XXVI.

Ashley Ward had been, an involuntary though perhaps not entirely an

unwilling guest, at Tres Hermanos a month or more before it dawned upon

him that he was not a perfectly welcome one. Throughout his illness,

which had been prolonged by the peculiar nursing and diet to which he

had been for the first time in his life subjected, he had, though left

almost entirely to the care of Selsa, been provided with luxuries and

delicacies that even his imperfect knowledge of the country and

situation enabled him to know were rare and costly, and most difficult

to obtain. Doña Isabel Garcia was like a princess in her quiet dignity

and in her gifts; and like a princess too, he grew to think, in the

punctiliousness with which, every day, she sent to inquire after his

health, and the infrequency with which she entered to express a hope

that he lacked nothing. She never touched his hand, seldom indeed turned

her eyes upon him when she spoke, and never smiled; and when she left

him he inwardly raged, and vowed he would leave the hacienda on the

morrow, even though he should die from the exertion. But his wound was

slow in healing; the fever had sapped his strength; he was alone, and no

opportunity of securing escort presented itself. He was virtually a

prisoner. And besides, after these periods of vexation he would fall

into a fit of musing, which would end in the resolve never to leave Tres

Hermanos until certain doubts were set at rest, which from day to day

grew more and more perplexing.

The nurse, Selsa, was more communicative than the Indian peasant woman

is apt to be. She had been employed constantly in and about the great

house in positions of some trust, and had lost that awe of superiors,

which held the mere common people dumb. In a sense, indeed, she felt

herself one of the family, privileged to use gentle insistence with the

sick, even against their aristocratic wills, and to be present, though

eyes and ears were to be as blind and deaf as the walls around her,

while matters of family polity were at least hinted at, if not openly

discussed. She had in fact been to the house of Garcia “the confidential

servant,” without which no Mexican household is complete,—one of those

peculiar beings who however false, cruel, deceitful, and thievish with

the world in general is silent as the grave, devoted even unto death,

true as the lode-star, to the person or family which she serves.

There was something in the personality of this wrinkled crone, growing

out of these relations, which early impressed the young American; and

gradually he grew to feel that he was face to face with an oracle, had

he but the magic to unseal her lips, as the witch-like Chinita had had

to change her air of vexed though friendly equality into unobtrusive yet

unmistakable deference. Other servants who came and went spoke with some

envy and spite of the sudden elevation of the gatekeeper’s foster-child.

But Selsa, sitting in the doorway of the sick man’s room, combing out

her long black locks,—for that, though she never succeeded in smoothing

them, was her favorite occupation,—would glance askance at Ward and

say,—

“Be silent! the Señora knows what she does. Go now! she has a heart like

any other Christian. What was to become of the girl, now that Pedro will

be leaving for the wars? Would you have Don ’Guardo think we are

barbarians here, who would leave the innocents to be devoured like lambs

by the coyotes?”

Don ’Guardo was the name Selsa had evolved from Ward, which she had

perhaps believed to be the foreign contraction of Eduardo; and as

Ashley, with boyish enthusiasm easily acquiring the limited vocabulary

of those around him, began to relieve the monotony of his convalescence

by listening to their conversations, and asking some idle questions, he

found himself answering to the convenient appellation and alluding to

himself by it, until it became as familiar to his ears as his own

baptismal name, and certainly conveyed far more friendliness to him than

the formal Señor Ward, which Don Rafael and his mother rendered with

infinite stumbling over the unattainable W.

There was a subdued excitement throughout the hacienda upon the day that

Don ’Guardo first appeared at the great gateway. Pedro was sitting there

in the dull, dejected manner suggestive of loss, or waiting, or both;

and it was only when Florencia, with an exclamation, twitched his sleeve

that he looked up.

“_Maria Sanctissima!_” he stammered, staggering to his feet. Ashley

stood in the dim light in the rear of the deep vestibule, with his hand

on Pepé’s shoulder,—for the boy had been called to attend him,—but with

a sudden faintness he had paused to rest against the stone wall hung

with serpents. Ashley was a handsome youth, but in Pedro’s eyes a

thousand times more startling than the most hideous snake or savage

beast. So had he seen John Ashley stand a hundred times or more, not

pale and trembling, but full of life and joy. Was this his sad ghost,

come with reproachful eyes to haunt him?

“It is the Señor American,” said Florencia. “My life! how pale he looks!

Go, go, Pepito! bring him hither before the carriage of my Señora drives

in; here it is at the very gate.”

