THE DEAD AND THE LIVING
Not a word more was uttered between the two. La Giralda, for no reason
that she would acknowledge even to herself, had conceived an infinite
respect for Sergeant Cardono, and was ready to obey him implicitly--a
fact which shows that our sweet Concha was over-hasty in supposing that
one woman in any circumstances can ever answer for another when there is
a man in the case.
But on this occasion La Giralda's submission was productive of no more
than a command to go down into the town of San Ildefonso, the white
houses of which could clearly be seen a mile or two below, while the
sergeant betook himself to certain haunts of the gipsy and the brigand
known to him in the fastnesses of the Guadarrama.
Like a dog La Giralda complied. She sharpened a stick with a knife which
she took from a little concealed sheath in her leathern leggings, and
with it she proceeded to quicken the donkey's extremely deliberate pace.
Then with the characteristic cry of the goatherd, she gathered her flock
together and drove them before her down the deeply-rutted road which led
from the farmhouse. She had not proceeded far, however, when she
suddenly turned back, with a quick warning cry to her cavalcade. The
donkey instantly stood still, patient amid its fagots as an image in a
church. The goats scattered like water poured on flat ground, and began
to crop stray blades of grass, invisible to any eyes but their own, amid
wastes of cracked earth and deserts of grey water-worn pebbles.
As she looked back, Sergeant Cardono was disappearing up among the
tumbled foot-hills and dry beds of winter torrents, which render the
lower spurs of the Guadarrama such a puzzle to the stranger, and such a
paradise for the smuggler and _guerrillero_. In another moment he had
disappeared. With a long quiet sigh La Giralda stole back to the
farmhouse. In spite of her race, and heathenish lack of creed, the spark
of humanity was far from dead in her bosom. The thought of the open eyes
of the little girl, which gazed even in death with fixed rapture upon
her wooden treasure, remained with her.
"The woman is as old as I--she can bide her time!" she muttered to
herself. "But the child--these arms are not yet so shrunken that they
cannot dig up a little earth to lay the babe thereunder."
And at the chamber door La Giralda paused. Like her people, she was
neither a good nor yet a bad Catholic. Consciously or unconsciously she
held a more ancient faith, though she worshipped at no shrine, told no
beads, and uttered no prayers.
"They have not been long dead," she said to herself, as she entered;
"the window is open and the air is sweet. Yet the plague, which snatches
away the young and strong, may look askance at old Giralda's hold on
life, which at the best is no stronger than the strength of a
basting-thread!"
Having said these words she advanced to the low trundle-bed, and,
softly crooning in an unknown tongue over the poor dead babe, she
lovingly closed its eyes, and taking a sheet from a wall-press that
stood partially open, she began to enwrap the little girl in its crisp
white folds. The Spaniards are like the Scottish folk in this, that they
have universally stores of the best and finest linen.
La Giralda was about to lay the wooden puppet aside as a thing of little
worth, but something in the clutch of the small dead hands touched and
troubled her. She altered her intention.
"No, you shall not be parted!" she said, "and if there be a resurrection
as the priests prate of--why, you shall e'en wake with the doll in your
arms!"
So the pair, in death not divided, were wrapt up together, and the gipsy
woman prepared to carry her light burden afield. But before doing so she
went to the bed. It was an ancient woman who lay thereon, clutching the
bed-clothes, and drawn together with the last agony. La Giralda gazed at
her a moment.
"You I cannot carry--it is impossible," she muttered; "you must take
your chance--even as I, if so be that the plague comes to me from this
innocent!"
Nevertheless, she cast another coverlet over the dead woman's face, and
went down the broad stairs of red brick, carrying her burden like a
precious thing. La Giralda might be no good Catholic, no fervent
Protestant, but I doubt not the First Martyr of the faith, the Preacher
of the Mount, would have admitted her to be a very fair Christian. On
the whole I cannot think her chances in the life to come inferior to
those of the astute Don Baltasar Varela, Prior of the Abbey of
Montblanch, or those of many a shining light of orthodoxy in a world
given to wickedness.
