"Well?"
"You won't touch him"--she nodded towards her grandfather's corpse.
"You won't touch him to--to----"
"Is it strip him you mean? Very well, then, I won't."
"You will help me to bury him? He cannot lie here. I can give you no
answer while he lies here."
"Right you are, again. Only, no tricks, mind!"
He stowed the guns under his left arm and gripped the collar of the old
man. Mercedes took the feet; and together they bore him out--a light
burden enough. Outside the hut a pale radiance lay over all the snow,
forerunner of the moon now rising over the crags across the ravine.
"Where?" grunted the Corporal.
Mercedes guided him. A little way down the path, beyond the wall of the
sty, they came to a recess in the base of the cliff where the wind's
eddies had piled a smooth mound of snow. Here, under a jutting rock,
they laid the body.
"Cover him as best you can," the Corporal ordered. "My hands are full."
He stood, clasping his guns, and watched Mercedes while she knelt and
shovelled the snow with both hands. Yet always her eyes were alert and
she kept her knife ready. From their mound they looked down upon the
ravine in front and over the wall of the sty towards the cabin. Behind
them rose the black cliff.
"Hark to the wolves!" said the Corporal, listening: and at that moment
something thudded down from the cliff, striking the snow a few yards
from him; rolled heavily down the slope and came to a standstill
against the wall of the sty, where it lay bedded.
The round moon had risen over the ravine, and was flooding the mound
with light. The Corporal stared at Mercedes: for the moment he could
think of nothing but that a large, loose stone had dropped from the
cliff. He ran to the thing and turned it over.
It was a knapsack.
He did not at once understand, but stepped back a few paces and gazed
up at the crags mounting tier by tier into the vague moonlight. And
while he gazed a lighter object struck the wall over head, glanced from
it, went spinning by him, and disappeared over the edge of the ravine.
As it passed he recognized it--a soldier's shako.
Then he understood. Someone had found the spot on the road above where
the treasure had been upset, and these things were being dropped to
guide his search. The Corporal ran to Mercedes and would have clutched
her by the wrist. The knife flashed in her hand as she evaded him.
"Quick, my girl--back with you, quick! They're after the money, I tell
you!"
He caught up the knapsack. They ran back together and flung themselves
into the cabin. The Corporal bolted the door.
"King's Own," he announced, having dragged the knapsack to the
firelight. "If there's only one, we'll do for him."
He stepped to the window-hole, pulled open the shutter, laid the two
guns on the ledge, and waited, straining his ears.
"Got such a thing as a shovel or a mattock?" he asked after a while. "I
reckon you could make shift to cover up the dollars: there's a deal of
loose earth come down with them."
It took her some time to guess what he wanted, for he spoke in a hoarse
whisper. He listened again for a while, then pointed to the treasure.
"Cover it up. If there's more than one, we'll have trouble."
She produced a mattock from a corner of the cabin and began, through
the broken wall, to rake down mud and earth and cover the coins. For
an hour and more she worked, the Corporal still keeping watch. Once or
twice he growled at her to make less noise.
He did not stand the suspense well, but after the first hour grew
visibly uneasy.
"I've a mind to give this over," he grumbled, and fell to unstrapping
his knapsack. "Here!"--he tossed it to her--"pack it, full as you can.
Half a loaf may turn out better than no bread."
She laid the knapsack open on the floor and set to work, cramming it
with dollars.
"Talking of bread," he went on by-and-by, "that's going to be a
question. My stomach's feeling at this moment like as if it had two
rows of teeth inside."
"Hist!" Mercedes rose, finger to lip. He turned again to the
window-hole and peered out, gun in hand, his shoulder blocking the
recess.
A man's footsteps were coming up the path--coming cautiously. Their
crunch upon the snow was just audible, and no more. Mercedes stole
towards the window and crept close behind the Corporal's back; stood
there, holding her breath.
The man on the path halted for a moment, and came on again, still
cautiously.... There was a jet of flame, a roar; and the Corporal,
after the kick of his musket, strained himself forward on the
window-ledge to see if his shot had told.
