The party of policemen discovered, all at once, the body in the road.
Hastily, from their huddling, quivering horses, they dismounted. They
turned the body over. With amazement and deep consternation, they saw
that it was one of themselves, the haughty sergeant of police, Senor Don
Esteban Alvarado!
Miguel, the dead man's son, stood over his father's body.
"It is that Jacinto Quesada!" he said, terribly moved. "He has come upon
my poor old father alone in the road, and he has killed him without
ruth. By the Wounds of Christ!" he swore, lifting his right hand to
heaven--"I will seek out this murderer; I will hound him down; at last,
remorselessly, I will kill him! I have taken my oath."
In the thick shadow of the bend, Jacinto Quesada smiled bitterly to
himself. Just as he had forecasted, just so had matters shaped
themselves. He was blamed for the crime of another!
But the captain, Luis Guevara, was speaking:
"This proves that Montara is mistaken--the Wolf-Cub is still alive! As
you say, mi pobre Miguel, without ruth he has killed your father, an
old, honored, and brave member of the police!
"Carajo! Only once before, in the case of that traveling Englishman, has
Quesada killed a man. His conscience will be more disturbed by this
atrocity than by his usual crimes. Surely now, after this vile deed of
blood, will he seek out a priest and beg forgiveness of God!
"Pronto, mis camaradas! Don Esteban has not been long dead. If we ride
to the nearest church, we may be in time to capture Quesada while he
makes his confession!"
"But there are few men of the cloth in these hills, and fewer churches,"
objected Miguel Alvarado. "I know; I was born in the portilla above this
pass. My old mother still lives there."
"You do not think that Quesada is a heretic, despite his sacrilegious
abuse of the bullfighters' chapel of Seville!"
Miguel shook his head.
"No. I think that he will go, straightway, to the shrine of the Christ
of the Pass. It is but a little way on, in a lonely pocket of this
gorge. For miles around serranos, burdened by sins, kneel before the
shrine, and pray, and beg absolution or ease of mind."
"Muy bueno!" said the captain. "We will go at once to this shrine and
wait there, in ambush, for Jacinto Quesada to come and confess his sin.
We will listen, and then we will kill him!"
There was a creaking of leather as the men leaped into the saddles.
Quesada shrunk back into the dark elbow of the jutting bend. He pressed
the nervous horse in against the rock wall. To still any outcry he vised
his hand over the trembling nostrils of the animal. He waited, hardly
daring to breathe.
The gendarmes, following the lead of the captain, filed into the pass
and looking straight ahead, unsuspecting the dark, went by him almost
within arm's length.
He waited until they had all gone on, and the shadows of the pass had
engulfed them. Then he did not dodge around the bend and pursue the
decurrent way he had been going. He was seized with an unreasoning and
irresistible impulse to follow the troop and witness whatever might be
the outcome of their expedition to the shrine. Loosening but not
removing his hand from the horse's nostrils, he stalked a goodly
distance behind the party like a quiet long-legged shadow.
As they neared the boulder-hedged pocket which sheltered the shrine, a
whisper sibilated through the ranks of the policemen. Some one was
kneeling before the cross!
Noiselessly the gendarmes halted, dismounted, quickly hobbled their
horses with the long reins, and crept stealthily forward between the
boulders and the ragged prickly shrubbery. Quesada followed, a safe
distance behind.
But it was only the old white-haired wife of Don Esteban who knelt
before the pale figure of the Christ, with its crown of black horsehair
and red-painted wounds. As he crept nearer, behind the police and
between the weeds and rocks, Quesada heard her voice. In quavering
tones, she was speaking aloud. She was confessing that she was the
murderer of her husband, Sergeant Esteban Alvarado!
Thinking herself alone before the moon-white effigy of the crucified
Saviour, in an anguish of soul, she was pouring out the whole pitiful
story. For some time, she had been tortured by a harrowing secret. Her
son, the darling of her life, although a member of the Guardia Civil
like his father, was also a base poseur and highwayman!
It was his infamous plan to doff the policeman's uniform and steal out
at night dressed to resemble the bandolero, Jacinto Quesada. Then, his
crimes consummated, he would put the uniform on again. That honored
uniform and the fact that all his crimes were laid, successfully and
invariably, at the door of Jacinto Quesada, kept suspicion from resting
upon him.
It had smote her with desolation to discover that her son was a stealthy
outlaw. Since that long-ago time when her ancestors had been reclaimed
from brigandage and become Miquelets, no one in her family ever again
had turned criminal. They had all been policemen.
Her husband, the haughty Don Esteban, was fiercely proud of the record
of his family of policemen. It had harassed her poor old soul, filled
her with overwhelming terror lest Don Esteban should discover the
perfidy of his only son. Pride of house and long years as an officer of
the Guardia Civil had made him unforgiving of crime, unsparing and
inexorable to mete out justice even to his own kith and kin.
That afternoon, after a lengthy absence on police duty, Don Esteban had
come home for an interval of rest. He had just parted from Pascual
Montara, he said, who was to take his report down to Getafe. Between
them, the morning prior, they had killed the Wolf of the Sierras,
Jacinto Quesada!
The old mother, aghast lest by mistake he had killed his own son
masquerading as Quesada, had thereupon, in distracted fear and wild
grief, blurted out the whole truth.
The righteous indignation and awful rage of the old sergeant knew no
bounds. Solemnly he swore that he would have his son's life for this
outrageous conduct. She had pleaded with him, wept and prayed. But he
had cast her from him and gone out into the twilight to hound down the
son.
She had followed him down the mountainside, insane with fear for the
life of her only child. He had discovered her and commanded her to go
back. But she crept after him, stifling her sobs.
