"To the Mountain of Olives one morning I hied,Threelittle black goats before me I spied,Thosethreelittle goats onthreecars I laid,Black cheesesthreefrom their milk I made;TheoneI bestow on the lodestone of power,That save me it may from all ills that lower;Thesecondto Mary Padilla[1]I give,And to all the witch hags about her that live;ThethirdI reserve for Asmodeus[2]lame,That fetch me he may whatever I name."
"To the Mountain of Olives one morning I hied,Threelittle black goats before me I spied,Thosethreelittle goats onthreecars I laid,Black cheesesthreefrom their milk I made;TheoneI bestow on the lodestone of power,That save me it may from all ills that lower;Thesecondto Mary Padilla[1]I give,And to all the witch hags about her that live;ThethirdI reserve for Asmodeus[2]lame,That fetch me he may whatever I name."
The rhythm of that solemn dance grew ever more sprightly. Her languor dropped from her like a discarded shift. Faster and faster her brown bare feet beat the sands. She leaped ecstatically in air. Suddenly the dance ended in a whirl of exaltation. Then, for a long minute, she stood like one petrified, like a statue sculptured in onyx, her brown arms upflung, her face uplifted and sublimated. And in the voice of a demoniac, she screamed:
"Oh,el buen Baron! O Asmodeus the Lame! Send an evil upon the arrogant head of the stripling Quesada, he who tore the heart from my virgin breast and then ground it beneath his heel as though it were a ball of dung! Accursed was the salt placed in his mouth in the church when he was baptized, the vile Busno! He is too disdainful of me, too contemptuous! Send a black evil upon him and his, O Asmodeus! O Apollyon! By the three black little goats and the three black little cheeses, I invoke you!
"Humble him, break his heart of arrogant cold granite by making those he loves most fondly fall into fevers and die like flies in a frost! Send an evil of hideous disease upon those about him! Make those about him fall ill of horrid discharges and cramps of the stomach; then weaken them by causing them to vomit a gray pasty whey; then turn their bodies to blue and purple, and then let them die within twelve or twenty-four hours!
"Break his spirit as my father breaks the spirit of a proud black stallion, O Asmodeus the Lame! Do this for thy handmaid and votaress, do this for Caste Sonacai, known to the Busne as Paquita, the child of Flammenco Chorolengro, hetman of the clan of Barolengro and count of the people of Zend!"
You must know that the Gypsies of Spain practice a magic of two kinds. Their magic of the first kind is compounded of pure bunkum and fraud. Always in public do they practice this charlatanry and upon gullible Gentiles whom they hope to hocus-pocus and swindle out of a few pesetas. When they tell a buena ventura, or fortune, by crossing the dupe's palm with a piece of the dupe's gold, this is the sort of arrant nonsense they practice. The Hokkano Baro, the Great Trick, is another of their thieves' devices. The Ustilar Pastesas and the Chiving Drao are still others. In not one of the swindling tricks mentioned do they use any true clairvoyancy or authentic warlockry; it is all sleight-of-hand and humbuggery. At this kind of magic the Gypsies laugh loudest themselves.
Those who in public practice magic in order to hoodwink others, always practice in secret another sort of magic which they consider the true magic, and in which they devoutly believe. This is dogma. Did not the priests of ancient Egypt make magic in public to the cat-headed god Bast, the bull Ptah, and the lioness Sakhmi whom they despised as images of stone and machinery, but to whom they salaamed that the ignorant rabble might continue to be hoodwinked? And did not those same priests make magic in secret to the one true God? Thus with the Gypsies. In secret they practice another and second kind of sorcery which they believe in with a fanatic faith!
And that was the kind of magic the girl Paquita practiced in secret down on the tiny beach by the oleander-arcaded pool. Her execration solemnly concluded, the beautiful and youthful dealer in the warlockry of the Roms became again a hot wind of action. Swiftly she ran to the pool, filled her cupped hands with water, and as swiftly came back again.
The fires had died down into twin nests of coals. She cast no water upon them. What water she carried in her cupped hands, she threw upon that little sand image which resembled a man.
Without pausing to watch the havoc she played with her handiwork, she repeated the action, this time throwing water upon the little effigy which looked vaguely like a woman. Then, her midnight-black hair falling about her face and her dusky eyes burning from beneath the obscuring oily threads with a strange sibylline fire, she crouched on her brown bare heels before the two sodden hillocks of sand.
Now, when standing upright, the two little images of sand had seemed mated divinities, bound together by a common majesty. In their downfall and watery ruin, however, one might say that they had become antagonized; there was that in the way they fell which suggested a coldness between them, a rift, a void. In melting and crumbling, the two watersoaked little images had fallen gently away from each other.
Paquita got up and shook back the hair from her face. Her face was flushed, her eyes glowing with glad triumph. She laughed long and arrantly.
"It is written in the sands!" she exclaimed. "She will never have Jacinto Quesada for her bridegroom. It is written; it has been shown to me! Never will those two lie down together on the bed of marriage! And a plague—even that hideous plague I asked for—shall come upon them; a plague of low fevers and cramps of the stomach; a plague that shall color their bodies blue and purple!"
Hypnosis is an abnormal cerebral state that soon wears off. As one who wakes from a sleep or a spell, the girl Paquita now stretched her arms wide, blinked her eyes, and looked swiftly over her shoulders and this way and that.
Then slowly, her head bowed in thought, her brow knotted in a little puzzled frown, she walked to where lay rumpled on the sand her ocean-green Spanish gown. She slipped into it, returned, stamped into the beach the debris of the two images and then clambered up the rocks. She left the watercourse behind, and neared the camp of the Gitanos.
As she came through the trees that palisaded the clearing round, she heard her father's voice and answering voices that she never before had heard. She hesitated a moment, then crept forward quietly, almost to the edge of the line of trees. Her body hidden by a bush, she parted the screening foliage with her hands and looked out as through a little window.
Her father, Pepe Flammenca, known to the Gypsies as Flammenco Chorolengro, stood face to face with an oddly attired stranger and with him busily talked. The fantastic stranger was hardly thirty. He was a little below the middle height, had a long body and short muscular legs, and seemed all iron and strength.
He wore the black rosette and ribbons of a matador in his coleta, his queue—that long, thick, and sacred lock of hair all bullfighters wear as the time-honored insignia of their ancient profession. His brown Andalusian face was the typical young bullfighter's face—boyish, almost effeminate with its mild contours. Upon his hands he wore riding gloves. Over the shoulders of his short, gold-braided green jacket were slung bandoleers crowded with cartridges. On a belt about his waist hung a revolver and a sheathed knife. The pink silk stockings that clad his legs were almost concealed by a pair of riding-boots of Cordovan horsehide.
Addressing Pepe Flammenca, he said, "A hundred times, in the last four days, we have lost our way on the plains. And now we are about to assault the defiles and goat paths of the Sierra Morena. We must have a guide. You know the mountains; agree to guide us at your own price!"
Behind him, standing in various attitude of attention, was a whole background of men in oddly assorted costumes. When he spoke, they all nodded assent like a Greek chorus, and remarked, "Si, si!" Evidently, the young matador was their spokesman.
