After they had garnished their stomachs with the puchero, they sat
brooding around the three fires, the girl, Felicidad, and Jacinto and
his three ruffians. The Gypsy lad with the shirt open to the waist and
the yellow sash brought out his battered accordion again and played upon
it for their entertainment.
He made it scream and exult obscenely; he made it lament like a fallen
angel. He made it sing wild and wanton songs of Gypsy love; he made it
chant of Gypsy treachery and Gypsy chiromancy. When you heard its
uncouth and haunting assonances, you believed in the Evil Eye, the
_Querelar nasula_; in the _Hokkano Baro_, the Great Trick; and even in
the _Chiving Drao_, that sorcery by which the Gitanos cause horses to
become sick and glandered, and swine to die as suddenly as if poisoned.
In short, you believed all you ever had heard of the strange doings of
the Zincali!
The hours fled by. Those about the fires grew sleepy. One by one, the
Gypsy wenches withdrew into their tents. Then the girl Paquita spoke to
Felicidad and led her away. They lay down to sleep that night--the
highborn young lady and the girl of common Gypsy clay--in a certain
wagon of the Gitanos. To that wagon came Jacinto Quesada and his three
dorados, a short time later, and upon the open sward before it, threw
themselves, their ponchos wrapped around them to protect them from the
night cold and dew.
After breakfast next morning, Quesada talked long and earnestly with
Pepe Flammenca.
"You had best remain in camp, at least this morning," advised the Gypsy
count. "Up above, there is going to be a great _monteria_, and there
will be many men upon the mountains. Some one may see the Senor Don
Jacinto and report it to the police."
"It is good, friend Pepe. And the other matter?"
Flammenca called aloud in the Gypsy _gerigonza_. Instantly followed a
scene of extraordinary liveliness and interest. Flammenca, Quesada,
Perez, Ignacio Garcia, and Estrada sat cross-legged on the grass.
Flammenca's Gypsy lads led before them, first the horses of Quesada and
his dorados, and then the three- and four-year-olds attached to the
Gypsy caravan. There was a great chaffering; the various points of the
horses were appraised enthusiastically and with minute care. It was an
impromptu horse fair. Wherever found, whether in Spain, England, Russia,
Hungary, or the United States, the true Gypsy is an expert _chalan_ or
horse trader.
When all the bargaining was over, Quesada and his dorados discovered
they had not got off second best. They had acquired five new horses,
unfatigued and glossy coated after a fortnight in the barranca. Their
own jaded animals had come into the possession of Flammenca and his
bucks.
"It would please the young lady who rides with us," said Quesada to the
Gypsy chieftain, "if she could change her attire for something more
suited to the saddle."
"My Paquita will attend to the matter," returned Flammenca. "Let them go
together into one of the tents and find out whether their clothing be
fit to barter and whether their two pretty shapes are mates."
The girl, Paquita, had been hovering about Jacinto Quesada all the
morning. At breakfast, she had anticipated his every desire, waiting on
him with silent devotion. Continually she kept her great dusky eyes upon
him, following him everywhere he went with a gaze abject and doglike in
its utterness of adoration.
Now, Quesada drew forth a packet of tissue papers and a pouch of
tobacco, of a sudden and altogether unexpectedly, she stooped above him
and seized the papers and tobacco from his hands. Looking fixedly into
his astonished eyes, she rolled a cigarette, wetting the edges with her
lips. Then she handed the _papelito_ to him, made a long obeisance, and
turned away.
Her father chuckled and gave her the word to take Felicidad apart and
find her fit riding clothes. She withdrew, looking over her shoulder at
Quesada with passionate Gypsy eyes.
Sometime later, she and Felicidad came out of the tent into which they
had vanished, and Felicidad wore a brown jacket and a brown bisected
riding skirt, both rather the worse for wear, and Paquita was completely
attired in Felicidad's green traveling dress. The Gypsy girl looked very
charming in the more conventional attire, what of her nut-brown skin
and dye-black hair against the contrasting green.
She walked about the clearing with the grace of a she-leopard,
continually smoothing the tight, revealing skirt over her hips, and
rearranging and patting her hair which she had put up in imitation of
Felicidad. Preening herself thus, she smiled often in a frank and
childlike pleasure in herself. But there were no men about to admire
her.