Pedro instantly recovered his usual stoicism. “Wait, Señor!” he said,

“you are well placed where you are. The carriage can pass and not throw

an atom of dust on you.” And at that moment the feet of the horses and

the rattle of wheels were heard on the stone paving, and the hacienda

carriage was driven rapidly into the courtyard. As it passed, Ashley

caught a glimpse of Doña Isabel—how pale and statuesque!—and beside her

a creature radiant in triumph, who nodded to Pedro as she passed; her

smile seeming to say, “Behold me!” Hers was not an ignoble pride, but

the wild exultation of an eaglet that had been chained to earth, and for

the first time had tried its wings in the empyrean. That morning Doña

Isabel had said, “Chinita, thou shalt go with me;” and though the lady’s

brows had risen a little when with unconscious audacity the girl had

taken the seat beside her, and not that opposite, where Doña Feliz was

wont to sit, she said nothing. “The child is pale,” she thought, “and

needs the air; there is no one to heed that she sits beside me.”

It would be hard to tell what were the thoughts of Chinita; they were a

sudden delirium after the intense quiet of the semi-imprisonment, which

she had borne with stoical fortitude for the sake of a dimly seen future

of power. In this enforced quiet, day by day, her ambitions were shaping

themselves; the dominant passion of her being was seeking a point from

which she might have advantage over all the narrow field within the

range of her mental vision. As yet her aspirations knew no name; they

were mere vague, impatient longings, or rather impatient spurning of the

old ignoble conditions of life. To ride in a carriage was an

intoxication to her, because the low-born peasant went afoot. She chafed

in a very thraldom of inaction because the high-born toiled not. She

loved the rustle of a gaudy silk, while her hand shrank from the contact

of the stiff and rustling fabric, because such attire was only for the

rich and great. As undefined as had been the joy with which she had

heard she was a Garcia, was still the delight of each fresh conquest

that she made. No eager _virtuoso_ groping in the dark among undescribed

treasures could be more ignorant yet more wildly anticipative of the

glories the daylight should discover than she of what the future should

reveal.

From where Don ’Guardo and his attendant stood, they could see Doña

Isabel and Chinita as they descended from the carriage. Doña Isabel,

without glancing around, ascended the stairs to her own apartment.

Chinita followed a step or two behind, then turned and paused. Her quick

eye scanned the little group that had gathered in the court. Ashley Ward

himself was startled by the change that had passed over her since he had

seen her last. What had been elfish in her wild abandonment of bearing

had become a subtle grace of manner, which gave piquancy to a hauteur

that counterfeited the dignity of inherent nobleness. “The gypsy has

borrowed the air of a queen!” was the thought of the American. He felt

Pepé quiver beneath his hand, and looking at him saw a sullen fire in

his dark, slumberous eyes, though his lips were white and his dusky face

ashen as if a chill had seized him. The girl had overlooked him and all

the plebeian crowd, and her eyes rested in a triumphant challenge on

Ashley. She smiled, and a ray of sunlight darted down and reddened the

crisp and straggling tendrils of her hair. The smile or the sunlight

dazzled him; he leaned heavier on Pepé’s shoulder. She reminded him of a

Medusa idealized, of incarnate passion surrounded by the halo of radiant

youth.

Ashley was roused by a sudden movement of Pepé, who had for the moment

forgotten his station, and impetuously thrown himself upon a bench in an

attitude of impotent grief and rage; then he sprang to his feet, and

again placed his shoulder under Ashley’s hand. Once more he was the mere

stock and stick; but Ashley had discovered in him the soul and heart of

a man.

“Poor fool!” he thought, with a sort of anger mingled with his pity;

“here is a touch of the tragic in this little comedy, which the wily

little peasant is inspired to play so daintily. She appears to have

bewitched me with the rest; I can’t keep the thought of her, or rather

of her words, out of my head,—and yet I have only a word to build a

whole fabric of theory upon.”

These thoughts had passed through his mind in an instant,—the instant in

which Chinita had lightly run up the stone steps after Doña Isabel, and

in which Ashley and Pepé had reached the broad gateway of the hacienda.

