The bandolero went round the walls until he came upon that which he sought. It was a yellow-leaved volume, lettered in Gothic type, that was yet not so old. It contained much data on the various forms of cholera, its causes, symptoms, stages, treatment, dissemination and prevention.

Running his eye down the columns of print, Quesada discovered that he would need to carry many drugs, preparations, and aperient and astringent medicines. At that rate, the ancient volume would prove an added burden. Quickly he decided to tear the descriptive pages from the volume. They were all that was desired.

But of a sudden, he was arrested in his vandal task. Nothing real and tangible halted him; only it seemed to him that the screams of a child were driving like knives into his heart. He remembered, then and all at once, that long-forgotten day when Felicidad, innocently naughty, had torn some of the richly illumined pages from the rare old books, and cut them into paper dolls, and been lashed unmercifully with a short whip of horsehide by her father.

He saw himself, a lad of ten years, rendered desperate by her screams as only a child becomes desperate. He saw himself charging at the terrible hidalgo, screaming like a little animal, tearing at the doctor's trousers with his finger nails, trying to leap up and upon him. He felt the fall of the quirta upon his head. It was acutely stinging as in reality. His jaws snapped together; they snapped together just as they had snapped, in that dim past day, upon the doctor's wrist. And a grim satisfaction tingled the edges of his locked teeth. It was for all the world as if, again, his teeth had sunk into flesh!

"Ah, you son of a mangy she-wolf!" sounded in his brain. "How's the wolf-cub to-day?"

He looked quickly about him. There on the wall he saw that which he had not noticed before. A painting of the doctor--Don Jaime himself, his hair whitened by years and by sorrow, and his gray eyes glinting out from his deep swarth face like remote stars in an intolerant heaven.

"Todopoderoso Dio'!" groaned Quesada, shuddering. "Pity Felicidad indeed when he finds her!"

With a kind of desperation, in one jerk he tore the desired pages from the book, then hied himself quickly out of the room.

"It is a haunt of ghosts!" he said almost superst.i.tiously.

He entered the doctor's laboratory. Here, from chests and racks and trays, he collected the relieving and remedial agents praised in the torn pages--opium pills, preparations of starch and laudanum, ammonia, salt, powdered aromatic chalk, astringents and laxatives. Down in the cellar, he secured some cobwebbed bottles of old brandy and clear wine.

He made several trips to his s.h.a.ggy pony, picketed outside in the road.

He secured what he had gathered in the canvas packs slung from the saddle. He left without once meeting the aged Teresa or again bothering the butler, Uncle Pedro.

He returned up the hills through the pa.s.ses and green corries. He shoved the horse ahead at a persistent canter, yet such was the grade and such the growing leg-weariness of the cob that slow days were consumed in the journeying. At last, in the dim fresco of a certain nightfall, he found himself back in that forested dell where he had commanded Rafael Perez to remain on guard.

But no chill ululations answered his imitations of the hoot of the eagle owl. He rode through the brush and across the stream. Back in the clearing, the door of the log cabin was swinging forlornly in the rising wind; within, was only dark obscurity and emptiness. Rafael Perez had fled with the other two!

Once again Quesada recalled the sullen manner and incomprehensible words of the trio when he last had met them. He shook his head gloomily.

"Something surely is afoot!" he murmured. "They mutter against me, they disobey me with impunity. The dogs of ladrones, they may have turned traitor! Instead of keeping an eye on the road, Perez may have put the Guardia Civil on my track. Porvida, it will go hard with them if such proves true! They'll never live to get the reward. Dios hombre, I swear it!"

His temper sharpened and embittered by the discovery, he vented it in harsh kicks against his pony's flanks. The wearied nag extended itself.

By late dawn, Quesada rode into the gorge from which the goat-path looped up to the empested village.

Presently, as they wound through the gorge, unusual signs of alertness began to show in the tired cob. He lifted his head, p.r.i.c.ked up his ears.

He was just about to neigh when the bandolero, on the watch, leaned over and clamped his hand tightly upon his nostrils. From ahead, on the instant, breathed into Quesada's ears the neigh of recognition of another horse.

The bandolero leaped from the saddle. With one hand firm on the muzzle of the pony, the other on the b.u.t.t of the long-barreled revolver protruding from his holster, tensely he stood waiting and hearkening.

Into his nostrils drifted the acrid smell of a wood fire. He heard a clipping staccato sound as of some one chopping f.a.ggots. He saw, some hundred feet ahead, a thin whitish smoke voluting up from the green tops of the pines and alders, and merging into the fog cloak above. There was a camp of men in the gorge.

His vague suspicions of the three dorados congealed into quick and firm convictions.

"It is the Guardia Civil," he surmised. And he swore; "By the Nails of Christ!"

CHAPTER XXIV

Quesada led his horse back around the bend and out of sounding distance.

He picketed him behind a feathery smoke-plant up the side of the gorge.

Then he stole forward toward the camp.

He caught now, as he drew near, the clatter of tin as of men preparing breakfast, the tempting aroma of coffee, and the hot sizzle of frying meat. Creeping through the underwood on hands and knees, silent as a cat of the wilds, he came to where he could peer through an entangle of white buckthorn and genista, and out into a trampled s.p.a.ce about an alder tree.

