Dismounting, Miguel Alvarado stepped swiftly to the girl's side, threw his arms about her shoulder and waist, and drew her back among the trees and out of sight of those about the fires. She did not scream; she did not seem affrighted in the least. Only when he strove to kiss her, she put a slow but determined hand upon his forehead and pushed away his impetuous lips.
He forebore to combat her for that which she would not give. Crushing her to him, he whispered triumphantly, "Ah, my Paquita, maiden of my soul! Did I not say rightly, when I said we should meet again?"
Evidently she had not been quite certain whom he was until he spoke. For now, she writhed free from his arms, her face contorted with loathing and wrath.
"So you come sweethearting again, you vile louse of a Busno! Si, seguramente, si—we meet again! But I met with hunger when I was a child, and I met hunger often since, and I like hunger the less at each of our meetings. The same with the cholera! The same with you!"
A cold and haughty tower of ivory, she faced him. Her face was superbly royal with high disdain.
"Go away at once or I will set our scavenger curs on you! Have I not warned you before this never to approach me with your treacle words of love, your kissing lips that turn my blood to vinegar, your caressing arms that make my skin shudder and creep? Go away, you itch, you ringworm! You are not a man; there is nothing masculine, varonil, strong and savage about you. All you can do is to moon and coo and sigh; you are a sot ever thirsty for love; you are a soft, shapeless blubber of passion! And how can you come near me when you know you are one of the order of men who murdered my brother for poisoning a few poor pigs and for stealing a few poor horses?—you, a man of the Guardia Civil, the enemy of my clan and race since time out of mind; our blight, our scourge!"
Beneath the bite and lash of her words, beneath the scorching fire of her scorn-filled eyes, a lesser man than Miguel Alvarado would have shriveled into a smoking black cinder. But never he. Folding his arms across his chest, he waited in a dramatic silence while the wrack and tempest swept over him. Then, slowly, theatrically, he raised his arms above his head, and uplifted his eyes, and addressed himself to the serene heavens—under the circumstances, the obvious and altogether Spanish thing to do.
"Senor Don Dios!" he apostrophized solemnly. "My soul leaps like a flame with love for her—I love her unto death. And she repulses me! What shall I do?"
Go away and leave her victorious in her disdain? Not Miguel Alvarado!
When Pascual Montara finished questioning the Gypsy chieftain and hetman, and came seeking his compañero through the trees, he found them together still—the hot-blooded young policeman and the lithe Paquita of the nut-brown legs. Miguel Alvarado had progressed some way with his bitterly contested love-making. But she still shrugged away from him when impetuously he approached too close.
Having left his horse in a distant quarter of the clearing, on foot through the gloaming came Pascual Montara; and, glimpsing the girl in the shadow of the trees, he halted dead and eyed her with wonder and admiration. She wore a printed calico dress of deep vermilions and flaming saffrons, and a grass-green scarf was wound, in the Gypsy fashion, among her ink-black tresses. There was a string of copper coins upon her bosom and a bangle of copper coins upon one wrist. Her dress came but little more than half-way down her bare, symmetrical and richly polished legs, and it was open at the throat to show glimpses of her small brown breasts and of the swale between.
Letting Miguel Alvarado talk as he willed, she stood watching him out of slow gloomy eyes. His elocution was fluent, full of zest, soul-moving; his words were gorgeous, magnificent, glowing with color and music. One moment he called her a baggage, a jade, a wanton, a thing of ugliness, a soiled and tawdry wench. The next, he called her a virgin most pure, most chaste, most admirable, and endowed her with every beauty and charm ever conceded by a lover's tongue, appraising separately and in sequence her features, her contours, her color, the texture of her skin, the fineness of her hair. With bold, splendid splashes of color and enunciation, he lifted her up, up from the degradation and the mire to which he so lately had debased her, and put her upon the apex of the world, erecting her upon a pedestal above all other women, his words a coronation, a canonization, and an apotheosis. When he had done, she raised a little brown hand to her mouth, and yawned prodigiously. Then she turned away.
Pascual Montara came forward, loudly rattling the fallen leaves with his feet to apprise Alvarado of his nearness.
"Let us be on our way," he said. "I have questioned this Pepe Flammenca and others of the Gypsy bucks, questioned them as though I were Fray Tomas de Torquemada himself! They know less of the men we seek than do sucking infants of sin. Come, Miguel Alvarado! It grows dark, and you will forget your duty to the Guardia Civil if you linger long here!"
Young Alvarado flashed an angry look at him. Then, suddenly getting in hand, he shrugged himself calm and said:
"Morales and the rest have not been here, eh? Well, let us clear our heels of the filth of this vile-smelling place before dark, then."
Without another word, he turned his back upon the girl and went seeking his pony among the trees. A sibilant, softly called Gypsy word, repeated twice, and the horse came clattering through the underwood toward him like a well-trained dog.
He mounted. Pascual Montara had gone striding across the clearing to retrieve his own animal. The girl lingered under the trees, standing as he had found her, her back against the trunk of an algarroba, the toes of one nut-brown leg scratching the calf of the other, her eyes pensive.
"My Paquita," said Miguel Alvarado, sidling near her on his horse, "there is an ancient and massive wild olive far down at the gateway to this barranca. And it looks like a tall and handsome cavalier waiting for the moon to rise that he may have a meeting with some Gypsy girl who is his beloved."
She looked slowly up at him, then away.
"My Paquita," he persisted, "you have seen this wild olive, have you not?"
She did not answer him.
"My Paquita," he said again, "you are a Gitana. Tell me; you are wise in reading nature; will there be a moon clear of clouds to-morrow night?"
