Yet Quesada knew. In this expose of Ferou's execrable character, it was plain by comparison that the Frenchman had artfully cajoled Felicidad and then used her as a cat's-paw to pluck golden chestnuts out of the fire. The girl had been duped and ensnared by the creature's wiles. Even to the adamantine mind of the senor doctor, the blow and blot of his daughter's conduct must inevitably pall before the odiousness of the Frenchman's villainy.
But again Don Jaime said no word. He only prescribed a certain diet for Carson. Without so much as a softening glance toward the pale and fearful girl, he marched out of the cabana, his boots clamping down in firm measured strides.
They returned to the hospital only to find Gabriel suffering, once more, in the grip of the plague. To ease the poor lad's griping pangs and still the heart-tearing cries for his dead mother, the senor doctor dropped a few beads of chloroform down his throat.
"Do not despair, my precious little man!" encouraged Morales, in a husky voice, from his place down the platform. "Have a high fearless heart, and the great Torreblanca will yet pull you through."
With an utterness of gratitude at having won such inspiriting words from the matador whom he so venerated, the boy thanked Morales with black eyes that were smoldering great coals in their deep pits.
Don Jaime turned to Quesada. Morales had tossed off the upper end of his blanket and the hidalgo had suddenly noticed the gold-braided green jacket about the matador's torso. With that characteristic frankness of his which so often sounded brutal and coarse, he queried:
"Who is this hombre in gold-tinsel and green that has such faith in the ability and concoctions of Torreblanca y Moncada?"
"Que, que!" exclaimed the bandolero, distinctly surprised. "What, what! Does not the senor doctor know?"
But the doctor did not even remember having seen the man in the excitement of his first rounds.
"That is Morales, the bravest espada in all the Spains!"
"Morales? Manuel Morales, that great murderer of bulls, that supremely dexterous one with the sword? And here!"
Don Jaime went at once to the side of the wanly smiling matador.
"My Manuel Morales," he said with earnestness, "all Spain mourns for its lost pastime while you lie helpless here. We must quickly get you well. But valgame Dios! no poor few remedies of mine will work the miracle half so speedily as that own brave golden Moorish heart of you!"
Interposed Quesada quietly:
"Jacques Ferou robbed our Manuel, too. And you know the great Morales, Don Jaime! He would rather starve than play the mouse to this hawk. Yet he had to pay!
"Ah, Torreblanca y Moncada," he added with rising vehemence, "this hombre Ferou, is a human bloodsucker, as you say! He is a greedy, foul buzzard!"
Don Jaime snapped erect. A portentous gleam was in his stony eyes.
"He robbed Manuel Morales, too!" he exclaimed. "That's enough; not another word! We will give the creature short shrift! Carajo! I have a plan."
Quesada and Morales looked about to see that no henchman of Ferou had chanced to overhear. The doctor understood their wary glances. He lowered his voice.
"All the short jump up the goat path," he said in even tones, "ever since this morning when I heard the French ringworm's conversation in the gorge, I have been formulating this plan. And it is a good plan; it will attain many ends at the one time. It will blight the treacherous plot of Ferou, save you from the Guardia Civil, Quesada, and in the same breath win back for me my stolen money! Ah, it is almost divine in its justice! Mediante Dios—God willing, I will use it as another instrument of my vengeance!"
Quesada gasped.
"You mean to kill the French leech? But my senor doctor, in the whole pueblo, Jacques Ferou is the only man armed! No lo quiera Dios, Don Jaime! God forbid, yet I fear he will slay you first!"
"I have a horse-pistol," said the physician with grave significance. "Yet I do not mean to sully these hidalgo hands of mine by killing him myself. Seguramente, no! He shall die, but from no bullet of mine!"
He shook his white head slowly as if fixing something definite in his mind.
"To-morrow noon," he added imperiously. "To-morrow noon, he shall die!"
It was the selfsame hour Ferou himself had bargained with the Guardias Civiles for the killing of Quesada!
Don Jaime would say no more. He was as arrogantly enigmatic as the very God Himself!
Don Jaime worked that day. That night he slaved. About eventide Alfonso Robledo, the banderillero who so bravely had seconded Quesada that morning, suffered all at once a severe relapse. Perhaps it came from the overheating excitement of that crucial time upon the rock; perhaps the abrupt exposure in that intrepid try to avert Felicidad's cruel and barbarous fate, had brought it on; at any rate and all on a sudden, his weakened body began writhing in an agony of cramps.
There was nothing else for it. The hidalgo doctor gave the bullfighter a hypodermic injection of morphia. The paroxysms lessened, altogether ceased. The eyelids of the banderillero rolled down heavily, and he slumped into a deep stertorous sleep.
That reawakened in Don Jaime the Fear. He made once more a round of the hospital. He went from choza to cabana outside, seeking new cases. Where a man could not sleep or a woman persisted in moaning, he administered narcotics.
When morning dawned through wisps of rain, the long night of taxing and intolerable work showed plainly in the doctor. His narrow face looked thin and long as a ferule; the cheek bones were high, the aquiline nose never more imperious. What with all the coffee he had drunk like a good Moor, to accelerate the action of his brain and steady the movement of his hand, his skin seemed tinged to a deeper swarth.
Quesada awoke early and with a renewed strength. He brewed for the grandee another pot of fresh aromatic coffee.
Don Jaime had gone down behind the cabanas to release his hobbled old skate of a horse and lead him to water. When he returned, his huge horse-pistol was strapped to his waist.
He quaffed two cups of the coffee in quick succession. He stained, with marked and aloof indifference, his usually immaculate white point of a beard. Then, without a word, with feruled face determined and grim, he returned into the hospital to his urgent ministry.
It was coming noon. Quesada was sunning himself before the hospital, according to his daily wont, when Ferou appeared around one mud wall with the suddenness of a jack-in-the-box.
In his right hand the Frenchman showed a revolver. He pointed the revolver at Quesada. With a politeness that seemed more deadly than the gleam of the gun, he said:
"You will arise, Senor Don Jacinto. You will do all that which I tell you to do. Aupa!"
The chair, tilted against the mud wall, banged down upon its forlegs. Quesada got to his feet.
"March forward past me. Now stop. It is good, my brave bandolero. Now, with me behind you, march toward that great rock on the brink of the pueblo!"
Everything was happening as the doctor had foretold. The tall Frenchman nudged Quesada with the muzzle of the revolver in the small of his back. They started on. And then, all at once, from the gloom of the chapel behind them, came the galvanic voice of the hidalgo:
"Alto! Drop that gun, you French leech!"
Quesada did not dare turn round. But Ferou, his blond lids fluttering with stupendous surprise, gave a quick glance back over his shoulder. He saw the hidalgo doctor standing in the low doorway, the huge horse-pistol leveled in one harsh fist, his eyes gleaming like quartz in the sun.
The Frenchman gave a precipitant leap to one side. He was quick as an ape. He slewed round, his revolver lifted.