Down in the shady angle of the little orchard the old gipsy found a
little garden of flowers, geranium and white jasmine, perhaps planted to
cast into the rude coffin of a neighbour, _Yerba Luisa_, or lemon
verbena for the decoctions of a simple pharmacopoeia, on the outskirts
of these a yet smaller plot had been set aside. It was edged with white
stones from the hillside, and many coloured bits of broken crockery
decorated it. A rose-bush in the midst had been broken down by some
hasty human foot, or perhaps by a bullock or other large trespassing
animal. There were nigh a score of rose-buds upon it--all now parched
and dead, and the whole had taken on the colour of the soil.
La Giralda stood a moment before laying her burden down. She had the
strong heart of her ancient people. The weakness of tears had not
visited her eyes for years--indeed, not since she was a girl, and had
cried at parting from her first sweetheart, whom she never saw again. So
she looked apparently unmoved at the pitiful little square of cracked
earth, edged with its fragments of brown and blue pottery, and at the
broken rose-bush lying as if also plague-stricken across it, dusty,
desolate, and utterly forlorn. Yet, as we have said, was her heart by no
means impervious to feeling. She had wonderful impulses, this parched
mahogany-visaged Giralda.
"It is the little one's own garden--I will lay her here!" she said to
herself.
So without another word she departed in search of mattock and spade. She
found them easily and shortly, for the hireling servants of the house
had fled in haste, taking nothing with them. In a quarter of an hour the
hole was dug. The rose-tree, being in the way, was dragged out and
thrown to one side. La Giralda, who began to think of her donkey and
goats, hastily deposited the babe within, and upon the white linen the
red earth fell first like thin rain, and afterwards, when the sheet was
covered, in lumps and mattock-clods. For La Giralda desired to be gone,
suddenly becoming mindful of the precepts of the Sergeant.
"No priest has blessed the grave," she said; "I can say no prayers over
her! Who is La Giralda that she should mutter the simplest prayer? But
when the Master of Life awakes the little one, and when He sees the look
she will cast on her poor puppet of wood, He will take her to His bosom
even as La Giralda, the mother of many, would have taken her! God, the
Good One, cannot be more cruel than a woman of the heathen!"
And so with the broken pottery for a monument, and the clasp of infant
hands about the wooden doll for a prayer to God, the dead babe was left
alone, unblessed and unconfessed--but safe.
* * * * *
Meanwhile we must go over the hill with Sergeant Cardono. Whatever his
thoughts may have been as he trudged up the barren glens, seamed and
torn with the winter rains, no sign of them appeared upon his sunburnt
weather-beaten face. Steadily and swiftly, yet without haste, he held
his way, his eyes fixed on the ground, as though perfectly sure of his
road, like a man on a well-beaten track which he has trod a thousand
times.
For more than an hour he went on, up and ever up, till his feet crisped
upon the first snows of Penalara, and the hill ramparts closed in. But
when he had reached the narrows of a certain gorge, he looked keenly to
either side, marking the entrance. A pile of stones roughly heaped one
upon the other fixed his attention. He went up to them and attentively
perused their structure and arrangement, though they appeared to have
been thrown together at random. Then he nodded sagely twice and passed
on his way.
The glen continued to narrow overhead. The sunshine was entirely shut
out. The jaws of the precipice closed in upon the wayfarer as if to
crush him, but Sergeant Cardono advanced with the steady stride of a
mountaineer, and the aplomb of one who is entirely sure of his
reception.
The mountain silence grew stiller all about. None had passed that way
(so it seemed) since the beginning of time. None would repass till time
should be no more.
Suddenly through the utter quiet there rang out, repeated and
reduplicated, the loud report of a rifle. The hills gave back the
challenge. A moment before the dingy bedrabbled snow at Cardono's feet
had been puffed upwards in a white jet, yet he neither stopped for this
nor took the least notice. Loyal or disloyal, true or false, he was a
brave man this Sergeant Cardono. I dare say that any one close to him
might have discerned his beady eyes glitter and glance quickly from side
to side, but his countenance was turned steadfastly as ever upon the
snow at his feet.
Again came the same startling challenge out of the vague emptiness of
space, the bullet apparently bursting like a bomb among the snow. And
again Cardono took as much notice as if some half-dozen of village
loungers had been playing ball among the trees.
Only when a third time the _whisk_ of the bullet in the snow a yard or
two to the right preceded the sound of the shot, Cardono shook his head
and muttered, "Too long range! The fools ought to be better taught than
that!" Then he continued his tramp steadily, neither looking to the
right nor to the left. The constancy of his demeanour had its effect
upon the unseen enemy. The Sergeant was not further molested; and though
it was obvious that he advanced each step in about as great danger of
death as a man who is marched manacled to the garrote, he might simply
have been going to his evening billet in some quiet Castilian village,
for all the difference it made in his appearance.
