"It was thus in my mother's case. The only doctor near here who will journey up these perilous goat paths and moaning gorges to help the poor serranos, is the hidalgo doctor, Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada, a grandee of Spain and Felicidad's own father. We sent one of the villagers for him, but he was away looking for Felicidad and for his stolen money. And my mother died. It may be nothing, senores; it may be the dread cholera; but at least, mis caballeros, I have warned you."

Questioningly, almost with haughty challenge, he looked at Morales. The matador hesitated. He glanced at his cuadrilla. Whether because of the privations they had suffered, or because of the pale light from the chance moonbeams, or because of an inconcealable revulsion and dread, the faces of the bullfighters looked blanched and sharply haggard. The matador turned for moral aid to the American.

Carson was engrossed in a perplexity of thought. Was this but an obstacle suddenly contrived and cunningly put in their way to cause them to take the bandolero's word on its face value, without seeking further to ascertain the facts about the girl? Quesada had left himself room to crawl out. It might be nothing, he had said, or it might be a noxious pestilence. It could always prove to be nothing.

"We will risk the chance," decided the American with determination. "We will go with you to your barrio."

There was a noisy rustling and crackling of the gorse as the men scrambled afoot. Well, suddenly above the noise, from the foliage-embowered darkness up the road, exploded a voice of command:

"Throw up your hands, you Jacinto Quesada!"

It was the voice of the Frenchman. He stepped into the moonlight. Tall and blond, his ashy skin drawn tight with virulent resolution over his hawklike face, his slate-colored eyes showing bright as an animal's, he pointed his large-calibered revolver at the bandolero.

Quesada obeyed with quick dispatch. Yet he found occasion to whisper to the others, "I have told you the truth, senores. I am altogether in your hands."

Whether they should intervene just then or allow things to take a certain limited course, the American and the matador were uncertain. How much had the Frenchman heard? Did he know that he himself was accused of crime, of thievery and abduction, and of worse than crime--failure to share with them while they were enduring the intolerable pangs of starvation? Was this but a bold move to retrieve favor in their eyes?

Carson and Morales decided, all at once to wait.

Never removing the menace of the revolver, slowly Jacques Ferou drew near.

"Carson," he instructed with biting command, "you search him. He has my roll of five-thousand peseta bills!"

Plainly then Carson realized that the Frenchman could not have overheard Quesada's history of that money. This was but a presumptuous and shameless attempt to recover the doctor's bills!

"He hasn't your money, Ferou!" objected Carson with prompt.i.tude and energy. "He just has told us that he turned those bills over to Felicidad, whose dowry they were."

It was, of course, a lie. Quesada had explained quite definitely, in the course of his story, that he was holding the purse against an occurrence he dreaded. He knew, with a fearful cert.i.tude, that Doctor Torreblanca y Moncada must soon hear where his disgraced daughter had found refuge; and then would he come, stony of eye and agate of heart, to wreak vengeance upon her. Quesada intended to produce the bills, at that trying moment, in the hope that their appearance would have the effect of mitigating the awful anger of the haughty Don Jaime.

But the Frenchman, not having overheard any of Quesada's recital, swallowed the bait in blissful ignorance.

"Is that so?" he queried with a lift of his blond eyebrows. He leaped into a sudden and importunate impatience. "Let us go, let us go to my fiancee!" he urged. "Oh, I must see Felicidad!"

Said Morales very coldly, "Jacinto Quesada is just about to lead us to his native pueblo where the girl is domiciled."

"But I trust him not! How do we know that he will lead us aright; how do we know that it is not all a lie? Blue devils! he may have the very money on him now and be but leading us into a snare! Here you, Quesada!

Keep up your arms! I will search you myself alone!"

But Carson stepped between.

"Senor Quesada has offered to guide us to his village," he said, "and Don Manuel, his cuadrilla and I have signified our willingness implicitly to trust him. You must abide by the decision of the majority.

Ferou, put down your gun!"

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. It was wise to obey; there were two and more against him. He stuck the weapon in his coat pocket.

But Quesada shook his head.

"I will trust him not, this Frenchman, senores. My offer was to you. If the Frenchman is to go along, he must go along unarmed."

"_Mais non, mais non!_" expostulated the Frenchman, lapsing in his agitation into his native language.

"_Pues y que?_" asked Morales sharply. "Why not?" And he s.n.a.t.c.hed the revolver, with the words from Ferou's pocket.

The Frenchman seemed of a temperament to blow hot and cold by turns. He recovered almost immediately from his first fears. He shrugged his athletic shoulders. A man like a gutta-percha ball he was, resilient, full of elasticity, rebounding when struck. Behind Morales' back, slyly and covertly he smiled his calculating and very superior smile.