Quesada's dorados had gone behind the wagons to currycomb and further
polish their new horses. The Roms, every last dishevel-headed and
swarthy-faced lad, had left the camp immediately after the conclusion of
the horse trading. Led by Pepe Flammenca, they had stalked silently up
the barranca, their Mausers and Mannlichers couched tenderly in their
arms.
They were bound for the heights above the barranca. There, in the
tag-end mountains of the Sierra Morena, a great monteria, or mountain
drive, was under way that day. Senor D. Pablo Lario de Quinones was the
host. He was a rich Catalan who had made his millions in the cork
industry. He had purchased two or three of the mountains for a sporting
estate, and in one of the higher passes he had erected a shooting box.
It was the only habitation within miles, for he had ousted the few
native mountaineers from their landholds.
Among his guests for this particular monteria were many Spanish
notables, high and mighty ones of Letters, the State, and the Church, as
well as several foreign ambassadors and their attachés. The Duke of
Fernan Nuñez, the Duke of Medinaceli, the Marquis of Viana, the Conde
de Agrela, the Marquesa de Manzanedo, Colonel Barrera and Senor D. I. L.
de Ybarra were among the crack guns invited.
Lario de Quinones had his own pack of _podencos_, or hunting dogs--a
_recoba_ of about forty dogs. But, as is the custom of the sporting
gentry of Spain, certain of his guests--the Duke of Fernan Nuñez, the
Conde de Agrela, and Colonel Barrera--had brought with them their own
packs of podencos and their own huntsmen, to reinforce De Quinones' pack
and make the drive a more stupendous affair.
Now, Pepe Flammenca and his Gypsy lads were arrant trespassers on the
hunting grounds of the grandees. Should the mountaineers who served as
beaters and extra huntsmen come upon them in the brushwood, they would
thrash them unmercifully and drive them out of the mountains at the
points of their guns. But Pepe Flammenca and his bucks were hardened and
desperate poachers. It was their plan to skulk along the line of the
drive and to hide themselves in thickets near the _armada_ or firing
line of gentlemen sportsmen; and should a wounded stag come bounding
toward their places of concealment, it would be most swiftly killed and
most swiftly borne away to their camp.
A head or two of game would not be missed, nor a rifle report away to
one side cause much sensation in all that great to-do of the monteria.
To drown the sound of the poachers' guns, there would be the baying and
tinkling of bell-carrying dogs, the trumpeting of huntsmen upon their
_caracolas_, the shooting of blank cartridges to announce that some
game-beast had been jumped, the crashing of beaters through the thorny
cistus, and the running reports of magazine rifles along the _rayas_ or
open rides.
After the poaching Gypsies had gone on their quest, Quesada sauntered
down to the brook. Here, where an arcade of oleanders shaded a tiny
white beach, he seated himself upon a huge stone above a pool. He busied
with watching the trout in the riffles and with spying upon two water
shrews that swam beneath the surface of the slack water, and dipped and
dived, seeking everywhere for food. For something like half an hour,
these velvety-black little creatures engrossed Quesada's attention.
Then, as pebbles tinkled down near at hand, he looked up to see the girl
Paquita coming down the bank.
She seated herself beside him on one end of the stone, swinging her bare
brown feet above the pool.
"You have not said that I look very pretty in this green Spanish dress,"
she said at length. "But that is your thought, is it not? It would not
be difficult for me to be the proud and aristocratic lady, eh, man? But
I would rebel if I must wear shoes! I think my sun-burnt little feet are
prettier naked as they are!"
Quesada smiled and continued to smoke his cigarette.
She leaned her body against the bole of the tree behind, and clasped her
hands behind her head, and thoughtfully regarded him. After a time, she
said:
"Tell me, caballero of my soul--tell me, have you ever loved a Gypsy
girl, a brown, soft-cooing maiden of the Zincali who was sugar and wine
to kiss, and velvet and Filipino silk to caress?"
No, Jacinto Quesada had not.
"It is not too late, intrepid one, to make amends! Any Gypsy wench would
be most glad to have you for a lover. Even a Gypsy count's daughter,
even the loveliest Gypsy maid in all the Spains, would not be too proud
to cling to your kisses, Busno though you be! Don Jacinto,
I--I--Paquita--could love you, and no trouble at all!"
Persistently, he watched the water shrews in the runlet.
"Am I not prettier than she?"
"Of whom do you speak?"
"This highborn lady, this slow-blooded and cold aristocrat--she who is
as pale as a sickly lily, as slender and ungraceful as a growing
boy--this Felicidad!"
