His hand jerked back in superst.i.tious fear. The man did not move; he was lying on his face. Quesada put out his hand again and touched the still thing with a braver and more prying touch. All at once he turned it over.

Stark in the moonlight showed a short knife-sharp white beard, a fine-chiseled imperious nose, and a swarthy face, lean and haughty as a griffon vulture's! The revolver fell from his palsied hand.

"Sangre de Cristo!" his dry lips fluttered. "It is Don Jaime himself!"

But no! Don Jaime could not be here. Had he not left the hidalgo doctor, that every morning, in the village above in the sierras?

A grave calmness came upon him then, and a questing thoroughness. Who was the man? Somehow his features seemed familiar. Was it only because of that striking resemblance to Don Jaime?

He noticed, all at once, that there was visible on the body, under the powdering of dust from the road, a kind of red-edged blue jacket. On one sleeve was a single red chevron, and to one side, almost hidden in the dust, the shimmer of a patent leather hat. With a stifled gasp, recognition leaped full-fledged into his brain. The man was Senor Don Esteban Alvarado, the aged sergeant of the Guardia Civil!

No more than a few weeks before, Quesada had seen the sergeant in the gorge below Minas de la Sierra, dominant with life and lording it over the apelike policeman Montara. To find the sergeant now only a still black huddle in the road was a distinct shock to the bandolero. He knew that just the day before either the sergeant or Montara had shot Ferou.

Almost incredulous, Quesada felt the body for signs of life. But the sergeant was dead. His body was not what one could call warm, yet neither was it cold with that soft stickiness so instinctively repulsive to the living touch. The sergeant had been killed only a short time before. A caking of dust on the torso of his jacket showed where the blood had oozed from a bullet wound in the chest, and quickly dried.

"It was that shot I heard!" the bandolero surmised. "But who killed him?

And why?"

Of the sudden, he remembered the old woman who had pa.s.sed him in the road, crying softly to herself. He bounded back around the bend. But in the intervening jiffy of time, the shadows of the defile had swallowed her from sight.

"She is the sergeant's poor old wife," he said to himself. "She must have come upon him, slain like a dog in the road. I knew Don Esteban, his wife, and son lived in these hills. Now the poor old woman is gone to pray before the Christ of the Pa.s.s for the eternal welfare of his departed soul. May it rest in peace!"

He came back to the black huddle, still profoundly puzzled as to whom had done the killing. He turned the body over into that posture in which he had found it. He retrieved his fallen revolver.

He was about to mount and ride on, when abruptly he halted, one foot in the stirrup. An enlightening but bitter thought had suddenly shocked his brain.

For a long time now, crimes had been committed which he never had a hand in, but which in every case had been laid at his door. Automobiles had been held up, toreros' chapels invaded, men robbed and even killed by a young man described as Jacinto Quesada when, all the time, Quesada himself had been quarantined in Minas de la Sierra.

There was a sinister purpose, a foul plan underlying the criminal's habit of masquerading and posing as Jacinto Quesada. Behind the personality of Quesada, he was cloaking his own ident.i.ty and committing crimes without a suspicion pointing toward himself. What could be more probable than that this same criminal had killed the old policeman?

"It was that masquerader!" the bandolero exclaimed to the night. And he swore: "By the Nails of Christ!"

He circled by the p.r.o.ne body in the road, his horse nervous and quivering with instinctive fright. He kicked the nag into a brisk canter. He sought thus in action to quiet the thoughts which now were bothering his brain. He pursued the descent.

But the turgid thoughts would not be stifled. They fluttered in his head like the pale moonbeams on the rock walls. They filled him with gloom as profound as the shadow-haunted deeps of the narrow way.

He, Jacinto Quesada, had discovered the corpse. Was that not strange, portentous? It seemed to him now as if the hand of G.o.d were foreshadowing, in this grisly discovery, some tragic misfortune about to befall him. The masquerader had committed the crime of blood. Well, the penalty for it would strike most surely upon Quesada's head! Of that, he felt superst.i.tiously certain!

He made the sign of the horned hand in an attempt to avert the impending evil. But no use. His mind would not still, nor would the misgivings die. He reined in the nag.

"There is but one thing for me to do," he announced to himself. "I must return to the side of the corpse, and kneel and say a prayer for his soul in purgatory. A mere word of requiescat is not enough. He was mine enemy in life; I must show complete Christian forgiveness toward him, now that he is dead. That alone will prevent a curse from falling upon me!"

