He came, in the noontide, to the boulder-strewn, gorse-whelmed pocket of the Christ of the Pa.s.s. He paused neither to rest nor to eat. In the moon of that evening, he found himself in the forested dell at the foot of that dark green corry which snaked over a shoulder of the sierras.

Here in the night, almost a week before, Aguilino the guide had deserted Morales and his men.

Quesada turned aside from his decurrent course. He broke through the moon-filtering brush of the dell. He waded the nearby frothing and echoing mountain stream. All the while, louder than the splash and chop of the boisterous rivulet, he ululated shrilly in the mournful manner of the Spanish she-wolf.

Presently, from the underwood beyond, came an answering call. It was a singular bird note, not much the ordinary hoot of an owl, but more a growl and something of a gruff scream. It was the hoot of the eagle owl.

Quesada pressed forward. He came out, a moment later, upon a tiny clearing, saffron in the moonlight. To one side stood a log hut, its c.h.i.n.ks plastered with adobe. Crowded in the open doorway were three men.

They were his dorados, Ignacio Garcia, Pio Estrada, and Rafael Perez.

To judge from this, Perez had not fled so far, after all. The other two must have recently come up. Perez lacked altogether now the yellow scar that had so hideously distinguished Aguilino the guide.

Quesada showed no surprise. It was as if he had thoroughly expected to find them there.

"Hola, mis dorados!" he called, as he stepped into the clearing. "Bring forward one of your nags."

"But the booty!" objected Rafael Perez, whilom Aguilino.

"Si; the sacks of mail and jewels and money!"

"Do we not go forward to the cache now," asked Garcia, "and split the loot between us?"

"Disparate! I have no time. The plunder is cached with our cacique, Dionisio Almazarron, in the foothills of the Sierra Morena. Go you there, you three, and take it all. But alto! first get me one of your cobs to ride down into Granada."

No one of the three men moved. Said Pio Estrada in an odd voice:

"Ah, you do not care for this little treasure, eh, maestro? Times have been good to you in Spain. Don Jacinto has taken to enterprising abroad, single-handed, and accomplishing marvelous and audacious feats. It is true indeed that Don Jacinto is brave, brave as the very G.o.d himself!"

Quesada did not understand the significance of the words, but there was no mistaking their intent. There was that in the tone of Estrada's voice and in the fact that the men still stood unmoving in the doorway, in sullen disobedience to his command, which spelled sedition and revolt.

Slowly from his holster, Quesada lifted his huge long-barreled revolver.

"My golden ones," he said quietly, "you do not hear well in the moonlight. Would you understand better the detonation of a pistol?" He smiled, showing his clean white teeth.

The grim jest of his words, the set of his long jaw, the gleam of eyes and teeth and steely revolver, had a decided effect upon the men. Like cats frightened away by the Spanish scat, zape! they stretched their legs around the cabin and out of sight.

Within a trice, they were back, each leading a wiry rough-coated pony.

Quesada selected the most mettlesome and leaped into the deep saddle.

"Rafael Perez," he instructed, turning partly round, "you shall remain here. Let the others go for the loot. You watch the road. Men of the Guardia Civil will be riding the hills. When I pa.s.s here again, in returning from Granada, I shall hoot like the eagle owl and you will answer in the manner of the wolf b.i.t.c.h. Let me know, then, if any policemen come this way. By this time, the affair of the Seville-to-Madrid must be loudly bruited abroad in Spain. I should not wonder if some two Guardias Civiles will ride over this corry in an attempt to capture me in my own village."

Perez grunted in ill-concealed distaste of the task. Ignacio Garcia spoke out.

"There are many other things loudly bruited abroad in Spain, these days, maestro mio!"

Quesada swung completely around in the saddle to face the sullen trio.

"Carajo! Do you think to trifle with Jacinto Quesada! What is all this muttering going on here?"

Garcia shrugged his shoulders noncommittally and a bit fearfully; the erstwhile Aguilino remained taciturn and lowering of dark brow; but with a strange audacity that was almost insolence, Estrada ventured:

"Oh, you will soon learn, Don Jacinto of the high hand!"

Quesada cursed them angrily for the whelps of dogs; then swung round in the saddle, dug his heels into the horse's flanks, and headed full-tilt through the brush. Once back in the trampled band of heath and brambles, which was the road through the dell, he sped the nag at a gallop up the dark green corry.