An explosion burst from the pistol of the doctor. Ferou's revolver dropped to the mud. He clutched his right wrist. It was trickling blood from where a bullet had creased the flesh like a branding wire.
"Quesada!" cracked the thin lips of Don Jaime. "Pick up that revolver. You, Ferou, march in here!" He menaced the Frenchman with that huge gun which was loaded and ready for more quick work.
Quesada turned round, thereat, and lifted from the mud the Frenchman's revolver. He shook off the clinging silt and pointed it at Ferou. His ashy face working like a monkey's with abrupt and nervous apprehension, the Frenchman marched into the hospital.
Once inside, in the runway between the blanketed figures of plague sufferers, Don Jaime snapped out a terse and inexplicable command. Ferou thought himself the only one that understood its purpose. A shuddering fit seized him. He knew that, in the receptacles beneath his armpits, were concealed the small mahogany-colored leather purse he had taken from Quesada and the peseta bills he had pitilessly mulcted out of Carson and Morales. He thought that the doctor was searching for them.
"Undress!" repeated the hidalgo.
The Frenchman's slate-colored eyes fluttered about. He saw Quesada threatening him with his own revolver. There was no help for it. With fingers suddenly thick and clumsy with nervousness, he began to unbutton his gray tweeds.
"And you, too, Quesada!" ended the doctor. "Give the Frenchman's revolver into the keeping of Morales, and undress, too!"
Quesada did not at all understand. He saw Morales sitting up, as if prepared to lend aid, a pillow bolstering his back. He passed the Frenchman's revolver into the hands of the matador. Then bewildered but blindly obedient, he began to doff his alpagartas, rough corduroys, and sheepskin zamarra.
The Frenchman stood forth in his nether garments, a tall, quaking and almost ludicrous figure. He watched Quesada, a nameless fear sharpening his slate-colored eyes.
"Hand over the money, Senor Ferou," said Don Jaime with frosty politeness; then explosively: "All of it! Pronto!"
The eyes of the Frenchman flashed like the eyes of a ferocious animal about to be robbed of its meat. But quickly he got himself in hand; the baleful gleam dulled. He shot a questioning glance toward the disrobing bandolero. Perhaps this thing he sensed and dreaded was only a grisly figment of his imagination. Perhaps, after all, the doctor only wanted the money. It were wise to obey.
With an astonishing readiness, he produced, from the receptacles cunningly prepared beneath his armpits, the purse of the doctor and the bills belonging to Morales and Carson.
Don Jaime did not wait to open the purse and inspect its contents. He shoved the wallet into his pocket. He cast the roll of loose bills upon the platform beside Morales.
"They belong to you and the American. You can take what is due you and return the others to Senor Carson. But hola! let the division go till later!"
He kicked the gray tweeds of Ferou over the hard-tamped earth floor toward Quesada.
"Put them on," he commanded bluntly.
The bandolero nodded, though as yet he did not comprehend the whyfore of it all. With dispatch, he commenced to garb himself in the tweeds of the Frenchman which, despite the hard usage of the last few weeks, still showed the ineradicable signs of good material.
"You, Ferou!" the doctor bit out. "You don the clothes of Quesada!"
The growing nameless fear in Ferou's brain bourgeoned, at that command, into noisome bloom. His jaw slacked and began an incontrollable quivering. His eyes glittered in a pasty sweating face.
"Mais non, mais non!" he cried, lapsing in his extremity into his native tongue. "Not that, monsieur! You cannot demand that! The clothes, they are dirty, foul!"
It was only the subterfuge of a time of dire peril. His eyes darted wildly about. They sought Morales. Morales had been very tender with the sick. Perhaps—
But Morales was leveling his own revolver at him with a hand only a trifle less steady than that of the doctor. His face, parchment-dry and sunken of flesh from the ravages of disease, was forbidding with grim determination.
"Put them on!" persisted Don Jaime.
Solemnly then and very laboriously, with jaw still quivering and shaking hands, Ferou dressed in the sheepskin zamarra, rough corduroys, and alpagartas of the bandolero. Don Jaime himself clapped upon Ferou's blond head the high-pointed hat of Quesada.
"Now, march!" he exploded. "March toward that great rock on the brink of the village!"
All the Frenchman's dismal fears became quick and instant. He was sure now! The nostrils of his predatory nose twitching and working, his whole pasty face working and grimacing, with unrestrainable fear, like a horrible mask of rubber, he groveled on his knees and held out his two arms to the doctor in abject supplication.
"Mercy, Don Jaime! Mon Dieu, you would not have me shot like a dog!"
"March!" the hidalgo insisted. His voice rang with metallic timbre; his gray eyes flashed as if they were bits of flint upon which steel had struck. He shoved the muzzle of his pistol against the Frenchman's chest.
Ferou stumbled to his feet and backed out the doorway. The doctor followed him step by step. Quesada, a great light coruscating in his brain, recovered the revolver from the bedridden Morales and bounded out in the wake of the two.
Thus, the Frenchman retreating before the importunate muzzle of the senor doctor's pistol, Quesada following after, they went down the muddy street toward that great rock which glared, in the noontide sunlight, on the brink of the village.
Once the Frenchman paused. Imploringly, he lifted his still bleeding right hand.
"Monsenor!" he cried. "For the love of Christ, monsenor—"
Came the sharp click of a pistol being cocked. Then, like a sharper echo of it, the command of the doctor.
"March!"
A mad notion to turn and run for it seized Ferou. But no! They would shoot him down ere he could take ten steps. They were too close.
The police, on the other hand, would be far below, in the gorge. Maybe their carbines would miss. There was always hope.
He backed out upon the hot glaring rock.
Came a yell from the hidalgo, sounding shrill and bodiless in the thin air, and carrying back and far away in ringing echoes:
"Hola, mis Guardias Civiles! Jacinto Quesada—he is here!"
An answering shout spiraled up from the deeps of the gorge. Then, on the heels of it, one long slithering shaft of sound. The crang of a carbine!
Ferou threw up his arms and, his face black with congested blood, half spilled forward as if he had been struck by a blow between the shoulders. He swayed back and forth on the balls of his feet, caught himself, hung still for intolerable moments. Then, as is usually the case with a man killed by a bullet, he tottered backward, slipped on the crumbling lip of the rock and went over, clutching with white clawing hands at the brink, twisting, turning, and shrieking—shrieking for minutes afterward, shrieking hideously!
Doctor Torreblanca Y Moncada strategically overcame the trouble engendered by cremation. He had the serranos burn whole trees and from the ashes, by percolation through water, produce a leaching of lye. Then, a goodly distance from the water supply coursing through the old Moorish flume, on the lip of the gorge where a void had been left by the dismantling of the two infected cabanas, he had the men of the pueblo dig a deep pit. Therein he purposed burying the dead in sheets of the burning alkali.
