Laden with medicinal supplies, Quesada returned to Minas de la Sierra.
He found the American walking about on his own two legs and able, at a
pinch, to lend a hand to the doctor. Morales, attenuated but rapidly
repairing in strength, occupied the bandolero's old chair tilted against
one mud wall of the sick bay. For long hours the matador thus sat in the
crisp sunlight and held a-straddle on his knees the slowly recovering,
oddly wrinkled little Gabriel. Like some sweet Sister of Mercy,
Felicidad moved solicitously among the convalescing serranos, two pale
roses of health constantly mantling her smooth ivory cheeks.
The bane was lifting. A period of continuous mild warmth, free of
neblinas and snowstorms and icy blasts, had assisted and incalculably
sustained the efforts of the hidalgo doctor in driving the pestilence
from the pueblo.
Ensued more days of sun sparkle, more nights clear as crystal, and the
hospital at last was empty. Announced Don Jaime thereupon:
"The barrio must endure five more days of quarantine. We must make sure
the plague is snuffed out, buried. There must be no new cases."
Two days passed. Then three. No man slapped under. They entered upon the
fourth.
The scourge was being weighed in a hair-fine balance. It was a deciding
interval. It was a terrific time of waiting, and dread and hungry
longing that tried the blood and iron of every man.
Quesada, shaking with the contagious apprehension, buttonholed the
American as he came out of the cabanas after completing some mission for
the doctor.
"How goes it, Senor Carson?"
"All right so far. But gad, it's tough! It wasn't so bad when they were
dying. These days when there are no stricken, and the sick bay is empty,
and each man watches the next in fear lest he should succumb--that's
maddening!"
They talked jerkily. Quesada wanted to forget the trial of waiting, to
ease his mind of the down-bearing strain. To change the subject, he
said:
"I have learned something. About the man who was sticking-up persons and
saying he was I, Jacinto Quesada. He was a member of the Guardia Civil
named Miguel Alvarado. Down by the shrine of Christ of the Pass, his own
kind, the Guardia Civil, shot him to death."
The American understood. When Quesada first had returned to the village
poisoned with worry at what he had overheard from the policemen then
waiting in the gorge, he had told Carson the beginning of the story of
the masquerader. Now, at hearing its tragic end, Carson merely nodded.
All the while, as he listened, he eyed Don Jaime with fearful anxiety as
the physician moved in and out from choza to cabana.
The racking strain--the long torture of work and travail of
waiting--showed plainly in the hidalgo doctor,--in the high cheek bones
almost bursting through the deep swarth skin, in the thinly chiseled
nose and the gray eyes that seemed crystallized to a hard quartz. He was
working arduously, Don Jaime--prodigiously, epically, like a true son of
Hispanus, that first Spaniard sprung from the loins of Hercules!
Hardly daring to breathe, the barrio entered upon the fifth and occult
day. Twenty-four hours more of immunity from disease, and the tension
would be over, the iron clutch of the quarantine lifted.
Night shut down, black, breathing, full of the nameless. Groups
collected. The suspense was on them like thumbscrews.
Dawn came slowly, a leaden wash, Don Jaime went his final rounds.
No man had stuck his toes toward heaven; in the night, no man had gone
under from the plague. The grip of the horror was broken!
"Infected Minas de la Sierra is once again clean and whole," announced
Don Jaime. And he breathed fervently: "Thank God!"
The final requiem had been said. The last to waste away and wear forever
the cold cerement of death was the banderillero, Alfonso Robledo, who so
ably had seconded Quesada in halting, for the while, Don Jaime's cruel
vengeance. That had been six days gone.
The pale gold sun hung high in the heavens like an eucharistic wafer
emblematic of victory over disease and death. It was noon of that Day
Resurgent. Now that the slavish and heroic labor was over for Don Jaime,
the great good accomplished, he quietly got his horse prepared for the
return to his lizard-haunted, gloomy, and lonely casa outside Granada.
Mounted and ready, he paused on the great rock at the brink of the
village to bid the thankful serranos a saturnine adieu. All the while,
unwaveringly, his gray quartz eyes remained fixed on the certain cabana
which had been given over to Felicidad. And then, as loudly the
villagers chorused their gratitude and well-wishes, that eventuated
which Don Jaime knew would surely eventuate.
Her low white brow knuckled with perplexity, Felicidad appeared in the
doorway of the cabana. The hullaballoo had bewildered and attracted her.
"Felicidad!"
As if drawn and irresistibly compelled by the electric fluid of some
hypnotic influence, slow as in a trance, Felicidad moved toward the
avenger. Watching her, Don Jaime's thin-edged ferule of a face slowly
iced into rigid and pitiless lines.