"I cannot," Pepe Flammenca answered; "I must stay here. I am the chief of this clan and must remain with my own people. But there is another Gitano somewhere about the camp. To replenish our stock of wild meat, the others went early away, but he and I stayed behind to look after the horses and foals. With my permission, he can guide you. He knows the Sierra Morena thoroughly. I will call him."
Pepe Flammenca turned round, cupped his hands about his mouth and bellowed, "Aguilino!"
Came forth from behind the wagons, another man whom Paquita had never laid eyes on before.
He was clean-shaven, and brown as a mulatto. He wore the corduroy leggings of a Gypsy and a red-striped shirt, and in true Zincali fashion, his head was wrapped tightly with a red kerchief. Where his left eyebrow once had been, was a hideous yellow scar that curved down as far as the cheek bone. What with his harsh and evil features and his mulatto-mahogany skin, this yellow scar gave him an altogether villainous look. In his left hand, he held a currycomb.
As the man approached, Pepe Flammenca turned to another of the strangers and remarked:
"When you first accosted me, after dismounting, you asked me for news of the bandolero, Jacinto Quesada. Three times you asked me, and three times I gave you the same reply. I was most truthful, but you were not assured. You showed me a hand in which lay five gold coins. You thought I had clenched my tongue between my teeth for some good reason, and the sight of the red metal would make me loosen it. But even your tempting golden Alfonsos did not cause me to lie. I have not seen Jacinto Quesada in months, I repeat. I have had no word of him in months. Of his recent movements I know nothing.
"But question this buck of my clan, this Aguilino! You will be assured of my honesty, then. I desire that. I know one of you to be Manuel Morales, the greatest matador in all the Spains, and I desire Manuel Morales to be convinced that Pepe Flammenca is no teller of lies."
"I am convinced already, my friend!" interposed Morales at that. "Your last words convince me."
But another of the strangers, a foreign-looking hombre, proved more cautious.
"We will do what you say and question this man," he agreed in stilted and strongly accented Spanish. "But first let us find out whether this Little Eagle of yours will guide us through the mountains. That's the most important business."
The man with the foreign accent was big, broad-shouldered, fair-haired and as smooth-shaven as any bullfighter. He was square of face, his jaw was a round resolute knob, and his eyes were blue and very steady in gaze. He was garbed in a dark sack suit of rather formal cut, a pair of tan riding boots and a peaked Manchegan sombrero; and heavily equipped with a belt of cartridges, a carbine and a Colt's automatic. It was the American, John Fremont Carson.
The nine fantastic looking cabalgadores closed about the ruffianly Aguilino. They listened eagerly while Carson spoke to him in low persuasive tones. At length Aguilino commenced nodding his head, saying, "Si! I agree. Si! I will go with you."
The tall Frenchman with the waxed mustache, Jacques Ferou, whispered triumphantly in Carson's ear, "We have our guide. Now let fall the name of Jacinto Quesada!"
But the man Aguilino did not recoil at the sharp and sudden mention of the bandolero.
"Seguramente, yes; I have heard of him often. On the plains and in the mountains. He is a most celebrated man. No, I have never seen him in the flesh. Nor have I word of his recent movements. You say that he must have passed this way either in the dark of last night or in the gray of this very morning? Ah, senores, you do not know how many barrancas there are that gutter these foothills! You do not know how like a shadow this man Jacinto Quesada is—how like a fox that skulks and dodges and keeps always his distance from the habitations and bivouacs of men such as we! Jacinto Quesada come to our camp and break bread with us? Ah, senores, senores, that would be too much honor!"
The nine men exchanged glances of disappointment and dismay. They had been altogether off in their guess. Jacinto Quesada had not stopped in passing to hobnob with the Gypsies. He had not passed that way at all. The cabalgadores felt themselves like beagles who mill around and bark in vain braggadocio. Jacinto Quesada had shaken them off his heels. Neither sight nor smell of their game had they.
At this disheartening stage, suddenly from the forest a nut-brown girl in a green dress came out and stood before them. She was round limbed and delicately graceful as any nymph or naiad of the glens and waterfalls. Her dye-black hair hung loose upon her shoulders; two spots of hot crimson burned on the roundness of her cheeks; and her eyes pulsed like fiery opals. She seemed all aflame with some strong emotion. In a throaty shaking voice, she cried out:
"My father lies! This Aguilino whom I have never seen before—he too lies! Jacinto Quesada has been here, in this very spot! He came to this barranca in the dark of last night—he and three dorados and a tall ungraceful wench, pale as a sickly lily! They were given food, they were given shelter for the night. Then went away but two hours ago. They went on up the canyon!"
A sharp gust of wind shrilled through the barranca, rattling among the trees overhead. The sky seemed suddenly to darken, the day to grow colder. Pepe Flammenca snarled aloud, between bared fangs, in the gerigonza of the Gypsies which the strangers did not understand:
"You horrible flea, you maggot of the dung, you vile daughter of an unfaithful mother! Into mytanand say not another word! For every word you have said, you shall pay with ten lashes of greenhide across your bare back!"
The cabalgadores could not know what he said, but they sensed the threat shaking his voice. No one spoke or made a move. The girl looked at her father a moment with eyes like cold gloomy mountain lakes, then moved slowly toward the large tent of the hetman. Her lips were set in a disdainful and a triumphant smile.
About the clearing and above her head, the trees shook and swayed as in an agony. Three great drops of water fell with the weight of leaden bullets and made slow stains upon her green gown. The dog-grass, vetch and darnels of the clearing lifted up and seemed to drink the air. A storm was approaching. Leaves whirled about like a hundred excited birds.
Of a sudden, the girl Paquita paused near the tent to turn her head and fling back the words:
"I have not lied! Though my father will beat me for it, I have told the truth! I hate Jacinto Quesada!"
"Say another word, thou child of a witch-woman and a demon!" sibilated Pepe Flammenca in the Gypsy gerigonza, "and I will kill thee with my bare hands!"
The girl Paquita entered the tent of her father, there to await him and his whip of greenhide.
Suddenly and with great gusto, it began to rain. Great drops of water, lead-gray and heavy as shot, pelted down. The cabalgadores sought the cover of the trees. But the trees afforded little shelter, as the rain volleyed this way and that at the will of the gusts of wind, and each drop seemed to hold a whole cupful of icy water. In a trice, the men were wet to the skin.
Pepe Flammenca motioned them to the tents. Manuel Morales, Jacques Ferou, and the American, Carson, found themselves together beneath the same protection of canvas and vari-colored rags.
"What do you think?" asked Morales.
"That she spoke the truth," returned the Frenchman. "She had on my Felicidad's green traveling dress. Jacinto Quesada has indeed been here."
"But will that great bearded Gypsy beat the girl?" anxiously asked Carson.
The tall Frenchman shrugged his shoulders.
"The Zincali are a strange people,mon Americain!" said he. "And, besides, she said he is her father. Would you interpose between a father and his daughter?"
Carson subsided into a gloomy silence and looked about the tent.
"But this guide, Aguilino," continued Ferou. "He lied to us, Morales. Should we trust ourselves to his guidance?"