On the morning following that on which poetic justice had come to Ferou, he approached Quesada, who was superintending the work of digging the pit. Save for a certain wolfish gauntness, the bandolero was almost himself.
"Jacinto," he said, "do you feel hardy enough, my haggard one, to journey down these hills to my casa near Granada?"
The Moorish oblong eyes of the bandolero showed surprise and a shade of fear.
"I am easily strong enough by now, Don Jaime. But—"
"Is it the police you fear? They rode away immediately after the killing of Ferou."
Quesada shook his head.
"I am frank with you, my hidalgo doctor. Should I absent myself from the barrio, I would fear for Felicidad of the gold hair and heart of fire!"
With his cold gray eyes, the grandee looked at Quesada and through and through him. As if mouthing some religious dogma, he returned haughtily:
"You know, son of a mangy she-wolf, that no man can halt a Torreblanca y Moncada once he says, I will! Ea pues! It is thus with my vengeance. The ancient name of my house, the blood of my veins, must be cleared of all tainture! Felicidad must die!"
"God preserve you, Don Jaime! You are still the soul of granite, unforgiving and unsparing even though your stolen money is all returned to you now, and your daughter's disgrace altogether wiped out by the death of the French poodle!"
The hidalgo laughed harshly. He refused in his lordly pride to argue. Cleverly he countered:
"And you, Jacintito; you are still the Wolf-Cub, ever leaping to the jade's defense as you did when you were only a bantling!
"But it is not because I wish to be rid of you that I ask you to journey," he went on. "You have reminded me that I am a priest of the body. It is of my profession I speak. I need medicines. The supply is nearly exhausted."
"But I carted up such a lot, fully four canvas packs!"
"I know. But mi gran espada Manuel and the Senor Carson, both well-meaning but untutored, made extravagant inroads on the treasures you brought. And hearing from old Tio Pedro that you had stocked yourself so well, I rode extra light to make speed."
"Yet things are going better now," objected Quesada. "There are fewer deaths and more recoveries."
"Thank God for that! But one can never tell. The present even tone of the weather may suddenly change and cause the scourge to redouble its havoc. I must not run short."
"That is true," nodded Quesada. Yet it was evident that he still hesitated to go for fear of leaving Felicidad unassisted and helpless before the cold implacable wrath of her father.
Said Don Jaime, commencing to offer inducements, plainly weakening before the obstinacy of the bandolero:
"If you will go, Jacinto, you may take my horse. No other has ridden him in over ten years. He will carry you well, though only at a snail's pace."
Quesada realized what that offer meant.
"I will take the horse," he agreed. "That horse of yours shall be as a bond given in hand to me, Don Jaime, that you will remain here and stay your vengeance until I return!"
"My vengeance? Well, like the Judgment Day of Christ, that can wait!"
"Is it a promise?"
"It is a promise!"
"Vaya, Don Jaime!"
"Con Dios, Jacintito!"
Garbed in the once elegant clothes of the dead Frenchman, even to his slouch traveling hat, Quesada sat deep in the doctor's saddle and carefully guided the old rawboned nag down the loops of the goat path.
He kept a wary eye out for the policemen. The Guardias Civiles might chance to be lingering on in the gorge. But the trampled space about the alder tree was wholly deserted; the ashes from the breakfast fire of the day before were being rapidly dissipated by the draughty wind.
He pushed on down. Crackling over the fallen leaves in the gorges, clattering along the stony hogbacks and ridges, he came, in the waning afternoon, to the boulder-strewn pocket of the Christ of the Pass. And suddenly from below, louder than the ring of his horse's hoofs, there echoed up to him a sharp sound like the report of a pistol.
Come of long outlawry, Quesada was circumspectly cautious. The report might have exploded near at hand; the chances were that, with the odd carrying knack of sounds high on mountains, it had echoed, clear and distinct, from far away. But he would take no chances.
The ragged prickly gorse and huge boulders, which bestrewed the pass about the foot of the cross, furnished unusual hiding places. He dismounted hastily, tied his horse behind a sumach bush and, behind a tall boulder, hid himself.
Twilight deepened quickly into full dark night. It was gruesome waiting there beneath the pale white figure of the Saviour, with its crown of black horsehair and red-painted wounds. Save for the wind sweeping through the pass with little shrill noises, nothing stirred or sounded in the long defile.
After a little, Quesada conquered his vague apprehensions sufficiently to sup upon the cold sausages, dry bread, and bota of wine which he had had the forethought to sling to the cantle of his saddle. Then it was on again, through the dark night and the savage uncouth pass, in haste to accomplish his errand for the doctor.
A piece of moon came up and shot long pale slithers of light down the rock walls. Ahead, in the sudden wan light, he made out the bent and bundled figure of an old, shawl-wrapped peasant woman. She was coming toward him up the gorge. She seemed making little catching sounds, as if softly weeping.
"A Dios, mother," he greeted, as he rode past.
She gave him neither answer nor notice. Her few wisps of white hair streaming in disarray from under her flat worsted cap, she went by, sobbing quietly, as if utterly oblivious of his presence.
Quesada looked after her bent form and shook his head commiseratingly.
"Ah, there has been some little domestic trouble in her cabana this night!" he remarked to himself. "And she is going on, the poor creature, to seek strength and consolation from the lonely Christ of the Pass. It is the way they have in these desolate hills—Hola! What's the matter, my bony Pegasus!"
The nag beneath him, suddenly shying, had come to a dead stop, and now was shivering in every limb. They had just rounded the bend which portaled the pass. Leaping afoot in the stirrups, Quesada gazed over the lifted frightened head of the horse. Ahead in the open road and shapeless in the vague moonlight, he saw something lying still and black!
Ever wary of ambush, resultant from long outlawry, he sprung out of the saddle and getting the horse by the bridle, shoved him violently back into the shadow of the spur. For an intolerable fraction of time, he peered round the bend and watched.
The black shapeless huddle in the road never moved. Was it some animal, sleeping or dead? He crept forward cautiously, Ferou's old revolver in hand. He put out his fingers toward the vague outline of it. He touched soft cloth, he touched a yielding mass. Wounds of Christ! it was the body of a man!
His hand jerked back in superstitious fear. The man did not move; he was lying on his face. Quesada put out his hand again and touched the still thing with a braver and more prying touch. All at once he turned it over.
Stark in the moonlight showed a short knife-sharp white beard, a fine-chiseled imperious nose, and a swarthy face, lean and haughty as a griffon vulture's! The revolver fell from his palsied hand.
"Sangre de Cristo!" his dry lips fluttered. "It is Don Jaime himself!"
But no! Don Jaime could not be here. Had he not left the hidalgo doctor, that every morning, in the village above in the sierras?
A grave calmness came upon him then, and a questing thoroughness. Who was the man? Somehow his features seemed familiar. Was it only because of that striking resemblance to Don Jaime?