Up to this point Cardono had walked directly up the torrent bed, the
rounded and water-worn stones rattling and slipping under his iron-shod
half-boots, but at a certain point where was another rough cairn of
stones, he suddenly diverged to the right, and mounted straight up the
fell over the scented thyme and dwarf juniper of the mountain slopes.
Whatever of uncertainty as to his fate the Sergeant felt was rigidly
concealed, and even when a dozen men dropped suddenly upon him from
various rocky hiding-places, he only shook them off with a quick gesture
of contempt, and said something in a loud voice which brought them all
to a halt as if turned to stone by an enchanter's spell.
The men paused and looked at each other. They were all well armed, and
every man had an open knife in his hand. They had been momentarily
checked by the words of the Sergeant, but now they came on again as
threateningly as before. Their dark long hair was encircled by red
handkerchiefs knotted about their brows, and in general they possessed
teeth extraordinarily white gleaming from the duskiest of skins. The
beady sloe-black eyes of the Sergeant were repeated in almost every
face, as well as that indefinable something which in all lands marks the
gipsy race.
The Sergeant spoke again in a language apparently more intelligible than
the deep Romany password with which he had first checked their deadly
intentions.
"You have need of better marksmen," he said; "even the Migueletes could
not do worse than that!"
"Who are you?" demanded a tall grey-headed gipsy, who like the Sergeant
had remained apparently unarmed; "what is your right to be here?"
The Sergeant had by this time seated himself on a detached boulder and
was rolling a cigarette. He did not trouble to look up as he answered
carelessly, "To the Gitano my name is Jose Maria of Ronda!"
The effect of his words was instantaneous. The men who had been ready to
kill him a moment before almost fell at his feet, though here and there
some remained apparently unconvinced.
Prominent among these was the elderly man who had put the question to
the Sergeant. Without taking his eyes from those of the Carlist soldier
he exclaimed, "Our great Jose Maria you cannot be. For with these eyes I
saw him garrotted in the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca!"
The Sergeant undid his stock and pointed to a blood-red band about his
neck, indented deeply into the skin, and more apparent at the back and
sides than in front.
"Garrotted in good faith I was in the Plaza of Salamanca, as this
gentleman says," he remarked with great coolness. "But not to death. The
executioner was as good a _Gitano_ as myself, and removed the spike
which strikes inward from the back. So you see I am still Jose Maria of
Ronda in the flesh, and able to strike a blow for myself!"
The gipsies set up a wild yell. The name of the most celebrated and most
lawless of their race stirred them to their souls.
"Come with us," they cried; "we are here for the greatest plunder ever
taken or dreamed of among the Romany----"
"Hush, I command you," cried the elder man. "Jose Maria of Ronda this
man may be, but we are _Gitanos_ of the North, and need not a man from
Andalucia to lead us, even if he carry a scarlet cravat about his neck
for a credential!"
The Sergeant nodded approval of this sentiment and addressed the old
gipsy in deep Romany, to which he listened with respect, and answered in
a milder tone, shaking his head meanwhile.
"I have indeed heard such sayings from my mother," he said, "and I
gather your meaning; but we _Gitanos_ of the North have mingled too much
with the outlander and the foreigner to have preserved the ancient
purity of speech. But in craft and deed I wot well we are to the full as
good Roms as ever."
By this time it was clear to the Sergeant that the old man was jealous
of his leadership; and as he himself was by no means desirous of taking
part in a midnight raid against a plague-stricken town, he proceeded to
make it clear that, being on his way to his own country of Andalucia and
had been led aside by the gipsy cryptograms he had observed by the
wayside and the casual greeting of the crook-backed imp of the village.
Upon this the old man sat down beside Sergeant Cardono, or, as his new
friends knew him to be, Jose Maria the brigand. He did not talk about
the intended attack as the Sergeant hoped he would. Being impressed by
the greatness of his guest, he entered into a minute catalogue of the
captures he had made, the men he had slain as recorded on the butt of
his gun or the haft of his knife, and the cargoes he had successfully
"run" across the mountains or beached on the desolate sands of
Catalunia.
