Even as his father had hurried down the mountainside many years before,
even so Jacinto Quesada wended his descending way, that morning, on an
enterprise of forlorn desperation. He was bound for the casa of
Torreblanca y Moncada outside Granada. He did not wait to borrow one of
the village mules which the serranos used to sleigh their cords of pine
down to the lower torrents and to carry their panniers of white-flowered
manzanilla into the towns of the plains. His long mountaineer's legs
were swifter to move and even more tireless than the slow hoofs of any
stupid borrico. His descent proved far more rapid than had been the
arduous climb of the nine cabalgadores.
He came, in the noontide, to the boulder-strewn, gorse-whelmed pocket of
the Christ of the Pass. He paused neither to rest nor to eat. In the
moon of that evening, he found himself in the forested dell at the foot
of that dark green corry which snaked over a shoulder of the sierras.
Here in the night, almost a week before, Aguilino the guide had deserted
Morales and his men.
Quesada turned aside from his decurrent course. He broke through the
moon-filtering brush of the dell. He waded the nearby frothing and
echoing mountain stream. All the while, louder than the splash and chop
of the boisterous rivulet, he ululated shrilly in the mournful manner
of the Spanish she-wolf.
Presently, from the underwood beyond, came an answering call. It was a
singular bird note, not much the ordinary hoot of an owl, but more a
growl and something of a gruff scream. It was the hoot of the eagle owl.
Quesada pressed forward. He came out, a moment later, upon a tiny
clearing, saffron in the moonlight. To one side stood a log hut, its
chinks plastered with adobe. Crowded in the open doorway were three men.
They were his dorados, Ignacio Garcia, Pio Estrada, and Rafael Perez.
To judge from this, Perez had not fled so far, after all. The other two
must have recently come up. Perez lacked altogether now the yellow scar
that had so hideously distinguished Aguilino the guide.
Quesada showed no surprise. It was as if he had thoroughly expected to
find them there.
"Hola, mis dorados!" he called, as he stepped into the clearing. "Bring
forward one of your nags."
"But the booty!" objected Rafael Perez, whilom Aguilino.
"Si; the sacks of mail and jewels and money!"
"Do we not go forward to the cache now," asked Garcia, "and split the
loot between us?"
"Disparate! I have no time. The plunder is cached with our cacique,
Dionisio Almazarron, in the foothills of the Sierra Morena. Go you
there, you three, and take it all. But alto! first get me one of your
cobs to ride down into Granada."
No one of the three men moved. Said Pio Estrada in an odd voice:
"Ah, you do not care for this little treasure, eh, maestro? Times have
been good to you in Spain. Don Jacinto has taken to enterprising abroad,
single-handed, and accomplishing marvelous and audacious feats. It is
true indeed that Don Jacinto is brave, brave as the very God himself!"
Quesada did not understand the significance of the words, but there was
no mistaking their intent. There was that in the tone of Estrada's voice
and in the fact that the men still stood unmoving in the doorway, in
sullen disobedience to his command, which spelled sedition and revolt.
Slowly from his holster, Quesada lifted his huge long-barreled revolver.
"My golden ones," he said quietly, "you do not hear well in the
moonlight. Would you understand better the detonation of a pistol?" He
smiled, showing his clean white teeth.
The grim jest of his words, the set of his long jaw, the gleam of eyes
and teeth and steely revolver, had a decided effect upon the men. Like
cats frightened away by the Spanish scat, zape! they stretched their
legs around the cabin and out of sight.
Within a trice, they were back, each leading a wiry rough-coated pony.
Quesada selected the most mettlesome and leaped into the deep saddle.
"Rafael Perez," he instructed, turning partly round, "you shall remain
here. Let the others go for the loot. You watch the road. Men of the
Guardia Civil will be riding the hills. When I pass here again, in
returning from Granada, I shall hoot like the eagle owl and you will
answer in the manner of the wolf bitch. Let me know, then, if any
policemen come this way. By this time, the affair of the
Seville-to-Madrid must be loudly bruited abroad in Spain. I should not
wonder if some two Guardias Civiles will ride over this corry in an
attempt to capture me in my own village."
Perez grunted in ill-concealed distaste of the task. Ignacio Garcia
spoke out.
"There are many other things loudly bruited abroad in Spain, these days,
maestro mio!"
Quesada swung completely around in the saddle to face the sullen trio.
"Carajo! Do you think to trifle with Jacinto Quesada! What is all this
muttering going on here?"
Garcia shrugged his shoulders noncommittally and a bit fearfully; the
erstwhile Aguilino remained taciturn and lowering of dark brow; but with
a strange audacity that was almost insolence, Estrada ventured:
"Oh, you will soon learn, Don Jacinto of the high hand!"