"What would you?" returned Morales in Spanish fashion. "We must have a guide in these mountains, and there is no one else to hire. Surely, this Aguilino is better than no guide. We will watch him, we nine men, and above all, we will go on."
The American motioned them into silence. He nodded over his shoulder toward the rear of the tent. Behind them, they saw a naked child asleep on a blanket between two dogs and an old hag of a Gitana crouched in a corner, her eyes alive and fixed unwaveringly upon them.
The men remained wordless but they did not sit down. The smell of unwashed bodies and much-used body blankets of a sudden breathed into their nostrils. The tent was filthy. All at once, the three wished themselves out in the sweet, clean, if wet open again.
"What these folk need is education," whispered Carson in Morales' ear. "Education can do everything!"
"Education, si!" returned Morales in the same manner. "But what they need more is some one with a lion heart, a great golden arrogant heart, to lead them in the fight, to lead them up!"
Jacques Ferou said nothing, but as he followed them out into the open, he smiled his calculating and very superior smile.
Outside, the very mountains above seemed to have melted away into opaque sheets of driving water. The earth was sliding in brown streams from under their feet. The barranca boomed like a thousand drums beaten by mad Arabs.
To make himself heard above the booming of the rain, Jacques Ferou cupped his hands about his mouth and screamed into the faces of the others: "Let us go back. Sacre, we are soaking water here!"
"No!" returned the others, and they grimaced in disgust. But the rain fell with such outrageous passion that it was unendurable; there was naught to do but return within the tent.
Driven to it, they sought the shelter of the tent once again, but found it now a very poor shelter beneath that onslaught of rain. It leaked like a Japanese paper umbrella. And all the time the trees ran with heavy tears, and the rain flooded down with a tumultuous booming and a morose persistency.
That night, after the storm ceased and a spell before the moon rose, a man of the Guardia Civil rode across hills sweetened by the rain, and came in a roundabout way to the ancient wild olive at the portal of the barranca of the Gitanos. Here he dismounted and waited like one keeping a tryst, smoking innumerable cigarettes and kicking up the soft loam impatiently. He was Miguel Alvarado.
At length and on the sudden, he heard sounds as of some one coming toward him down the canyon through the dripping leaves. He hearkened a moment, then lifted his voice in a rich but gentle baritone:
"Loud sang the Spanish cavalier,And thus his ditty ran:God send the Gypsy lassie here,And not the Gypsy man."
"Loud sang the Spanish cavalier,And thus his ditty ran:God send the Gypsy lassie here,And not the Gypsy man."
She came to him from out the trees, the wench Paquita. She was clad in a dress of vermilions and yellows, those vermilions and yellows now bedusked by the soft light of the night. In her hair was wound a green scarf. And, as she approached, she sang the answering quatrain:
"At midnight, when the moon beganTo show her silver flame,There came to him no Gypsy man,The Gypsy lassie came."
"At midnight, when the moon beganTo show her silver flame,There came to him no Gypsy man,The Gypsy lassie came."
Impulsively he ran to meet her. They were like shadows that merged together and became one. They trembled, they swayed; they swayed as the wild olive swayed in the wind of the night. They kissed long and ardently. Then she drew herself away, throwing her head back and holding him off with arms rigidly extended.
"Ah, Miguel, my caballero of the impetuous lips," she sighed, "I could love you with all my heart and soul, but for one little thing!"
"Carajo! what is that?" he asked, his voice sharp with anxiety and eagerness. "Have I not always been the most adoring and tender of lovers—aye, and the most voracious and headlong, too? Did I not hurry pellmell for this meeting, the moment you sent word to me by that Gypsy brat? What have I done to make you think dismally of me? How have I displeased you? Tell me; I burn to know!"
She suddenly drew herself to him and clung there once again, kissing his lips and fondling his head with her hands. He shivered in every limb. He moaned in an ecstasy of delight, and pressed her to him with such impetuosity and gusto that it seemed as if his arms would break her body in two.
Beneath the ardor of his greedy embrace, the girl Paquita shuddered and went very pale in the gloom. A scream rose in her throat but she smothered it, unborn. Across her shoulders, under her gaudy gown, were red raw furrows where her father's greenhide had bitten and seared her. But she made no outcry, she gave no sign, though she was as one who has been tortured horribly and then given up to the iron caresses of a terrible, crushing machine.
His arms relaxed somewhat after a little, and she lay upon his neck and whispered:
"It is not what you have done; you were always the perfect lover. It is what you are. You are a policeman, one of those feared and hated and despised by my clan. I feel shame in loving a man of the Guardia Civil; there is something in my Gypsy blood that makes me feel that shame. It is the uniform you wear, the things that it symbolizes."
"We Guardias Civiles are the bravest of Spaniards. We are most brave and mettlesome men, every one!" returned the young policeman slowly, seeking to marshal his arguments in order. "Most Spanish girls are quick to love us if only because of our smart uniforms and gallantry and daring. And it is as natural for me to be a policeman as it is for you to be a Gitana. My father is a sergeant of the police; he has been in the Guardia Civil for thirty years. And all my male ancestors have been Guardias Civiles back to the long-ago, when they were bandoleros and outlaws who grew tired of being hunted and became Miquelets."
"But if you were more like your ancestors, the Miquelets—ah, then I could love you body and soul!" breathed the girl Paquita. And she went on very softly:
"Last night, there came to our camp in the barranca an outlaw, a salteador de camino. He was strong, he was magnificently strong, and he had a long absolute jaw and bold, proud, imperious eyes. About him, like an odor, hung the reek of the imposing and cruel and terrible things he had done.
"It is natural for us Gitanas to love an outlaw; we Gitanas are outlaws to the core, ourselves. And he was as arrogant as a Bourbon prince, or a sheik of Barbary, or an Andalusian sun on a noonday; but he looked at me only with the eyes of contempt, granite eyes. I made the fool of myself by flinging my body and soul at his feet. He—"
"Cascaras! what was his name?" cried Miguel Alvarado sharply. It was as though a knife had been plunged into his side and twisted this way and that.
"He was the glorious bandolero, Jacinto Quesada!"
"Jacinto Quesada! That swollen toad, that strutting mountebank in rags and tinsel, that upstart, the zascandil! Por los Clavos de Cristo! and you flung yourself at him?"
"But he is altogether the arrogant and brave man, altogether the savage and magnificent one!"
"Carjo! he is only a mountaineer's brat. We grew up on opposite slopes of the same mountain of the Sierra Nevada. His clodhopper of a father sold firewood to the sweet mother of me! He is uneducated; has no resource or originality. And he lacks entrails as well as brains! I am more varonil, I tell you; more impetuous with headlong daring than he. Were there a man such as Miguel Alvarado in the shoes of Jacinto Quesada, there would be things done, I wot! But I will show you what is what. I—"
"Yes, yes, you will show me—how, when?"
But to the ears of Miguel Alvarado the wind had borne sound of the to-do raised by an approaching horse. He hearkened to that pounding and clattering, looking down the sweep of foothills below the barranca. He saw nothing just at once. But the sounds became more distinct, drew nearer. Those sounds leaped toward them in great panther leaps.