There were two men in the trampled s.p.a.ce. They wore the blue, red-trimmed uniform of the Guardia Civil.

The one holding a blackened frying pan over the small blaze of f.a.ggots was facing toward Quesada. His uniform but poorly fitted his squat frame and broadly uncouth shoulders; it showed palpable signs of having been slept in the night before. His heavy-jawed, black-mustached face was sweating copiously from the hot nearness to the fire; he had tossed his tricorn police hat off his unkempt head and into the weeds behind; he looked, forsooth, more the type of brigand than ever did Quesada himself. He was the apelike gendarme, Pascual Montara.

The other, with back toward Quesada, was busying about the wiry, coa.r.s.e-haired ponies to one side. He was a tall man, his uniform as trim on his military figure as if he had not spent the night on the ground, and his polished three-corner hat set snugly on his head, white linen sun-shield behind, in thorough preparation for the day's work. As he currycombed and brushed the ponies, there was visible on one sleeve the red-braided chevron of a sergeant.

"Hola, Don Esteban, mi sargento!" called Pascual at the fire. He put the frying pan down upon the trampled gra.s.s and lifted the coffee pot from its bed in the coals.

The tall man turned about and, in full view to the peeping Quesada, came striding toward the fire. His hair, closely clipped, showed white beneath his hat; yet there was in him no sign of the weakness of age. He had a short, knife-sharp white beard, a face as lean and haughty as a griffon vulture's. He was Sergeant Esteban Alvarado, father of the lover of the Gypsy Paquita, Miguel Alvarado.

The two men squatted cross-legged upon the ground opposite each other, and ate and drank in silence. But Montara, munching prodigiously, kept continually shaking his ugly head. Finally he said:

"Seguramente, yes! It is the wild-goose chase."

"Pascual Montara," said the old man severely, "your talk shows you unfaithful to your duty."

"Duty, za! It is my head I use, Don Esteban. Did not the Americano tell us last night, from the great rock above, that the village is in the throes of the cholera? We cannot go into the barrio for fear of taking the disease, and they will not leave the pueblo for fear of spreading it about the countryside.

"We have done our duty, mi sargento. We have found the American, the great Morales, and his whole cuadrilla. They are safe. And they can please themselves when they want to come down. Valgate Dios, it is not in our instructions to drag them into civilization by the hair of their head!"

"Muy bueno. But it is in our instructions to capture and kill Jacinto Quesada--"

"Who is not in Minas de la Sierra. I tell you, Don Esteban, that Americano does not lie. This is Quesada's native barrio, true; but he is no friend of Jacinto Quesada. Jacinto Quesada robbed him in that affair of the Seville-to-Madrid; for weeks he has been pursuing the Wolf through the sierras. He says Quesada is not in the village."

The sergeant chewed his meat in silence. It was a dour silence, as if he refused to argue, yet was not convinced by the logic of the other.

Beneath it, there seemed an undercurrent of imperial anger.

Opening his mouth wide as he ate, Montara looked at him sharply, from under black bushy brows.

"Must I argue as I did last night?" he asked aggressively. "You say that we have them all bagged, including Quesada, in this eagle's nest. But I say Quesada is not there. He has not been up in this barrio for months.

He has been swinging like a pendulum back and forth across the two Spains. My soul, he is like ten men for being in more places than one.

If he were up here, how can you account for that affair of the Despenaperros over three weeks ago?"

"I must admit that," qualified the old man condescendingly. "My son Miguel and I were stationed in the Pa.s.s at the time. Miguelito said he was sure it was Quesada who stuck-up the automobile and beat to death the rich Englishman. The Englishman's pale wife described the bandolero.

It was indeed Quesada. But that outrage, coming on top of the hold-up of the Seville-to-Madrid, must surely have caused the outlaw to seek refuge in his village."

"But it didn't, Don Esteban. You've heard of that happening in the Alameda of Valladolid on a night two weeks ago. While the people, bent on enjoying the open-air cinema, were all gathered on the gra.s.s in the hot night, he appeared before the large white sheet and, pointing two guns at them, brazenly called out that he was Jacinto Quesada. Then, while the members of the civic orchestra were playing some outrageous gypsy tune in obedience to his command, he slipped quietly away. I cannot account for it myself. He gathered no gold from the crowd. But sacred blood! it was bold."

"It was too bold for me to believe," objected Alvarado, shaking his head. "Tut, it is but a story of the people. They are forever building wonderful adventures and sentimental romances about these hungry dogs of bandoleros. One would think that the wolves were gentlemen and fine heroes, and we of the Guardia Civil only ratty red-eyed ferrets!"

Pascual vehemently nodded his heavy head.

"I know, I know!" he agreed heartily. "It is no longer any honor to wear the uniform of the police in Spain. But what think you now of my argument, Don Esteban? Need I recite that shocking affair of the Plaza de Toros of Seville? The glamorous Moors of Spain do not make up stories about their bandoleros robbing brave matadors in the House of G.o.d. It is a lizard's trick. Since Quesada stuck-up the popular espada, Lagartijo, in the bullfighters' chapel of Seville, all Spain has been stunned by the sacrilege. And that was but one short week gone--"