Ashley sank upon the stone bench where Pedro was wont to sit, and Pepé

leaned sullenly against the rough wall. Both looked in silence over the

village, across the fields, the narrow line of cottonwood trees and

yellow mud which marked the bed of a torrent in the rainy season and a

waste of desolation in the long drought, and onward still to the gray

and barren mountains whose distant peaks of purple pierced the deep blue

of the cloudless sky. The scene to Pepé was as old as his years, too

familiar to distract for a moment his tortured mind; but Ashley beheld

it in a sort of rapture. Perhaps any glimpse of the outer world would

have charmed him after his unwonted imprisonment; but the fertility of

the valley, this gem set in the broad expanse of bare and sterile

Mexico, was a revelation to him of that wonderful productiveness and

beauty which in his journeyings he had often heard of but had never

encountered, until at last he had believed that the horrors of war, in

its years of duration, had swept over the land and blasted it. But here

was one spot at least that had escaped,—such a spot as he had pictured

for months, and sought in vain.

For a time he gazed upon it in simple admiration, then at first almost

unconsciously began to look about him for certain landmarks. Yes, here

at his back was the great pile of buildings; here on the sandy slope in

front, the village of adobe thatched with knife-grass; there along the

line of the watercourse, the few straggling huts of the miners and

laborers; there away to the right, the low walls of the reduction-works

with its tall brick chimney, and in its rear the gaping cleft of the

mountain which marked the entrance to the mine. All now was silent and

deserted; yet for a moment he seemed to look upon it with other eyes,

and to see the trains of laden mules filing in and out of the wide

gateways, and to trace the black smoke rising in a column to the

cloudless sky. “This must be the place!” he inwardly exclaimed; and

drawing from his breast-pocket a flat case of papers, he selected from

them a torn and yellow letter, and read it slowly over, ever and anon

raising his eyes to identify some point in the description, which a hand

as young, more firm, more resolute than his own, had in an hour of

leisure so accurately written years before. The date of the missive was

gone, and with it the name of this new place in which the writer seemed

to have found an earthly paradise,—“not wanting,” as he said at the

close of the letter, “an Eve to be at once the gem of this perfect

setting, and the inaccessible star to which poor mortals may raise

longing eyes, but may never hope to win.”

Ashley smiled as he read the words. Who could this divinity have been?

But for other letters that had been put into his hands he would have

thought the paragraph mere bathos, boyish gush, and sentiment; but it

was a prelude to what might prove a strange and fateful series of

events. Somewhere here his cousin had years ago lived and loved and been

done to death; and his mission was to trace the sequence of these

events, and to learn whether or no with John Ashley had passed away all

possible influence upon the fortunes of his own life.

Until within a few months such questions had never occurred to him. The

John Ashley whom he had dimly remembered had been murdered years before;

and so had ended an adventurous career, which had been his own choice,

or perhaps his evil destiny. To Ward, as to others, that had been the

sum and substance of the tragedy which had thrown a gloom for a time

over all the family, and had stricken a proud mother to the heart. She

had suffered years in silence, the name of her wayward son never passing

her lips; her young daughter had grown up with no knowledge of her

brother but his name. It was she who after the mother’s death had found

these letters, and entreated her cousin to seek the fatal spot of John

Ashley’s death,—surely there must be somewhere records that would give

the exact location,—and to make inquiries for the wife, and for the

possible child, of whom he wrote in his last short letter, full of

passionate appeal to his mother in behalf of the young creature who for

him had forfeited the confidence, perhaps the love, of her own.

“Herlinda! Herlinda! Herlinda!” was the burden of the letter. “The name

rings in my ears,” Mary Ashley had said. “How could my mother have been

deaf to it? She thought of those people as barbarous, false, cruel,

treacherous. But what matters that to me, if there is among them one who

has my brother’s blood, or one who loved him?”

“The marriage laws of those countries are strange,” Ward had ventured to

say. “Perhaps your mother feared complications which could but bring

disgrace and misery.”

“I do not fear them,” said Mary Ashley, proudly. “It is a wild country

for a woman to go to, but if you will not investigate this matter, I

will brave any inconvenience, any danger, to do so. I cannot live with

this tantalizing fear in my heart.”

The idea that tormented Mary seemed at best that of a mere possibility

to Ashley,—the possibility of an event which, as the mother had seen,

might if proved bring far more pain than joy, especially at this late

date; yet it worked upon his mind gradually, as it had upon Mary’s

suddenly,—perhaps the more surely because he personally profited by the

supposition that his cousin had died unwed. By his aunt’s will he had

been left the share in her property that John would have inherited, on

condition that neither he nor any legitimate heir should appear to claim

it.

People shrugged their shoulders and smiled pityingly. “Poor soul, had

she then doubted her son’s death?”