Suddenly a man on horseback came bounding over the hogback of a hill right below. He wore the tight uniform and the businesslike look of a man of the Guardia Civil. His policeman's three-cornered hat of shiny leather shimmered in the light of the newly risen moon. With the velocity and abandon of a French dragoon, he galloped full tilt up toward the barranca. And as he came, he shouted:
"Hola, Miguelillo!"
"It is my officer, my parent!" whispered the young policeman, and he swore softly in disappointment. Then, with the absolute obedience of only a Spanish son, he shouted back: "Here I am, Don Esteban, my father! What do you want of me?"
The sergeant of police came up like a driving pillar of sand and dismounted while his horse was in full charge. Swinging his quirta, he advanced swiftly upon the pair. There was in him no sign of the weakness of age. He had a short, knife-sharp white beard, and a face as lean and haughty as a griffon vulture's. From his tricorn hat still hung down, behind his head, a sun shield of white linen cloth.
"Come away with me!" he ordered peremptorily. "I have word that Jacinto Quesada is in the mountains near the Pass of Despenaperros. While there's work to do for Spanish policemen, I'll not have you playing the bear for the entertainment of any senorita in Spain, no matter how fine the moon!"
He peered into the soft shade beneath the wild olive.
"Aha, the maiden is with you, I see! But, zut! this is bad. She and you alone in this abandoned glen—has the girl no thought for what the people of her village will say of her?"
"The girl is a Gitana!" spoke up Paquita proudly.
"A Gitana! Blood of Christ! my son keeping tryst with a Gitana! Have you no respect for your Christian mother, you ungrateful whelp? Have you no pride in your policeman father and in your ancestors that have been keepers of the peace of Spain for a hundred years? Have you no thought of the uniform you wear?"
The father was severely angry.
"This is disgraceful, this is vile, Alvarado, my son! A Gitana, eh! Come away with me, at once. Come away, and no more words with this wanton Gypsy wench, or I shall lay my quirta across your back!"
The imperious old man turned on his heel, strode away, and leaped with one lithe strong spring upon his horse's back. Miguel Alvarado turned from the girl and moved reluctantly toward his own horse. He feared his father too much to disobey him. He feared his father as he feared neither God nor the Devil. He knew his father would beat him without qualm or ruth at the first word or look of defiance or rebellion.
Man-grown though he was, he could prove to you an acquaintance with his father's rawhide quirta by merely baring his young body to the waist. Spanish family life is the most solid and wholesome thing about Spain. Spanish sons and daughters respect and revere those who gave them life; they have been taught respect and reverence at the ends of whips. In the same manner, Jehovah made the Israelites love him; and who, through all the years of the world, have been more faithful to God than the stern race of Jews?
"I will be here, at this wild olive, ere the waning of three nights. At midnight of the third night, meet me, Paquita, virgin of my soul!" whispered Miguel Alvarado, bending down from the saddle.
"You will tell me then what you will do?" she whispered in return. "You will tell me then, will you not, my caballero of the impetuous lips and the great courage? I will remain chaste as gold, pure as a sacrament, for you, caballerete!"
"I will prove to you that I am not unworthy of your great love, my little one. This Jacinto Quesada—za!"
He thundered away after his proud and haughty parent.
Up from the misty profundities of the Llanos de Jaen climbed, like slow obstinate flies, the nine fantastic cabalgadores of Manuel Morales. Also, their guide, Aguilino. They were all afoot. With them, up the altitudes of the pass, yearned seven pack mules, heavy and swollen with great panniers of provisions.
The nine Quixotes and their scarred wolf of a guide had put two weeks of frugal living and heartbreaking toil between them and the barranca of Pepe Flammenca and his unwashed Gypsy clan. Right off, they had lost one horse and then another. The beasts had taken headers off mountainsides. They had consulted with their guide, the man Aguilino. He gave them to understand that horses were considered of very little worth in both the Sierra Morena and the Sierra Nevada. For a caravan of asses, they succeeded in bartering their horses with the arrieros, or muleteers, going down.
Now, after two weeks, they had at last won through the rolling torrent of mountains called the Sierra Morena. They were inching themselves up the long perpendicular miles of the windy gorge of the Llanos de Jaen.
The Llanos de Jaen is very narrow. One would think one could hurl a peseta across it, until one tried. Were it not for the chasmy gap of the Llanos de Jaen, the Sierra Morena and the Sierra Nevada would be one tremendous chain of mountains.
Half-way up, a mule stumbled in turning the flank of a precipice and took the leap, screaming like a soul thrown headlong to Hell. The nine Quixotes clung to the rock wall and felt sick to their stomachs. The mule seemed falling for a thousand years. They did not dare to look down and see it strike. The mule was the one the guide Aguilino had been leading. Perhaps a shove from him had sent it on its way to death. Again, perhaps not.
High above, upon the top of a glassy and steepriscoor overhanging rock, a man had moored himself with a short rope of horsehide. He was Jacinto Quesada. But he did not look the bandolero of the plains. Garbed as he was in alpagartas or rope sandals, the better to grip the precipitous ascents, and in sheepskin zamarra and long shawl as protection against the cold, he looked the true mountaineer.
With the vigilant application of an eagle eying its meat circling all unaware beneath its lofty eyrie, Quesada had been watching the men climb laboriously up the sheer of the pass. Now, as the mule fell to its magnificent death, he nodded his head in approbation and remarked to himself:
"Rafael Perez has finally set to work, I see! That is the first poor mule. But the whole seven must be disposed of, before Morales and his men journey far through the Sierra Nevada."
The nine Quixotes did not know Quesada was perched there, far above them. Long ere they crawled up to the overhanging rock, he had disappeared completely. Yet they felt sure that somewhere beyond, among the snowy crags and moaning canyons of the Sierra Nevada, Quesada was pursuing his way with the girl Felicidad.
A day prior, just before leaping the Llanos de Jaen and coming out of the Sierra Morena, they had stumbled, in a hollow of the hills, upon a mud choza that had the gloomy aspects of a hiding place for bandoleros and moonshiners. The peasant and his wife who lived in the hut had said no to all their questions. No, they had not seen Jacinto Quesada. No, they never had heard of him, they lived so far away in the mountains, senores. Don Jesu, they would not know him from the great Morales himself!
But their half-witted son, a tall, shock-headed, ungainly lad, was struck by the appearance of the cavalcade and especially by the colorful, if oddly assorted trapping of Manuel Morales. Poor lad, he had never before seen such glorious caballeros.
As the disheartened men had made to lead on their mules, he had crept to the offside of Morales' beast and there, hidden from the view of his father, he had engaged in a quick, fearful pantomime.
"What is it?" queried Morales.
Vehemently the feeble-minded lad had pointed on ahead, on toward the Llanos de Jaen and the Sierra Nevada beyond.
"He has gone that way!" he whispered. "Si, Jacinto Quesada himself and a girl white as the snows that fall in these hills. He passed here two days since. Into the Nevadas, into the Nevadas, he has gone, senor don!"
Morales believed him, believed him even more implicitly than if his mind had been sound. Despite the dubious looks and shakes of the head upon the part of the guide Aguilino, all the cabalgadores agreed that the poor feeble-minded fellow would be incapable of perpetrating a deception. With energy and ardor they had pressed on.
