When his mother went out on the mountainside to catch and to kill the
last surviving chicken, Jacinto Quesada went with her both to lend her a
hand and to ask her a question. She held the pullet to the block and
Jacinto raised the axe. Then, the axe poised aloft, Jacinto asked:
"Who is this rough burly man to whom the people do such honor?"
"He is the great Pernales!"
The axe descended; blood spattered the faces of the two; the head of the
pullet lay free from the body and still; the body flapped about in a
manner outrageous and vile. Said Jacinto, after a moment:
"Pernales, the bandolero?"
"_Si, si!_ Pernales, the bandolero, him hunted forever by the men of the
Guardia Civil!"
"But why do not the men of the Guardia Civil murder him as they murdered
our poor Juanito?"
"Art thou a dullard, child! Thy father was a mere contrabandista. Thy
father wished only to be left undisturbed by the police. He was a coward
at heart as are most Spaniards who turn dishonest that they might eat.
He suffered himself to be captured without a struggle; there was no
murder in his bowels!"
She swept on with true Latin eloquence and fervor:
"But this Pernales! The men of the Guardia Civil fear Pernales as they
do not fear men of your poor father's sort. He is muscled like a
leopard; he is long of arm; he is deep-loined; and the strength of him
is like the strength of the first Spaniard, Hispanus, the son of
Hercules. But there is more to him than mere body strength! He is
possessed of a strength above body strength, a strength beyond body
strength. He is strong in his soul!
"He is strong to live; he is strong to conquer; he is strong to make men
die. The bandoleros are all like that. They are arrogant, imperious,
absolute. They are like our ancestors, the Cristinos Viejos, the Old
Rusty Christians, they who eradicated the Moors from Spain. They are
like our ancestors, the Celtiberians, they who bathed in the urine of
horses that they might grow hard and muscular, they who asked for no
quarter in battle and who gave none.
"A man to be a bandolero must have entrails of iron. This Pernales is of
the right guts. He likes nothing better than to meet a policeman alone
in the hills and to fight him to the death. The men of the Guardia Civil
would capture and slay him if they could; but when they come up to him
on the high road, he turns and gives battle with laughter and taunt,
with ardor, strength, desperation, and ferocity! Never does he hesitate
or falter when comes the supreme moment--the moment when his weakness
says 'Be merciful!' and his strength says 'Kill thou, Pernales!'"
His mother sped into the house, but Jacinto stood by the dripping block,
immersed in thought.
Presently Jacinto Quesada sat on his little stool in the far corner of
the great fireplace and watched the bandolero eat. What huge teeth he
had and how white they were! Over each mouthful the whole broad face
worked, the lips and cheeks making a dozen grimaces, the jaws snapping
and grinding.
Every little while, the bandolero mumbled from a full mouth some
question. He seemed much interested in the murdered Juanito. But it was
almost as though he considered poor Juanito's death a humorous mishap;
at certain of the widow's remarks he laughed roughly, and his laughter
stormed through the cabana like a wind through one of the boulder-strewn
passes overhead.
An hour later he was astride his horse again and riding down the
goat-path that dropped away from Minas de la Sierra and wound through
the lower gorges. It is never the habit of the bandolero to linger in a
_pueblo_ or village longer than a very short time; most sensational and
brief and furtive are his visits.
There was a fat and brilliant moon, that night. It was as though a snow
had fallen, the heads and shoulders of the mountains were so white. Down
into the dark moaning gorges, one could see a great distance.
Pernales walked his horse very slowly, for the path led along the sheer
of a precipice. But while he kept a vigilant eye on the way ahead, ready
to throw himself toward the wall of the gorge should the nag stumble on
a loose stone, or shy from the path, and plunge screaming into
nothingness, Pernales continually cast wary quick glances toward the
crags and boulders overhead, and continually bent his ear back the way
he had come. It was almost as though he feared an ambush in that lonely
perilous place. It was almost as if, at any moment, he expected men of
the Guardia Civil to rise from behind every rock, and the command of the
Guardia Civil to sound in his ears:
"_Alto a la Guardia Civil!_"
He rounded a great rock that threatened to tear from its moorings down
into the winding gorge below. Abruptly he halted his horse and his
carbine came up. A long tense hush. Then suddenly he exploded:
"Who are you that stands beside the way?"
Came the answer in a child's thin voice:
"Jacinto Quesada!"
Minas de la Sierra was a long distance above and far back in the
sierras. With great surprise the bandolero recognized the child to whom
he had waved a hand and called a laughing "á Dios" some time before.