"I am no inlander," he said, "I am of the sea-coast of Tarragona. I have
never been south of Tortosa in my life; but there does not live a man
who has conducted more good cigars and brandy to their destination than
old Pepe of the Eleven Wounds!"
The sergeant with grave courtesy reached him a well-rolled cigarette.
"I have heard of your fame, brother," he said; "even at Ronda and on the
Madrid-Seville road your deeds are not unknown. But what of this venture
to-night? Have you enough men, think you, to overpower the town watchmen
and the palace-guards?"
The old gipsy tossed his bony hands into the air with a gesture of
incomparable contempt.
"The palace guards are fled back to Madrid," he cried, "and as to the
town watch they are either drunk or in their dotage!"
Meantime the main body of the gipsies waited patiently in the
background, and every few minutes their numbers were augmented by the
arrival of others over the various passes of the mountains. These took
their places without salutation, like men expected, and fell promptly to
listening to the conversation of the two great men, who sat smoking
their cigarettes each on his own stone in the wide wild corrie among the
rocks of the Guadarrama which had been chosen as an appropriate
rendezvous.
Singularly enough, after the sergeant had shown the scarlet mark of the
strangling ring about his neck, no one of all that company doubted for a
moment that he was indeed the thrice-famous Jose Maria of Ronda. None
asked a question as to his whence or whither. He was Jose Maria, and
therefore entitled not only to be taken at once into the secrets of
Egypt, but also, and it pleased him, to keep his own.
And very desperate and bloody some of 'his own' were. In the present
instance, plunder and bloodshed were to proceed hand in hand. No quarter
was to be given to old or young. The plague-stricken sick man and the
watcher by the bed, the woman feeding her fire of sticks under her
_puchero_, the child asleep on its pillow, the Queen in the palace, the
Princess in her nursery--all were to die, quickly and suddenly. These
men had sworn it. The dead were no tale-tellers. That was the way of
Egypt--the ancient way of safety. Were they not few and feeble in the
midst of innumerable hordes of the _Busne_? Had they not been driven
like cattle, abused like dogs, sent guiltless to the scaffold, shot in
batches by both warring parties? Now in this one place at least, they
would do a deed of vengeance at which the ears of the world would
tingle.
The Sergeant sat and smoked and listened. He was no stranger to such
talk. It was the way of his double profession of Andalucian bandit and
Carlist _guerrilero_, to devise and execute deeds of terror and death.
But nothing so cold-blooded as this had Jose Maria ever imagined. He had
indeed appropriated the governmental mails till the post-bags almost
seemed his own property, and the guards handed them down without
question as to a recognised official. He had, in his great days,
captured towns and held them for either party according to the good the
matter was likely to do himself. But there was something revolting in
this whole business which puzzled him.
"Whose idea was all this?" he asked at last. "I would give much to see
the _Gitano_ who could devise such a stroke."
The grim smile on the countenance of old Pepe of the Eleven Wounds grew
yet more grim.
"No gipsy planned it and no man!" he said sententiously. "Come hither,
Chica!"
And out from among the listening throng came a girl of thirteen or
fourteen, dressed neatly and simply in a grey linen blouse belted at the
waist with a leather belt. A gay plaid, striped of orange and crimson,
hung neatly folded over her shoulder, and she rested her small sunburnt
hand on the silver hilt of a pistol. Black elf-locks escaped from
beneath a red silk kerchief knotted saucily after the fashion of her
companions. But her eyes, instead of being beady and black with that
far-away contemplative look which characterises the children of Egypt,
were bright and sunny and blue as the Mediterranean itself in the front
of spring.
"Come hither, Chica--be not afraid," repeated old Pepe of the Eleven
Wounds, "this is a great man--the greatest of all our race. You have
heard of him--as who, indeed, has not!"
Chica nodded with a quick elfish grin of intense pleasure and
appreciation. "I was listening," she said, "I heard all. And I
saw--would that I could see it again. Oh, if only the like would happen
to me!"
"Tell the noble Don Jose who you are, my pretty Chica," said Pepe,
soothingly.
But the child stamped her sandalled foot. It was still white at the
instep, and the sergeant could see by the blue veins that she had not
gone long barefoot. The marks of a child either stolen for ransom or run
away from home owing to some wild strain in the blood were too obvious
to be mistaken. Her liberty of movement among the gipsies made the
latter supposition the more probable.