Now, as they won to the bare-fanged wind-shrieking altitudes of the pass, Morales and his men felt dizzy; their stomachs churned, their heads were like gas-filled balloons. Sheerly below them dropped the narrow, profound gutter of the Llanos de Jaen. It seemed composed of three parts rock, standing on end, and seven parts air, giddying around in a stew. They drew their eyes away. They felt as if they would like to leave off clinging by their finger nails and slip down into the abysmal void.
They sank down upon the uneven spaces of a granite spire that was as a needle for slimness. Into the north rolled away, like a gray sea of mist, the massive ramifying Sierra Morena. To the south and ahead bulked up, even more imposing of port, the lofty altitudes of the Sierra Nevada. It was like some long and magnificent staircase, its lower steps of mica schist overgrown with gum cistus, rhododendron, and broom, its top a dazzling flow of snow. Crags and peaks, jungled windy cuts, rock-bound alpine lakes, creamy knobs, and sharp obelisks saw-edged the sublime blue like the teeth of some titanic rake. The white melting heads of old Muley Hassan and the Picacho de la Veleta looked but a jump away, and yet with the mighty distance, the pink and purple of rhododendron, the white and pink of trailing arbutus and the green of gum cistus and broom seemed all of the same hazy blueness. It was a stupendous, overpowering jumble of cathedral mountains, colossal mountains, awful mountains.
"The Sierra Nevada has a scowling look," remarked Manuel Morales. "We may thank the good Dios humbly and gratefully, if we come triumphant through those solitudes and steeps."
"We must not lose another mule," said Jacques Ferou. "There are no red deer in the Sierra Nevada, nor wild boar, nor even mongoose. Is it not so? The panniers of provisions are our only salvation."
"And the mules may be eaten, too, when we're hungry enough," added Carson grimly. "I've eaten worse meat in my day in Death Valley, California."
Aguilino the guide heard the remarks without a quiver of his scarred eye.
Late that afternoon, John Fremont Carson halted his mule on the eyebrow of a cliff and the caravan crowded together at imminent risk of one or more going overside. His beast had gone suddenly lame, Carson said. It was standing on three legs, gray head drooping, and attempting every little while to put down its fourth leg.
"Carajo! The cattle must be shot!" said the guide Aguilino at first glance. "The contents of its panniers can be apportioned among the other mules."
"Nothing doing," said Carson shortly. "We can't afford to lose a single mule."
"You are right, monsenor," agreed Jacques Ferou. "In the Sierra Morena, the cabanas of the mountaineers were far between and few, and we succeeded in keeping our strength only by killing our meat as we went. Here, this Sierra Nevada seems as empty of men and wild meat as the deserts of French Algiers. We must save all our panniers, all our mules."
"Let me see the lame foot!" spoke up Manuel Morales suddenly. As are most bullfighters, Morales was wise in horseflesh and its kindred species. He crouched, took the hoof between his knees and examined it carefully. All at once his head snapped up.
"You lagarto, you lizard, you sly trick one!" he shouted at the guide. "What Gypsy trick is this?"
He showed the mule's hoof to the others. Slightly protruding from the inside of that hoof was the head of a nail. It had been driven straight into the quick.
"Come, you flea!" commanded Morales. "Get me a pair of pincers, a hammer with a claw—anything which will grip this nail and help to draw it out."
The guide, glad enough to hide his discomfiture, hurried away. But in a moment he returned with empty hands.
"Senor, we have no pincers, pliers, hammer—nothing of the kind!"
The American blurted out an oath.
"Think you can stump us, eh?" he said collectedly in English. And he borrowed the revolver of Jacques Ferou, broke it, and emptied its six chambers.
"My automatic hasn't the leverage of your gun," he remarked to the Frenchman in explanation.
With the steel finger guard of the revolver he sought, as he spoke, to get a grip on the head of the nail. But the nail had been driven in so far that its head just barely protruded from the surface of the hoof. There was no room beneath the nail-head for the slim steel of the finger guard.
Manuel Morales shouldered him away. Taking the hoof again between his knees, he dug at the head of the nail with his bare fingers. It seemed a preposterous thing to do, but he worked with a gnawing persistency. The mule shivered in every member, and made hoarse, almost human sounds of pain. Suddenly it screamed. Morales, his round face dark with blood and shiny with sweat, his body hunched all in a knot, slowly drew out the nail between the vise of two strong bullfighter's fingers!
"Now we will go on," said Carson.
"And no more of your Gypsy tricks, you lagarto!" Morales warned the guide.
Aguilino ignored the threat.
"The hole is spurting black blood," he said. "Let me make a poultice to stop the bleeding."
He gathered a handful of the stick leaves of a gum cistus which grew in the crevices of the cliff wall, chewed them in his mouth, then spit the cud into his palm and pressed it over the ragged hole left by the nail in the mule's hoof.
Yet, for all the appearance of doing good, he seemed to handle the painful leg with unwarranted brutality. The mule, snorting in agony and anger, recoiled sharply from him toward the brink of the path. Before the others could realize that anything untoward was in motion, before ever they could leap forward to save the beast, he pressed his head and shoulders against the burdened animal and it tottered on the crumbling edge of the cliff, then went over, turning round and round like an empty wine cask, banging its panniers against the rock faces, kicking the air with frail legs, and screaming all the while frightfully.
Manuel Morales caught the guide as he almost followed into the void. With his two strong arms, the matador lifted him bodily into the air and held him over the miles of emptiness.
"You snake in the grass!" he swore. "We will see now with how much grace you take the leap yourself!"
The guide did not squirm. He could not squirm. He was stiff with terror of the misty abysmal depths below. Yet, somehow, he managed to stutter:
"Heart of God, senor, don't! You will lose yourselves—in these savage mountains—without me to guide you! You will all starve to death! Maestro, for the love of Mary the Pitiful, don't, don't!"
There was something of truth in what the guide said. Morales put him back upon the path. But he said with bitterness and brooding menace, "We will lose no more mules. You will see to that, eh, my trustworthy man?"
Aguilino worked more cleverly after that.
In the dusk of the following night, Turiddu, the mule led by Morales himself, went over a cliff, almost dragging the matador along. There was no use blaming the guide, Aguilino. He had not been near the doomed ass during the long morning and the longer afternoon.
Besides, twenty times that day the beast had come within an ace of its eventual finis. Since dawn, it had conducted itself in a contrary and restive manner; it had shied without seeming cause, reared and plunged forward in sudden frights, caracoled and beat the path with its hoofs, and whinnied, snorted, and shaken its head as though unaccountably irritated. It seemed a mule spirited and unrestrainably stimulated by an overfeeding of oats; a mule intoxicated, possessed of a demon!
What had befallen Turiddu in the shadowy darkness of the prior night, Dios sabe! Yet the Gypsies have a jockey trick which might explain the whole mystery. When selling or bartering mules and borricos, they drop a tiny nodule of quicksilver into the long ears of the beasts.
Have you ever suffered a drop of water in the ear and been unable to move a hand to flick it out? The nodule of quicksilver is as irritating as that. It is wet and never still. It frets the mules and causes them to liven up their paces and seem more mettlesome.
