Jacinto Quesada drew back from the entangled buckthorn and genista. His brow was ruffled as a mountain stream. So this was the meaning of his dorados' sullen insinuations! Come to think of it, even old Pedro down in Granada had been struck aghast at sight of him whom he had known from a boy.

"Ah, Mother of G.o.d!" old Pedro had exclaimed, a strange quavering note in his voice. "It is Jacinto Quesada about whom all Spain talks!" And he had added, upon hearing of the plague: "It is the hand of G.o.d, Jacint.i.to! 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!"

Some unknown was sticking-up persons on the road and in far-off alamedas, and then, with bl.u.s.ter and insane braggadocio, announcing he was Jacinto Quesada! The fool had cold murder in his bowels! He had killed a foreigner, an Englishman. He slayed like a ferocious beast or a crazed man. And he had abused the sanct.i.ty of the chapel of the bullfighters in the Plaza de Toros of Seville. The thing was unheard of.

It was sacrilege!

"By the wounds of Christ!" swore Quesada softly. "The fellow is odious and detestable. And all his vile ordure is flung at my head. The creature is braiding a noose for my neck!"

Out in the trampled s.p.a.ce about the alder tree, the sergeant's voice had risen with a peremptory note.

"Do not stay here, Pascual Montara! It is against all the code of the Guardia Civil, but zut! ride away without me, and you please. I stay here. Understand, hombre; I stay here! Every wolf has his lair, every bandolero his home. This barrio above is Quesada's home. In a week or a month, he must return here. I shall wait that week or that month. He can come only this way. When he comes this way, by the Life! I shall rid Spain forever of his baneful presence!"

Jacinto Quesada stole back around the bend to his picketed horse. From behind the cantle of the saddle, he removed those canvas packs which contained the drugs, preparations, and liquors he had gathered at the doctor's casa. He unwound the reins from about a branch of the sumach bush and tied them loosely to the pommel of the saddle. He broke off a hairy flower stalk from the smoke-plant. Then, with an eye to quietude, carefully he led the pony down the brushy side of the gorge.

Once in the dust-coated road which wound through the bottom of the gorge, he faced the pony down the way he had come and inserted, under the brows of the saddle against the spine, the setule of flower stalk.

Immediately the animal, irritated out of his weariness, began fidgeting, flicking his tail, snapping his head round on either side, baring his long yellow teeth and crinkling again and again the skin of his back.

Quesada stepped to one side. With his open hand, he struck the horse a resounding thwack upon the rump. The pony leaped forward, the bristle of flower stalk painfully rubbing his spine. Ere he could recover from the shock of the blow and pause to lessen the aggravating p.r.i.c.king under the saddle, Quesada snapped out his revolver and discharged it in the air behind him--bang, bang! Exasperated and thoroughly frightened, the horse fled precipitantly down the road.

While the winding gutter of gorge detonated with the hoof-clatter of the racing horse and while the rock walls flung back and forth, like sounding-boards, the sharp metallic explosions of the pistol, Jacinto Quesada bounded up the brushy side to where, behind the feathery wig-plant, he had flung the canvas saddlebags.

He was none too quick. Like a louder echo of the echoes sounded up the gorge, of a sudden, the crang of a carbine; then the thundering hoof beats of horses careering down at full tilt; and then the voices of men lunging up in the dread challenge and command of the police:

"Alto a la Guardia Civil! Halt for the Civil Guard!"

Quesada crouched behind the whitish-green thicket of sumach, and waited tense as a trigger at half-c.o.c.k.

Around the bend up the road drove into view like a lean racing terrier a wiry rough-coated pony, hoofs pounding in a quick rataplan, barrel low to the dust, and ears flattened sharply back. Upright in the saddle, a carbine across the hollow of one arm, was the tall sergeant of police, linen sun-shield flying straight behind like a white guidon snapping in a wind.

"Don't shoot, Montara!" he called back from an eager keen-edged face.

"Don't shoot till you see the hair on his neck!"

"Shoot his horse!" answered a roaring shout. "Carajo! In all our lives, we may never get another such chance at Jacinto Quesada!"

