To some he gave stimulants and astringents; to those in the more severe stages of the disease, he doled out opiates.

He went from cabana to choza outside, bringing brandy and nutritive food to the convalescing. He was leaving the choza of one villager when Quesada, d.o.g.g.i.ng his steps, plucked him by the sleeve.

"You have seen, senor don hidalgo?" asked the bandolero. "The Frenchman Ferou is up here, also."

"I know," nodded Don Jaime austerely. "He is wherever trouble is. He is the sc.u.m that gathers where things are filthy, an abomination to be squashed under the heel! Za!" he ended, with profound loathing. "He is a human leech!"

Quickly then, as they approached the next cabana, he related with characteristic frankness and bitter contempt, all he had seen and heard that morning in the gorge at the foot of the goat path.

Quesada showed little surprise. What could one expect from the French vulture!

But what did surprise him not a little was to find, upon putting his hand inside his sheepskin zamarra, that the small mahogany-colored leather purse of the doctor was no longer there. Carajo! what had become of the purse and money of Don Jaime?

"It is that Frenchman!" he quickly surmised. "Don Jaime, he has stolen your money for a second time! I took the purse from him in that affair of the Seville-to-Madrid; I was holding all those five thousand peseta bills for you, my senor doctor; but while I was down sick and knew nothing, the French ferret must have gone through my pockets!"

Don Jaime only grunted.

They entered the obscurity of the next cabana. Within, Felicidad was sitting at the bedside of the convalescing American, explaining all that had occurred. At their appearance, she abruptly quieted.

Pointing to the American upon the leaf-stuffed couch, Quesada explained in a few sketchy sentences just who Carson was and all he had done. Then the bandolero told how Ferou had charged Carson for the medicines so vital to his recovery and even for the bare necessities of life.

"The Frenchman is a plunderer, an extortioner, Don Jaime. He charged prices, exorbitant prices. He robbed this man of all his ready money.

Senor Don Dios, it was outrageous, detestable! There was no need of prices; the man was down on his back, helpless, well-nigh dead; there was no need of prices of any kind. But what could we do? In all the barrio, Ferou was the only one armed."

The hidalgo doctor lifted Carson's heavy hand to feel his pulse. He said no word. He never once looked toward Felicidad who had arisen to her feet and stepped to one side.

Yet Quesada knew. In this expose of Ferou's execrable character, it was plain by comparison that the Frenchman had artfully cajoled Felicidad and then used her as a cat's-paw to pluck golden chestnuts out of the fire. The girl had been duped and ensnared by the creature's wiles. Even to the adamantine mind of the senor doctor, the blow and blot of his daughter's conduct must inevitably pall before the odiousness of the Frenchman's villainy.

But again Don Jaime said no word. He only prescribed a certain diet for Carson. Without so much as a softening glance toward the pale and fearful girl, he marched out of the cabana, his boots clamping down in firm measured strides.

They returned to the hospital only to find Gabriel suffering, once more, in the grip of the plague. To ease the poor lad's griping pangs and still the heart-tearing cries for his dead mother, the senor doctor dropped a few beads of chloroform down his throat.

"Do not despair, my precious little man!" encouraged Morales, in a husky voice, from his place down the platform. "Have a high fearless heart, and the great Torreblanca will yet pull you through."

With an utterness of grat.i.tude at having won such inspiriting words from the matador whom he so venerated, the boy thanked Morales with black eyes that were smoldering great coals in their deep pits.

Don Jaime turned to Quesada. Morales had tossed off the upper end of his blanket and the hidalgo had suddenly noticed the gold-braided green jacket about the matador's torso. With that characteristic frankness of his which so often sounded brutal and coa.r.s.e, he queried:

"Who is this hombre in gold-tinsel and green that has such faith in the ability and concoctions of Torreblanca y Moncada?"

"Que, que!" exclaimed the bandolero, distinctly surprised. "What, what!

Does not the senor doctor know?"

But the doctor did not even remember having seen the man in the excitement of his first rounds.

"That is Morales, the bravest espada in all the Spains!"

"Morales? Manuel Morales, that great murderer of bulls, that supremely dexterous one with the sword? And here!"

Don Jaime went at once to the side of the wanly smiling matador.

"My Manuel Morales," he said with earnestness, "all Spain mourns for its lost pastime while you lie helpless here. We must quickly get you well.

But valgame Dios! no poor few remedies of mine will work the miracle half so speedily as that own brave golden Moorish heart of you!"

Interposed Quesada quietly:

"Jacques Ferou robbed our Manuel, too. And you know the great Morales, Don Jaime! He would rather starve than play the mouse to this hawk. Yet he had to pay!

"Ah, Torreblanca y Moncada," he added with rising vehemence, "this hombre Ferou, is a human bloodsucker, as you say! He is a greedy, foul buzzard!"

Don Jaime snapped erect. A portentous gleam was in his stony eyes.

"He robbed Manuel Morales, too!" he exclaimed. "That's enough; not another word! We will give the creature short shrift! Carajo! I have a plan."

Quesada and Morales looked about to see that no henchman of Ferou had chanced to overhear. The doctor understood their wary glances. He lowered his voice.

"All the short jump up the goat path," he said in even tones, "ever since this morning when I heard the French ringworm's conversation in the gorge, I have been formulating this plan. And it is a good plan; it will attain many ends at the one time. It will blight the treacherous plot of Ferou, save you from the Guardia Civil, Quesada, and in the same breath win back for me my stolen money! Ah, it is almost divine in its justice! Mediante Dios--G.o.d willing, I will use it as another instrument of my vengeance!"

Quesada gasped.

"You mean to kill the French leech? But my senor doctor, in the whole pueblo, Jacques Ferou is the only man armed! No lo quiera Dios, Don Jaime! G.o.d forbid, yet I fear he will slay you first!"

"I have a horse-pistol," said the physician with grave significance.

"Yet I do not mean to sully these hidalgo hands of mine by killing him myself. Seguramente, no! He shall die, but from no bullet of mine!"

He shook his white head slowly as if fixing something definite in his mind.

"To-morrow noon," he added imperiously. "To-morrow noon, he shall die!"

It was the selfsame hour Ferou himself had bargained with the Guardias Civiles for the killing of Quesada!

Don Jaime would say no more. He was as arrogantly enigmatic as the very G.o.d Himself!

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

Don Jaime worked that day. That night he slaved. About eventide Alfonso Robledo, the banderillero who so bravely had seconded Quesada that morning, suffered all at once a severe relapse. Perhaps it came from the overheating excitement of that crucial time upon the rock; perhaps the abrupt exposure in that intrepid try to avert Felicidad's cruel and barbarous fate, had brought it on; at any rate and all on a sudden, his weakened body began writhing in an agony of cramps.

There was nothing else for it. The hidalgo doctor gave the bullfighter a hypodermic injection of morphia. The paroxysms lessened, altogether ceased. The eyelids of the banderillero rolled down heavily, and he slumped into a deep stertorous sleep.

That reawakened in Don Jaime the Fear. He made once more a round of the hospital. He went from choza to cabana outside, seeking new cases. Where a man could not sleep or a woman persisted in moaning, he administered narcotics.

When morning dawned through wisps of rain, the long night of taxing and intolerable work showed plainly in the doctor. His narrow face looked thin and long as a ferule; the cheek bones were high, the aquiline nose never more imperious. What with all the coffee he had drunk like a good Moor, to accelerate the action of his brain and steady the movement of his hand, his skin seemed tinged to a deeper swarth.

Quesada awoke early and with a renewed strength. He brewed for the grandee another pot of fresh aromatic coffee.