Morales and his cabalgadores watched the guide with deep but indefensible suspicion. Vexedly they wondered and worried. Finally, in the next few days, they were provoked into savage anger when three more mules took it upon themselves to act unconventionally, and then die in fits, one, two, three.
These mules were thoughtful and discreet to a degree. They did not leap, screaming, off the walls of the mountains. They expired in their tracks and therefore saved to the nine Quixotes the panniers strapped over their spines.
Morales and his men became, all at once, coldly furious. The third mule in dying, coughed up a round, compactly pressed ball of pointed black-green leaves. Some one in the company had forced handfuls of oleander leaves down the throats of the three mules!
Now, the leaves of the oleander are extremely poisonous to man and beast. Horses and kindred cattle have an instinct which warns them against eating the shrub. But man who has no strong instincts, often dies poisoned by the oleander's juices. It is related that several British soldiers during the Peninsular War cut and peeled some oleander branches to use as skewers for roasting meat over the campfires. Of the twelve men who ate that meat, seven died.
Even a creature as asinine as an ass knows enough to avoid the pointed black-green leaves. Most mules would rather starve than even smell of the plant. Yet, during the nights that preceded their untimely taking-off, some one in the company had forced handfuls of the poisonous leaves down the throats of the three mules.
For hours before the death, each mule had coughed. Also, each mule had simpered, simpered like a convent girl. Simpered is a strange word to use in such a case, but it describes exactly the way the mules had moved and worked their lips in a try to rid their stomachs of the deadly leaves.
Of the whole caravan of seven mules that had trotted so bravely out, there was left now but one sorely burdened ass. The nine cabalgadores weighted the surviving beast with some of the provisions from the backs of the three poisoned mules; they encumbered their own shoulders with the rest; then they continued doggedly on, thinking to kill the last mule for meat, once the provisions upon their backs and in the panniers were completely exhausted.
That night they bivouacked in a stony and savage ravine, and built two small fires, and hugged them close. It was very cold. An icy mountain fog orneblinahad crept down like a clammy gray ghost from the windy passes and frozen snowfields far above. One could not see much farther before one through the thick mist than the nose upon one's face.
They wrapped their ponchos about them and shivered in the damp. A cavern of snarling wind-echoes and of eddying, dark shapes was the steep ravine. Down the length of it, the fog marched like an endless caravan of ghostly, silent, gray mules. The two fires, robust enough and certainly well attended, seemed as pale and anæmic and cold as two incandescents in the black heart of a mine.
Without the fling of the twin fires, a man in sheepskin zamarra, alpagartas and voluminous mountaineer's shawl sat cross-legged on a large boulder and watched the men bulk before the flames, and move back and forth, and lie down, keeping close together for warmth. He did not seem to feel the icy chill of the fog; he did not seem to fear discovery. And yet, should the fires leap up and burn voraciously because of some knot braided with pitch, he would be disclosed most surely to the men about the flames.
For days, however, he had been with them and never once had chance betrayed him to the men he watched. He had clung to a risco above them when they had climbed like slow obstinate flies out of the profundities of the Llanos de Jaen and plunged into the gargantas and barrancas of the desolate Sierra Nevada. He had hung upon their flank as a wolf hangs upon the flank of a gang of deer; as a podenco, or hunting dog, hangs upon the flank of a sounder of wild boar. While they ate, he had lingered near and, with a rare and pensive curiosity, had watched them slowly but surely exhaust the linings of their mules' panniers.
Suddenly, from the boulder on which he sat as quietly as another rock, he lifted up his voice in a long, thin, bestial ululation. Such a somber and unearthly sound is made only by the Spanish she-wolf when, standing above the den of its brood, it gives tongue to a thousand old memories and desires.
One of the recumbent figures about the fires lifted himself upon an elbow and, his face sharp, hearkened intently. Again, from the boulder, uprose the steely cry, mournful as a wail sent spearing aloft from Purgatory. From his elbow, Aguilino the guide lifted himself to his feet.
"When you hear the she-wolf give tongue," he answered to the inquiring looks of the others, "you may be sure that its den and runways are near. The young fat cubs make fairly good meat. I will go out into the darkness, hearkening to the cries of the bitch, and if I am lucky, I may locate the brood for you. God willing, we will have an oteo, a wolf-drive, at dawn to-morrow!"
He walked out of the radius of the firelight and went stumbling through the shadowy gloom. As he brushed through the white buckthorn, arbutus, and holly which sprouted in the more generous soil between the boulders, those about the fires could hear a swishing and snapping, and a regular-spaced crackling from the rich mould under his walking feet. Then all crackling and rustling ceased, and the night was darkly still.
Aguilino halted at the foot of the boulder. The man in the mountaineer's shawl dropped down beside him.
"Rafael Perez," he said, "to-morrow you must murder the last mule!"
"But, Don Jacinto, I dare not! Three times already have they threatened my life, and they regard me forever with the most savage of looks. The others I do not fear so much, but that magnificent one—I tell you I fear Morales so that I shudder at each of his glances. The man looks murder. Believe me, Don Jacinto, he would shoot me like a dog should I make but one more move!"
"Then I must finish that last mule myself. To-morrow, above the Pass of the Blessed Trinity, where the three roads converge into one, I will send down a boulder to crush out its life."
"Ah, that is better, senor don! They cannot blame me if a little rock falls from the heights, while I walk with them through the gap. But how much longer must I endure their scowling looks, maestro? My life is not worth a peseta while I linger with that company."
"They continue to eat, do they not?" said Quesada significantly.
"Si, but it's no fault of mine. Don Jacinto, how could I dare send more than three mules toppling off the mountain walls? You yourself, maestro, told me to resort to the oleander leaves. Remember, it was in that little talk behind the granite crag? But the oleander leaves did not get rid of the panniers of the three poisoned beasts. These Quixotes fill themselves from those panniers without stint, especially the Frenchman. They will continue to eat for a few days—"
"Hola, the Frenchman has an appetite, eh?"
"Seguramente, si! But when shall I quit the distasteful presence of that terrible Morales?"
"To-morrow at dusk, if you will have it."
"A thousand thanks! But what excuses shall I give, Don Jacinto?"
"Say to them that it is not the will of God that you go farther!"
"Carajo, they will shoot me for it!"
"Que, que! What of that? They will only cheat the Guardia Civil of another black rogue!"
Little comforted by the words of consolation, grumbling and shaking his head morosely, Rafael Perez, alias Aguilino, returned to the bivouac of the nine fantastic ones. The other, who wore the garb of a serrano, hurried away through the foggy darkness, his head bent and brow thoughtful.
The following day, as slowly they climbed one of the three roads which led into the mournful Pass of the Blessed Trinity, a huge boulder came bounding down from the granite heights, viciously leaped by John Fremont Carson's head and, having been deflected by a rock above, missed the last mule by a good dozen yards. The guide Aguilino swore in his chest, and no one heard him.
As the sun rose to its meridian, the vertical rays, reflected from the stony bare-fanged walls, gave off an intense heat, and the party halted in a hollow that lay brown and lean between two mountains. The men squatted down to partake of a light noontide repast, and it was then that Rafael Perez approached Morales.