He noticed, all at once, that there was visible on the body, under the powdering of dust from the road, a kind of red-edged blue jacket. On one sleeve was a single red chevron, and to one side, almost hidden in the dust, the shimmer of a patent leather hat. With a stifled gasp, recognition leaped full-fledged into his brain. The man was Senor Don Esteban Alvarado, the aged sergeant of the Guardia Civil!
No more than a few weeks before, Quesada had seen the sergeant in the gorge below Minas de la Sierra, dominant with life and lording it over the apelike policeman Montara. To find the sergeant now only a still black huddle in the road was a distinct shock to the bandolero. He knew that just the day before either the sergeant or Montara had shot Ferou.
Almost incredulous, Quesada felt the body for signs of life. But the sergeant was dead. His body was not what one could call warm, yet neither was it cold with that soft stickiness so instinctively repulsive to the living touch. The sergeant had been killed only a short time before. A caking of dust on the torso of his jacket showed where the blood had oozed from a bullet wound in the chest, and quickly dried.
"It was that shot I heard!" the bandolero surmised. "But who killed him? And why?"
Of the sudden, he remembered the old woman who had passed him in the road, crying softly to herself. He bounded back around the bend. But in the intervening jiffy of time, the shadows of the defile had swallowed her from sight.
"She is the sergeant's poor old wife," he said to himself. "She must have come upon him, slain like a dog in the road. I knew Don Esteban, his wife, and son lived in these hills. Now the poor old woman is gone to pray before the Christ of the Pass for the eternal welfare of his departed soul. May it rest in peace!"
He came back to the black huddle, still profoundly puzzled as to whom had done the killing. He turned the body over into that posture in which he had found it. He retrieved his fallen revolver.
He was about to mount and ride on, when abruptly he halted, one foot in the stirrup. An enlightening but bitter thought had suddenly shocked his brain.
For a long time now, crimes had been committed which he never had a hand in, but which in every case had been laid at his door. Automobiles had been held up, toreros' chapels invaded, men robbed and even killed by a young man described as Jacinto Quesada when, all the time, Quesada himself had been quarantined in Minas de la Sierra.
There was a sinister purpose, a foul plan underlying the criminal's habit of masquerading and posing as Jacinto Quesada. Behind the personality of Quesada, he was cloaking his own identity and committing crimes without a suspicion pointing toward himself. What could be more probable than that this same criminal had killed the old policeman?
"It was that masquerader!" the bandolero exclaimed to the night. And he swore: "By the Nails of Christ!"
He circled by the prone body in the road, his horse nervous and quivering with instinctive fright. He kicked the nag into a brisk canter. He sought thus in action to quiet the thoughts which now were bothering his brain. He pursued the descent.
But the turgid thoughts would not be stifled. They fluttered in his head like the pale moonbeams on the rock walls. They filled him with gloom as profound as the shadow-haunted deeps of the narrow way.
He, Jacinto Quesada, had discovered the corpse. Was that not strange, portentous? It seemed to him now as if the hand of God were foreshadowing, in this grisly discovery, some tragic misfortune about to befall him. The masquerader had committed the crime of blood. Well, the penalty for it would strike most surely upon Quesada's head! Of that, he felt superstitiously certain!
He made the sign of the horned hand in an attempt to avert the impending evil. But no use. His mind would not still, nor would the misgivings die. He reined in the nag.
"There is but one thing for me to do," he announced to himself. "I must return to the side of the corpse, and kneel and say a prayer for his soul in purgatory. A mere word of requiescat is not enough. He was mine enemy in life; I must show complete Christian forgiveness toward him, now that he is dead. That alone will prevent a curse from falling upon me!"
He was kneeling in prayer beside the dead sergeant and had reached the words: "May his soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace," when, all at once from down the road, his ears were assailed by a startling sound—the hoof beats of approaching horses!
Hastily he made the sign of the cross and got to his feet. Dragging his horse by the bridle after him, he concealed both nag and himself completely in the deep shadowy elbow of the spur.
Came to him then, on the vagrant breaths of the night wind, the sound of voices. They were men's voices, loud above the steady hoofbeats of the horses, as if raised in some wordy contention:
"But I tell you, Pascual Montara, the Wolf-Cub is not dead!"
"And I tell you, mi capitan, Quesada is dead! Right now, were you not my superior officer, I should be on my way down to Getafe to file Don Esteban's report."
"You say the sargento, Don Esteban, has returned to his home in these mountains?"
"Si; seguramente, si! His work is accomplished. After killing the Wolf-Cub, Quesada, is he not entitled to a good rest? Test the truth of my statement, el capitan; ask his son, young Miguel there, if his father does not live in these hills."
"It is most certainly true, mi Capitan Guevara," answered a new voice. "I myself was born and raised in a portilla of the Picacho de la Veleta."
"Za, this is the wild-goose chase!" exclaimed the raucous voice of Montara. "This is the wild-goose chase, I tell you—this chase after a man already dead! Down in Getafe by now, ten thousand pesetas should be awaiting the Frenchman as a reward for having brought about the killing of Jacinto Quesada."
"And that was when, you say?"
"I have told you twenty times. It was but yesterday."
"Then answer me this, apelike one! I have asked it of you a hundred times before. How is it that the diligence from Granada to Montefrio was held up only last night and the bandolero announced that he was Jacinto Quesada himself? He fled into these hills, and we hot after him!"
The men of the Guardia Civil usually ride in pairs; but this was a troop of the Guardia Civil, an extraordinary troop. Peering around the spur, Quesada made out eleven uniformed men riding smartly toward him through the dim moonlight.
One was, of course, that apelike policeman, Pascual Montara, whom Quesada last had seen in the gorge below Minas de la Sierra with Don Esteban. It appeared, from the tenor of the conversation, that Montara had been on his way down to headquarters to file the sergeant's report of Quesada's death when he had been met on the road by the troop and turned back by the order of the captain.
Quesada well knew this captain as one Luis Guevara. Eight others he recognized as gendarmes with whom he had had an occasional brush. The eleventh was the dead man's son, Miguel Alvarado, youthful, tall, smoothly brown of face, and as subtle and gallant-looking in the vague moonlight as a sword of Toledo.
Now, such a large body of the Guardia Civil could be seldom seen on the main-traveled highroads, let alone in the gorge-pierced sierras of the Nevada. Something untoward was afoot. But it was not the mysterious murder of the old sergeant which had called them together. Not one of the approaching policemen had discovered as yet, close to the entrance of the pass, that huddle lying still and black in the road. They did not know Don Esteban was dead.
They were riding after Jacinto Quesada, whom Montara believed he had killed, for a crime that Jacinto Quesada himself was positive he never had committed!
The party of policemen discovered, all at once, the body in the road. Hastily, from their huddling, quivering horses, they dismounted. They turned the body over. With amazement and deep consternation, they saw that it was one of themselves, the haughty sergeant of police, Senor Don Esteban Alvarado!
Miguel, the dead man's son, stood over his father's body.