Yet, deep in his heart, the great passions that once had made Don Jaime
so formidable--those classic passions of ire and resentment--like hard
but friable rock had been slowly worn away. Too often, altogether too
often, had his wrathful hand been stayed. Time and his prodigious
struggle with the plague had combined to crush and crumble to bits the
fury in his rock-ribbed soul.
No longer was he strong with faith in the righteousness of his cause. He
was only moved, now, by a determination to fulfill his solemn word, to
live up to the oath he had sworn. Pride alone possessed him. He was
being swept along toward a damnation of crime by the momentum of an
inexorable pride!
He himself felt the weakness, the blight. In an open confession that
showed forth his inward doubt, in a heart-poignant appeal to Heaven
beseeching leniency for that awful thing he felt he now must do, he
cried out:
"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; but the bleeding wounds of Christ
and the thorn-pierced heart of His Most Virgin Mother shall intercede
for my grievously sinning soul on the Day of Judgment!"
He raised the heavy horse-pistol.
The serranos fell from about him like flung chaff. The spittle dried in
their mouths; they could not speak. They were blind of eye, and blind
and black of brain as to what to do.
The scene was much as before. On the great rock of the village, Don
Jaime sat rigid in the saddle like some black-browed Destroying Angel
and menaced, with his huge pistol, the pale trembling lily of a girl.
But this time it was not Quesada who intervened. The bandolero long had
brooded upon the coming of this inevitable moment; yet now, when
ultimately it had struck, the moment found him standing off to one side
and a good twenty feet from the great rock where bulked up Don Jaime.
Ere the bandolero could interpose himself to obstruct Don Jaime's will,
ere he could dash forward to shoulder the perilous rebuttal, came
interposition from an unexpected and astonishing source. Stepped forward
the American, John Fremont Carson!
Big, broad-shouldered, and wornly angular of face, Carson stepped
before the agitated girl, wholly between her and the threat of the
leveled gun. He lifted dauntless blue eyes to her Hebraic Jehovah of a
father.
"Senor Don Jaime, you have no longer the right to seek retribution on
Felicidad," he said with quiet but positive defiance. "Ere you can
retaliate on her, you must deal with me. She is now my affianced bride!"
Don Jaime's jaw sagged; an astounded gleam zig-zagged across the hard
quartz of his eyes. But quickly came to his aid the iron composure of
the hidalgo. Without lowering the pistol, he turned eagle-sharp white
head and stony eyes to look down frigidly at the square-jawed American
facing him in the street. With a forced politeness, he returned:
"In Spain, know you, Senor Americano, one must ask the father for the
hand of his daughter. Should the father agree, the consent of the girl
follows as a matter of course. We are very hidebound in these
conventions, we Moors; no other ways command honor. The plighted word of
a mere chit of a girl--Dios hombre! who would think of respecting that!"
He laughed harshly.
"Grandee of Spain," answered Carson in the same lofty Spanish manner as
that used by the father, "in my country, should a man desire a girl, he
asks that girl in marriage; if the girl reciprocates, they bother asking
by-your-leave of no one else. Neither man nor American woman would
consider for a moment allowing a parent to select the companion and
helpmate of a lifetime.
"This is not America; this is Spain. I know that, hidalgo doctor; and
whenever I can, I try to obey Spain's laws of conduct. I would have
sought your agreement and your blessing but for one good reason.
Felicidad is no longer your daughter! Because you believe she has
dishonored your ancient name, you have publicly disclaimed her as a
Torreblanca y Moncada.
"Good God, man!" Carson exclaimed, the untenable and even outrageous
incongruity of the doctor's position suddenly hitting him like the smash
of a bludgeon. "How can _you_ contend for a father's rights over
Felicidad after the harsh and cruel way you have used her! Why, at this
very moment, you seek her life!"
That struck home. A murderous gleam leaped into Don Jaime's eyes. His
eyes blazed like chips of glass.
"Senor Americano," he said huskily, in shaking voice, "do you not know
that you are very rash? I am armed and ready; I look at you and see no
weapon in your hands. Do you think that a Torreblanca y Moncada will
long endure a quarrel in words? I warn you, my cheeky one! Cease
challenging my prerogatives! Else shall you provoke me to kill you!"
It was more than a threat. Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada, grandee
by birth and breeding, hidalgo of the old granite-jawed, eagle-stern and
eagle-haughty Spanish sort, trained the huge horse-pistol, with the
words, upon the square-jawed American facing him in the street!