Doctor Torreblanca Y Moncada strategically overcame the trouble
engendered by cremation. He had the serranos burn whole trees and from
the ashes, by percolation through water, produce a leaching of lye.
Then, a goodly distance from the water supply coursing through the old
Moorish flume, on the lip of the gorge where a void had been left by the
dismantling of the two infected cabanas, he had the men of the pueblo
dig a deep pit. Therein he purposed burying the dead in sheets of the
burning alkali.
On the morning following that on which poetic justice had come to Ferou,
he approached Quesada, who was superintending the work of digging the
pit. Save for a certain wolfish gauntness, the bandolero was almost
himself.
"Jacinto," he said, "do you feel hardy enough, my haggard one, to
journey down these hills to my casa near Granada?"
The Moorish oblong eyes of the bandolero showed surprise and a shade of
fear.
"I am easily strong enough by now, Don Jaime. But--"
"Is it the police you fear? They rode away immediately after the killing
of Ferou."
Quesada shook his head.
"I am frank with you, my hidalgo doctor. Should I absent myself from the
barrio, I would fear for Felicidad of the gold hair and heart of fire!"
With his cold gray eyes, the grandee looked at Quesada and through and
through him. As if mouthing some religious dogma, he returned haughtily:
"You know, son of a mangy she-wolf, that no man can halt a Torreblanca y
Moncada once he says, I will! Ea pues! It is thus with my vengeance. The
ancient name of my house, the blood of my veins, must be cleared of all
tainture! Felicidad must die!"
"God preserve you, Don Jaime! You are still the soul of granite,
unforgiving and unsparing even though your stolen money is all returned
to you now, and your daughter's disgrace altogether wiped out by the
death of the French poodle!"
The hidalgo laughed harshly. He refused in his lordly pride to argue.
Cleverly he countered:
"And you, Jacintito; you are still the Wolf-Cub, ever leaping to the
jade's defense as you did when you were only a bantling!
"But it is not because I wish to be rid of you that I ask you to
journey," he went on. "You have reminded me that I am a priest of the
body. It is of my profession I speak. I need medicines. The supply is
nearly exhausted."
"But I carted up such a lot, fully four canvas packs!"
"I know. But mi gran espada Manuel and the Senor Carson, both
well-meaning but untutored, made extravagant inroads on the treasures
you brought. And hearing from old Tio Pedro that you had stocked
yourself so well, I rode extra light to make speed."
"Yet things are going better now," objected Quesada. "There are fewer
deaths and more recoveries."
"Thank God for that! But one can never tell. The present even tone of
the weather may suddenly change and cause the scourge to redouble its
havoc. I must not run short."
"That is true," nodded Quesada. Yet it was evident that he still
hesitated to go for fear of leaving Felicidad unassisted and helpless
before the cold implacable wrath of her father.
Said Don Jaime, commencing to offer inducements, plainly weakening
before the obstinacy of the bandolero:
"If you will go, Jacinto, you may take my horse. No other has ridden him
in over ten years. He will carry you well, though only at a snail's
pace."
Quesada realized what that offer meant.
"I will take the horse," he agreed. "That horse of yours shall be as a
bond given in hand to me, Don Jaime, that you will remain here and stay
your vengeance until I return!"
"My vengeance? Well, like the Judgment Day of Christ, that can wait!"
"Is it a promise?"
"It is a promise!"
"Vaya, Don Jaime!"
"Con Dios, Jacintito!"
Garbed in the once elegant clothes of the dead Frenchman, even to his
slouch traveling hat, Quesada sat deep in the doctor's saddle and
carefully guided the old rawboned nag down the loops of the goat path.
He kept a wary eye out for the policemen. The Guardias Civiles might
chance to be lingering on in the gorge. But the trampled space about the
alder tree was wholly deserted; the ashes from the breakfast fire of the
day before were being rapidly dissipated by the draughty wind.
He pushed on down. Crackling over the fallen leaves in the gorges,
clattering along the stony hogbacks and ridges, he came, in the waning
afternoon, to the boulder-strewn pocket of the Christ of the Pass. And
suddenly from below, louder than the ring of his horse's hoofs, there
echoed up to him a sharp sound like the report of a pistol.
Come of long outlawry, Quesada was circumspectly cautious. The report
might have exploded near at hand; the chances were that, with the odd
carrying knack of sounds high on mountains, it had echoed, clear and
distinct, from far away. But he would take no chances.
The ragged prickly gorse and huge boulders, which bestrewed the pass
about the foot of the cross, furnished unusual hiding places. He
dismounted hastily, tied his horse behind a sumach bush and, behind a
tall boulder, hid himself.
Twilight deepened quickly into full dark night. It was gruesome waiting
there beneath the pale white figure of the Saviour, with its crown of
black horsehair and red-painted wounds. Save for the wind sweeping
through the pass with little shrill noises, nothing stirred or sounded
in the long defile.
