Up from the misty profundities of the Llanos de Jaen climbed, like slow
obstinate flies, the nine fantastic cabalgadores of Manuel Morales.
Also, their guide, Aguilino. They were all afoot. With them, up the
altitudes of the pass, yearned seven pack mules, heavy and swollen with
great panniers of provisions.
The nine Quixotes and their scarred wolf of a guide had put two weeks of
frugal living and heartbreaking toil between them and the barranca of
Pepe Flammenca and his unwashed Gypsy clan. Right off, they had lost one
horse and then another. The beasts had taken headers off mountainsides.
They had consulted with their guide, the man Aguilino. He gave them to
understand that horses were considered of very little worth in both the
Sierra Morena and the Sierra Nevada. For a caravan of asses, they
succeeded in bartering their horses with the arrieros, or muleteers,
going down.
Now, after two weeks, they had at last won through the rolling torrent
of mountains called the Sierra Morena. They were inching themselves up
the long perpendicular miles of the windy gorge of the Llanos de Jaen.
The Llanos de Jaen is very narrow. One would think one could hurl a
peseta across it, until one tried. Were it not for the chasmy gap of the
Llanos de Jaen, the Sierra Morena and the Sierra Nevada would be one
tremendous chain of mountains.
Half-way up, a mule stumbled in turning the flank of a precipice and
took the leap, screaming like a soul thrown headlong to Hell. The nine
Quixotes clung to the rock wall and felt sick to their stomachs. The
mule seemed falling for a thousand years. They did not dare to look down
and see it strike. The mule was the one the guide Aguilino had been
leading. Perhaps a shove from him had sent it on its way to death.
Again, perhaps not.
High above, upon the top of a glassy and steep _risco_ or overhanging
rock, a man had moored himself with a short rope of horsehide. He was
Jacinto Quesada. But he did not look the bandolero of the plains. Garbed
as he was in alpagartas or rope sandals, the better to grip the
precipitous ascents, and in sheepskin zamarra and long shawl as
protection against the cold, he looked the true mountaineer.
With the vigilant application of an eagle eying its meat circling all
unaware beneath its lofty eyrie, Quesada had been watching the men climb
laboriously up the sheer of the pass. Now, as the mule fell to its
magnificent death, he nodded his head in approbation and remarked to
himself:
"Rafael Perez has finally set to work, I see! That is the first poor
mule. But the whole seven must be disposed of, before Morales and his
men journey far through the Sierra Nevada."
The nine Quixotes did not know Quesada was perched there, far above
them. Long ere they crawled up to the overhanging rock, he had
disappeared completely. Yet they felt sure that somewhere beyond, among
the snowy crags and moaning canyons of the Sierra Nevada, Quesada was
pursuing his way with the girl Felicidad.
A day prior, just before leaping the Llanos de Jaen and coming out of
the Sierra Morena, they had stumbled, in a hollow of the hills, upon a
mud choza that had the gloomy aspects of a hiding place for bandoleros
and moonshiners. The peasant and his wife who lived in the hut had said
no to all their questions. No, they had not seen Jacinto Quesada. No,
they never had heard of him, they lived so far away in the mountains,
senores. Don Jesu, they would not know him from the great Morales
himself!
But their half-witted son, a tall, shock-headed, ungainly lad, was
struck by the appearance of the cavalcade and especially by the
colorful, if oddly assorted trapping of Manuel Morales. Poor lad, he had
never before seen such glorious caballeros.
As the disheartened men had made to lead on their mules, he had crept to
the offside of Morales' beast and there, hidden from the view of his
father, he had engaged in a quick, fearful pantomime.
"What is it?" queried Morales.
Vehemently the feeble-minded lad had pointed on ahead, on toward the
Llanos de Jaen and the Sierra Nevada beyond.
"He has gone that way!" he whispered. "Si, Jacinto Quesada himself and a
girl white as the snows that fall in these hills. He passed here two
days since. Into the Nevadas, into the Nevadas, he has gone, senor
don!"
Morales believed him, believed him even more implicitly than if his mind
had been sound. Despite the dubious looks and shakes of the head upon
the part of the guide Aguilino, all the cabalgadores agreed that the
poor feeble-minded fellow would be incapable of perpetrating a
deception. With energy and ardor they had pressed on.
Now, as they won to the bare-fanged wind-shrieking altitudes of the
pass, Morales and his men felt dizzy; their stomachs churned, their
heads were like gas-filled balloons. Sheerly below them dropped the
narrow, profound gutter of the Llanos de Jaen. It seemed composed of
three parts rock, standing on end, and seven parts air, giddying around
in a stew. They drew their eyes away. They felt as if they would like to
leave off clinging by their finger nails and slip down into the abysmal
void.