"I would not say she is too slender, Paquita; I would not say she is too
pale! It is only that her sort of beauty does not please you, because it
is not the Gypsy kind with which you are familiar."
"It is not that, Don Jacinto! I have seen her unclothed, I have seen her
costumed only in her alabaster skin. There she stood in as much
loveliness as the Senor Don Dios had thought fit to give her. And I
looked her up and down with a woman's eye. _Chachipe_! the wench had
nothing of fascination and beauty about her that I have not! She is
young, yes, and soft, yes, and smooth of skin, and somewhat gracefully
shaped. But she is at least three years older than I, and she is no
more a woman, no better rounded. My breasts are as fully blossomed and
alluring! My--"
"Paquita, you are indiscreet!"
"Indiscreet? I, a Gypsy girl, indiscreet? Don Jacinto, we Gitanas are
never indiscreet! A kiss or two, an errant arm about the waist, or a
hand upon the breasts--what of that? An uncovered bosom, a shapely leg
bared to the knee--there is little evil in that. But if you venture too
far, if you touch upon our honor, thinking that we and honor to each
other are strangers--Tate! you will find a dirk has nosed its way
between your ribs!"
She laughed mockingly, showing her fine white Gypsy teeth.
"Am I indiscreet in speaking as I did about this girl of the Busne? Did
I not undress and dress her with my own hands?"
"But you need not tell these things to me. I think her beautiful to
death!"
"Oh, you cannot love her!"
"Love her? I do not know."
"Ah, but if you once turned your eyes upon poor wistful me--chachipe!
you would soon know whether you loved me! I would make you hunger for me
like a famished wolf, I would make your blood race and burn! When I
danced the jota, or the Romalis, or merely moved languorously about, you
would suffer all the thirsty bitterness of hell, all the exalted sweets
of heaven!"
Jacinto Quesada looked away.
"But I do not desire to love you, Paquita."
"Si, si; but ah, if you only would! Could you not love me only a
little--you who are so proud and courageous, you who are so strong and
absolute?"
Jacinto Quesada turned his head and plunged his austere glance into her
deep yearning eyes.
"Paquita," he said, not coldly, but without any weakness of pity, "it is
because I am strong and absolute that I cannot love you. When your eye
caresses me with its look, your tongue with its subtle flattery, my
masculinity rebels at the thought of being wooed by a woman; I am
revolted, sickened! Fling your soul with the same impetuosity and
passion to some Gypsy lad, and he may love you; but I--no, never I!"
She groaned aloud, knowing full well that he spoke a primitive truth.
But she could not help yearning toward him, her face bloodless with
desire.
Said he, "If you would but flee away from me, or shudder when your
glance meets mine, or even treat me with disdain and coldness, perhaps
then--who knows? But I must be the predatory one, the seeker, the
stalker! Else I cannot love."
He made as if to rise. But before he could get upon his feet, she leaped
up and bent above him and kissed him full upon the lips. Then swiftly
and blindly she fled.
Once she had gone, Quesada did not bestir himself. He sat gazing
morosely into the limpid tarn below his rock.
From a great distance, from away up in the mountains, there dropped down
vaguely to his ears the ringing note of a pack of hounds in full cry.
Came also, every little while, the bark of rifles remote and far.
Quesada gave no heed to these sounds. All through the morning, the
mountain airs had wafted through the barranca vagrant notes of this same
refrain.
Very suddenly, however, Quesada heard, from much nearer at hand, the
voices of men shouting and hallooing. He heard his own name called. The
voices drew nearer. The shouting men were in the barranca itself; they
were noisily proceeding through the rattling underwood. He heard them on
the path above his nook by the pool, still calling his name. He did not
lift his voice in reply, nor even turn his head. But suddenly, from the
bushes within touch of his hand and right behind his head, a voice spoke
out, sharply, peremptorily:
"Aupa, Don Jacinto! There is no time to be lost. Already they are
entering the gateway to this barranca!"
Looking over his shoulder, Quesada saw, no more than a yard in the rear
and peering through a hole in the bushes, an uncouth disheveled face
like the face of a satyr or faun--the Gypsy-eyed, bronzed, and
grizzle-bearded face of Pepe Flammenca.
"Of whom do you speak?" asked the bandolero.
Answered Pepe Flammenca; "Of Manuel Morales and his fantastic
cabalgadores!"