"Settled him!" he announced, drawing back and turning to face her with
a triumphant grin.
But Mercedes confronted him with her father's fowling-piece in hand.
She had slipped it off the window-ledge from under his elbow as he
leaned forward.
"Unbar the door!" she commanded.
"Look here, no nonsense!"
"Unbar the door!" She believed him to be a coward, and he was.
"You just wait a bit, my lady!" he threatened, but drew the bolt,
nevertheless; when he turned, the muzzle of the fowling-piece still
covered him.
She nodded toward the knapsack. "Pick up that, if you will.... Now turn
your back--your back to me, if you please--and go."
He hesitated, rebellious: but there was no help for it.
"Go!" she repeated. And he went.
Above the cabin the path ended almost at once in a _cul de sac_--a
wall of frowning cliff. There was no way for him, whether he wished to
descend or climb the mountain, but that which led him past the body of
the man he had just murdered. He went past it tottering, fumbling with
the straps of his knapsack: and Mercedes stood in the moonlit doorway
and watched him out of sight.
By-and-by she seated herself before the threshold, and, laying the gun
across her knees, prepared herself to wait for the dawn. The dead man
lay huddled on his side, a few paces from her. Overhead, along the
waste mountain heights, the wolves howled.
Hours passed. Still the wolves howled, and once from the upper darkness
Mercedes heard, or fancied that she heard, a scream.
* * * * *
At noon, next day, two men--a priest and a young peasant--were climbing
the mountain-path leading to the hut. The young man carried on his
shoulder a two-year-old child; and, because the sun shone and the crisp
air put a spirit of life into all things untroubled by thought, the
child crowed and tugged gleefully at his father's _berret_. But his
father paid no heed, and strode forward at a pace which forced the
priest (who was stout) now and again into a run.
"She will not be there," he kept repeating, steeling himself against
the worst. "She cannot be there. When she missed her child----"
"She is waiting on her grandfather, belike," urged the priest. "They
left him with one day's food: so she told the Brothers. And they, like
fools, let her go with just sufficient for her own needs. Yet I ought
not to blame them for losing their heads in so small a matter. They
saved many women."
He told again how he--the parish priest of Nogales--had found Gil the
Younger and his wife dead and drunken, with their heads in a gutter
and the child wailing in the mud beside them. "Your wife had given her
mother the child to guard but a minute before she fell in with the
soldiers. A young officer saved her, the Brothers said."
"Mercedes will have sought her child first," persisted Sebastian; and
rounding the corner of the cliff, they came in sight of the hut and of
her whom they sought.
She sat in the path before it, still with the fowling-piece across
her knees. But to reach her they had to pass the body of a soldier
lying with clenched hands in a crimson patch of snow. The child, who
had passed by many horrors on the road, and all with gay unconcern,
stretched out his arms across this one, recognising his mother at once,
and kicking in his father's clasp.
She raised her eyes dully. She was too weak even to move. "I knew you
would come," she said in a whisper; and with that her eyes shifted and
settled on the body in the path.
"Take him away! I--I did not kill him."
Her husband set down the child. "Run indoors, little one: you shall
kiss mamma presently."
He bent over her, and, unstringing a small wine-skin from his belt,
held the mouth of it to her lips. The priest stooped over the dead
man, on whose collar the figures "28" twinkled in the sunlight. The
child, for a moment rebellious, toddled towards the doorway of the hut.
Mercedes' eyelids had closed: but some of the wine found its way down
her throat, and as it revived her, they flickered again.
"Sebastian," she whispered.
"Be at rest, dear wife. It is I, Sebastian."
"I did not kill him."
"I hear. You did not kill him."
"The child?"
"He is safe--safe and sound," he assured her, and called,
"Sebastianillo!"
For a moment there was no answer: but as he lifted Mercedes and carried
her into the hut, on its threshold the boy met them, his both hands
dropping silver dollars.