He was kneeling in prayer beside the dead sergeant and had reached the words: "May his soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of G.o.d, rest in peace," when, all at once from down the road, his ears were a.s.sailed by a startling sound--the hoof beats of approaching horses!

Hastily he made the sign of the cross and got to his feet. Dragging his horse by the bridle after him, he concealed both nag and himself completely in the deep shadowy elbow of the spur.

Came to him then, on the vagrant breaths of the night wind, the sound of voices. They were men's voices, loud above the steady hoofbeats of the horses, as if raised in some wordy contention:

"But I tell you, Pascual Montara, the Wolf-Cub is not dead!"

"And I tell you, mi capitan, Quesada is dead! Right now, were you not my superior officer, I should be on my way down to Getafe to file Don Esteban's report."

"You say the sargento, Don Esteban, has returned to his home in these mountains?"

"Si; seguramente, si! His work is accomplished. After killing the Wolf-Cub, Quesada, is he not ent.i.tled to a good rest? Test the truth of my statement, el capitan; ask his son, young Miguel there, if his father does not live in these hills."

"It is most certainly true, mi Capitan Guevara," answered a new voice.

"I myself was born and raised in a portilla of the Picacho de la Veleta."

"Za, this is the wild-goose chase!" exclaimed the raucous voice of Montara. "This is the wild-goose chase, I tell you--this chase after a man already dead! Down in Getafe by now, ten thousand pesetas should be awaiting the Frenchman as a reward for having brought about the killing of Jacinto Quesada."

"And that was when, you say?"

"I have told you twenty times. It was but yesterday."

"Then answer me this, apelike one! I have asked it of you a hundred times before. How is it that the diligence from Granada to Montefrio was held up only last night and the bandolero announced that he was Jacinto Quesada himself? He fled into these hills, and we hot after him!"

The men of the Guardia Civil usually ride in pairs; but this was a troop of the Guardia Civil, an extraordinary troop. Peering around the spur, Quesada made out eleven uniformed men riding smartly toward him through the dim moonlight.

One was, of course, that apelike policeman, Pascual Montara, whom Quesada last had seen in the gorge below Minas de la Sierra with Don Esteban. It appeared, from the tenor of the conversation, that Montara had been on his way down to headquarters to file the sergeant's report of Quesada's death when he had been met on the road by the troop and turned back by the order of the captain.

Quesada well knew this captain as one Luis Guevara. Eight others he recognized as gendarmes with whom he had had an occasional brush. The eleventh was the dead man's son, Miguel Alvarado, youthful, tall, smoothly brown of face, and as subtle and gallant-looking in the vague moonlight as a sword of Toledo.

Now, such a large body of the Guardia Civil could be seldom seen on the main-traveled highroads, let alone in the gorge-pierced sierras of the Nevada. Something untoward was afoot. But it was not the mysterious murder of the old sergeant which had called them together. Not one of the approaching policemen had discovered as yet, close to the entrance of the pa.s.s, that huddle lying still and black in the road. They did not know Don Esteban was dead.

They were riding after Jacinto Quesada, whom Montara believed he had killed, for a crime that Jacinto Quesada himself was positive he never had committed!

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

The party of policemen discovered, all at once, the body in the road.

Hastily, from their huddling, quivering horses, they dismounted. They turned the body over. With amazement and deep consternation, they saw that it was one of themselves, the haughty sergeant of police, Senor Don Esteban Alvarado!

Miguel, the dead man's son, stood over his father's body.

"It is that Jacinto Quesada!" he said, terribly moved. "He has come upon my poor old father alone in the road, and he has killed him without ruth. By the Wounds of Christ!" he swore, lifting his right hand to heaven--"I will seek out this murderer; I will hound him down; at last, remorselessly, I will kill him! I have taken my oath."

In the thick shadow of the bend, Jacinto Quesada smiled bitterly to himself. Just as he had forecasted, just so had matters shaped themselves. He was blamed for the crime of another!

But the captain, Luis Guevara, was speaking:

"This proves that Montara is mistaken--the Wolf-Cub is still alive! As you say, mi pobre Miguel, without ruth he has killed your father, an old, honored, and brave member of the police!

"Carajo! Only once before, in the case of that traveling Englishman, has Quesada killed a man. His conscience will be more disturbed by this atrocity than by his usual crimes. Surely now, after this vile deed of blood, will he seek out a priest and beg forgiveness of G.o.d!

"p.r.o.nto, mis camaradas! Don Esteban has not been long dead. If we ride to the nearest church, we may be in time to capture Quesada while he makes his confession!"