Quesada cursed them angrily for the whelps of dogs; then swung round in
the saddle, dug his heels into the horse's flanks, and headed full-tilt
through the brush. Once back in the trampled band of heath and brambles,
which was the road through the dell, he sped the nag at a gallop up the
dark green corry.
But topping the rise and dropping down on the other side, he reined in
the cob the better to reconsider the sullen manner and incomprehensible
words of his trio of dorados.
"The knaves have been bitten by some foul plan," he surmised. "It is not
that they intend to rob me of all share in the booty. Seguramente, no! I
told them they were welcome to the entire lot. Something else is afoot,
God knows what!"
Coming out of the mournful Pass of the Blessed Trinity, some time later,
he took that one of the three roads which diverged most sharply from the
course pursued by the cabalgadores in climbing up. After a good time
more, he rode through the myrtle and orange trees of the Alpujarras and,
following the Darro, slanted down toward the Moorish city of Granada,
gleaming white on the sides of the hills.
A few miles outside the city, upon the great hasped door of the
crumbling adobe casa of Torreblanca y Moncada, Quesada knocked
echoingly. After an appreciable space, the little mullion window in the
door was opened, and an old white-haired man peered out with bright
eyes. He was Pedro, the butler.
"Ah, Mother of God!" he exclaimed, a strange quavering note in his
voice. "It is Jacinto Quesada about whom all Spain talks!"
"I bring news of the little Felicidad."
"God grant it is good news!"
"Good and bad. She is safe in my native pueblo, but she is sick. She is
sick of the same disease that killed off my own poor mother only a few
days ago. It is a plague, Tio Pedro. The whole village is sick with the
dread cholera."
The old servant ejaculated in horror.
"It is the hand of God, Jacintito!" he went on with warning
sententiousness. "It is a scourge of God striking down those about you
because of the terrible vile things you have been doing, these last
nights, throughout the peninsula. Take heed, Jacintito mio; take heed
ere it is too late, and all you love are dead!"
There was something in the old man's words which sounded startlingly and
disagreeably reminiscent of the three dorados, their sullenness, their
mutterings.
"Disparate!" exclaimed Quesada. "What nonsense is this? Just tell me,
tio; is Don Jaime still away?"
The white head nodded energetically behind the mullion window.
"Si; seguramente, si! Ever since that affair of the Seville-to-Madrid,
the senor doctor has been scouring the plains and hills of La Mancha for
his stolen daughter and all his money. Ah, Don Jaime is indeed a hard
man. God pity Felicidad when he finds her!"
"I come," said Quesada brusquely, tiring of the old man's continual
whine--"I come to get medicines from the hidalgo doctor's chest in order
to combat the pestilence. Once Don Jaime returns, you will tell him of
our plight."
Came abruptly the grating of hastily drawn bolts; the heavy door swung
in.
"You know the house; it is yours," said old Pedro with true Spanish
hospitality.
The bandolero entered the gloom of the corridor.
"I shall go to find Teresa," added Pedro, as he re-bolted the door. "We
shall kneel, and say prayers for the repose of your mama's soul, and for
the quick recovery of the little nina, Felicidad, and the other sick
ones. When the senor doctor returns, I shall tell him all that you said.
And when he rides away up the steep goat paths to your barrio, we shall
plead with Mary, the Compassionate and the Compassionating, that his
granite heart may soften with pity for his little daughter...."
As he left the whining voice of the old butler behind him and went
through the long echoing dusky corridors, an orientation took place
within Jacinto Quesada. Back through the years he went; back to the day
when, a scrawny little mountaineer's bantling, he had put his puny hand
into the great harsh fist of the hidalgo doctor and come down the
mountains to the decayed, lizard-haunted, and dingy casa.
No longer was the muggy mansion the sumptuous palace it had seemed to
his ten-year-old eyes. And yet every spacious poverty-bare room that he
passed and glimpsed was quick and instant to him with memories. They
were memories all of one sort. Memories of a pretty little girl with
golden hair and legs round and pudgy as his own would have been, on that
time, had his father lived and prospered. Unconsciously he found himself
pausing in the gloom as if to catch a note of her rippling and
infrequent laughter.
The shadowy library seemed never so vast nor so gloomy as now. Most of
the huge old sheepskin-bound books were gone. The voids in the tall
cases, rapidly gathering dust, were as poignantly reminiscent as the
empty chair of one that has died.
The bandolero went round the walls until he came upon that which he
sought. It was a yellow-leaved volume, lettered in Gothic type, that was
yet not so old. It contained much data on the various forms of cholera,
its causes, symptoms, stages, treatment, dissemination and prevention.