She slipped away from the trunk of the algarroba and started off toward the clearing. Suddenly, she paused and looked back over one shoulder. She answered his questions in the order asked.
"The wild olive is well-known to me, and there will be a fine moon to-morrow night. But there will be no meetings at the wild olive between you and me. I have no appetite for your caresses and kisses; I would hate you, did I not think too little of you. You are only a cinder in my eye! I have kept myself a virgin all these years for some man more bold and brutal and magnificent than you!"
Pascual Montara had mounted his horse and was waiting in growing impatience.
"Hola, mi compañero!" he called. "What is keeping you?"
Trotting his horse out into the open space where were the three fires of black smoke and dancing embers, Alvarado joined him. Together the two policemen rode away up the shadow-haunted alleys of the steep and narrow barranca.
With a great gusto, the Gypsy bucks assaulted their evening meal. They had no need of plates nor forks. Three wolfish circles of men swiftly formed about the three steaming pots, which had been taken off the fires and left standing upon the grass. The pots contained the ubiquitous national dish of Spain, the puchero, that most savory of stews. Into the pots the Gypsies dipped with their navajas—those long, wicked-looking clasp-knives—and with their fingers.
It was like a grab-bag. In that puchero one could not know what variety of meat or vegetable one might pluck forth. The Gitanos went at the business of eating with a singular moroseness; they were like glum and voracious animals. When any secured a chunk of meat too large to be swallowed in one desperate mouthful, it was torn into more reasonable pieces by hands and teeth, or sawed into lengths by the ever ready navajas.
The women and children waited wistfully apart. It was not for them to sit and eat until the last of the males had done. They were the weaker, and they must take thankfully that which was left them by the strong.
One by one, the bucks got up from about the pots of puchero, licking their lips and reaching for papers and tobacco. The three fires had decayed and become mere hillocks of embers. The men formed new and more indolent circles about these, smoking lazily, their eyes dull and complacent with eating. Chattering like famished sparrows, their voices sharp with eagerness, the women and children fell hastily upon the remnants their men had left.
It was about this time that a party of cabalgadores, riding hard, passed the massive wild olive that stood at the dingle's gateway like asereno, like a metropolitan night policeman at the corner of a dark and narrow street. Keeping steadily on, they rode through the obscurity of the corridorlike reaches of the barranca, and swiftly drew near the opening among the trees and the camp of the Gypsies.
Soon they glimpsed the red of firelight through the underwood, and caught snatches of the shrill chattering of the women and children. There was an undertone of music from the camp, the soft reedlike notes of an accordion, and suddenly a man's voice began chanting "The Song of Juanito Ralli":
"The false Juanito, day and night,Had best with caution go,The Gypsy Cales of Yeira heightHave sworn to lay him low."Throughout the night, the dusky night,I prowl in silence round,And with my eyes look left and right,For him, the Spanish hound,That with my knife I him may smite,And to the vitals wound."I'll wash not in the limpid floodThe shirt which binds my frame;But in Juanito Ralli's bloodI'll bravely wash the same."
"The false Juanito, day and night,Had best with caution go,The Gypsy Cales of Yeira heightHave sworn to lay him low.
"Throughout the night, the dusky night,I prowl in silence round,And with my eyes look left and right,For him, the Spanish hound,That with my knife I him may smite,And to the vitals wound.
"I'll wash not in the limpid floodThe shirt which binds my frame;But in Juanito Ralli's bloodI'll bravely wash the same."
The strangers halted in the concealing underwood, drawing close together. Words passed in whispers; then the group of five separated. Three of the party moved slowly and quietly away through the trees; the other two waited, motionless as rock.
At length, the feat in strategy was successfully accomplished. In each of four sectors of the palisading circle of foliage and shadows which surrounded the opening among the trees, there waited a man, silent and watchful, a carbine ready in his two hands. No one of the four dismounted, but suddenly one rode briskly out into the clearing.
"Who is this?" cried Pepe Flammenca, starting up. "Not another policeman!"
"No, lo quiera Dios!" quietly returned the horseman. "God forbid, no!"
He halted his horse half-way to the groups about the fires. The Gypsy fellow with the open shirt and yellow sash had abruptly quit singing and playing the accordion. The very children were frightened into large-eyed silence.
"Ah, you are one of theErrate, one of the Blood!" exclaimed Flammenca. "It is a Zincalo that speaks, a Romano, a Cale. Is it not,hombre?"
"God forbid that too!" the horseman laughed shortly. "Approach, Pepe Flammenca, and see for yourself whom I am."
There was in his voice a certain imperious note. The gigantic Gypsy count moved slowly forward. He peered at the brown youthful face beneath the broad-brimmed felt.
"Jacinto Quesada!" he whispered sharply, falling back a step. He looked over his shoulder at his Roms scattered upon the grass. They had heard his sharply sibilated whisper; and an echo of that whisper had passed over them as each repeated the name and sat up, dramatically moved.
"What do you do here, Quesada?" asked Pepe Flammenca.
Quesada ignored the question.
"Tell me," he said, "how long have you been encamped in this spot?"
"Four of our wagons have been here a fortnight. But three that had been delayed on the way joined us in this spot only this afternoon. I and my daughter, Paquita, came with the vanguard."
"There is a singular troop of cabalgadores somewhere upon the plains," remarked Quesada, studiously regarding him. "They are nine—all strangers to the countryside. They are led by a man known from end to end of Spain, the redoubtable espada, Manuel Morales. Two among them are outlanders; the one a Frenchman, the other an American.
"I seek news of them, Count. Perchance you may have encountered them in traversing the high parameras of La Mancha? Perchance you may have entertained them with a puchero in your encampment here?"
