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 hoa.r.s.e, 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 gra.s.s!" he swore. "We will see now with how much grace you take the leap yourself!"

CHAPTER XIX

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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.s 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 a.s.s 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 a.s.s. The nine cabalgadores weighted the surviving beast with some of the provisions from the backs of the three poisoned mules; they enc.u.mbered 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 or _neblina_ had crept down like a clammy gray ghost from the windy pa.s.ses 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 anaemic 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, b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 rec.u.mbent 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 b.i.t.c.h, and if I am lucky, I may locate the brood for you. G.o.d 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-s.p.a.ced 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 Pa.s.s 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 appet.i.te, eh?"