"I am _not_ pretty Chica, and I am not little," she cried angrily. "I
would have you remember, Pepe, that _I_ made this plan, which the folk
of Egypt are to execute to-night. But since this is the great brigand
Don Jose of Ronda, who was executed at Salamanca, I will tell him all
about it."
She looked round at the dark faces with which they were surrounded.
"There are new folk among these," she said, "men I do not know. Bid them
go away. Else I will not speak of myself, and I have much to say to Don
Jose!"
Pepe of the Eleven Wounds looked about him, and shook his head. Gipsydom
is a commonwealth when it comes to a venture like this, and save in the
presence of some undoubted leader, all Egypt has an equal right to hear
and to speak. Pepe's authority was not sufficient for this thing. But
that of the Sergeant was.
He lifted his Montera cap and said, "I would converse a while with this
maid on the affairs of Egypt. 'Tis doubtless no more than you know
already, and then, having heard her story my advice is at your service.
But she will not speak with so many ears about. It is a woman's whim,
and such the wisest of us must sometimes humour."
The gipsies smiled at the gay wave of his hand with which Cardono
uttered this truism and quickly betook themselves out of earshot in
groups of ten and a dozen. Cards were produced, and in a few minutes
half a score of games were in progress at different points of the
quarry-like cauldron which formed the outlaws' rendezvous.
At once the humour of the child changed.
"They obeyed you," she said; "I like you for that. I mean to have many
men obey me when I grow up. Then I will kill many--thousands and
thousands. Now I can do nothing--only I have it in my head--here!"
The elf tapped her forehead immediately underneath the red sash which
was tied about it. The Sergeant, though eager to hear her story and
marvelling at such sentiments from the lips of a child, successfully
concealed his curiosity, and said gently, "Tell me how you came to think
of to-night----"
"Of what to-night?" asked the girl quickly and suspiciously.
"The deed which is to be done to-night," replied the Sergeant simply, as
though he were acquainted with the whole.
She leaped forward and caught him by the arm.
"You will stay and go with us? You will lead us?" she hissed, her blue
eyes aflame and with trembling accents, "then indeed will I be sure of
my revenge. Then the Italian woman and her devil's brat shall not
escape. Then I shall be sure--sure!"
She repeated the last words with concentrated fury, apparently
impossible to one of her age. The Sergeant smoked quietly and observed
her. She seemed absolutely transfigured.
"Tell me that you will," she cried, low and fierce, so that her voice
should not reach the men around; "these, when they get there, will think
of nothing but plunder. As if rags and diamonds and gold were worth
venturing one's life for. But I desire death--death--death, do you hear?
To see the Italian woman and her paramour pleading for their lives, one
wailing over against the other, on their knees. Oh, I know them and the
brat they call the little Queen! To-night they shall lie dead under my
hands--with this--with this!"
And the girl flashed a razor-keen blade out of her red waistband. She
thrust the hilt forward into the Sergeant's hands as if in token of
fealty.
"See," she said, touching the edge lovingly, "is it not sharp? Will it
not kill surely and swiftly? For months I have sharpened it--ah, and
to-night it will give me my desire!"
It was the Sergeant's belief that the girl was mad, nevertheless he
watched her with his usual quiet scrutiny, the power of which she
evidently felt. For she avoided his eyes and hastened on with her story
before he had time to cross-question her.
"Why do I hate them? I see the question on your lips. Because the
Italian woman hath taken away my father and slain my mother--slain her
as truly and with far sharper agony than she herself shall know when I
set this knife to her throat. I am the daughter of Munoz, and I swore
revenge on the man and on the woman both when I closed my mother's eyes.
My mother's heart was broken. Ah, you see, she was weak--not like me! It
would take a hundred like the Neapolitan to break my heart; and as for
the man, though he were thrice my father, he should beg his life in
vain."
She snatched her knife jealously out of his hand, tried its edge on the
back of her hand with a most unchildlike gesture, and forthwith
concealed it in her silken _faja_. Then she laid her hand once more on
the Sergeant's arm.
"You will lead us, will you not, Jose Maria?" she said pleadingly. "I
can trust you. You have done many great deeds. My nurse was a woman of
Ronda and told me of your exploits on the road from Madrid to Sevilla.
