, arrogant, half-gachupín American! He’d meant to make an example of him, to show these peasants how easily these Juaristas, who raved of patriotism and freedom, could crack under a few swipes of the whip. Now, simply because the man had been too proud to cry out, they’d be thinking him heroic—a martyr of the revolution. He would not have it! Alvarado was a spy—a common criminal who had to be punished. He must show these people that the French dispensed stern justice to spies and traitors.
And yet—tempering his rightful anger, came the uncomfortable thought of possible repercussions. There was the woman to be thought of too. Now collapsed in a sobbing, crumpled heap at his side, with only the manacles he had ordered fastened to her wrists to keep her at the balcony rail, she was still a problem to be reckoned with. He had to remember that these were no ordinary peons he was dealing with. As his prisoner had already pointed out with supreme insolence, Don Francisco Alvarado was a man of far reaching influence as well as being one of the richest hacendados in the whole of Mexico. He had hoped that with a full confession he would be able to forestall any angry reactions on Don Francisco’s part. But now—Colonel Devereaux swore to himself again, his eyes lingering in spite of himself on Ginny’s bright hair.
What a woman! He could feel himself flushing angrily when he remembered the insults and the threats she had shrieked at him when she found out what was happening to her husband. She would tell the whole world of the methods he used—how he had tricked her. She would have American armies here to avenge her—her uncle in Paris, who had the emperor’s ear, would see to it personally that the colonel’s career would be finished. Such threats—such fury! And then, typically female, she had begun to weep and wail and beg him to stop the torture. Even now, she sobbed uncontrollably, her shoulders heaving. He should not have brought her here perhaps, but Dieu! He could not help desiring her! He had thought to be subtle—to play with her, trick her and then cow her into submission. To possess her body and feel her trembling flesh under his as she opened herself to him. And she had dared threaten!
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