"Neither have I bespoke them nor have I had sight of them," returned Pepe Flammenca with great certitude.
"No? But of course not! It is only four days ago that they first enterprised abroad. However, the wagons of your caravan that just came up to-day will surely have some word of them. These cabalgadores of Manuel Morales are an uncommon looking lot; some of them are outfitted in the full ring regalia of bullfighters; and the bright reds, greens and yellows of their costumes have caused the vaqueros and herders, who chanced across their path, to become puzzled and amazed and extravagantly talkative. Then, too, they bristle with Mausers and Mannlichers, and are heavily weighted with bandoleers in which cartridges are as thick as teeth in a man's mouth.
"Small wonder, Pepe Flammenca, that tongues have wagged and legends been fabricated—Morales and his men are nine of the most outlandish cabalgadores ever seen in these parts; they are nine Quixotes, as fantastic looking and out of place upon La Mancha as was the Ingenious Gentleman himself! Myself, I had word of them borne me across the wastes by a dozen different arrieros, and by the hard-riding horseboys of certain innkeepers of my acquaintance.
"It is strange, but I, and I alone, know on what business they ride. But then, I am the man they seek—I, Jacinto Quesada! But, Count, you are not making any inquiries among the men of the three wagons that joined you to-day. Do so at once!"
"There is no need, Don Jacinto. Already I have asked questions of them."
"But, man, you have not budged a foot! Carajo! do you think to trifle with Jacinto Quesada?"
"God forbid, no!" returned the gigantic Gypsy hastily. "But I speak the truth, Senor Quesada—already have I made inquiries among my men for news of this Morales and his cabalgadores. Don Jacinto, it may surprise you, but others have been here no more than an hour ago seeking news of this selfsame Morales and his fantastic troop. They were two men of the Guardia Civil and—"
"Hola! Two Guardias Civiles? And no more than an hour ago? When they left you, which way did they ride?"
"Right on up the barranca—towards the mountains—and they did not stop for food."
Jacinto Quesada, keeping the Gypsy chieftain transfixed with his eye, raised his voice so that it carried all through the clearing and even out to the shadows beyond:
"Carajo! they were here, eh? Two Guardias Civiles—and they went right on up the barranca!"
At once and silently, two of the cabalgadores waiting in the shadows moved off up the dark defile. It was as though they were play-actors hidden in the wings of a stage, and the loudly shouted words of Jacinto Quesada were to them an awaited signal, a cue to be immediately obeyed.
"What do you desire of us, Don Jacinto?" asked Flammenca of Quesada, without seeming to notice his change of voice.
"Food."
"Sit down and eat. You are most welcome."
"Do you think Jacinto Quesada will be satisfied with your leavings and the leavings of your brats and wenches? Besides, there is not enough stew left to satisfy my stomach. I have the appetite of three men."
He looked at Flammenca a long moment, then added, "And again, I have a following of four cabalgadores who will be here shortly. Their stomachs must be well garnished. They have ridden hard and steadily these last four days."
"Any you bring with you are most welcome here, Senor Quesada, my friend. Are not the Gypsies forever the friends of outlaws?"
"One of those who will come will be a lady, a gentle highborn lady—"
"Tell her to come forward out of the shadows, man! Why keep her waiting outside the clearing because of your foolish distrust of us? We Gypsies mean no treachery by you or yours,ley tiro solloholomus opre lesti—you may take your oath on that!"
The two men looked at each other for a long minute. Then Jacinto Quesada, in perfectly good grace, turned his head and called, "Forward, my Felicidad!"
She came forth, the golden-haired girl, riding a tobacco colored mare of the small but hardy Manchegan breed. She looked very proud and highborn and lonely, as she walked her horse slowly toward them.
"You are safe from all harm here,madama," said Flammenca, bowing low. "Rest yourself and soon you will eat. My own daughter, Paquita, will serve you. We are your good friends even as we are the good friends of Jacinto Quesada."
Very courteously, he helped her dismount.
Just then sounded, very suddenly, the hoot of the eagle owl. It came from up the barranca. As it vibrated sharply between the steep high walls of the canyon, Flammenca turned and looked at the young bandolero, cocking his ears the while. Quesada, in the act of dismounting, paused also and listened. The sound came again, a singular bird note, not much the ordinary hoot of an owl, but more a growl and something of a gruff scream.
Pepe Flammenca strode quickly to Quesada's side.
"The men you sent up the canyon after the Guardias Civiles have returned, I see," he said. "Call them in! You are overwary of me and my people, Don Jacinto. Such caution is commendable in most circumstances, but not when you deal with the Zincali. Trust us, Quesada; we will not betray you! Have we not for hundreds of years been outlaws hunted like wolves? Do you think the men of the Guardia Civil look upon us as their allies? We of the Zincali are thieves, and we honor you for being a greater thief than we. No reward the police of Spain can offer would make us prove false to you and yours!"
A long silence followed. Again Jacinto Quesada looked steadily into Flammenca's eyes and strove to read the soul of the man.
"Very well!" he said at length. He raised his carbine aloft and fired it into the air.
Briskly his three dorados, Rafael Perez, Ignacio Garcia, and Pio Estrada, rode into the clearing. It was noticeable then, in the light from the replenished fires, that no one of them was laden with the plunder from the hold-up of the Seville-to-Madrid. The chances were that they had left the telltale sacks of mail and conglomerate loot in the posada of some protecting cacique, or buried them between the concrete feet of some windmill, or cached them between the boulders in some gully in the foothills.
The three dismounted. With gratification they shook out their saddle-cramped limbs. Jacinto Quesada led his own horse and that of Felicidad over to one of the wagons and picketed them to a wheel. As he did, a nut-brown chit of a girl came and stood before him.