"Caballero of my soul," he said fearfully, "I can go no farther with you!"
"Disparate!" exclaimed Morales, jumping to his feet. "What nonsense is this! Hola, Ferou and you, Carson; the treacherous knave desires to abandon us!"
The Frenchman and American crowded up.
"But he cannot!" objected Ferou. "We will not let him!"
"What reason have you for refusing to go farther?" asked Carson, turning upon the guide.
"Senores," replied Aguilino with feigned humility, but no little trepidation; "it is not the will of God!"
"It is not the will of Jacinto Quesada, you mean!" bit out the American with quick penetration.
Aguilino shrugged his shoulders expressively.
"Senores," he whined, "there are no churches in these mountains, and men of the good Dios come but seldom here. In these mountains, the will of Jacinto Quesada moves stronger than does the will of God!"
"Ah!" exclaimed Morales, with sudden understanding. "So that's it, eh?" And his youthful face cold and grim, he lifted his automatic pistol and shoved it beneath the nose of the guide.
"Smell of its maw, my good hombre!" he commanded metallically. "Now tell me whose will you will obey!"
Aguilino grimaced like a frightened monkey.
"Heart of God, Senor Don Manuel, I will stay, I will stay!"
They went on through the hollow in the northern hills. And Aguilino shook his head.
"It is that terrible Morales," he mumbled to himself. "Don Jacinto does not know him. Twice has Don Jacinto failed me this day."
They went up a dark green corry that looked like the hiding place of savage wolves. It was a narrow bridle path, a mere tunnel hewn out of solid rock and overarching foliage. The afternoon drew into twilight; a dim fresco held beneath the plait-work of lentisk, oleanders, and clinging briar; and then, all at once, the corry topped its rise and began descending, plunging down abrupt rock faces and zigzagging about the mountainside like the spiral of a corkscrew. It made the spine tingle to think that one false step in the darkness might precipitate one into the unseen murmuring stream far below.
They camped, that night, in a dell at the foot of the corry, not far from the constantly crashing stream. When they sprawled out to sleep, Morales and John Fremont Carson drew close on either side of Aguilino and carelessly dropped a leg across his legs, one from the right, the other from the left.
But they slept too well, those self-appointed bodyguards. What with the fatigue poisons that had been gathering in their joints and muscles during the long toilsome day and the many days which had preceded it, they could not hope to bat one eye in sleep and keep the other warily winking at the mat between. Quickly they became like logs of wood, incapable of feeling and enterprise. And in some black cavernous hour of the night, Aguilino crawled out and away.
They awoke in the chill dawn, and looked about them with red-rimmed eyes, and spoke together in husky whispers. Without a guide, they were like the fabled babes in the wood. They were lost completely in those gray, echoing, savage mountains.
They breakfasted glumly and, with lightened packs upon their shoulders, went on. Now before them stalked no Gypsy guide; before them stalked an emaciated and bony specter that looked back to grimace every little while, and to beckon them on—the specter of Starvation!
High on a shoulder of the Picacho de la Veleta, one late afternoon, stood Jacinto Quesada. It was very cold, and his mountaineer's shawl was drawn tightly around his throat and knotted about his middle. About and above him frowned the crags and snow spires and sinister precipices of the sierras; below, splitting the mountain like a great clean knife-cut, was a deep, winding pass.
Quesada was morosely engaged in watching the peculiar antics of a number of men in a cove or pocket to one side of that pass.
Inset in the pocket, under a thatched pointed roof, was a rudely carved figure of the Saviour hanging from a cross. The sacred effigy was fashioned of some white pine, with a crown of black horsehair and dabs of red paint, in hands and crossed feet and side, to depict bleeding wounds. It was a homely and stark symbol, a shrine famous in the mountains as the Christ of the Pass.
But the men, despite that poignant reminder before them, were not kneeling in prayer to Heaven. They were squatting among the huge boulders in the ragged prickly gorse, their heads lolling on their chests, and their words, when they talked, coming in disjointed, never-finished sentences as if they were wearied and needed sleep.
They were the nine fantastic cabalgadores. They were starving. For three days not a morsel of food had passed their lips. Theirs had been a complete fast from organic solids. That noon, at a mountain burnlet, for the last time they had drunk copiously of water. It had served to keep up their ebbing strength.
Now, however, they were suffering all the distress and tortures of hunger and thirst. Their stomachs yearned, but the gastric juices were dry; their heads ached and at times felt heavy as shot, and at other times, light and dizzy. They had been compelled to sit down. They were still too low in the sierras to come across the tracks of snow-capering wild ibex and thus appease their famished stomachs. They were suffering an agony, hopeless and cruel.
Starvation excites the imagination and causes giddying eyes to see illusions. It was thus with John Fremont Carson, the American. Come of light-headedness and fretted nerves, he had thought, all through that third day, that as they walked along they were companioned by a strange man who walked with them, now on one hand, now in the brush on the other.
Pausing for minutes to think, losing the line of thought, beginning and never finishing his statements, yet somehow he communicated his fancy to Morales. The matador nodded; he also had seen the shawl-wrapped gliding figure. But the Frenchman pleaded ignorance of any such illusion.
Of a sudden now, as they squatted about the shrine, aware only of the ceaseless gnawings of their stomachs, from up the road came the crash as of a falling bounding stone. It was as if some one, moving along the cliff above their heads, had dislodged the stone from underfoot.
"It is he," said Carson, and he thought he added: "The unknown man." But the words died unsaid on his parched lips.
Morales nodded and continued to nod, his head wagging loosely like that of a mechanical toy. After an appreciable interval, he said, "He is prowling about us like a hungry wolf."
The tall, blond, mustached Frenchman seemed the strongest of all those once-strong men. He pulled out his large-calibered revolver. With none of the hesitancy of feebleness, he said:
"I shall go forward. I am the only one that can walk and see straight. If this unknown man is truly skulking about, I shall find out what he is doing up there ahead."
He left the pitiful cluster of men. Without any signs of dizziness or staggering, he walked between the boulders which bestrew the path. Bent sharply forward, revolver in hand, he disappeared around a turn of the road.
Abruptly, from beside the road and very near at hand, came then, loud and distinct, the sharp snapping of shrub twigs. The men squatting before the shrine looked about dully. Out of the gorse and bramble beside the road stepped the man whom they had seen following them all that day. He wore heavy rope sandals, sheepskin zamarra, a long serape and pointed mountaineer's hat. He was Jacinto Quesada.
Weakly the famished men reached for their weapons; but he smiled with friendliness and commiseration, and sat down among them.
"There is no need of force, senores," he said. "I am here of my own free will."
The starving men looked at him as they would at a ghost, hardly able to credit their eyes. As he spoke, Morales reached over and touched him on the arm.
"My soul!" he exclaimed, the excitement of the discovery stimulating his undermined energies. "He is real—Jacinto Quesada himself!"
"You are starving, senores," said the bandolero, "or else you would never doubt that it is I. But I prolong your agony. Eat; I have brought you food!"