Around the bend, like a screaming projectile, lunged another pony, neck extended, nostrils blowing red, and the ugly policeman Montara standing a-tiptoe in the stirrups. Montara was like some wild Arab in a mad display of horsemanship. He swayed back and forth; he waved the carbine in one long apelike hand. Carried away by the l.u.s.t of the chase, he shouted repeatedly from his blood-darkened countenance:

"Alto a la Guardia Civil! Alto, alto! Alto a la Guardia Civil!"

Ponies and riders plunged behind a huge brown boulder down the road and out of sight. Quesada snapped up. Active as an ape, he slung the canvas packs over his shoulders and leaped down the brushy side of the gorge.

What time the stony defile echoed and reechoed with the distance-dimming clangor of pounding hoofs and turbulent shouts, he sped, on his long mountaineer's legs, up the convolutions of the goat path to the empested barrio.

The crang of a carbine suddenly spearing aloft from down the gorge caused him to halt on the great rock at the brink of the village. He looked back. He smiled somberly.

"That will be my poor horse," he remarked. "He has halted for the Guardia Civil!"

CHAPTER XXV

To Jacinto Quesada, returned after an absence of over a week, the village of Minas de la Sierra wore an inexplicably strange appearance.

Gone utterly--mud and thatch and wooden shutters--were the chozas in which the widowed mother of the mountain boy, Gabriel, had lain sick and the white-haired Villarobledo had died. Where the huts had stood were now only empty spans.

Before the other huts had been built a covered wooden flume, as for the carrying off of sewage. Down the old Moorish gutter in the center of the uneven street coursed a clear quick stream with cold reflections and tiny gurgling noises that seemed to tempt one to drink.

Otherwise, nothing stirred in the chill morning sunlight. No serranos stood in the low doorways of the cabanas or hovered about the cork-oak tree in the center of the barrio. The village seemed a village of the dead.

Quesada hastened across the street, muddy and slippery from the heavy fog of the night prior. As he did, of a sudden from the direction of the little whitewashed chapel, there drifted down to his ears a continuous moaning and groaning. It sounded bodiless and unearthly in the thin air of that high alt.i.tude.

He knew thereat. Carson, the American, following out his scheme of sanitation, had segregated the sick. The tiny village chapel had been converted into a hospital. Within in the painful obscurity, behind those apertures that were now screened against flies with flimsy calico, men were moving back and forth on solemn and fearful tasks.

Quesada made his way into the cabana where he had left Felicidad.

Inside, in the gloom, he found John Fremont Carson visiting the girl in the course of his rounds.

Propped by a pillow, the golden-haired girl was sitting up in the bed.

Her cheeks were still white as ivory; but there was a brave new light in her blue eyes. She was convalescing. Carson was holding for her, with kind concern, a bowl of vegetable soup, thin and easily digestible.

Looking over the American's shoulder, she was the first to discover the bandolero. With glad and genuine effusiveness, in a voice that yet showed husky traces of the vox cholerica, she cried:

"My soul! It is Jacint.i.to come back to us!"

The American got quickly afoot and shook hands warmly.

"Have you brought the stuff?" he greeted solicitously.

"Seguramente, si!" smiled Quesada. "And we may thank the bueno Dios that the senor doctor, from long tending to cholera cases, had every little thing we needed!"

He unslung, with the words, the swollen canvas bags from his shoulders and placed them upon the leaf-stuffed couch to one side.

With care and deep concern, Carson fingered and opened the many boxes, bottles, and preparations. It was as if each were some priceless jewel.

He made odd little sounds in his throat, expressive of discovery and relief and infinite joy.

"Here are the pages, Senor Carson, which will tell you all about the cholera. The book was too heavy for me to carry; I had so many other things; and therefore I tore these pages out bodily."

The American nodded and shoved the torn pages into a pocket of his coat.

"And my father?" exclaimed Felicidad. Perhaps to her, as had happened to Quesada himself, there was something poignantly reminiscent in this talk of tearing pages from one of the rare old books of the hidalgo doctor.

"He is still away," answered Quesada vaguely.

The American looked up sharply from uncorking one of the cobwebbed bottles of wine.

"You left word?"

Quesada nodded constrainedly, as if against his will. He could not say Don Jaime must soon follow him up the mountains. He could not look at the girl. He feared overwhelmingly for Felicidad, once her father should arrive. He was afraid lest his Moorish eyes might betray him.

Carson mixed a narcotic of the wine and a pinch of opium, and proffered it to the girl.