“But why did you enlist—­a man like you?”

“Why?” He pondered the question.  “I was young.  I guess I needed the excitement.  I have to get about so much or I don’t enjoy my food.”

“Did you join the Maderistas for excitement?”

“Mostly.  Then, too, I believed Panchito Madero was honest and would give the peons land.  An honest Mexican is worth fightin’ for, anywhere.  The pelados are still struggling for their land—­ for that and a chance to live and work and be happy.”

Mrs. Austin stirred impatiently.  “They are fighting because they are told to fight.  There is no patriotism in them,” said she.

“I think,” he said, with grave deliberateness, “the majority feel something big and vague and powerful stirring inside them.  They don’t know exactly what it is, perhaps, but it is there.  Mexico has outgrown her dictators.  They have been overthrown by the same causes that brought on the French Revolution.”

“The French Revolution!” Alaire leaned forward, eying the speaker with startled intensity.  “You don’t talk like a—­like an enlisted man.  What do you know about the French Revolution?”

Reaching for a coal, the Ranger spoke without facing her.  “I’ve read a good bit, ma’am, and I’m a noble listener.  I remember good, too.  Why, I had a picture of the Bastille once.”  He pronounced it “Bastilly,” and his hearer settled back.  “That was some calaboose, now, wasn’t it?” A moment later he inquired, ingenuously, “I don’t suppose you ever saw that Bastille, did you?”

“No.  Only the place where it stood.”

“Sho!  You must have traveled right smart for such a young lady.”  He beamed amiably upon her.

“I was educated abroad, and I only came home—­to be married.”

Law noted the lifeless way in which she spoke, and he understood.  “I’ll bet you hablar those French and German lingoes like a native,” he ventured.  “Beats me how a person can do it.”

“You speak Spanish, don’t you?”

“Oh yes.  But I was born in Mexico, as near as I can make out.”

“And you probably speak some of the Filipino dialects?”

“Yes’m, a few.”

There was something winning about this young man’s modesty, and something flattering in his respectful admiration.  He seemed, also, to know his place, a fact which was even more in his favor.  Undoubtedly he had force and ability; probably his love of adventure and a happy lack of settled purpose had led him to neglect his more commonplace opportunities and sent him first into the army and thence into the Ranger service.  The world is full of such, and the frontier is their gathering-place.  Mrs. Austin had met a number of men like Law, and to her they seemed to be the true soldiers of fortune—­fellows who lived purely for the fun of living, and leavened their days with adventure.  They were buoyant souls, for the most part, drifting with the tide, resentful