After a little, Quesada conquered his vague apprehensions sufficiently
to sup upon the cold sausages, dry bread, and bota of wine which he had
had the forethought to sling to the cantle of his saddle. Then it was on
again, through the dark night and the savage uncouth pass, in haste to
accomplish his errand for the doctor.
A piece of moon came up and shot long pale slithers of light down the
rock walls. Ahead, in the sudden wan light, he made out the bent and
bundled figure of an old, shawl-wrapped peasant woman. She was coming
toward him up the gorge. She seemed making little catching sounds, as if
softly weeping.
"A Dios, mother," he greeted, as he rode past.
She gave him neither answer nor notice. Her few wisps of white hair
streaming in disarray from under her flat worsted cap, she went by,
sobbing quietly, as if utterly oblivious of his presence.
Quesada looked after her bent form and shook his head commiseratingly.
"Ah, there has been some little domestic trouble in her cabana this
night!" he remarked to himself. "And she is going on, the poor creature,
to seek strength and consolation from the lonely Christ of the Pass. It
is the way they have in these desolate hills--Hola! What's the matter,
my bony Pegasus!"
The nag beneath him, suddenly shying, had come to a dead stop, and now
was shivering in every limb. They had just rounded the bend which
portaled the pass. Leaping afoot in the stirrups, Quesada gazed over the
lifted frightened head of the horse. Ahead in the open road and
shapeless in the vague moonlight, he saw something lying still and
black!
Ever wary of ambush, resultant from long outlawry, he sprung out of the
saddle and getting the horse by the bridle, shoved him violently back
into the shadow of the spur. For an intolerable fraction of time, he
peered round the bend and watched.
The black shapeless huddle in the road never moved. Was it some animal,
sleeping or dead? He crept forward cautiously, Ferou's old revolver in
hand. He put out his fingers toward the vague outline of it. He touched
soft cloth, he touched a yielding mass. Wounds of Christ! it was the
body of a man!
His hand jerked back in superstitious fear. The man did not move; he was
lying on his face. Quesada put out his hand again and touched the still
thing with a braver and more prying touch. All at once he turned it
over.
Stark in the moonlight showed a short knife-sharp white beard, a
fine-chiseled imperious nose, and a swarthy face, lean and haughty as a
griffon vulture's! The revolver fell from his palsied hand.
"Sangre de Cristo!" his dry lips fluttered. "It is Don Jaime himself!"
But no! Don Jaime could not be here. Had he not left the hidalgo doctor,
that every morning, in the village above in the sierras?
A grave calmness came upon him then, and a questing thoroughness. Who
was the man? Somehow his features seemed familiar. Was it only because
of that striking resemblance to Don Jaime?
He noticed, all at once, that there was visible on the body, under the
powdering of dust from the road, a kind of red-edged blue jacket. On one
sleeve was a single red chevron, and to one side, almost hidden in the
dust, the shimmer of a patent leather hat. With a stifled gasp,
recognition leaped full-fledged into his brain. The man was Senor Don
Esteban Alvarado, the aged sergeant of the Guardia Civil!
No more than a few weeks before, Quesada had seen the sergeant in the
gorge below Minas de la Sierra, dominant with life and lording it over
the apelike policeman Montara. To find the sergeant now only a still
black huddle in the road was a distinct shock to the bandolero. He knew
that just the day before either the sergeant or Montara had shot Ferou.
Almost incredulous, Quesada felt the body for signs of life. But the
sergeant was dead. His body was not what one could call warm, yet
neither was it cold with that soft stickiness so instinctively repulsive
to the living touch. The sergeant had been killed only a short time
before. A caking of dust on the torso of his jacket showed where the
blood had oozed from a bullet wound in the chest, and quickly dried.
"It was that shot I heard!" the bandolero surmised. "But who killed him?
And why?"
Of the sudden, he remembered the old woman who had passed him in the
road, crying softly to herself. He bounded back around the bend. But in
the intervening jiffy of time, the shadows of the defile had swallowed
her from sight.
"She is the sergeant's poor old wife," he said to himself. "She must
have come upon him, slain like a dog in the road. I knew Don Esteban,
his wife, and son lived in these hills. Now the poor old woman is gone
to pray before the Christ of the Pass for the eternal welfare of his
departed soul. May it rest in peace!"
He came back to the black huddle, still profoundly puzzled as to whom
had done the killing. He turned the body over into that posture in which
he had found it. He retrieved his fallen revolver.
He was about to mount and ride on, when abruptly he halted, one foot in
the stirrup. An enlightening but bitter thought had suddenly shocked his
brain.
For a long time now, crimes had been committed which he never had a hand
in, but which in every case had been laid at his door. Automobiles had
been held up, toreros' chapels invaded, men robbed and even killed by a
young man described as Jacinto Quesada when, all the time, Quesada
himself had been quarantined in Minas de la Sierra.