"It is that Jacinto Quesada!" he said, terribly moved. "He has come upon my poor old father alone in the road, and he has killed him without ruth. By the Wounds of Christ!" he swore, lifting his right hand to heaven—"I will seek out this murderer; I will hound him down; at last, remorselessly, I will kill him! I have taken my oath."
In the thick shadow of the bend, Jacinto Quesada smiled bitterly to himself. Just as he had forecasted, just so had matters shaped themselves. He was blamed for the crime of another!
But the captain, Luis Guevara, was speaking:
"This proves that Montara is mistaken—the Wolf-Cub is still alive! As you say, mi pobre Miguel, without ruth he has killed your father, an old, honored, and brave member of the police!
"Carajo! Only once before, in the case of that traveling Englishman, has Quesada killed a man. His conscience will be more disturbed by this atrocity than by his usual crimes. Surely now, after this vile deed of blood, will he seek out a priest and beg forgiveness of God!
"Pronto, mis camaradas! Don Esteban has not been long dead. If we ride to the nearest church, we may be in time to capture Quesada while he makes his confession!"
"But there are few men of the cloth in these hills, and fewer churches," objected Miguel Alvarado. "I know; I was born in the portilla above this pass. My old mother still lives there."
"You do not think that Quesada is a heretic, despite his sacrilegious abuse of the bullfighters' chapel of Seville!"
Miguel shook his head.
"No. I think that he will go, straightway, to the shrine of the Christ of the Pass. It is but a little way on, in a lonely pocket of this gorge. For miles around serranos, burdened by sins, kneel before the shrine, and pray, and beg absolution or ease of mind."
"Muy bueno!" said the captain. "We will go at once to this shrine and wait there, in ambush, for Jacinto Quesada to come and confess his sin. We will listen, and then we will kill him!"
There was a creaking of leather as the men leaped into the saddles. Quesada shrunk back into the dark elbow of the jutting bend. He pressed the nervous horse in against the rock wall. To still any outcry he vised his hand over the trembling nostrils of the animal. He waited, hardly daring to breathe.
The gendarmes, following the lead of the captain, filed into the pass and looking straight ahead, unsuspecting the dark, went by him almost within arm's length.
He waited until they had all gone on, and the shadows of the pass had engulfed them. Then he did not dodge around the bend and pursue the decurrent way he had been going. He was seized with an unreasoning and irresistible impulse to follow the troop and witness whatever might be the outcome of their expedition to the shrine. Loosening but not removing his hand from the horse's nostrils, he stalked a goodly distance behind the party like a quiet long-legged shadow.
As they neared the boulder-hedged pocket which sheltered the shrine, a whisper sibilated through the ranks of the policemen. Some one was kneeling before the cross!
Noiselessly the gendarmes halted, dismounted, quickly hobbled their horses with the long reins, and crept stealthily forward between the boulders and the ragged prickly shrubbery. Quesada followed, a safe distance behind.
But it was only the old white-haired wife of Don Esteban who knelt before the pale figure of the Christ, with its crown of black horsehair and red-painted wounds. As he crept nearer, behind the police and between the weeds and rocks, Quesada heard her voice. In quavering tones, she was speaking aloud. She was confessing that she was the murderer of her husband, Sergeant Esteban Alvarado!
Thinking herself alone before the moon-white effigy of the crucified Saviour, in an anguish of soul, she was pouring out the whole pitiful story. For some time, she had been tortured by a harrowing secret. Her son, the darling of her life, although a member of the Guardia Civil like his father, was also a base poseur and highwayman!
It was his infamous plan to doff the policeman's uniform and steal out at night dressed to resemble the bandolero, Jacinto Quesada. Then, his crimes consummated, he would put the uniform on again. That honored uniform and the fact that all his crimes were laid, successfully and invariably, at the door of Jacinto Quesada, kept suspicion from resting upon him.
It had smote her with desolation to discover that her son was a stealthy outlaw. Since that long-ago time when her ancestors had been reclaimed from brigandage and become Miquelets, no one in her family ever again had turned criminal. They had all been policemen.
Her husband, the haughty Don Esteban, was fiercely proud of the record of his family of policemen. It had harassed her poor old soul, filled her with overwhelming terror lest Don Esteban should discover the perfidy of his only son. Pride of house and long years as an officer of the Guardia Civil had made him unforgiving of crime, unsparing and inexorable to mete out justice even to his own kith and kin.
That afternoon, after a lengthy absence on police duty, Don Esteban had come home for an interval of rest. He had just parted from Pascual Montara, he said, who was to take his report down to Getafe. Between them, the morning prior, they had killed the Wolf of the Sierras, Jacinto Quesada!
The old mother, aghast lest by mistake he had killed his own son masquerading as Quesada, had thereupon, in distracted fear and wild grief, blurted out the whole truth.
The righteous indignation and awful rage of the old sergeant knew no bounds. Solemnly he swore that he would have his son's life for this outrageous conduct. She had pleaded with him, wept and prayed. But he had cast her from him and gone out into the twilight to hound down the son.
She had followed him down the mountainside, insane with fear for the life of her only child. He had discovered her and commanded her to go back. But she crept after him, stifling her sobs.
As he reached the road and the slice of moon came out in the sky, she saw him take out a revolver and examine it to see that it was loaded and ready for use. She heard, on top of this, the clatter of an approaching horse. It was Quesada mounted on the doctor's nag. But she did not know. She thought it was her son, her pobre Miguelito, returning home to pay her a visit between duties!
Carried beyond herself by the sudden crystallizing of all her fears, she had dashed out upon her husband and struggled with him to wrest the revolver from his hands. The stern sergeant had forgot himself then. He went mad with a barbarous fury. He rained blows upon her old tear-stained face. Even did he try to choke her.
But her terror lent her strength superhuman. She clung to him, pulled and wrenched at the revolver. She was like some tigress fighting for her young.
All at once, there was a sharp hideous explosion. Don Esteban slumped like a burst balloon in her arms. He clutched his chest, made a gurgling sound in his throat, slipped to the ground, rolled over, and was dead!
Now, in a terrible turmoil of soul, she cast her gnarled workworn hands out to that compassionating Figure on the Cross.
"Dios hombre, what shall I do, what shall I do?" she cried. "I have suffered in the last few hours all the torments of the damned, like a soul lost a thousand years in purgatory! Oh, what shall I do? Lord and Saviour, Pitiful One, I do not seek forgiveness. I want to repay, I want to atone! I want to die myself!..."
Her voice fainted away. She got to her feet at last. Muttering feverish prayers, weeping like a soft rain, swaying and stumbling, she made up the path.
The policemen shivered out of their state of suspended animation. They recovered their wits; their dead eyes glinted. Savagely, they turned to look at the man among them who had caused the whole pitiful tragedy—the son of the dead sergeant and the poor old heartbroken mother, the masquerader and the traitor, Miguel Alvarado!
He was gone.
