“Let the evil one tell her, if he will!” growled Pedro. “I would like to see him keep this from her,” and he picked up a jagged lava fragment over which he had stumbled. “Be not sheep! Close behind me, now.”
Pedro stepped out upon the log whose white length stretching into the gloom seemed to rest upon nothing. His teguas made no noise upon the wood, and he was midway across when suddenly there came a stifled oath. His feet flew right and left and he dropped astride the log with a violence that shook the breath out of him, and in the same instant began to slip to one side. In vain he clutched at the log. It gave no hold, and lurching over he dropped twenty feet. There was a tremendous splash; and then another and another. Pepe and ’Lipe had followed their leader downward without even stopping to sit down first.
The shores here were steep and rocky, cut deep in a lava flow millenniums older than that whose jet black miles lay along the pretty meadow. In the middle was a long, deep pool wherein the few boys of Alamitos were wont to swim in summer. Just now it was not particularly attractive. During the shearing several thousand sheep were watered daily at the head of this pool and at the shallower one above, and at such times no one thought of bathing in the odorous mess.
Any one listening might have heard for some seconds after the splashes nothing but a faint gurgle, as of bubbles breaking. Then there were curious snorts and plashings, as if that invisible black abyss had suddenly become the home of a hippopotamus family, and then a laborious thrashing about. Presently there was a rattle of pebbles, mingled with coughs and angry mutterings, as if some one were trying to scale the banks.
“Why didn’t you come this side, stupids?” Pedro whispered across when he had done choking and sputtering. “The bruja lives over here—not yonder. Vamos!”
“But man! We are not crazy! Seest thou not that she has the power and so easily has bewitched us? If we go further we shall find worse.”
“Four times fools! It was only that I slipped, and you, being scared, fell also. Come on!”
“Thanks,” answered Pepe and ’Lipe in a breath. “But even fools know better than to defy the evil one.”