There was a sinister purpose, a foul plan underlying the criminal's
habit of masquerading and posing as Jacinto Quesada. Behind the
personality of Quesada, he was cloaking his own identity and committing
crimes without a suspicion pointing toward himself. What could be more
probable than that this same criminal had killed the old policeman?
"It was that masquerader!" the bandolero exclaimed to the night. And he
swore: "By the Nails of Christ!"
He circled by the prone body in the road, his horse nervous and
quivering with instinctive fright. He kicked the nag into a brisk
canter. He sought thus in action to quiet the thoughts which now were
bothering his brain. He pursued the descent.
But the turgid thoughts would not be stifled. They fluttered in his head
like the pale moonbeams on the rock walls. They filled him with gloom as
profound as the shadow-haunted deeps of the narrow way.
He, Jacinto Quesada, had discovered the corpse. Was that not strange,
portentous? It seemed to him now as if the hand of God were
foreshadowing, in this grisly discovery, some tragic misfortune about to
befall him. The masquerader had committed the crime of blood. Well, the
penalty for it would strike most surely upon Quesada's head! Of that, he
felt superstitiously certain!
He made the sign of the horned hand in an attempt to avert the impending
evil. But no use. His mind would not still, nor would the misgivings
die. He reined in the nag.
"There is but one thing for me to do," he announced to himself. "I must
return to the side of the corpse, and kneel and say a prayer for his
soul in purgatory. A mere word of requiescat is not enough. He was mine
enemy in life; I must show complete Christian forgiveness toward him,
now that he is dead. That alone will prevent a curse from falling upon
me!"
He was kneeling in prayer beside the dead sergeant and had reached the
words: "May his soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace," when, all at once from down
the road, his ears were assailed by a startling sound--the hoof beats of
approaching horses!
Hastily he made the sign of the cross and got to his feet. Dragging his
horse by the bridle after him, he concealed both nag and himself
completely in the deep shadowy elbow of the spur.
Came to him then, on the vagrant breaths of the night wind, the sound of
voices. They were men's voices, loud above the steady hoofbeats of the
horses, as if raised in some wordy contention:
"But I tell you, Pascual Montara, the Wolf-Cub is not dead!"
"And I tell you, mi capitan, Quesada is dead! Right now, were you not my
superior officer, I should be on my way down to Getafe to file Don
Esteban's report."
"You say the sargento, Don Esteban, has returned to his home in these
mountains?"
"Si; seguramente, si! His work is accomplished. After killing the
Wolf-Cub, Quesada, is he not entitled to a good rest? Test the truth of
my statement, el capitan; ask his son, young Miguel there, if his father
does not live in these hills."
"It is most certainly true, mi Capitan Guevara," answered a new voice.
"I myself was born and raised in a portilla of the Picacho de la
Veleta."
"Za, this is the wild-goose chase!" exclaimed the raucous voice of
Montara. "This is the wild-goose chase, I tell you--this chase after a
man already dead! Down in Getafe by now, ten thousand pesetas should be
awaiting the Frenchman as a reward for having brought about the killing
of Jacinto Quesada."
"And that was when, you say?"
"I have told you twenty times. It was but yesterday."
"Then answer me this, apelike one! I have asked it of you a hundred
times before. How is it that the diligence from Granada to Montefrio was
held up only last night and the bandolero announced that he was Jacinto
Quesada himself? He fled into these hills, and we hot after him!"
The men of the Guardia Civil usually ride in pairs; but this was a troop
of the Guardia Civil, an extraordinary troop. Peering around the spur,
Quesada made out eleven uniformed men riding smartly toward him through
the dim moonlight.
One was, of course, that apelike policeman, Pascual Montara, whom
Quesada last had seen in the gorge below Minas de la Sierra with Don
Esteban. It appeared, from the tenor of the conversation, that Montara
had been on his way down to headquarters to file the sergeant's report
of Quesada's death when he had been met on the road by the troop and
turned back by the order of the captain.
Quesada well knew this captain as one Luis Guevara. Eight others he
recognized as gendarmes with whom he had had an occasional brush. The
eleventh was the dead man's son, Miguel Alvarado, youthful, tall,
smoothly brown of face, and as subtle and gallant-looking in the vague
moonlight as a sword of Toledo.
Now, such a large body of the Guardia Civil could be seldom seen on the
main-traveled highroads, let alone in the gorge-pierced sierras of the
Nevada. Something untoward was afoot. But it was not the mysterious
murder of the old sergeant which had called them together. Not one of
the approaching policemen had discovered as yet, close to the entrance
of the pass, that huddle lying still and black in the road. They did not
know Don Esteban was dead.
They were riding after Jacinto Quesada, whom Montara believed he had
killed, for a crime that Jacinto Quesada himself was positive he never
had committed!