A man wasted from disease sat, all this while, in the morning sunlight
on a chair tilted back against one whitewashed wall of the village
chapel. His young haggard face was screwed up, and he frowned through
Moorish amber eyes toward where, some distance below, the Frenchman
sprawled on the great rock at the brink of the village. He could not
account for the unseemly posture and gesticulating hands and head of the
Frenchman.
No word of Ferou's bartering reached him. He lacked even one clue to the
strange and absorbing business going forward. He did not know that the
waiting members of the Guardia Civil had advanced up the gorge and now,
out of sight, down at the foot of the goat path, were making
cold-blooded arrangement with the Frenchman for the delivery of his own
living body!
Quesada lacked the strength which would urge him boldly to investigate.
And he was too weak to concentrate his mind, for any length of time, on
an apparently unsolvable problem. He shrugged aside his perplexity,
after a little, and sunk back into that trick of strategic plotting so
natural to the feeble in body but strong in spirit.
Twisting his head about, he looked through the doorway into the
hospital. Within, in that fetid moaning place where lay the sick
Morales, there were no attending serranos; they had finished their
rounds for the nonce. Below on the great rock, the engrossing and
unaccountable business had every appearance of engaging Ferou for some
time. The way was clear.
Quesada thumped down his tilted chair and walked on weakly rickety legs
to where, near the cork-oak tree in the center of the uneven street, a
number of the villagers were brewing a puchero in a great iron pot.
"Come, mis paisanos!" he said in a voice surprisingly commanding for one
so enervated from disease. "Ladle out to me a bowl of the stew."
"We have no orders to refuse you, Don Jacinto," answered one of the men
obsequiously. "We only mind that Morales and the Americano should get
none."
The bandolero snorted, but held his peace. He took the steaming earthen
bowl proffered him; then quaking like one palsied, exerting a deal of
effort so as not to spill a drop of the precious haricot, he slowly
retraced his steps toward the sick bay.
Here he glanced back over one shoulder. The serranos had returned to the
business of stirring the puchero; they were not watching him. In he
staggered, through the chapel doorway, to share the soup of the stew
with the sick matador, Manuel Morales.
Minutes clicked by--a good ten minutes.
Within the cabana where Carson convalesced, Felicidad was sitting in a
chair at the American's bedside, her golden head nodding with
drowsiness, when the _blut_ of approaching feet on the earthen floor
startled her into alertness. She saw the slim gray-suited form of the
Frenchman darkening the doorway. Her blue eyes widened and filled with
apprehension and deep abhorrence. She shuddered involuntarily and shrunk
back in the chair.
But Ferou only bowed in mock respect.
"Senor Carson," he addressed the American, "my serranos are stewing, out
in the street, a fine savory ragout of meat and lentils. Would you care
for some of the soup? It would be very strength-giving."
Carson, his angular hollow-cheeked face white as the pillow pressed
about it, made no answering movement of head or mouth. With eyes
deep-sunken and chilly blue as high mountain lakes, he looked up at the
Frenchman unblinkingly.
"It will be very simple, monsenor," continued Ferou suavely, the hard
lines deepening about his mouth in a grim smile. "All you have to do is
to give me one of your five-thousand peseta bills! Since yesterday, the
price of lentils and meat has soared on these mountains. But to you who
are so rich, that is no importa. Only five thousand pesetas for a bowl
of soup!"
All at once, like an unexpectedly loosed avalanche, the girl was on her
feet, her blue eyes coldly ablaze like points of steel.
"You--you thief! You know he has left only one bill of five thousand
pesetas! You have taken all the others! Oh, you rapacious hawk, you
vile, vile vulture!" she cried out, shuddering with horrid remembrance
and a sudden increase of detestation. "You would rob him of his all,
everything! You would have him end his days in want and misery, just
like the pobre padre of me!"
The Frenchman did not wither beneath her scorn. He shoved his sharp
blond head nearer her. And his face livid with stirred-up bile, his
slate-colored eyes narrowed to mere blazing slits, he bared his long
white teeth in a passionate carnivorous snarl of envenomed hate.
"You baggage, you treacherous snake! I'll show you what! When I get done
my work in this barrio, you'll go with me. Mon Dieu, I'll show you how
an Apache Parisien treats one such as you!"
The movement was unexpected. Sudden as the sweep of a hawk, he bent his
tall athletic body forward sharply and made a grab at her wrist!
She recoiled from him. The nostrils of his high predatory nose twitching
and working, his whole ashy face working and grimacing with fury like a
horrible mask of rubber, he leaped after her. She sidled along the edge
of the bed. Trembling in every limb like a terrorized doe, she retreated
out the doorway.
Bent sharply forward, bounding from spot to spot like a leopard, the
Frenchman followed.
The American attempted to lift his head from the pillow. He fell back
like a load of lead. He worked his hands together and groaned aloud at
his helplessness.
Came a sudden clatter of horse's hoofs out in the village; then the loud
shaking voice of a man:
"Alto! Halt, you nameless wench! You have soiled my honor, profaned my
name, defiled my blood! Heart of God, you must die!"
It was not the voice of the Frenchman. It was the voice of Don Jaime de
Torreblanca y Moncada. The terrible doctor had come!
Sitting stark upright upon his horse on the great rock at the brink of
the village, his narrow face a cinder-gray, Don Jaime was leveling his
huge horse-pistol at the backing form of the golden-haired girl!
"Ha!" exclaimed the Frenchman, his eyes lighting up like sunlight on
ice, his grimacing face wreathing into an outrageous smile. "It is the
haughty hidalgo come to wipe out his dishonor in the blood of ma chérie
Felicidad!"
With a laugh that was worse than brutal, that was pitiless and fiendish
at such a time, he sprung back into the dark shelter of the doorway.
The frail slip of a girl was left, unaided and alone, to face the
avenger.