Running his eye down the columns of print, Quesada discovered that he
would need to carry many drugs, preparations, and aperient and
astringent medicines. At that rate, the ancient volume would prove an
added burden. Quickly he decided to tear the descriptive pages from the
volume. They were all that was desired.
But of a sudden, he was arrested in his vandal task. Nothing real and
tangible halted him; only it seemed to him that the screams of a child
were driving like knives into his heart. He remembered, then and all at
once, that long-forgotten day when Felicidad, innocently naughty, had
torn some of the richly illumined pages from the rare old books, and cut
them into paper dolls, and been lashed unmercifully with a short whip of
horsehide by her father.
He saw himself, a lad of ten years, rendered desperate by her screams as
only a child becomes desperate. He saw himself charging at the terrible
hidalgo, screaming like a little animal, tearing at the doctor's
trousers with his finger nails, trying to leap up and upon him. He felt
the fall of the quirta upon his head. It was acutely stinging as in
reality. His jaws snapped together; they snapped together just as they
had snapped, in that dim past day, upon the doctor's wrist. And a grim
satisfaction tingled the edges of his locked teeth. It was for all the
world as if, again, his teeth had sunk into flesh!
"Ah, you son of a mangy she-wolf!" sounded in his brain. "How's the
wolf-cub to-day?"
He looked quickly about him. There on the wall he saw that which he had
not noticed before. A painting of the doctor--Don Jaime himself, his
hair whitened by years and by sorrow, and his gray eyes glinting out
from his deep swarth face like remote stars in an intolerant heaven.
"Todopoderoso Dio'!" groaned Quesada, shuddering. "Pity Felicidad indeed
when he finds her!"
With a kind of desperation, in one jerk he tore the desired pages from
the book, then hied himself quickly out of the room.
"It is a haunt of ghosts!" he said almost superstitiously.
He entered the doctor's laboratory. Here, from chests and racks and
trays, he collected the relieving and remedial agents praised in the
torn pages--opium pills, preparations of starch and laudanum, ammonia,
salt, powdered aromatic chalk, astringents and laxatives. Down in the
cellar, he secured some cobwebbed bottles of old brandy and clear wine.
He made several trips to his shaggy pony, picketed outside in the road.
He secured what he had gathered in the canvas packs slung from the
saddle. He left without once meeting the aged Teresa or again bothering
the butler, Uncle Pedro.
He returned up the hills through the passes and green corries. He shoved
the horse ahead at a persistent canter, yet such was the grade and such
the growing leg-weariness of the cob that slow days were consumed in the
journeying. At last, in the dim fresco of a certain nightfall, he found
himself back in that forested dell where he had commanded Rafael Perez
to remain on guard.
But no chill ululations answered his imitations of the hoot of the eagle
owl. He rode through the brush and across the stream. Back in the
clearing, the door of the log cabin was swinging forlornly in the rising
wind; within, was only dark obscurity and emptiness. Rafael Perez had
fled with the other two!
Once again Quesada recalled the sullen manner and incomprehensible words
of the trio when he last had met them. He shook his head gloomily.
"Something surely is afoot!" he murmured. "They mutter against me, they
disobey me with impunity. The dogs of ladrones, they may have turned
traitor! Instead of keeping an eye on the road, Perez may have put the
Guardia Civil on my track. Porvida, it will go hard with them if such
proves true! They'll never live to get the reward. Dios hombre, I swear
it!"
His temper sharpened and embittered by the discovery, he vented it in
harsh kicks against his pony's flanks. The wearied nag extended itself.
By late dawn, Quesada rode into the gorge from which the goat-path
looped up to the empested village.
Presently, as they wound through the gorge, unusual signs of alertness
began to show in the tired cob. He lifted his head, pricked up his ears.
He was just about to neigh when the bandolero, on the watch, leaned over
and clamped his hand tightly upon his nostrils. From ahead, on the
instant, breathed into Quesada's ears the neigh of recognition of
another horse.
The bandolero leaped from the saddle. With one hand firm on the muzzle
of the pony, the other on the butt of the long-barreled revolver
protruding from his holster, tensely he stood waiting and hearkening.
Into his nostrils drifted the acrid smell of a wood fire. He heard a
clipping staccato sound as of some one chopping faggots. He saw, some
hundred feet ahead, a thin whitish smoke voluting up from the green tops
of the pines and alders, and merging into the fog cloak above. There was
a camp of men in the gorge.
His vague suspicions of the three dorados congealed into quick and firm
convictions.
"It is the Guardia Civil," he surmised. And he swore; "By the Nails of
Christ!"