You will lead us to-night. Only you must leave these three in the palace
to me. If you will, you shall have also my share of the plunder. But
what do I say, I know you are too noble to think only of that--as these
wolves do!"
She cast a haughty glance around upon the gipsies at their card-play.
"I, that am of Old Castile and noble by four descents, have demeaned
myself to mix with _Gitanos_," she said, "but it has only been that I
might work out my revenge. I told Pepe there of my plan. I showed him
the way. He was afraid. He told ten men, and they were afraid. Fifty,
and they were afraid. Now there are a hundred and more, and were it not
that they know that all lies open and unguarded, even I could not lead
them thither. But they will follow you, because you are Jose Maria of
Ronda." The Sergeant took the girl's hand in his. She was shaking as
with an ague fit, but her eyes, blue and mild as a summer sky, had that
within them which was deadlier than the tricksome slippery demon that
lurks in all black orbs, whether masculine or feminine.
"Chica," he said, "your wrongs are indeed bitter. I would give much to
help you to set the balance right. Perhaps I may do so yet. But I cannot
be the commander of these men. They are not of my folk or country. They
have not even asked me to lead them. They are jealous of me! You see it
as well as I!"
"Ah!" cried the girl, laying her hand again on his cuff, "that is
because they do not wish you to share their plunder. But tell them that
you care nothing for that and they will welcome you readily enough. The
place is plague-stricken, I tell you. The palace lies open. Little
crook-backed Chepe brought me word. He says he adores me. He is of the
village of Frias, back there behind the hills. I do not love him, even
though he has a bitter heart and can hate well. Therefore I suffer him."
The Sergeant rose to his feet and looked compassionately down at the
vivid little figure before him. The hair, dense and black, the blue
eyes, the red-knotted handkerchief, the white teeth that showed between
the parted lips clean and sharp as those of a wild animal. Cardono had
seen many things on his travels, but never anything like this. His soul
was moved within him. In the deeps of his heart, the heart of a Spanish
gipsy, there was an infinite sympathy for any one who takes up the blood
feud, who, in the face of all difficulties, swears the _vendetta_. But
the slim arms, the spare willowy body, the little white sandalled feet
of the little girl--these overcame him with a pitifully amused sense of
the disproportion of means to end.
"Have you no brother, Senorita?" he said, using by instinct the title of
respect which the little girl loved the most. She saw his point in a
moment.
"A brother--yes, Don Jose! But my brother is a cur, a dog that eats
offal. Pah! I spit upon him. He hath taken favours from the woman. He
hath handled her money. He would clean the shoes they twain leave at
their chamber door. A brother--yes; the back of my hand to such
brothers! But after to-night he shall have no offal to eat--no bones
thrown under the table to pick. For in one slaying I will kill the
Italian woman Cristina, the man Munoz who broke my mother's heart, and
the foisted changeling brat whom they miscall the daughter of Fernando
and the little Queen of Spain!"
She subsided on a stone, dropped her head into her hands, and took no
further notice of the Sergeant, who stood awhile with his hand resting
on her shoulder in deep meditation. There was, he thought, no more to be
said or done. He knew all there was to know. The men had not asked him
to join them, so he would venture no further questions as to the time
and the manner of attack. They were still jealous of him with that
easily aroused jealousy of south and north which in Spain divides even
the clannish gipsy.
Nevertheless he went the round of the men. They were mostly busy with
their games, and some of them even snatched the stakes in to them, lest
he should demand a percentage of the winnings after the manner of
Sevilla. The Sergeant smiled at the reputation which distance and many
tongues had given him. Then, with a few words of good fellowship and
the expression of a wish for success and abundant plunder, he bade them
farewell. It was a great deed which they designed and one worthy of his
best days. He was now old, he said, and must needs choose easier
courses. He did not desire twice to feel the grip of the collar of iron.
But young blood--oh, it would have its way and run its risks!
Here the Sergeant smiled and raised his Montera cap. The men as
courteously bade him good-day, preserving, however, a certain respectful
distance, and adding nothing to the information he had already obtained.
But Chica, seated on her stone, with her scarlet-bound head on her hand,
neither looked up nor gave him any greeting as his feet went slowly down
the rocky glen and crunched over the begrimed patches of last year's
snow, now wide-pored and heavy with the heat of noonday.