"Are you alone?" The carbine still threatened.
"See for yourself, maestro! But I am altogether alone."
The bandolero rode nearer. When the horse shouldered up, the little
Jacinto was compelled to squeeze into the very crevices of the rock
wall, so narrow was the path.
From his lofty seat on the big, rawboned black horse, Pernales looked
down at the son of the widow Quesada and measured, with his eyes, the
boy's extreme youthfulness and preposterous lack of strength and size.
Jacinto was only thirteen years old.
What he saw altogether reassured Pernales. His blue eyes twinkled; he
smiled; he grinned, his lips working and twitching; and at last he broke
out in a frank and free burst of laughter.
"Cascaras!" he roared, between guffaws. "How came you here, lively
little one? Have you the sharp hoofs of the ibex to gallop you from crag
to crag, across gorges and _gargantas_ and all? Or have you the griffon
vulture's wings that you may fly over mountains? You are no real flesh
and blood child! You are a sprite, a--"
Jacinto Quesada, imperious with a great desire, brushed his bantering
words aside. Trembling with eagerness, he cried:
"Take me with you, Pernales! I would be a bandolero, too! Lift me up
behind you on your horse, and I will go with you through Spain and be
your _compañero_ and your _dorado_--your golden one, your trustworthy
one! Take me with you, please, please, Pernales!"
The bandolero did not credit his own ears. He was too astounded to
laugh.
"Hola!" he gasped. "What is this now? You, my chicken, would be a
bandolero! And you came all the way down here to recruit with me! Por
los Clavos de Cristo!"
Then soberly and slyly, for he was beginning to see good fun in the
little fellow:
"But do you not know that it is a rule, a convention, of us good
bandoleros to ride alone? Solitary and single-handed, we are safer and
stronger than if a troop of cabalgadores surrounded us. There is no one
so swift and slippery and elusive as a bandolero who rides alone, and
no one so free from fear of treachery--he trusts no man and no man he
dreads."
"True. You understand your business, I see," said Jacinto Quesada.
He was only thirteen; yet he spoke slowly, with deliberation and
discernment and a great air of mannish profundity. He had got something
from Don Jaime's books, this mountaineer's bantling!
"But there are times," he qualified, "when even the most superb
bandolero needs assistance in some serious and signal business. Have you
not yourself a _dorado_, a _camarada_, who rides with you on your
greater crimes, the Nino de Arahal? Certain folk have told me of the
Nino; they said he shared the glory of those enterprises which made
imperative a show of numbers and strength; do not tell me these folk
lied! I had hoped to dispossess this camarada and dorado of yours, this
Nino de Arahal, and to attain to the envied place down from which I
threw him headlong!
"But the Nino," he added, arrogating to himself judicial authority--"let
us forget him! Za! he is only an insignificant frog! Your wish to ride
unhindered and alone, of that I would speak! Maestro, when I become your
dorado, we will ride together always, for we will commit only imposing
and glorious crimes!"
Said Pernales softly:
"But how would you dispossess the Nino de Arahal?"
"I would pit against the huge gorilla's head of the Little One of
Arahal, my head of gold for thinking quick thoughts and audacious ones.
I would displace him and replace him by my natural superiority of brain.
But if that were not enough--Carajo! I would lock knives with him, I
would lunge and slash and rip and stab with my _navaja_, while he tore
and stabbed and slashed and lunged with his, until one or the other of
us gushed out his life through his wounds and was dead!"
Then it was that Pernales laughed so that the very canyon roared and
rang. He rolled back his head; he clapped his hands to his stomach; he
opened his mouth to its widest stretch; and he guffawed so tremendously
that the horse beneath him staggered and almost overbalanced from the
wall. He was Olympian in his laughter.
And why not laugh? Did he not see in his mind's eye the gigantic ruffian
nicknamed the Nino de Arahal locked with this stripling, this barefoot
child, this suckling babe? Za! The Nino would make ten of him! _Zape!_
The Nino would swallow him at a mouthful! It was preposterous! It was so
funny, he cared not a peseta if he laughed himself to death!
But suddenly, through his laughter, slid Jacinto Quesada's low-toned
words:
"But if he were altogether too huge and brawny for me to murder in open
combat, then I would murder him in some hidden, treacherous way.
Treachery is the strength of the weak who are yet strong. If there be no
other way, the superior brain resorts to treachery for the superior
brain is invincible. While I am still weak of body, I will not disdain
to use treachery!