The news had reached Mrs. Ashley in an irregular way; the war had

supervened, and particulars had been few and far from exact. But later,

through some business house, inquiries had been made and some few books

and almost worthless articles of clothing had been obtained from an

alcalde, who swore they had been the dead man’s sole effects. Certainly

the proofs had been irregular but sufficient. What could one expect from

such a lawless set of uncivilized renegades, who knew nothing of civil

or international law, and were bent on the sole task of exterminating

one another? They smiled at the condition in the will, and pitied the

poor woman who could thus hope against hope. Ashley Ward himself, the

orphan nephew whom his aunt had loved with a jealous devotion, which at

times wearied him by its suspicions and exactions, at first smiled also.

But when Mary brought to him the fragments of three old letters to read,

just as his mind was filled with plans for a career which the possession

of ample wealth and leisure seemed to justify, and which in poverty he

could never have dared aspire to, he grew thoughtful, moody at

times,—then suddenly his own impetuous, generous self again.

“I will go to Mexico, Mary,” he said, “and bring you word of your

brother’s life there. No doubts shall shake their spectre fingers at me

in my prosperity, nor torment your loving and anxious soul.”

“Good, true cousin!” was all she answered. She perhaps did not realize

what effect upon the prospects of Ashley the results of this journey

might possibly have; they dawned upon her little by little as the days

went by and no news came of him.

The daring traveller had been obliged to enter Mexico at some obscure

point. The Liberal government under Juarez was installed at Vera Cruz;

the Conservatives held the City of Mexico; and the length and breadth of

the country was in a state of riot and ferment, torn and devastated by

roving bands who changed their politics as readily as their encampments.

Ashley’s journey through the Republic was like a passage over

smouldering coals between two fires, and constant address and

fearlessness were required to avoid collision with either faction,—his

ignorance of the language and causes of contention perhaps serving him a

good turn in making natural the indifference and absolute impartiality

which he could never so successfully have assumed had his sympathies

been ever so slightly biassed.

In the distracted state of the country it was almost a hopeless task to

endeavor to trace the movements of an alien who had lived in it but a

short time, and that years before. If any record had been made of the

exact place and mode of John Ashley’s death, it certainly had been

unofficial, and retained no place in the archives of either the Mexican

or American government.

Ashley Ward was at first appalled by the unexpected difficulties that he

encountered. Inquiries brought to his knowledge the existence of several

haciendas bearing the name of Los Tres Hermanos; and these he

successively visited, reserving to the last that which lay in the most

isolated and mountain-begirt district,—a point which it seemed

impossible could, amid wild and sterile surroundings, offer the panorama

of beauty and fertility which the pen of his cousin had described. He

would perhaps have abandoned his search, at least for that unpropitious

time, but for a re-perusal of the first letter which contained neither

news nor descriptions of importance, but in which was mentioned the fact

that the writer had been offered employment by the family of Garcia. The

owners of the distant hacienda of Tres Hermanos, Ashley Ward discovered,

were called Garcia,—a name too common, however, to be any proof of

identity, yet which seemed to make it worth his while to spend another

month or more of precious time in the search, which in another country,

with records of average exactness, would perhaps have been performed in

one or two days.

The trip had been made as quickly as the excessively bad state of the

roads at the rainy season would allow, and with but few divergences and

delays; and the boundaries of the estate had been already passed when

the young American and his servant were, in a merry rather than a savage

humor, detained or rather actually captured by the redoubtable Calvo,

who to amuse the leisure that hung rather heavily upon his hands invited

the young American to ride in his company. In his broken but expressive

English, the freebooter uttered such courteous phrases that the young

man was quite unconscious that he was in fact a prisoner, and passed a

not uninteresting day in exchanging political opinions, local and

international, with the dashing chieftain,—who, while apparently

absorbed in the novelty and pleasure of listening to the conversation of

his involuntary guest, was mentally preparing the speech in which he

should convey to him on the morrow the terms of ransom for himself and

servant,—a likely fellow whom Calvo had more than half a mind to add to

the number of his followers.

But the servant himself had no illusions as to the glory of fighting or

the chances of booty, and sometime during the night in which they were

encamped at the _ranchito_ of El Refugio managed to elude the lax

watchfulness of the troop, who had made a merry meal on freshly killed

lambs and such other modest viands as Doña Isabel Garcia’s trembling

shepherds could furnish, and without so much as a word of warning to the

American had escaped,—bearing with him the small bag of necessaries of

which he had charge, a pair of silver-mounted pistols, and a sum of

money which Ward had been assured would in case of attack and capture be

more secure in the possession of this “loyal and honest man” than in his

own.