"You are that arrogant and absolute one, Jacinto Quesada!" she asked with rising inflection.
Jacinto Quesada nodded without speaking. The Gypsy girl looked at him in a way that gave him a singular feeling. Boldly she measured him with her eyes, appraised him. Her glance was at once inquisitive, prying, annoying, and yet ardent and approving. She had, too, the strange slow stare peculiar to persons of the Gypsy race, that fixed uncouth look that makes one feel much as if one were being hypnotized by a serpent.
"You are very young to be a bandolero," she remarked, half to herself.
Once again Quesada nodded without speaking.
"You are altogether unlike the bandoleros I have seen."
"It is the deed, senorita," said Quesada. "The deed makes us bandoleros—not the length of our limbs nor the cast of our faces."
"But you are very handsome!" she said. "You are as handsome as the very Hyperion himself!"
Surprised at the ardor with which she said these words, Quesada looked at her with a more curious interest. Small but oddly statuesque, a superbly shaped figurine in her close-clinging calico dress of glowing vermilions and blazing saffrons, she stood with head ecstatically upraised toward him, her dusky eyes radiant with admiration. She thrilled a little toward him, her olive bosom undulating deeply and slowly.
"Who are you, child?" he asked.
"Paquita. I am the daughter of Pepe Flammenca."
Without comment, he made to return to the group about the fires. But she stayed him with a hand upon his arm.
"Tell me," she asked, panting with eagerness; "have you murdered many men on the mountains and on the plains?"
"Carajo, no! No man have I killed as yet, though I have battled with many," returned Quesada, wounded in his manhood. "I am but a simple Moor, not a ferocious beast that lusts to slay."
"But you are magnificent with pride and courage!"
"I love the fierce ecstasy of the running fight, the hand-to-hand skirmish! But there is little cold murder, know you, in my bowels. Now, leave me,ninita!"
Impatiently, he thrust her hand from his arm and started away. But she put herself before him, and once again uplifted her face and bathed him in the gaze of her ardent eyes. And she cried, her voice tremulous with a kind of passion:
"Don Jacinto, I have never before met any one like you! You are bold and imperious, you are savage and mighty, but you are not weakly cruel! And ah, you are handsome—handsome as the very Hyperion himself!"
She suddenly burst into tears and fled away. Quesada looked after her, perturbed, amazed, and sorely puzzled. Her conduct was altogether inexplicable. But the underwood hid her from further sight. He shrugged his shoulders as one who should say, "She is only a Gypsy, poor thing!" and returned to the fires. His meal awaited him.
After they had garnished their stomachs with the puchero, they sat brooding around the three fires, the girl, Felicidad, and Jacinto and his three ruffians. The Gypsy lad with the shirt open to the waist and the yellow sash brought out his battered accordion again and played upon it for their entertainment.
He made it scream and exult obscenely; he made it lament like a fallen angel. He made it sing wild and wanton songs of Gypsy love; he made it chant of Gypsy treachery and Gypsy chiromancy. When you heard its uncouth and haunting assonances, you believed in the Evil Eye, theQuerelar nasula; in theHokkano Baro, the Great Trick; and even in theChiving Drao, that sorcery by which the Gitanos cause horses to become sick and glandered, and swine to die as suddenly as if poisoned. In short, you believed all you ever had heard of the strange doings of the Zincali!
The hours fled by. Those about the fires grew sleepy. One by one, the Gypsy wenches withdrew into their tents. Then the girl Paquita spoke to Felicidad and led her away. They lay down to sleep that night—the highborn young lady and the girl of common Gypsy clay—in a certain wagon of the Gitanos. To that wagon came Jacinto Quesada and his three dorados, a short time later, and upon the open sward before it, threw themselves, their ponchos wrapped around them to protect them from the night cold and dew.
After breakfast next morning, Quesada talked long and earnestly with Pepe Flammenca.
"You had best remain in camp, at least this morning," advised the Gypsy count. "Up above, there is going to be a greatmonteria, and there will be many men upon the mountains. Some one may see the Senor Don Jacinto and report it to the police."
"It is good, friend Pepe. And the other matter?"
Flammenca called aloud in the Gypsygerigonza. Instantly followed a scene of extraordinary liveliness and interest. Flammenca, Quesada, Perez, Ignacio Garcia, and Estrada sat cross-legged on the grass. Flammenca's Gypsy lads led before them, first the horses of Quesada and his dorados, and then the three- and four-year-olds attached to the Gypsy caravan. There was a great chaffering; the various points of the horses were appraised enthusiastically and with minute care. It was an impromptu horse fair. Wherever found, whether in Spain, England, Russia, Hungary, or the United States, the true Gypsy is an expertchalanor horse trader.
When all the bargaining was over, Quesada and his dorados discovered they had not got off second best. They had acquired five new horses, unfatigued and glossy coated after a fortnight in the barranca. Their own jaded animals had come into the possession of Flammenca and his bucks.
"It would please the young lady who rides with us," said Quesada to the Gypsy chieftain, "if she could change her attire for something more suited to the saddle."
"My Paquita will attend to the matter," returned Flammenca. "Let them go together into one of the tents and find out whether their clothing be fit to barter and whether their two pretty shapes are mates."
The girl, Paquita, had been hovering about Jacinto Quesada all the morning. At breakfast, she had anticipated his every desire, waiting on him with silent devotion. Continually she kept her great dusky eyes upon him, following him everywhere he went with a gaze abject and doglike in its utterness of adoration.
Now, Quesada drew forth a packet of tissue papers and a pouch of tobacco, of a sudden and altogether unexpectedly, she stooped above him and seized the papers and tobacco from his hands. Looking fixedly into his astonished eyes, she rolled a cigarette, wetting the edges with her lips. Then she handed thepapelitoto him, made a long obeisance, and turned away.