As he reached the road and the slice of moon came out in the sky, she
saw him take out a revolver and examine it to see that it was loaded and
ready for use. She heard, on top of this, the clatter of an approaching
horse. It was Quesada mounted on the doctor's nag. But she did not know.
She thought it was her son, her pobre Miguelito, returning home to pay
her a visit between duties!
Carried beyond herself by the sudden crystallizing of all her fears, she
had dashed out upon her husband and struggled with him to wrest the
revolver from his hands. The stern sergeant had forgot himself then. He
went mad with a barbarous fury. He rained blows upon her old
tear-stained face. Even did he try to choke her.
But her terror lent her strength superhuman. She clung to him, pulled
and wrenched at the revolver. She was like some tigress fighting for her
young.
All at once, there was a sharp hideous explosion. Don Esteban slumped
like a burst balloon in her arms. He clutched his chest, made a gurgling
sound in his throat, slipped to the ground, rolled over, and was dead!
Now, in a terrible turmoil of soul, she cast her gnarled workworn hands
out to that compassionating Figure on the Cross.
"Dios hombre, what shall I do, what shall I do?" she cried. "I have
suffered in the last few hours all the torments of the damned, like a
soul lost a thousand years in purgatory! Oh, what shall I do? Lord and
Saviour, Pitiful One, I do not seek forgiveness. I want to repay, I want
to atone! I want to die myself!..."
Her voice fainted away. She got to her feet at last. Muttering feverish
prayers, weeping like a soft rain, swaying and stumbling, she made up
the path.
The policemen shivered out of their state of suspended animation. They
recovered their wits; their dead eyes glinted. Savagely, they turned to
look at the man among them who had caused the whole pitiful tragedy--the
son of the dead sergeant and the poor old heartbroken mother, the
masquerader and the traitor, Miguel Alvarado!
He was gone.
Seeking him, they dashed wildly among the boulders and bushes. They beat
the ragged gorse with their carbines. They called loudly one to
another. Suddenly, into the wan moonlight, stepped forth Jacinto
Quesada.
"You seek Miguel Alvarado?" he asked.
"Heart of God, yes!"
"Then come with me."
They did not recognize Quesada. Not only because of the pallor of the
moonlight, but more because he was garbed in the gray tweeds and foreign
slouch hat of the Frenchman. He led them down the path to where they had
hobbled their horses.
Here, supine in the weeds and bound hand and foot, lay the policeman,
young Miguel. In the midst of his mother's pitiful confession, he had
crept back down the road and, just about to mount his horse and ride
away, had been captured by Quesada.
"Oh, Paquita, maiden of my soul!" he was wailing. "I am undone--undone!
Your love has robbed me of my father, and broken the poor old heart of
the mamacita of me!"
Quesada started visibly.
"What is that!" he exclaimed. "You speak of Paquita, daughter of Pepe
Flammenca?"
"I speak and dream of her always! I love her--God, yes! And she told me
she adored Jacinto Quesada because he was a bandolero; she told me she
despised my uniform. I thought to emulate Quesada and thus win her love.
But I have only caused the death of my old father and brought sorrow and
heartbreak to my poor old mother in her last years. Ah, Senor Don Jesu,
pity me!"
But there was that in the glint of the eyes of the clustered policemen
which spelled death for Miguel Alvarado. He was a traitor to all the
ethics of the Guardia Civil. He had dishonored and defiled the uniform
they wore. He was a wolf in sheep's clothing. More; he was a shepherd
dog turned poacher, depredator, wolf!
"He must die!" said the captain.
"Seguramente, yes! And we all must bind ourselves to keep the matter
secret."
The captain nodded grimly. "This is an affair of honor between us of the
Guardia Civil." He turned sharply upon Quesada.
"Hombre, you are the only outsider. Will you swear to tell no one, to
lock all you have heard this night in your own breast?"
Quesada evaded taking the oath of secrecy. Why should he, the Wolf of
the Sierras, make covenant with the podencos of the Guardia Civil?
Besides, a higher emotion stirred him. In his unknowable Spanish soul,
he was moved to pity for Miguel Alvarado.
"Mi capitan," he said, "if you kill this man, you will do a wrong. He is
young; he has youth and true penitence to help him reform. It is a
terrible lesson he has received this night. He is the dupe of a woman, a
wench of the Gitano--"
"A plague on the yellow witch!" muttered Montara.
"Senores," Quesada appealed to them, "you cannot right what is now an
irreparable wrong, you cannot bring Don Esteban back to life. Would you
rob the poor old mother, then, of her only paltry happiness and hope?
"Heed me, you of the Guardia Civil! This man has outraged Jacinto
Quesada more than he has you. Yet I know that if Jacinto Quesada were to
have this Alvarado's fate in his hands, to-night, he would let him go!"
He had done what he could. He moved off to where he had tied his horse
to a bush. The policemen conversed together in low tones. As he mounted,
Captain Guevara exclaimed:
"But who are you that you tell us all this?"
He kicked his nag and started away. Through the moon-filtering dark, he
flung back, "Jacinto Quesada!"
Ere they could recover from their stupefaction, he was only a clattering
noise in the night.
He was circling, presently, by the dead body of the old sergeant in the
road. Of a sudden, a volley of rifle reports detonated between the rock
walls behind him.
"That will be Miguel Alvarado," he said gloomily. He shook his head.
"Ah, Paquita!" he exclaimed to the night, "you have exacted a fearful
payment for my rash scorn of you--you have killed two men, this night,
and broken the heart of a poor old woman!"
He rode thoughtfully on.