Seeking him, they dashed wildly among the boulders and bushes. They beat the ragged gorse with their carbines. They called loudly one to another. Suddenly, into the wan moonlight, stepped forth Jacinto Quesada.
"You seek Miguel Alvarado?" he asked.
"Heart of God, yes!"
"Then come with me."
They did not recognize Quesada. Not only because of the pallor of the moonlight, but more because he was garbed in the gray tweeds and foreign slouch hat of the Frenchman. He led them down the path to where they had hobbled their horses.
Here, supine in the weeds and bound hand and foot, lay the policeman, young Miguel. In the midst of his mother's pitiful confession, he had crept back down the road and, just about to mount his horse and ride away, had been captured by Quesada.
"Oh, Paquita, maiden of my soul!" he was wailing. "I am undone—undone! Your love has robbed me of my father, and broken the poor old heart of the mamacita of me!"
Quesada started visibly.
"What is that!" he exclaimed. "You speak of Paquita, daughter of Pepe Flammenca?"
"I speak and dream of her always! I love her—God, yes! And she told me she adored Jacinto Quesada because he was a bandolero; she told me she despised my uniform. I thought to emulate Quesada and thus win her love. But I have only caused the death of my old father and brought sorrow and heartbreak to my poor old mother in her last years. Ah, Senor Don Jesu, pity me!"
But there was that in the glint of the eyes of the clustered policemen which spelled death for Miguel Alvarado. He was a traitor to all the ethics of the Guardia Civil. He had dishonored and defiled the uniform they wore. He was a wolf in sheep's clothing. More; he was a shepherd dog turned poacher, depredator, wolf!
"He must die!" said the captain.
"Seguramente, yes! And we all must bind ourselves to keep the matter secret."
The captain nodded grimly. "This is an affair of honor between us of the Guardia Civil." He turned sharply upon Quesada.
"Hombre, you are the only outsider. Will you swear to tell no one, to lock all you have heard this night in your own breast?"
Quesada evaded taking the oath of secrecy. Why should he, the Wolf of the Sierras, make covenant with the podencos of the Guardia Civil? Besides, a higher emotion stirred him. In his unknowable Spanish soul, he was moved to pity for Miguel Alvarado.
"Mi capitan," he said, "if you kill this man, you will do a wrong. He is young; he has youth and true penitence to help him reform. It is a terrible lesson he has received this night. He is the dupe of a woman, a wench of the Gitano—"
"A plague on the yellow witch!" muttered Montara.
"Senores," Quesada appealed to them, "you cannot right what is now an irreparable wrong, you cannot bring Don Esteban back to life. Would you rob the poor old mother, then, of her only paltry happiness and hope?
"Heed me, you of the Guardia Civil! This man has outraged Jacinto Quesada more than he has you. Yet I know that if Jacinto Quesada were to have this Alvarado's fate in his hands, to-night, he would let him go!"
He had done what he could. He moved off to where he had tied his horse to a bush. The policemen conversed together in low tones. As he mounted, Captain Guevara exclaimed:
"But who are you that you tell us all this?"
He kicked his nag and started away. Through the moon-filtering dark, he flung back, "Jacinto Quesada!"
Ere they could recover from their stupefaction, he was only a clattering noise in the night.
He was circling, presently, by the dead body of the old sergeant in the road. Of a sudden, a volley of rifle reports detonated between the rock walls behind him.
"That will be Miguel Alvarado," he said gloomily. He shook his head. "Ah, Paquita!" he exclaimed to the night, "you have exacted a fearful payment for my rash scorn of you—you have killed two men, this night, and broken the heart of a poor old woman!"
He rode thoughtfully on.
Laden with medicinal supplies, Quesada returned to Minas de la Sierra. He found the American walking about on his own two legs and able, at a pinch, to lend a hand to the doctor. Morales, attenuated but rapidly repairing in strength, occupied the bandolero's old chair tilted against one mud wall of the sick bay. For long hours the matador thus sat in the crisp sunlight and held a-straddle on his knees the slowly recovering, oddly wrinkled little Gabriel. Like some sweet Sister of Mercy, Felicidad moved solicitously among the convalescing serranos, two pale roses of health constantly mantling her smooth ivory cheeks.
The bane was lifting. A period of continuous mild warmth, free of neblinas and snowstorms and icy blasts, had assisted and incalculably sustained the efforts of the hidalgo doctor in driving the pestilence from the pueblo.
Ensued more days of sun sparkle, more nights clear as crystal, and the hospital at last was empty. Announced Don Jaime thereupon:
"The barrio must endure five more days of quarantine. We must make sure the plague is snuffed out, buried. There must be no new cases."
Two days passed. Then three. No man slapped under. They entered upon the fourth.
The scourge was being weighed in a hair-fine balance. It was a deciding interval. It was a terrific time of waiting, and dread and hungry longing that tried the blood and iron of every man.
Quesada, shaking with the contagious apprehension, buttonholed the American as he came out of the cabanas after completing some mission for the doctor.
"How goes it, Senor Carson?"
"All right so far. But gad, it's tough! It wasn't so bad when they were dying. These days when there are no stricken, and the sick bay is empty, and each man watches the next in fear lest he should succumb—that's maddening!"
They talked jerkily. Quesada wanted to forget the trial of waiting, to ease his mind of the down-bearing strain. To change the subject, he said:
"I have learned something. About the man who was sticking-up persons and saying he was I, Jacinto Quesada. He was a member of the Guardia Civil named Miguel Alvarado. Down by the shrine of Christ of the Pass, his own kind, the Guardia Civil, shot him to death."
The American understood. When Quesada first had returned to the village poisoned with worry at what he had overheard from the policemen then waiting in the gorge, he had told Carson the beginning of the story of the masquerader. Now, at hearing its tragic end, Carson merely nodded. All the while, as he listened, he eyed Don Jaime with fearful anxiety as the physician moved in and out from choza to cabana.
The racking strain—the long torture of work and travail of waiting—showed plainly in the hidalgo doctor,—in the high cheek bones almost bursting through the deep swarth skin, in the thinly chiseled nose and the gray eyes that seemed crystallized to a hard quartz. He was working arduously, Don Jaime—prodigiously, epically, like a true son of Hispanus, that first Spaniard sprung from the loins of Hercules!
Hardly daring to breathe, the barrio entered upon the fifth and occult day. Twenty-four hours more of immunity from disease, and the tension would be over, the iron clutch of the quarantine lifted.
Night shut down, black, breathing, full of the nameless. Groups collected. The suspense was on them like thumbscrews.
Dawn came slowly, a leaden wash, Don Jaime went his final rounds.
No man had stuck his toes toward heaven; in the night, no man had gone under from the plague. The grip of the horror was broken!
"Infected Minas de la Sierra is once again clean and whole," announced Don Jaime. And he breathed fervently: "Thank God!"