Her father chuckled and gave her the word to take Felicidad apart and find her fit riding clothes. She withdrew, looking over her shoulder at Quesada with passionate Gypsy eyes.
Sometime later, she and Felicidad came out of the tent into which they had vanished, and Felicidad wore a brown jacket and a brown bisected riding skirt, both rather the worse for wear, and Paquita was completely attired in Felicidad's green traveling dress. The Gypsy girl looked very charming in the more conventional attire, what of her nut-brown skin and dye-black hair against the contrasting green.
She walked about the clearing with the grace of a she-leopard, continually smoothing the tight, revealing skirt over her hips, and rearranging and patting her hair which she had put up in imitation of Felicidad. Preening herself thus, she smiled often in a frank and childlike pleasure in herself. But there were no men about to admire her.
Quesada's dorados had gone behind the wagons to currycomb and further polish their new horses. The Roms, every last dishevel-headed and swarthy-faced lad, had left the camp immediately after the conclusion of the horse trading. Led by Pepe Flammenca, they had stalked silently up the barranca, their Mausers and Mannlichers couched tenderly in their arms.
They were bound for the heights above the barranca. There, in the tag-end mountains of the Sierra Morena, a great monteria, or mountain drive, was under way that day. Senor D. Pablo Lario de Quinones was the host. He was a rich Catalan who had made his millions in the cork industry. He had purchased two or three of the mountains for a sporting estate, and in one of the higher passes he had erected a shooting box. It was the only habitation within miles, for he had ousted the few native mountaineers from their landholds.
Among his guests for this particular monteria were many Spanish notables, high and mighty ones of Letters, the State, and the Church, as well as several foreign ambassadors and their attachés. The Duke of Fernan Nuñez, the Duke of Medinaceli, the Marquis of Viana, the Conde de Agrela, the Marquesa de Manzanedo, Colonel Barrera and Senor D. I. L. de Ybarra were among the crack guns invited.
Lario de Quinones had his own pack ofpodencos, or hunting dogs—arecobaof about forty dogs. But, as is the custom of the sporting gentry of Spain, certain of his guests—the Duke of Fernan Nuñez, the Conde de Agrela, and Colonel Barrera—had brought with them their own packs of podencos and their own huntsmen, to reinforce De Quinones' pack and make the drive a more stupendous affair.
Now, Pepe Flammenca and his Gypsy lads were arrant trespassers on the hunting grounds of the grandees. Should the mountaineers who served as beaters and extra huntsmen come upon them in the brushwood, they would thrash them unmercifully and drive them out of the mountains at the points of their guns. But Pepe Flammenca and his bucks were hardened and desperate poachers. It was their plan to skulk along the line of the drive and to hide themselves in thickets near thearmadaor firing line of gentlemen sportsmen; and should a wounded stag come bounding toward their places of concealment, it would be most swiftly killed and most swiftly borne away to their camp.
A head or two of game would not be missed, nor a rifle report away to one side cause much sensation in all that great to-do of the monteria. To drown the sound of the poachers' guns, there would be the baying and tinkling of bell-carrying dogs, the trumpeting of huntsmen upon theircaracolas, the shooting of blank cartridges to announce that some game-beast had been jumped, the crashing of beaters through the thorny cistus, and the running reports of magazine rifles along therayasor open rides.
After the poaching Gypsies had gone on their quest, Quesada sauntered down to the brook. Here, where an arcade of oleanders shaded a tiny white beach, he seated himself upon a huge stone above a pool. He busied with watching the trout in the riffles and with spying upon two water shrews that swam beneath the surface of the slack water, and dipped and dived, seeking everywhere for food. For something like half an hour, these velvety-black little creatures engrossed Quesada's attention. Then, as pebbles tinkled down near at hand, he looked up to see the girl Paquita coming down the bank.
She seated herself beside him on one end of the stone, swinging her bare brown feet above the pool.
"You have not said that I look very pretty in this green Spanish dress," she said at length. "But that is your thought, is it not? It would not be difficult for me to be the proud and aristocratic lady, eh, man? But I would rebel if I must wear shoes! I think my sun-burnt little feet are prettier naked as they are!"
Quesada smiled and continued to smoke his cigarette.
She leaned her body against the bole of the tree behind, and clasped her hands behind her head, and thoughtfully regarded him. After a time, she said:
"Tell me, caballero of my soul—tell me, have you ever loved a Gypsy girl, a brown, soft-cooing maiden of the Zincali who was sugar and wine to kiss, and velvet and Filipino silk to caress?"
No, Jacinto Quesada had not.
"It is not too late, intrepid one, to make amends! Any Gypsy wench would be most glad to have you for a lover. Even a Gypsy count's daughter, even the loveliest Gypsy maid in all the Spains, would not be too proud to cling to your kisses, Busno though you be! Don Jacinto, I—I—Paquita—could love you, and no trouble at all!"
Persistently, he watched the water shrews in the runlet.
"Am I not prettier than she?"
"Of whom do you speak?"
"This highborn lady, this slow-blooded and cold aristocrat—she who is as pale as a sickly lily, as slender and ungraceful as a growing boy—this Felicidad!"
"I would not say she is too slender, Paquita; I would not say she is too pale! It is only that her sort of beauty does not please you, because it is not the Gypsy kind with which you are familiar."