Now, following the striding long-legged figure of the bandolero, the nine cabalgadores pursued on and upward through the moon-shimmering night.

CHAPTER XXII

On the great rock at the brink of the village of Minas de la Sierra where, years before when he was yet a very little Spaniard, Jacinto Quesada had stood with his weeping mother and watched his father hurry down the mountainside on an enterprise of forlorn and fatal desperation, a boy in cotton knee breeches and bare brown legs, despite the mountain cold, stood waiting like some statue carved in basalt.

Behind him, into the dull gray wash of sky, the Picacho de la Veleta lifted its craggy head; off to the northeast bulked snowy old Muley Ha.s.san, Cerro de Mulhacen, the highest peak of the peninsula; and all about, just brightening with the chill light of dawn, were the bleak spires of lesser mountains, shadowy defiles, dark and moaning gorges.

Nothing moved in the leaden, glacial, desolate reaches save an immense lammergeyer that hovered on slow wings over its high eyrie like some black dragon of morbid fancy.

Presently, out of the gloom of a lower gorge, the shapes of men emerged into view and began mounting the fiber-line of goat path which curved and twisted and wound up to the barrio like a convoluted snake. It was Jacinto Quesada, leading the nine cabalgadores, weary from the long climb through the night.

The boy began crying out at the sight. It is an odd fact that sounds high on mountains lose in volume, but gain in distinctness and carrying power. The cries of the boy that were more like the bleating of a helpless ewe beset by wild dogs, dropped down to the men in the gorge.

"Oh, Jacinto, caballero of my soul!" he shrilled. "The mother of me, who waited in her last illness upon your own good mother--G.o.d rest her soul!--my own pobre mamacita is sick! Last night, her stomach turned upside down on her, and to-day her skin is blue and cold! Save her, Don Jacinto of my heart; save her to me, and the Holy Mother of G.o.d will kiss your brow with fortune!"

"Hush, Gabriellito!" said Quesada tenderly, when he came up in the van.

He gathered the boy to him, under one arm, and turned to the others. His young smooth brown face was priestly with pain and somberness and a great pity. In a grave voice, he said:

"There can be no mistake, senores; it is indeed the dread cholera! Like the great black wings of that lammergeyer of the air, it has closed down about my poor pueblo."

A little clatter of sound came from a yellow run of water as it trickled, after the old Moorish fashion, down the village street through an open stone gutter. In Minas de la Sierra, clinging like a cragmartin's nest to a ledge of the Picacho de la Veleta, there was naught else of sound or movement.

No old men mumbled endless talk in the cold sun beneath the cork-oak in the center; no shawled manzanilleros strode by with panniers of the white-flowered manzanilla upon their backs. From the scanty forests above came no sound of woodchoppers, no steely ring of axe on pine.

Tightly closed were the wooden hatches which shuttered the windows of the mud-and-thatch cabanas. Within, no light from the great open fireplaces cleaved the darkness. There was no laugh or squeal of children.

Gabriel, the village lad, unable to restrain his nervousness and deep fear, hurriedly led them to the mud choza where his mother lay dying. It was very dark within. Strings of pimentos hung drying from the low rafters. There was a bed on either side of the cold fireplace. On one of the beds the woman was prostrated under a heap of rags.

All sap seemed to be drained from her body. She was withered and dark-hued as a burnt match. Carson stooped and felt her wrist. The pulse-beat was an almost imperceptible flutter. Quesada spoke gently to her and, with brave effort, she answered in a whisper that was as the gasping of a wind through one of the boulder-strewn pa.s.ses above. That was the _vox cholerica_. She was in the second and usually fatal stage of malignant cholera.

They left the boy lamenting softly at the bedside of his mother.

"She is a widow," said Quesada, "and all he has left in the world."

Their fears a hideous cert.i.tude now, grimly they went through the dying village. In a nearby hut, they found an old white-haired man altogether dead. His muscles were oddly contracted; one arm was turned round, the palm of the hand out and hanging over the edge of the cornshuck tick.

As very often happens after death through cholera, his body was not only still warm, but rising in temperature, burning up.

It seemed poignantly lonely in there with the solitary dead. They stumbled out of the sour darkness.

"That was Antonio Villarobledo," said Quesada; "a man who has long lived alone. He was almost a father to me when I was a boy."

Everywhere they went in the barrio, everywhere in the cold clay cabanas, Death had stalked before them on bony rickety legs, a chill damp on his forehead, his emaciated fingers picking at the coverlets of the sick, shutting their eyes to desire and despair. A great illness was on the serranos--a foul plague that caused them to double up with stomach cramps and vomit a gray pasty whey; that turned their skins to blue and purple and swatted them off, like flies, within twelve and twenty-four hours.