The final requiem had been said. The last to waste away and wear forever the cold cerement of death was the banderillero, Alfonso Robledo, who so ably had seconded Quesada in halting, for the while, Don Jaime's cruel vengeance. That had been six days gone.
The pale gold sun hung high in the heavens like an eucharistic wafer emblematic of victory over disease and death. It was noon of that Day Resurgent. Now that the slavish and heroic labor was over for Don Jaime, the great good accomplished, he quietly got his horse prepared for the return to his lizard-haunted, gloomy, and lonely casa outside Granada.
Mounted and ready, he paused on the great rock at the brink of the village to bid the thankful serranos a saturnine adieu. All the while, unwaveringly, his gray quartz eyes remained fixed on the certain cabana which had been given over to Felicidad. And then, as loudly the villagers chorused their gratitude and well-wishes, that eventuated which Don Jaime knew would surely eventuate.
Her low white brow knuckled with perplexity, Felicidad appeared in the doorway of the cabana. The hullaballoo had bewildered and attracted her.
"Felicidad!"
As if drawn and irresistibly compelled by the electric fluid of some hypnotic influence, slow as in a trance, Felicidad moved toward the avenger. Watching her, Don Jaime's thin-edged ferule of a face slowly iced into rigid and pitiless lines.
Yet, deep in his heart, the great passions that once had made Don Jaime so formidable—those classic passions of ire and resentment—like hard but friable rock had been slowly worn away. Too often, altogether too often, had his wrathful hand been stayed. Time and his prodigious struggle with the plague had combined to crush and crumble to bits the fury in his rock-ribbed soul.
No longer was he strong with faith in the righteousness of his cause. He was only moved, now, by a determination to fulfill his solemn word, to live up to the oath he had sworn. Pride alone possessed him. He was being swept along toward a damnation of crime by the momentum of an inexorable pride!
He himself felt the weakness, the blight. In an open confession that showed forth his inward doubt, in a heart-poignant appeal to Heaven beseeching leniency for that awful thing he felt he now must do, he cried out:
"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; but the bleeding wounds of Christ and the thorn-pierced heart of His Most Virgin Mother shall intercede for my grievously sinning soul on the Day of Judgment!"
He raised the heavy horse-pistol.
The serranos fell from about him like flung chaff. The spittle dried in their mouths; they could not speak. They were blind of eye, and blind and black of brain as to what to do.
The scene was much as before. On the great rock of the village, Don Jaime sat rigid in the saddle like some black-browed Destroying Angel and menaced, with his huge pistol, the pale trembling lily of a girl.
But this time it was not Quesada who intervened. The bandolero long had brooded upon the coming of this inevitable moment; yet now, when ultimately it had struck, the moment found him standing off to one side and a good twenty feet from the great rock where bulked up Don Jaime. Ere the bandolero could interpose himself to obstruct Don Jaime's will, ere he could dash forward to shoulder the perilous rebuttal, came interposition from an unexpected and astonishing source. Stepped forward the American, John Fremont Carson!
Big, broad-shouldered, and wornly angular of face, Carson stepped before the agitated girl, wholly between her and the threat of the leveled gun. He lifted dauntless blue eyes to her Hebraic Jehovah of a father.
"Senor Don Jaime, you have no longer the right to seek retribution on Felicidad," he said with quiet but positive defiance. "Ere you can retaliate on her, you must deal with me. She is now my affianced bride!"
Don Jaime's jaw sagged; an astounded gleam zig-zagged across the hard quartz of his eyes. But quickly came to his aid the iron composure of the hidalgo. Without lowering the pistol, he turned eagle-sharp white head and stony eyes to look down frigidly at the square-jawed American facing him in the street. With a forced politeness, he returned:
"In Spain, know you, Senor Americano, one must ask the father for the hand of his daughter. Should the father agree, the consent of the girl follows as a matter of course. We are very hidebound in these conventions, we Moors; no other ways command honor. The plighted word of a mere chit of a girl—Dios hombre! who would think of respecting that!"
He laughed harshly.
"Grandee of Spain," answered Carson in the same lofty Spanish manner as that used by the father, "in my country, should a man desire a girl, he asks that girl in marriage; if the girl reciprocates, they bother asking by-your-leave of no one else. Neither man nor American woman would consider for a moment allowing a parent to select the companion and helpmate of a lifetime.
"This is not America; this is Spain. I know that, hidalgo doctor; and whenever I can, I try to obey Spain's laws of conduct. I would have sought your agreement and your blessing but for one good reason. Felicidad is no longer your daughter! Because you believe she has dishonored your ancient name, you have publicly disclaimed her as a Torreblanca y Moncada.
"Good God, man!" Carson exclaimed, the untenable and even outrageous incongruity of the doctor's position suddenly hitting him like the smash of a bludgeon. "How canyoucontend for a father's rights over Felicidad after the harsh and cruel way you have used her! Why, at this very moment, you seek her life!"
That struck home. A murderous gleam leaped into Don Jaime's eyes. His eyes blazed like chips of glass.
"Senor Americano," he said huskily, in shaking voice, "do you not know that you are very rash? I am armed and ready; I look at you and see no weapon in your hands. Do you think that a Torreblanca y Moncada will long endure a quarrel in words? I warn you, my cheeky one! Cease challenging my prerogatives! Else shall you provoke me to kill you!"
It was more than a threat. Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada, grandee by birth and breeding, hidalgo of the old granite-jawed, eagle-stern and eagle-haughty Spanish sort, trained the huge horse-pistol, with the words, upon the square-jawed American facing him in the street!
It exasperated and incensed Carson—this high-handed attempt of the hidalgo to gag and stop his mouth, to cow and overawe his soul.
He did not bother now to temper or anyway mollify his words. Bluntly, boldly, he asserted:
"I know your sort of man, Don Jaime! We have them in my country—the Kentuckians, for instance! You do not really desire to kill Felicidad. Your pride goads you, but your heart is no longer in the work. And now you are more pleased than chagrined that I have stepped forth as her champion—you think to satisfy your pride by working up enough venom against me to bump me off and let the matter end there!
"I'll take my chances, proud hidalgo. I'll fight you every move until bitten by your lead. But you are not going, as you say, to wage much longer this war in words. Very soon you are either going to get hot enough to plug me, or you are going to throw up the sponge! Oh, I know your sort! You'll do one or the other. But one thing you will not do—you will not allow yourself to be made ridiculous!"
Don Jaime was staggered. The American's talk was a talk strange and utterly new to him. John Fremont Carson fought him with weapons that he had not known existed.
Don Jaime lowered the heavy horse-pistol to his knee. A spirit of sardonic deviltry entered into him. He would worst this cheeky American on his own ground! His lips curling half in smile, half in sneer, a strange light in his eyes, he said:
"Senor Americano, I will combat you and crush you with your own kind of weapon. I will vanquish you with words—with one question! But it must be understood, for the nonce, that I possess unqualifiedly and absolutely the right to speak as Felicidad's father."