"It is not that, Don Jacinto! I have seen her unclothed, I have seen her costumed only in her alabaster skin. There she stood in as much loveliness as the Senor Don Dios had thought fit to give her. And I looked her up and down with a woman's eye.Chachipe! the wench had nothing of fascination and beauty about her that I have not! She is young, yes, and soft, yes, and smooth of skin, and somewhat gracefully shaped. But she is at least three years older than I, and she is no more a woman, no better rounded. My breasts are as fully blossomed and alluring! My—"
"Paquita, you are indiscreet!"
"Indiscreet? I, a Gypsy girl, indiscreet? Don Jacinto, we Gitanas are never indiscreet! A kiss or two, an errant arm about the waist, or a hand upon the breasts—what of that? An uncovered bosom, a shapely leg bared to the knee—there is little evil in that. But if you venture too far, if you touch upon our honor, thinking that we and honor to each other are strangers—Tate! you will find a dirk has nosed its way between your ribs!"
She laughed mockingly, showing her fine white Gypsy teeth.
"Am I indiscreet in speaking as I did about this girl of the Busne? Did I not undress and dress her with my own hands?"
"But you need not tell these things to me. I think her beautiful to death!"
"Oh, you cannot love her!"
"Love her? I do not know."
"Ah, but if you once turned your eyes upon poor wistful me—chachipe! you would soon know whether you loved me! I would make you hunger for me like a famished wolf, I would make your blood race and burn! When I danced the jota, or the Romalis, or merely moved languorously about, you would suffer all the thirsty bitterness of hell, all the exalted sweets of heaven!"
Jacinto Quesada looked away.
"But I do not desire to love you, Paquita."
"Si, si; but ah, if you only would! Could you not love me only a little—you who are so proud and courageous, you who are so strong and absolute?"
Jacinto Quesada turned his head and plunged his austere glance into her deep yearning eyes.
"Paquita," he said, not coldly, but without any weakness of pity, "it is because I am strong and absolute that I cannot love you. When your eye caresses me with its look, your tongue with its subtle flattery, my masculinity rebels at the thought of being wooed by a woman; I am revolted, sickened! Fling your soul with the same impetuosity and passion to some Gypsy lad, and he may love you; but I—no, never I!"
She groaned aloud, knowing full well that he spoke a primitive truth. But she could not help yearning toward him, her face bloodless with desire.
Said he, "If you would but flee away from me, or shudder when your glance meets mine, or even treat me with disdain and coldness, perhaps then—who knows? But I must be the predatory one, the seeker, the stalker! Else I cannot love."
He made as if to rise. But before he could get upon his feet, she leaped up and bent above him and kissed him full upon the lips. Then swiftly and blindly she fled.
Once she had gone, Quesada did not bestir himself. He sat gazing morosely into the limpid tarn below his rock.
From a great distance, from away up in the mountains, there dropped down vaguely to his ears the ringing note of a pack of hounds in full cry. Came also, every little while, the bark of rifles remote and far. Quesada gave no heed to these sounds. All through the morning, the mountain airs had wafted through the barranca vagrant notes of this same refrain.
Very suddenly, however, Quesada heard, from much nearer at hand, the voices of men shouting and hallooing. He heard his own name called. The voices drew nearer. The shouting men were in the barranca itself; they were noisily proceeding through the rattling underwood. He heard them on the path above his nook by the pool, still calling his name. He did not lift his voice in reply, nor even turn his head. But suddenly, from the bushes within touch of his hand and right behind his head, a voice spoke out, sharply, peremptorily:
"Aupa, Don Jacinto! There is no time to be lost. Already they are entering the gateway to this barranca!"
Looking over his shoulder, Quesada saw, no more than a yard in the rear and peering through a hole in the bushes, an uncouth disheveled face like the face of a satyr or faun—the Gypsy-eyed, bronzed, and grizzle-bearded face of Pepe Flammenca.
"Of whom do you speak?" asked the bandolero.
Answered Pepe Flammenca; "Of Manuel Morales and his fantastic cabalgadores!"
"We chanced to look down from a great rock on the mountain above," explained Pepe Flammenca, as swiftly he and Quesada returned to the clearing, "and we saw them moving across the broad sallow face of the plain, like slow-crawling sticky flies. For quite a time we watched them, wondering if they would come this way. They approached across the high plains, making straight for the entrance to this barranca. They ascended the hills, and then I returned alone to warn you that they would be here shortly. My lads continued on without me. They will skulk along the fringe of the Senor Don Pablo's great monteria, and I am willing to swear they will not come back empty-handed."
"You counted the cabalgadores—there were nine?"
"Seguramente, yes. And the noses of their carbines flashed like leaping trout in the sun. And two wore scarlet, two yellow, and another green. The green one was Morales himself, yes?"
Quesada nodded shortly.
"They did not ride with impetuosity, you say; they rode painfully slow? We have still time then, friend Pepe, to make a clean get-away before they climb through the barranca. With but fifteen minutes' grace I will guarantee to show my heels to the fleetest caballeros in all the Spains!"
They entered the clearing. Before one of the tents of many colors sat Felicidad like a golden-headed queen. A little court of scantily clad, brown-limbed Gypsy toddlers were ringed about her, engaged in lisping the songs of the Zincali for her entertainment. The verses sounded very strange coming from those soft baby lips; for the words were all of love, ardent and free, of murder and revenge, and of theft and treachery.
