Like mechanical toys on clockwork pivots, every man and woman within sound of the doctor's great voice, turned simultaneously to look for Quesada.

There, twenty feet away, stood the wolfishly gaunt bandolero, a revolver in his right hand trained rigidly on Don Jaime! That revolver had once been Jacques Ferou's!

Not before had John Fremont Carson noticed the revolver in Quesada's hand. He was taken completely by surprise. Little had he realized how close to black tragedy had been the drama in which he had enacted so prominent a part!

In the American's eyes, in the eyes of every man there present, the hidalgo on horseback loomed up, then and on the sudden, with a new and imposing dignity, a rare n.o.bility and magnificence. Don Jaime alone had known of the imminent threat of Quesada's revolver. All the while he had striven to attain his vengeance, all that while Don Jaime had trusted his life to a hair. Quesada had him covered. The mere press of a finger on the trigger, and Don Jaime would have toppled out of the saddle--a dead man!

Quesada had thought Don Jaime all unaware. Now, for the first time, he comprehended the sublime insolence of the hidalgo's persistency. Abashed and shamefaced, he lowered the revolver and shoved it back into his belt.

Don Jaime lifted the horse-pistol from his knee and slipped it into the holster slung from the saddle. Then, without another word and without even a glance toward his daughter, he turned the old nag's head about and went deliberately down the goat path.

He never once looked round. But his back seemed not quite so rigid nor his old white head so erect. All at once there were about the unmistakable signs of an old, old man. And in the slow pace of the faithful nag, there seemed something that wanted to linger yet was urged on by pride, inexorable and pitiless.

"Oh, mi pobre padre!" wailed Felicidad after him. "His heart breaks and he is lonely! And there is only old whining Pedro and the childish Teresa to welcome him back to the gloomy casa!"

Save for the creaking of the saddle, the soft pad-pad of the horse's hoof-falls, nothing answered from down the goat path. For the first time then, in all that intolerable eternity of death and disease and l.u.s.ting vengeance, Felicidad wilted in a swoon to the ground.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

"By gad!" exclaimed Carson, leaping to the side of Felicidad and lifting her tenderly in his arms. "There will yet be a wedding down in the casa of Torreblanca y Moncada outside Granada! Come, Jacinto; lend us your aid. Get horses! We must overtake the hidalgo doctor!"

"There are no horses in Minas de la Sierra," returned Quesada. "There are only mules and borricos which the serranos use to sleigh their cords of pine down to the lower torrents, and to carry their panniers of white manzanilla into the towns."

"Anything!" urged the American. Felicidad in his arms was showing signs of recovering consciousness. "Mules, borricos, anything upon which we can ride!"

"Muy bueno," a.s.sented Quesada readily. "It is very good, and I will go along with you. They say Jacinto Quesada is dead; I can ride the roads with impunity. And the roads are paved with gold for such as I!"

"I will go also," volunteered Morales--"I, and what remains of my cuadrilla. In his offices down in Seville sits my manager, the Senor Don Arturo Guerra, signing contract after contract; and these contracts I must soon fulfill, or lose much money and much prestige with the presidentes of the bull rings and the aficionados of Spain."

"Hola, mis serranos!" called Quesada. "Fetch forth your beasts. The caballeros would look at them and pay you well in golden notes on the Bank of Spain!"

A little later, the cavalcade wound down the loops of the goat path. In all the pueblo, there had proved to be only three burden-bearing animals--two mules and one a.s.s. However, Morales' cuadrilla had been depleted by the loss through the plague of Alfonso Robledo and Coruncho Lopez, and the death in the rebellion of the banderillero, Baptista Monterey; so the party managed, by doubling up, to make shift.

There were altogether seven of them. Morales and the three surviving men of the cuadrilla paired off on the two mules. Felicidad, still pale from her faint and pensive with longing, jogged behind Carson on the crupper of the st.u.r.dy sure-footed a.s.s.

Quesada laughed when they begged him also to mount one of the mules.

"It would be too much for the animal. And besides," he added with a return of his old pride, "I am the Wolf of the Sierras. My long mountaineer's legs are swifter to move now and even more tireless than the slow hoofs of any stupid borrico. Hold your peace, mis camaradas.

Ere nightfall, you shall see!"

Accoutred in the neat gray tweeds and slouch hat of the deceased Frenchman, he led the way with swinging strides. Long after they had disappeared down the gorge, the mountain boy Gabriel, yellow of skin and oddly wrinkled of face, stood on the rock at the brink of the village and sought to follow them with his wistful eyes.

