The child he still carried with him, simply because he had
not the heart to leave it to die in the desert alone. A few weeks
later he married an American woman he met in Sonora. They adopted
the child, but it died within the year of fever.
Meanwhile, he was horrified to learn that Dave Henderson,
following hard on his trail, had been found bending over the spot
where the dead soldier lay, had been arrested by a body of
Rurales, tried hurriedly, and convicted to life imprisonment. The
evidence had been purely circumstantial. The bullet found in the
dead body of the trooper was one that might have come from his
rifle, the barrel of which was empty and had been recently fired.
For the rest, he was a hated Americano, and, as a matter of
course, guilty. His judges took pains to see that no message from
him reached his friends in the States before he was buried alive
in the prison. In that horrible hole an innocent man had been
confined for fifteen years, unless he had died during that time.
That, in substance, was the story told by the showman, and
Bucky's incisive questions were unable to shake any portion of
it.
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