From beneath the voluminous folds of his shawl, he produced a bota or skin of wine and an osier basket containing cold sausages of meat, a chunk of goat's cheese, and some cornbread.
The famished men clawed the stuff from his hands. They were too hungry to pause for politeness or to think of thanks. They did not even stop to realize how incongruous it was that he whom they had been relentlessly pursuing should come to them now of his own accord and bring them that which they so direly needed. They thought only of appeasing the gnawings of their stomachs which had sharpened and become suddenly overpowering at the sight and smell of food.
They crammed fistfuls of food into their mouths and gulped the whole fistfuls almost without chewing. They ate without wait for words or breath, ravenously, like lean voracious wolves. But after a little, the American halted, a stout piece of bread to his lips. He looked at Morales with eyes that were livening with quickly returning energy.
"Jacques Ferou!" he breathed.
"Si," exclaimed Morales, also pausing between a mouthful. "The Frenchman!"
"The Frenchman?" repeated Quesada, and he laughed bitterly. "Ah, he is well able to take care of himself; he is a very lizard for living on! He has not been starving like you. From the back of that last mule, ere I shot it from across the canon and caused it to drop off the cliff, he filched a loaf of bread. His distress has been even more severe than yours because he tempted his stomach without wholly satisfying it; but by nibbling secretly for the last few days at this bread, he has been enabled to keep fairly strong."
The men, their tissues, muscles, and nerves, undergoing rapid repair because of the nutriment they had taken into their systems, looked astounded and a little incensed.
"But why did he not share with us?" asked one, Baptista Monterey, a short thick-set banderillero in the ordinary tight-fitting black clothes of the profession.
"The man is a French crook, a member of the clever criminal society of White Wolves," explained Quesada with marked patience. "From what Felicidad has told me about him, I have come to understand the workings of his evil mind. I know what he is about. You appreciate, senores, that Don Manuel and this Americano, Senor Carson, both withdrew large sums from the Bank of Spain, and that the residue of these sums is still upon their persons. Jacques Ferou has made up his mind to get this money. The man is avid for money. He means that you all should die, and that he shall survive you!"
"But he must be starving now," objected Morales. "The bread could not last forever."
"It lasted until yesterday evening," rejoined Quesada. "And this morning he accidentally cut his hand on a projecting rock. I was watching from the brush to one side. He sucked the blood from the cut, and that further strengthened him. It is odd, mis caballeros, but a man can live for many days by taking his own blood into his system. It is better even than water."
"But now," persisted Morales.
"Would you care to see what Ferou is doing now?"
They nodded with an awakening show of eagerness.
"We will bring him food anyway," said Carson.
Packing the now flabby bota of wine and the few sausages and bits of bread and cheese which remained, they went on up the road between the boulders at the heels of the stalking bandolero. Twilight was thickening. They rounded the bend and there, where the road slanted down into a ferny depression, they made out before them, seated a-straddle a fallen tree, the Frenchman, Jacques Ferou.
They watched in a kind of bewilderment. The Frenchman's gray-coated back was toward them, and he was bending down over the trunk. He appeared to be working with his hands at the trunk and carrying those hands, every so often, to his mouth. But it was all very vague in the thick twilight.
"Chispas!" exclaimed Morales in perplexity. "What is he doing there?"
"Eating the wood-grubs in that rotten tree!"
The men ejaculated in wrathful resentment. Said Carson: "So that's why he left the camp alone!"
"Si; the French pig!" from Morales. "And he would not tell us of even this distasteful means of satisfying our hunger and preserving our lives!"
"Despacio!" warned Quesada in a low tone. "Softly, gently, senores. Let us not disturb him, but go back alone. I have a deal more to tell you about this man. I should prefer that he would not be near to hear."
They rounded the bend and made down the road toward the shrine. As they went, Morales and Carson looked at one another. Then, without haste and very grimly, each reached into the osier basket on the American's arm and passed out among the men the remainder of the food.
The moon rose over the hills as they approached the shrine, and a random shaft, plunging down the pass, lighted the white figure and bleeding wounds of the crucified Christ with stark and ghastly effect. The men squatted among the boulders in the ragged prickly gorse.
"Senores," began Jacinto Quesada, "ever since you entered these mountains, I have been close to you. Every move you have made, I have watched; every unfortunate circumstance which befell you, I have caused. I rolled the boulder down the cliff which was meant for your last mule. I shot that last mule, three days ago, from the other side of the box canon. The day before that, I commanded the guide to leave you. You did not recognize Aguilino; you thought him a Gypsy; but he is my dorado, Rafael Perez, who helped rob you on the Seville-to-Madrid!"
The men murmured their surprise at the revelation.
"But why," ejaculated Morales, "why, Senor Quesada, did you do all this?"
"In order that I might show you Jacques Ferou in his true light. Once you were starving, I knew the innate selfishness of the man would out. Then, if I could make you believe me in the matter of the Frenchman, I knew you must believe me in my whole story. Listen, senores, and I shall tell you the reason why I snatched and fled away with the girl."
Quickly then, Quesada sketched to them the story told him by Felicidad. He ended:
"You see, senores, I did not actually kidnap this old friend of my childhood. It was her wish. I merely took her away to save her from a worse evil, this filthy one, Ferou!"
Strong now with the meal he had eaten and strangely elated over the story he just had heard, the matador sprang enthusiastically to his feet.
"Senor Don Jacinto!" he exclaimed. "You are a bandolero of the splendid good old sort—the José Maria, the Visco el Borje sort! I knew it, caballero of my heart! You are a true Moor, chivalrous and brave!"
Carson, with the canniness so characteristic of the American, was not to be so easily convinced. True, for the salt that he had eaten, he was under obligation to Jacinto Quesada. He appreciated that obligation and was thankful to the bandolero for what he had done for him and the others. But what he appreciated, probably in fuller mete than did any of the others, was that Quesada was a man, clearheaded, far-sighted, judicious, and acutely adroit.
Quesada had convicted himself, by his own word, of robbing them of their mules and guide in order to bring them into a state of starvation. Once they were enfeebled by hunger and thirst, he had come to them with food. Naturally they were grateful. And it was while their hearts were warm with gratitude toward him that he had related the past incidents in a new phase, incriminating one of their number, the Frenchman, and very plausibly explaining his reasons for running off with the girl. He had sowed suspicion and dissension among them, what time he had placed himself, in the matter of Felicidad, in a good if not heroic light. It all seemed an ingenious, well-calculated, and bold plan.
"But," objected Carson, "but may we not see the girl? Not that I doubt you, Senor Quesada," he added with almost Spanish politeness; "but we have come all this way to help Senorita Torreblanca y Moncada and it would greatly please us, now, to see her and to know that she is safe."
"My native village of Minas de la Sierra," said Jacinto Quesada, "is only a night's journey farther up the Picacho de la Veleta. There Felicidad is staying in the cabana of my mother, and to there I shall be glad to guide you. Yet I warn you, senores!" He paused ominously.
"What is it?" asked Carson sharply.
"Something wrong with Felicidad?" from Morales.
"Yesterday," said Quesada, "my mother died. She had long grieved for my father, but we fear it was not grief alone which killed her. We fear, senores," and his voice lowered—"we fear cholera!"