But topping the rise and dropping down on the other side, he reined in the cob the better to reconsider the sullen manner and incomprehensible words of his trio of dorados.

"The knaves have been bitten by some foul plan," he surmised. "It is not that they intend to rob me of all share in the booty. Seguramente, no! I told them they were welcome to the entire lot. Something else is afoot, G.o.d knows what!"

Coming out of the mournful Pa.s.s of the Blessed Trinity, some time later, he took that one of the three roads which diverged most sharply from the course pursued by the cabalgadores in climbing up. After a good time more, he rode through the myrtle and orange trees of the Alpujarras and, following the Darro, slanted down toward the Moorish city of Granada, gleaming white on the sides of the hills.

A few miles outside the city, upon the great hasped door of the crumbling adobe casa of Torreblanca y Moncada, Quesada knocked echoingly. After an appreciable s.p.a.ce, the little mullion window in the door was opened, and an old white-haired man peered out with bright eyes. He was Pedro, the butler.

"Ah, Mother of G.o.d!" he exclaimed, a strange quavering note in his voice. "It is Jacinto Quesada about whom all Spain talks!"

"I bring news of the little Felicidad."

"G.o.d grant it is good news!"

"Good and bad. She is safe in my native pueblo, but she is sick. She is sick of the same disease that killed off my own poor mother only a few days ago. It is a plague, Tio Pedro. The whole village is sick with the dread cholera."

The old servant e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in horror.

"It is the hand of G.o.d, Jacint.i.to!" he went on with warning sententiousness. "It is a scourge of G.o.d striking down those about you because of the terrible vile things you have been doing, these last nights, throughout the peninsula. Take heed, Jacint.i.to mio; take heed ere it is too late, and all you love are dead!"

There was something in the old man's words which sounded startlingly and disagreeably reminiscent of the three dorados, their sullenness, their mutterings.

"Disparate!" exclaimed Quesada. "What nonsense is this? Just tell me, tio; is Don Jaime still away?"

The white head nodded energetically behind the mullion window.

"Si; seguramente, si! Ever since that affair of the Seville-to-Madrid, the senor doctor has been scouring the plains and hills of La Mancha for his stolen daughter and all his money. Ah, Don Jaime is indeed a hard man. G.o.d pity Felicidad when he finds her!"

"I come," said Quesada brusquely, tiring of the old man's continual whine--"I come to get medicines from the hidalgo doctor's chest in order to combat the pestilence. Once Don Jaime returns, you will tell him of our plight."

Came abruptly the grating of hastily drawn bolts; the heavy door swung in.

"You know the house; it is yours," said old Pedro with true Spanish hospitality.

The bandolero entered the gloom of the corridor.

"I shall go to find Teresa," added Pedro, as he re-bolted the door. "We shall kneel, and say prayers for the repose of your mama's soul, and for the quick recovery of the little nina, Felicidad, and the other sick ones. When the senor doctor returns, I shall tell him all that you said.

And when he rides away up the steep goat paths to your barrio, we shall plead with Mary, the Compa.s.sionate and the Compa.s.sionating, that his granite heart may soften with pity for his little daughter...."

As he left the whining voice of the old butler behind him and went through the long echoing dusky corridors, an orientation took place within Jacinto Quesada. Back through the years he went; back to the day when, a scrawny little mountaineer's bantling, he had put his puny hand into the great harsh fist of the hidalgo doctor and come down the mountains to the decayed, lizard-haunted, and dingy casa.

No longer was the muggy mansion the sumptuous palace it had seemed to his ten-year-old eyes. And yet every s.p.a.cious poverty-bare room that he pa.s.sed and glimpsed was quick and instant to him with memories. They were memories all of one sort. Memories of a pretty little girl with golden hair and legs round and pudgy as his own would have been, on that time, had his father lived and prospered. Unconsciously he found himself pausing in the gloom as if to catch a note of her rippling and infrequent laughter.

The shadowy library seemed never so vast nor so gloomy as now. Most of the huge old sheepskin-bound books were gone. The voids in the tall cases, rapidly gathering dust, were as poignantly reminiscent as the empty chair of one that has died.