The American nodded, a kind of bewildered wonder crowding his eyes.
"For the nonce, that prerogative is yours," he agreed.
"Bueno! Then straightway I challenge you to prove yourself of fit birth to be Felicidad's husband! This is Spain, senor. I speak now as a Spanish father. More; I am a hidalgo, and I speak for my daughter who is the daughter of a hidalgo of Spain! She has an inheritance of blood and pride which you cannot gainsay, but which you must equal if you would marry her!"
Dan Jaime spoke with a Latin fluency of exposition, in a rushing torrent of words. His eyes sparkled like vitreous slag.
"Look you, my cheeky one! No man of common birth may hope to aspire to my daughter. We Spanish grandees are a feudal race, caste-bound and arrogant of birth. Perhaps you do not understand the true color of the situation, eh? Then know you that even in Spain there are not more than a score of men who are my equal in seignior blood and ancient knightly name!
"Now, for any one outside this aristocratic circle to yearn and quest for my daughter's hand would be a sun-daring presumption. Take this Manuel Morales, for an instance." Momentarily his eyes leaped up the street to where the matador stood, his wasted form propped against the mud wall of the hospital.
"Morales is the hero of the peninsula, as you know—a popular idol, a famous and distinguished man. Royalties and hidalgos ask after his health, greet him by name and with handshake. He is the most renowned of modern bullfighters. And he is a rich man—richer far than are most grandees; for much, much gold has come to him along with his well-deserved success.
"Yet never would Morales dare to look for a wife among blooded folk! Indeed, should he be so mad as to presume so far, the hidalgo whom he thus affronted would kill him without ruth, as for a deadly grievance. And at once that hidalgo would be acquitted of all wrong by the public opinion of Spain. Aye, though Morales is the idol of all Spaniards!
"That is right and as it should be; for when all is said, he is only a bullfighter. And bullfighters have no social standing; they are not men of birth nor breeding; they are a low caste. Ask Morales himself. Even now he is nodding agreement to my every word!"
Carson did not trouble to turn his head to gain corroboration of the doctor's statement from the matador up the street. He realized already the poser Don Jaime was soon to spring. He eyed the haughty hidalgo fixedly, a peculiar smile slowly parting his lips.
"And Quesada," Don Jaime swept on—"Jacinto Quesada is in the same case as Morales. My words apply to him as much as they do to any bullfighter. Not because he is the Wolf of the Sierras, a bandolero and outlaw. Seguramente, no! But only because he is of common birth."
Don Jaime paused. He looked down at the American. The half-smile had altogether fled his lips. His lips were palpably sneering.
"Now as to yourself, my cheeky one!" he said with biting sharpness. "It is often said that the Americans are a nation ofcanaille. Can you prove yourself worthy of the daughter of a Spanish hidalgo and grandee? I ask you that. I wait for your answer."
"You ask me to prove to you that I am not of common birth?"
Don Jaime nodded vigorously. Caspita! this was indeed a trump card! All the venom of his embittered spirit showed.
"You cannot prove that, eh? Then it is true, is it not, that the Americans are a nation of—"
"One moment, Don Jaime. Your Spanish royalty is the keystone, the fountainhead, of Spanish society, is it not? Alfonso, your king, is as good and better an aristocrat than any of his hidalgos—"
"There are some that would dispute you there. Myself, I know my line is older! My ancestors—"
The American was broadly smiling.
"You will admit, however, that Alfonso is of uncommon birth?"
"Seguramente, yes! Is he not my master and lord!"
"Well, then! I was born in the same year as Alfonso, 1886. He was the son of a king; I the son of an American millionaire. Because Alfonso was such a high and mighty infant, his birth was a long-heralded public affair. And so was mine. When I was born, the newspapers of America remarked that here was no common birth. In long articles they compared it to the birth of Alfonso, citing statistics to show the principalities in mines and manufactories I would rule, the kingly revenues that would pour annually into my coffers of state.
"Alfonso's actual birth was marked by great pomp and a certain ceremony. To prove that he was truly the son of his royal mother, that everything was aboveboard and as it should be, in the room with the queen, when Alfonso first put in an appearance, were a round dozen and more hidalgos—"
"That is our Spanish custom when royal infants are born."
"Just so. A very uncommon birth! Well, with my mother, when first I put in an appearance, were a round dozen doctors and nurses of all kinds, trained and practical, wet and dry! Quite an uncommon birth, too, don't you think?"
What could Don Jaime do? Carson had worsted him signally. The grim drama had become almost a comedy, a farce!
Don Jaime feared longer to persist. It would not do for him to be made ridiculous and laughable.
All at once he lifted his head and looked beyond Carson, beyond Felicidad. In a great voice, he called out:
"Put up your gun, Quesada! I am a wineskin squeezed dry; I am empty of all words and all passions; I am done! Put up your gun, you Wolf-Cub you, and I will put up mine! I had meant to beat you to the first shot—to kill Felicidad and then have you kill me! But now—Carajo, I am done!"
Like mechanical toys on clockwork pivots, every man and woman within sound of the doctor's great voice, turned simultaneously to look for Quesada.
There, twenty feet away, stood the wolfishly gaunt bandolero, a revolver in his right hand trained rigidly on Don Jaime! That revolver had once been Jacques Ferou's!
Not before had John Fremont Carson noticed the revolver in Quesada's hand. He was taken completely by surprise. Little had he realized how close to black tragedy had been the drama in which he had enacted so prominent a part!
In the American's eyes, in the eyes of every man there present, the hidalgo on horseback loomed up, then and on the sudden, with a new and imposing dignity, a rare nobility and magnificence. Don Jaime alone had known of the imminent threat of Quesada's revolver. All the while he had striven to attain his vengeance, all that while Don Jaime had trusted his life to a hair. Quesada had him covered. The mere press of a finger on the trigger, and Don Jaime would have toppled out of the saddle—a dead man!
Quesada had thought Don Jaime all unaware. Now, for the first time, he comprehended the sublime insolence of the hidalgo's persistency. Abashed and shamefaced, he lowered the revolver and shoved it back into his belt.
Don Jaime lifted the horse-pistol from his knee and slipped it into the holster slung from the saddle. Then, without another word and without even a glance toward his daughter, he turned the old nag's head about and went deliberately down the goat path.
He never once looked round. But his back seemed not quite so rigid nor his old white head so erect. All at once there were about the unmistakable signs of an old, old man. And in the slow pace of the faithful nag, there seemed something that wanted to linger yet was urged on by pride, inexorable and pitiless.
"Oh, mi pobre padre!" wailed Felicidad after him. "His heart breaks and he is lonely! And there is only old whining Pedro and the childish Teresa to welcome him back to the gloomy casa!"
Save for the creaking of the saddle, the soft pad-pad of the horse's hoof-falls, nothing answered from down the goat path. For the first time then, in all that intolerable eternity of death and disease and lusting vengeance, Felicidad wilted in a swoon to the ground.