His amber Moorish eyes liquid and softly glowing, Jacinto Quesada halted a few feet off, and watched her and listened. A tousle-headed urchin of nine, his only uniform an abbreviated and airy shirt, stepped forward and chanted, with gusto, "The Laws of Romany":
"O never with the Gentiles wend,Nor deem their speeches true;Or else, be certain in the endThy blood will lose its hue."There runs a swine down yonder hill,As fast as e'er he can,And as he runs he crieth still,Come, steal me, Gypsy man."To blessed Jesus' holy feetI'd rush to kill and slayMy plighted lass so fair and sweet,Should she the wanton play."Thy sire and mother wrath and hateHave vowed against me, love!The first, first night that from the gateWe two together rove."The girl I love more dear than life,Should other gallant woo,I'd straight unsheath my dudgeon knifeAnd cut his weasand through;Or he, the conqueror in the strife,The same to me should do."O, I am not of gentle clan,I'm sprung from Gypsy tree;And I will be no gentleman,But an Egyptian free."
"O never with the Gentiles wend,Nor deem their speeches true;Or else, be certain in the endThy blood will lose its hue.
"There runs a swine down yonder hill,As fast as e'er he can,And as he runs he crieth still,Come, steal me, Gypsy man.
"To blessed Jesus' holy feetI'd rush to kill and slayMy plighted lass so fair and sweet,Should she the wanton play.
"Thy sire and mother wrath and hateHave vowed against me, love!The first, first night that from the gateWe two together rove.
"The girl I love more dear than life,Should other gallant woo,I'd straight unsheath my dudgeon knifeAnd cut his weasand through;Or he, the conqueror in the strife,The same to me should do.
"O, I am not of gentle clan,I'm sprung from Gypsy tree;And I will be no gentleman,But an Egyptian free."
Felicidad looked up and flushed to a carnation color under the ardor of his eyes. Then, looking away, she asked, "What is it, Jacinto?"
"Come, my Felicidad! The sun is already high in the sky; it will be thirsty-hot on the upper slopes of the mountains. Let us mount and ride."
Pepe Flammenca had gone through the underwood seeking Rafael Perez, Garcia, and Pio Estrada; he found them out behind the wagons, busily engaged in currycombing and burnishing their new horses. Now he returned with the three at his heels, himself and two of Quesada's dorados bearing a raffle of harness in their hands and saddles on their shoulders, and the third leading by their halters the five barebacked animals.
At once and swiftly, Quesada's ruffians commenced to cinch the saddles upon the horses. Despite haste, the work was done most efficiently.
Quesada called Pepe Flammenca aside. He had become possessed of a new idea. He and the Gypsy chieftain put their heads together. Then Quesada called Rafael Perez over to them with a beckon of the hand. Perez, too, joined in the low-whispered zipizape of words. An impudent and fantastic intrigue was plotted out, then and there, by that assorted trinity. As they separated again, Jacinto Quesada asked with sudden doubt:
"Will it be very difficult to change the appearance of Perez?"
"Not for Pepe Flammenca! Am I not of the Zincali? We of the Zincali can make a young horse seem old and decrepit, and an old horse show as much fire and hauteur as an unbroken stallion! And chachipe! we can change a black horse to white, and a piebald one to the color of tobacco! It is very simple, Don Jacinto, for the Children of Egypt."
"If you can make me pleasing to look at," chuckled Rafael Perez, "you will do wonders!"
Then he and Pepe Flammenca went together into the tent of the Gypsy chieftain, a more imposing tent than the others. His horse thereupon was led back behind the wagons and its harness hung upon the limb of a tree.
"Let us not tarry now. Aupa, you!" commanded Jacinto Quesada.
At the command, Pio Estrada and Ignacio Garcia flung themselves upon their horses. Quesada stood beside the horse of Felicidad and made a cup of his hands. The golden-haired girl put her little foot in the cup and was lifted into the saddle.
Then Quesada walked over to the tent of Pepe Flammenca to say a final word to Rafael Perez. Unaided by a mirror, Rafael Perez was shaving himself with care and yet with extreme haste. Pepe Flammenca sat cross-legged at his feet, mixing a dark stew of pigments in an age-blackened calabash.
"I go, Rafael Perez," said Jacinto Quesada, poking his head under the flap. "I abandon you to your vices, and to Manuel Morales and his cabalgadores. Be prudent and discreet and sagacious, for henceforth you must enterprise single-handed and under cover. And may God go with thee!"
"And with thee, Don Jacinto of my soul!"
Quesada came back and threw himself astride his horse. "Adelante!" he commanded. The three men and the girl Felicidad filed slowly, on horseback, out of the clearing.
As they proceeded up the shadow-haunted alleys of the barranca, their pace quickened. At a smart trot they were approaching the upper end when, all at once, they were confronted by a girl who lingered beside the way. It was Paquita—Paquita with a pink rhododendron in her blue-black hair.
"You here, Paquita?" Quesada blurted. He was in the lead, and the girl disclosed herself with such surprising suddenness that she seemed a spirit conjured up in a blink of the eye.
"I waited here to say farewell to you, senor caballero of my heart," she replied. He made to push by, but she put her hands on stirrup and leg, yearning close. And panting with eagerness, she cried:
"Take me with you, Don Jacinto! For love of you I will give up wandering and all my other Gypsy ways! We shall have a cabana hidden somewhere in the mountains and secure from the Guardia Civil, and there you will repair to be made blissful by me! Take me with you, or I shall sicken and die, for I love you so ardently that I am consumed by fires within!"
"For shame, girl! I am a Busno—I am of another race!"
She got on tiptoe and clasped her bare arms about his waist and clung tenaciously, passionately.
"Leave me behind then, but first—kiss me! Taste of my lips, they are as sweet as the sweetest! Wrap me in your arms so that I suffocate! Then kill me, if you will! Gladly would I die under your hands—death is better than to be disdained by you!"
Quesada, appalled by the strength and ferocity of her passion, drew away. He felt shame before Felicidad. His face aflame, he cried angrily, "I will have nothing to do with you!" And he started on again.