They sank down upon the uneven spaces of a granite spire that was as a
needle for slimness. Into the north rolled away, like a gray sea of
mist, the massive ramifying Sierra Morena. To the south and ahead bulked
up, even more imposing of port, the lofty altitudes of the Sierra
Nevada. It was like some long and magnificent staircase, its lower steps
of mica schist overgrown with gum cistus, rhododendron, and broom, its
top a dazzling flow of snow. Crags and peaks, jungled windy cuts,
rock-bound alpine lakes, creamy knobs, and sharp obelisks saw-edged the
sublime blue like the teeth of some titanic rake. The white melting
heads of old Muley Hassan and the Picacho de la Veleta looked but a jump
away, and yet with the mighty distance, the pink and purple of
rhododendron, the white and pink of trailing arbutus and the green of
gum cistus and broom seemed all of the same hazy blueness. It was a
stupendous, overpowering jumble of cathedral mountains, colossal
mountains, awful mountains.
"The Sierra Nevada has a scowling look," remarked Manuel Morales. "We
may thank the good Dios humbly and gratefully, if we come triumphant
through those solitudes and steeps."
"We must not lose another mule," said Jacques Ferou. "There are no red
deer in the Sierra Nevada, nor wild boar, nor even mongoose. Is it not
so? The panniers of provisions are our only salvation."
"And the mules may be eaten, too, when we're hungry enough," added
Carson grimly. "I've eaten worse meat in my day in Death Valley,
California."
Aguilino the guide heard the remarks without a quiver of his scarred
eye.
Late that afternoon, John Fremont Carson halted his mule on the eyebrow
of a cliff and the caravan crowded together at imminent risk of one or
more going overside. His beast had gone suddenly lame, Carson said. It
was standing on three legs, gray head drooping, and attempting every
little while to put down its fourth leg.
"Carajo! The cattle must be shot!" said the guide Aguilino at first
glance. "The contents of its panniers can be apportioned among the other
mules."
"Nothing doing," said Carson shortly. "We can't afford to lose a single
mule."
"You are right, monsenor," agreed Jacques Ferou. "In the Sierra Morena,
the cabanas of the mountaineers were far between and few, and we
succeeded in keeping our strength only by killing our meat as we went.
Here, this Sierra Nevada seems as empty of men and wild meat as the
deserts of French Algiers. We must save all our panniers, all our
mules."
"Let me see the lame foot!" spoke up Manuel Morales suddenly. As are
most bullfighters, Morales was wise in horseflesh and its kindred
species. He crouched, took the hoof between his knees and examined it
carefully. All at once his head snapped up.
"You lagarto, you lizard, you sly trick one!" he shouted at the guide.
"What Gypsy trick is this?"
He showed the mule's hoof to the others. Slightly protruding from the
inside of that hoof was the head of a nail. It had been driven straight
into the quick.
"Come, you flea!" commanded Morales. "Get me a pair of pincers, a hammer
with a claw--anything which will grip this nail and help to draw it
out."
The guide, glad enough to hide his discomfiture, hurried away. But in a
moment he returned with empty hands.
"Senor, we have no pincers, pliers, hammer--nothing of the kind!"
The American blurted out an oath.
"Think you can stump us, eh?" he said collectedly in English. And he
borrowed the revolver of Jacques Ferou, broke it, and emptied its six
chambers.
"My automatic hasn't the leverage of your gun," he remarked to the
Frenchman in explanation.
With the steel finger guard of the revolver he sought, as he spoke, to
get a grip on the head of the nail. But the nail had been driven in so
far that its head just barely protruded from the surface of the hoof.
There was no room beneath the nail-head for the slim steel of the finger
guard.
Manuel Morales shouldered him away. Taking the hoof again between his
knees, he dug at the head of the nail with his bare fingers. It seemed a
preposterous thing to do, but he worked with a gnawing persistency. The
mule shivered in every member, and made hoarse, almost human sounds of
pain. Suddenly it screamed. Morales, his round face dark with blood and
shiny with sweat, his body hunched all in a knot, slowly drew out the
nail between the vise of two strong bullfighter's fingers!
"Now we will go on," said Carson.
"And no more of your Gypsy tricks, you lagarto!" Morales warned the
guide.
Aguilino ignored the threat.
"The hole is spurting black blood," he said. "Let me make a poultice to
stop the bleeding."
He gathered a handful of the stick leaves of a gum cistus which grew in
the crevices of the cliff wall, chewed them in his mouth, then spit the
cud into his palm and pressed it over the ragged hole left by the nail
in the mule's hoof.
Yet, for all the appearance of doing good, he seemed to handle the
painful leg with unwarranted brutality. The mule, snorting in agony and
anger, recoiled sharply from him toward the brink of the path. Before
the others could realize that anything untoward was in motion, before
ever they could leap forward to save the beast, he pressed his head and
shoulders against the burdened animal and it tottered on the crumbling
edge of the cliff, then went over, turning round and round like an empty
wine cask, banging its panniers against the rock faces, kicking the air
with frail legs, and screaming all the while frightfully.
Manuel Morales caught the guide as he almost followed into the void.
With his two strong arms, the matador lifted him bodily into the air and
held him over the miles of emptiness.
"You snake in the grass!" he swore. "We will see now with how much grace
you take the leap yourself!"