“Then what is to be done?”
“I have told you already, and I tell you once more: meet him to-morrow,—the time is not very distant now. You tell me that you are a fair swordsman: now, these chaps have but one attack and one guard. I 'll put you up to both; and if you are content to take a slight sabre-cut about the left shoulder, I'll show you how to run him through the body.”
“And then?”
“Why, then,” said he, turning his tobacco about in his mouth, “I guess you'd better run for it; there'll be no time to lose. Mount your beast, and ride for the Guajuaqualla road, but don't follow it long, or you'll soon be overtaken. Turn the beast loose, and take to the mountains, where, when you 've struck the miner's track, you 'll soon reach the town in safety.”
Overborne by arguments and reasons, many of which Seth strengthened by the pithy apothegm of “Bethink ye where ye are, boy! This is not England, nor Ireland neither!” all my scruples vanished, and I set about the various arrangements in a spirit of true activity. The time was brief, since, besides taking a lesson in the broadsword, I had to make my will. The reader will probably smile at the notion of Con Cregan leaving a testament behind him; but the over-scrupulous Seth would have it so, and assured me, with much feeling, that it would “save a world of trouble hereafter, if anything were to go a bit ugly.”
I therefore bequeathed to the worthy Seth my mustang and his equipments of saddle, holsters, and cloak-bag; my rifle and pistols and bowie-knife were also to become his, as well as all my movables of every kind. I only stipulated that, in the event of the “ugly” termination alluded to, he would convey the letter with his own hands to Guajuaqualla,—a pledge he gave with the greater readiness that a reward was to be rendered for the service. There was some seventy dollars in my bag, which, Seth said, need not be mentioned in the will, as they would be needed for the funeral. “It 's costly hereabouts,” said he, growing quite lively on the theme. “They put ye in a great basket, all decked with flowers, and they sticks two big oranges or lemons in your hands; and the chaps as carry you are dressed like devils or angels, I don't much know which,—and they do make such a cry! My eye for it, but if you was n't dead, you 'd not lie there long and listen to 'em!”
Now, although the subject was not one half so amusing to me as it seemed to Seth, I felt that strange fascination which ever attaches to a painful theme, and asked a variety of questions about the grave and the ceremonies and the masses, reminding my executor that, as a good Catholic, I hoped I should have the offices of the Church in all liberality.
“Don't distress yourself about that,” said he; “I 'll learn a lot of prayers in Latin myself,—' just to help you on,' as a body might say. But, as I live, there goes the chaps to the 'Molino';” and he pointed to a group of about a dozen or more, who, wrapped up in their large cloaks, took the way slowly and silently through the tall wet grass at the bottom of the garden.
I have ever been too candid with my kind reader to conceal anything from him. Let him not, therefore, I beg, think the worse of me if I own that, at the sight of that procession, a strange and most uncomfortable feeling pervaded me. There seemed something so purpose-like in their steady, regular tramp. There was a look of cold determination in their movement that chilled me to the heart. “Only to think!” muttered I, “how they have left their beds on this raw, damp morning, at the risk of colds, catarrhs, and rheumatism, all to murder a poor young fellow who never injured one of them!”
Not a thought had I for the muchacha,—the cause of all my trouble; my faculties were limited to a little routine of which I myself was the centre, and I puzzled my brain in thinking over the human anatomy, and trying to remember all I had ever heard of the most fatal localities, and where one could be carved and sliced with the fullest impunity.