The cavalcade convoluted through the gorges. Never once did they sight the senor doctor. Mounted as he was on the nag, slow with age yet swifter-paced than the ambling donkeys, the hidalgo had easily put dust and distance between them, and buried himself in the lower pa.s.ses.

They came, in the due course of nights and days, to the mournful Pa.s.s of the Blessed Trinity. There were three diverging roads leading out and down from it. Quesada, many yards in the lead, waited until the cavalcade overtook him. Then pointing to that dusty road which snaked most sweepingly to the left, he said:

"Felicidad will now recognize the way. That road winds through the Alpujarras and directly down into Granada. For myself, I bid thee adios!"

Felicidad exclaimed in surprise and deep disappointment:

"You are going to desolate us, Jacint.i.to, by absenting yourself?"

"And you are not going to help us a.s.sault the hidalgo doctor's casa with bell and book and ring?" from Morales.

Said the American with quiet appeal, "I intended you for my best man, Jacinto."

But to all Quesada shook his head in dissent.

"Down in Getafe," he returned, "there are ten thousand pesetas awaiting me--the reward for my own death!"

"But that affair of the Christ of the Pa.s.s!" exclaimed Carson. "You there proclaimed yourself to the police as still alive. The Guardia Civil must know now that Montara and the dead sergeant made a mistake.

They may even guess it was Ferou that was killed. To go to Getafe, after all this, will be to put your head into a noose!"

Quesada smiled grimly.

"But they may have taken me for a rank impostor. They may have thought me some serrano friend of the Alvarados who, overhearing the old mother's story and lacking ingenuity, announced myself as Jacinto Quesada just to dumbfound the police and save poor Miguel."

"Hardly likely," remarked Carson drily.

"Ea pues!" exclaimed Quesada. "Well, then! How about the fact that the honor of the Guardia Civil was jeopardized by young Alvarado's treachery and that, before my very eyes, Capitan Luis Guevara and his troop swore themselves to secrecy? Senor Carson, you do not know the Spanish police as do I. Even as Don Jaime and Sargento Esteban Alvarado thought more of their personal honor than they did of the lives of their offspring, even and just so do the Guardia Civil think more of their honor and good name than they do of capturing a mere bandolero, of keeping secure the peace of Spain!

"That troop of police has not told headquarters. I am even taking the chance that Montara filed his report as if nothing had happened that night at the shrine. Getafe will not know of my resurrection until I play this little trick. For the interval, I am Monsenor Jacques Ferou!"

"It is a coup!" enthused Morales.

"But a tremendously risky one," qualified the American dubiously. "You stand to win ten thousand pesetas, Quesada, but you stand by far longer odds to lose your life. For what do you need money so badly, Jacinto, that you should stake red alfonsos against your precious neck?"

"Am I not forever risking everything to gain mere gold?" countered Quesada. "But carajo! that is not my reason. I have a higher incentive."

His gaunt face became priestly with a sudden somber tenderness.

"Up in Minas de la Sierra," he went on, "there is a mountaineer's orphan bantling with heart of fire and soul of gold. To-day he dreams to be a great man of Spain. But the G.o.d of Spain smiles derisively upon a son of the people who would seek to rise above his fellows. Spain is a country of limited opportunities. Here there are only two careers open for a son of the soil. My little mountain brat may become a bullfighter, a gran espada like our Manuel; or he may become a bandolero like me. There is naught else for him. I know, Senor Carson; I have lived Spain myself!

"Up here in these desolate hills, my lad is too far removed from the cities of the plains. Never will he see the brutal savage encounter of bull and man; never will be waked in him the glamour and ambition for the blood and sand of the arena. Never will he be a bullfighter!

"But carajo! never shall he be a bandolero! I, Jacinto Quesada, say it!

I will not have him go houseless in the wind and rain, forever hounded by the podencos of the Guardia Civil. By the Nails of Christ, no!"

"What would you then, Jacinto?" asked Felicidad with the quick sympathy of a woman.

Interposed the matador with a sudden deep interest: "Of what child do you speak, Quesada?"

"Of the boy Gabriel! Half of the blood money shall be used to send him to the great University of Salamanca! I will make our little Gabriel a superb senor doctor like Felicidad's own haughty father, Don Jaime!"

"I will put an equal amount to the furtherance of the n.o.ble project!"