Ashley had barely had time to realize the defection of his servant, to

suspect his actual position as a prisoner in the hands of the courteous

but mercenary and implacable Calvo, and wrathfully to regret the

ignorant trustfulness with which he had divided with the much lauded

servant the risk of transporting his funds, retaining in his own hands

perhaps not enough to meet the rapacious demands of his captors, when

suddenly his meditations were interrupted by cries of confusion, shouts,

the crack of rifles, the whizzing of balls, challenges and defiant

yells, the shrieks of women, and the groans and appeals of the helpless

shepherds,—followed by the sight of huts ablaze, of frightened flocks

wildly bleating and rushing blindly under the very feet of the horses,

which trampled them down, while their keepers, as bewildered as they,

fell victims to the mad zeal and excitement of the opposing troops who

had so unexpectedly met on that isolated spot.

It was conjectured that the missing servant had in his flight to the

mountains accidentally come upon the soldiers of the Clergy, and to turn

attention from himself had betrayed the proximity of the Liberals. A

hurried march in the early morning hours had proved the truth of the

servant’s information; and the surprise and some advantage in

numbers—for the Captain Alva had spoken with a trace of the usual

exaggeration of the speech of his countrymen, in describing the enemy as

numbering three hundred—turned the chances in favor of the attacking

party; although Calvo at first seemed inclined to contest the matter

obstinately, and Ward, with an involuntary feeling of fealty to his host

(though he had already some inkling of his intentions in regard to

himself) had ranged himself upon his side. He soon saw with indignation,

however, that the defence of the poor villagers held no part in Calvo’s

thoughts. To frustrate some movement of the enemy, he actually ordered

the firing of a hut in which women and children had taken refuge; and it

was while defending the humble spot from Puro and Mocho alike, that Ward

received the wound which disabled him,—that covered with blows from

muskets and swords he fell, and trampled beneath the feet of the now

flying and pursuing soldiers, for a few horrible moments believed

himself doomed to die in a senseless mêlée, in which his only interest

had been to protect the weak, but in which he recognized no inherent

principle of right. Later he saw in those apparently senseless broils

the throes and struggles of an undisciplined and purblind nation toward

the attainment of a dimly seen ideal of justice and freedom, and learned

the truth that these people, who seemed so lightly swayed by the mere

love of adventure, held within their breasts the divine spark that

distinguishes man from the brute,—the deathless fire of patriotism. They

too could suffer, bear imprisonment, famine, even death, for freedom.

But these were none of Ashley Ward’s reflections as he found himself

laid apart from three or four dead men, who had been hurriedly thrown

together for burial, and after being subjected to a hasty

examination—which resulted in the abstraction of his remaining funds,

his watch and other valuables, and the binding up of his wound—lifted to

the back of a raw-boned troop-horse, and forced to join the march of the

triumphant guerillas. He would have preferred to be left to the care of

the houseless and destitute shepherds; but Captain Alva, whether with

the hope of some ultimate benefit from the capture of the foreigner or

not it is impossible to tell, professed himself horrified at the

barbarity of deserting him,—and, as we have seen later, in apprehension

of his death from exposure to the sun, and the fever that seized him,

availed himself of the opportunity of evading the responsibility of the

death of an American upon his hands, by delivering him to the care of

Doña Isabel Garcia.

And so, still weak, and destitute of money until he could arrange for a

supply from the City of Mexico, but full of hope, confident that he had

reached his goal, and that a few discreet inquiries would give him the

information he sought, and perhaps allay forever the doubts that

tormented his sensitive conscience, Ashley Ward drew a deep breath of

satisfaction as he sat at the hacienda gate; and in an animated mood,

which supplemented his insufficient Spanish, addressed himself to the

reticent and gloomy Pedro, startling him from his usual stoicism by the

exclamation, “And you, my man, can you tell me of the American your

foster-child spoke of? There is not so much happens here that you can

have forgotten.”

Had Ashley known anything of the instincts and customs of the genuine

ranchero, he would have begun his investigations in a far more guarded

manner. That a certain Don Juan had met a bloody death there years

before, he already knew; that this had been his cousin, he surmised;

that the gatekeeper should know more of the domestic life of an employee

of the hacienda than the owner herself, or even the administrador, was a

natural conclusion. But had Ashley Ward wished to seal the lips of the

suspicious and astute gatekeeper, he could not have chosen a more

effective manner of accomplishing it. As well touch the horns of a snail

and expect that it would not withdraw into its shell, as to question

this man directly and hope to learn aught of value.

Pedro looked at the inquirer from under the shadow of his bushy eyebrows

and wide hat; and though his heart bounded, his face became a very mask

of rustic stupidity as he answered, “Your grace has had much fever with

your wound. Heaven and all the saints be thanked that you are young and

healthy, and will soon be as strong as ever.”

“Um!” ejaculated Ward, for the moment disconcerted. “Yes, I have had

fever, but that has nothing to do with the American. He was a living man

fourteen or fifteen years ago, if there be any truth in what your—young

mistress told me.” He hesitated how to designate the girl, whose status

and relations seemed so strangely undefined.

Pedro’s eyes for a moment lightened. Pepé laughed ironically, yet he

would have turned like a wild beast on another who had done so.

“Who speaks much, speaks to his undoing,” quoth Pedro, gruffly, and

turned away; yet he eyed the young American furtively, with an inborn

hostility to his race, an unreasoning belief that in the guise of such

fair tempters lurked the demon who would destroy unwary damsels body and

soul, yet with an almost irresistible desire to unburden his soul of the

weight that had so long oppressed it, to cry aloud, “I can tell you all

you would know,—how the American lived, how he died, how the child he

never saw lives after him. Is it her you seek? And why?”

Pedro clenched his hands with a gasp. He remembered that the natural

instincts of kindred had changed to bitterness against Herlinda’s child.

She had been cast out, disowned, deserted. Who was this stranger, this

foreigner, that he should be more just, more generous, toward the

doubtful offspring of one who had died years before? How should he even

guess such a child to be in existence? No, he could not guess it. What a

mad thought had darted through his own brain! Pedro actually laughed at

his own perplexed imaginings. What! the secret of Herlinda, which had

been kept so inscrutably, in danger from this idle news-seeker?

Preposterous! yet an odd conceit entered the gatekeeper’s mind: “The

blind man dreamed that he saw, and dreamed what he desired.” This

groping youth had come far to inquire into the fate of a man long

dead,—it must be because it would bring him profit, for it did not for a

moment occur to Pedro that the questions asked were from mere idle

curiosity,—and would it be possible anything should escape him? “Well,

what God wills, the saints themselves cannot hinder.”

Pedro sat down upon the stone bench opposite, in an affectation of

sullen obstinacy. Ashley was weary and chagrined, and in silence looked

over the landscape with an increasing sense of recognition. Pepé stood

in the same lounging attitude, patiently waiting. One might have thought

him carved of wood against the stone wall, yet of the three men he it

was whose passions were fiercest, whose thoughts like unbridled coursers

followed one another in mad confusion. His mind was full of Chinita!

Chinita! Chinita! her beauty, her insolent grace,—the memory of her

pretty, haughty ways when she had been but a barefoot, ragged peasant

like himself, and the contemplation of the hopeless height to which she

had risen. Never before had he been conscious that he had aspired. Now,

bruised, torn, wounded as if by a fall into hopeless depths, he saw her

image swimming before his disordered vision; he thought of her as a

princess, a goddess, yet he laughed when he heard her named as mistress.

Such was the mood in which Pepé presently listened to the disconnected

dialogue between Pedro and the guest, who was hampered by a language

strange to him, and by suspicious caution on the part of the gatekeeper.

For the first time in his life, Pepé was struck by a peculiarity in

Pedro with which he had always been acquainted; namely, his

unwillingness to speak of the tragedy, which to other minds had seemed

no more horrible than scores of others that had occurred in the

neighborhood and were common subjects of conversation. As he listened,

Pepé became conscious that Pedro was detracting from the interest of the

tale rather than adding to it; and when the young American at last said

inquiringly, “And the cause of this murder was never known? There was no

woman—” he was startled that Pedro answered not with the old jest, “Was

there ever an evil but that a woman was at the root of it?” but rose and

strode rapidly away.

“There _was_ a woman,” muttered Ward, looking after him, “and the

gatekeeper knew her. I have found the man who can tell me of Herlinda.”

He spoke in English, but Pepé the eager listener caught the name

“Herlinda.” Five minutes later, when Ward turned to speak to the youth,

he found him with his hands clasped, stretched out before him, his eyes

staring into vacancy.

“Idiot!” was the half contemptuous, half pitying comment of the

American. Little guessed he that the conversation that had seemed to

result in so little to him had offered both a suggestion and an

inspiration to the peasant,—the very key to the problem which he had

himself come so far and dared so much to solve.