"And, man, man, I warn you! Do not continue to laugh at me! You have
laughed quite enough at me, Pernales! Cease laughing this instant!
Quick! Straighten your face, or _Porvida_! the Manchegan knife I have
with me, I will use on your horse. I will rip open his belly; and he,
with you upon him, will go bounding off the path and fall head over
heels down into the abyss!"
Instantly Pernales sobered. His face set into an emotionless mask; his
teeth clenched together with an audible click; his eyes became hard as
blue bright pebbles. Without seeming to do so, he looked down at the
child's hands; and true! there was in those hands a huge, flat-bladed
dagger, a dagger of La Mancha. The child was turning it over and over,
and studying it with a pensive interest.
Deep within himself, Pernales laughed ironically at his own
discomfiture. He could not use the carbine. Without chancing the great
risk of sending his horse recoiling and reeling off the path, he could
not strike down the child with a blow of his fist! And the child had but
to turn aside his gun or dodge his hard fist, and crouch out of harm's
way beneath the horse's barrel. Then might he strike up with the dagger,
and the horse would make the breakneck plunge as surely as he would
scream when stabbed.
"Jacinto Quesada," said Pernales bitterly, "you have caught Pernales in
a pretty deadfall! Use your knife; then go for the Guardia Civil and
guide a brace of policemen to where my body lies on the bottom of the
gorge, and there awaits you the money offered for my head! Cascaras! I
judged you altogether too superficially; I was too contemptuous!"
Quietly Jacinto Quesada put the Manchegan knife back in his belt.
"I forbear to strike," said he, "since you have confessed your fault.
Now, soberly and with due respect, give me your answer. Will you take me
with you?"
A gleam of admiration lit the eye of Pernales.
"Jacinto Quesada," he said, "you are no child. You have shown
resolution, force, finality; you are altogether masculine, altogether
_varonil_; you are a man! Therefore, as one man to another, I say: No, I
cannot take you with me!"
Pernales now was very serious.
"To be my dorado, it is not enough that you have a full-grown soul. You
must have a full-grown body; and your body is still the puny, soft-boned
body of a child. If you rode away with me, you of the weak body, your
strong soul might be sacrificed to the Nino de Arahal or the Guardia
Civil. And that--God forbid!
"Let us look at this matter like two sensible Moors. Don Eduardo Miura,
let us suppose, has a young fighting bull of extraordinary promise. At
the _Tentaderos_ (the breeders' private bullfight, when the young bulls
are ranked according to their merit as fighting animals), this youngster
shows superb courage and astounding ferocity. But he is only two years
old; and five years old must be the age of Don Eduardo's animals before
he exhibits them in the Plaza de Toros. Does Don Eduardo make an
exception of this unique bull, does he allow him because of his
astounding ferocity to have a premature début in the bull-ring? Name of
God, no! Not even if he be as magnificent with meat as the most mature
seven-year-old!
"Jacinto Quesada, quickly I have grown to love your strong soul--I have
grown to love your strong soul too much. And that is why I say, I cannot
take you with me. No! Porvida, no! But, if you are resentful, use your
knife and send me whirling down into the gorge. Proceed! I care not a
peseta what you do."
Jacinto Quesada stood motionless as a rock, thinking deeply. Something
in the boy's downcast attitude moved Pernales to pity.
"Do not despair, my fire-hearted, _arrogante_ little man," he said
presently. "I have said no; this time my no is absolute; but I shall not
say no to you, should I pass this way again when you are more fully
grown. Some day, I promise you, I shall again pass this way, and then if
you are still of the mind to be my dorado, you may join out with me and
we will murder the men of the Guardia Civil together, two sworn
compañeros. Meanwhile, grow brawny, grow brave, grow high-handed. There
will always be room in Spain for haughty resolute ones like you!"
"I accept the promise given," said Jacinto Quesada. "And I do not ask
you to swear to return for me--a word is enough between men. Now,
knowing you will come back, I will compose myself and wait. A child is
impetuous and fretful; a man is implacable yet patient."
"Son of the widow Quesada," returned Pernales magnificently, "on the
promise given and taken, let us strike hands! With a handshake, like two
true Spaniards, we will bind the bargain."
Jacinto Quesada took his hand off the hilt of his Manchegan navaja and
gripped claws with the bandolero. A certain note of solemnity thrilled
through the moment.
The bandolero started on.
"Go thou with God, compañero!" said Jacinto Quesada.
"Grow big, grow strong, thou!" said the great Pernales.