Very suddenly, then, her whole look changed. The ardent light fled from her eyes; forlornly her hands dropped to her sides; her slim girlish figure drooped and wilted. Most woebegone and piteous was she to see. And her voice a plaintive, fluttering sob, she called after him:
"Little caballero of the handsome face, there is a great tree at the entrance to this barranca—a wild olive that stands alone and waiting like a young bandolero who attends in patience until the coming of nightfall and his brown Gypsy love. There will be a fine moon to-morrow night."
"It is of no importa!" said Quesada, without looking back. "There shall be no more meetings of you and me. Go thou with God!"
The girl quivered beneath the scorning words like a flame harshly blown upon. But suddenly she pulsed rigid; a heat sharp as pepper, bitter as bile, violent as the sun, coursed through her veins; her face grew ashy and drawn, her dusky eyes glittered like a cat's. Like a cat she was then, like a beautiful she-leopard wounded into a barbarous and terrible ferocity.
"Go thou!" she screamed—"Go thou with Satanas, the foul-smelling, the gangrened! You are not a man; you are a putrescent sore, an ulcer, a leprosy! I hate you, I loathe you, and I will have your life taken from you some day!"
She ran after him, shrilly screaming her rage. She was a virago, a witch-woman! She picked up a stone and flung it after him. It struck the horse of Felicidad upon the withers. She picked up more stones and flung these. And a thousand vile curses she flung also. Coming thus from a woman's lips, they were worse than an abomination of sound; they were a pollution, a hideous obscenity.
Even Quesada's ruffians were appalled. For himself, Quesada was most glad that the horse of Felicidad was the one struck by the first stone. In a panic, it galloped away. She was soon out of earshot.
They hurried after her.
Not at once did the girl Paquita return to the camp of the Gitanos. Her low broad brow clouded with sullen anger, her dusky eyes somber and morosely smoldering, she clambered swiftly down the rocks of the watercourse. In the precipitancy of her descent, in the headlong hurry and indecorum with which she moved through swale and sunlight and between boulders and clumps of rhododendron, there was yet something of cold decision and steadfastness to purpose. She came out, at last, on the tiny beach of white sand beside the pool.
A red cloth on a rock caught her eye. She snatched it up and clenched it to her heart. It was the head-kerchief of Jacinto Quesada. When but lately he had sat and gloomed on that boulder above the pool, he had dropped it from his pocket and gone off unawares.
She replaced the red headcloth upon the boulder. It lay there in a crumpled crimson heap, and it pulsed a little as its folds eased out. It looked like a dying heart.
From some recess in her bosom, the girl Paquita drew forth a small moleskin sack on a string and shook its contents out upon the top of the rock. There was a looking-glass, smaller than the palm of her small brown hand. There was a flint and a bit of steel. There was a chunk of lodestone, the magnetic iron-ore which the Gypsies of Spain callLa Bar Lachiand which they claim is possessed of a thousand magical and miraculous properties. There were, also, a half dozen other uncouth Rommany charms and talismans.
She propped the hand-glass upright against the crumpled head-kerchief. She fell to her knees before it. With an unwavering and strangely intense gaze, with a stark contemplation, she stared into the eyes reflected from the mirror.
Five minutes, then ten snailed painfully by. The process of self-hypnosis went on. She was like one transfixed by a hooded cobra. Her body grew gradually rigid, and her breathing ever deeper and slower. At last she seemed not to breathe at all. Her eyes vacant and numbly fixed, she rose slowly to her feet.
She crossed the tiny beach of clean white sand. She stooped with a fluent graceful flexure at the brim of the pool, filled her hands with wet sand, and slowly pressed and molded that wet sand into an uncouth little image of a man.
The diminutive effigy she deposited upon the beach, setting it upright on its vaguely defined and overbroad feet. A second time, she stooped at the water's edge, filled her hands with sand, and again packed and shaped that wet sand into a squat little figure. Only this time the effigy bore a crude but easily perceived resemblance to a woman.
She deposited the one image on the beach beside the other. She gathered dry leaves and scraps of tinder-rot and made two little piles of them, each before a tiny figurine. She returned to the boulder, swathed the lodestone in the red headcloth and, lodestone and cloth in hand, bore them back across the beach. And everything was done with extreme slowness, with acute and painful deliberation. She was like a somnambulist in a walking sleep.
She fetched the flint and the steel from the boulder. She could execute, it seemed, only one errand at a time. She dropped to her knees above one of the tiny piles of dry leaves and tinder-rot, and busied herself with the flint and steel. So soon as the one leafy hillock commenced to burn bravely, she translated its flame. The other little bonfire cackled with a like eagerness and gusto.
Stepping back from her uncouth little idols and tiny sacrificial fires, she undid a catch here and another catch there, and her shoulders and then her hips emerged from the green gown, and the gown fell in a swishing billow about her brown bare feet. Clad only in her olive-pale, satin-smooth and satin-glowing skin, she stepped out of the atoll of green cloth and commenced a slow and strange dance there upon the sands.
It was not a dance voluptuous or obscene. It was a solemn dance of statuesque attitudes, and flowing flexures, and ceremonious pauses. Very like was it to some ritualistic dance of the sacerdotal dancing boys of the Cathedral of Toledo. And yet there was in it a taint of sorcery and demonolatry.
She stooped at the water's edge to dip therein her hands. Dancing on, she shook a few drops of water from her finger tips down upon the flames. Smoke arose, a gust of smoke for each trinity of drops. The while her eyes remained fixed and vacant and she danced slowly, she chanted a sort of weird incantation in the gerigonza of the Zincali.
Her voice was very low and came as with great effort. This was the rigmarole she chanted, translated from the Romany, which is descended from the Sanskrit and which it much resembles: