The Saint gazed at her with precarious gravity. He looked like a man who would obviously be on visiting terms with bandits. He looked rather like a bandit himself, in a debonair and reckless sort of way, with his alert tanned face and clean-cut fighting mouth and the unscrupulous gay twinkle in his blue eyes.
“Listen,” he said. “Once upon a time I was walking between San Miguel and Gajo, two villages not far from here. I saw from my map that the road led around in a great horseshoe, but they told me at an inn that there was a short cut, straight across, down into the canyon and up the other side. I climbed down something like the side of a precipice for hours — the path was all great loose stones, and presently one of them turned under my foot and I took a spill and sprained my ankle. When I got to the bottom I was done in. I couldn’t move another step, particularly climbing. I hadn’t any food, but there was a stream running through the bottom of the canyon, so I had water. I could only hope that someone else would try that short cut and find me... At the end of the third day a man did find me, and he looked like one of your bandits if anyone ever did. He did what he could for me, gave me food from his pack — bread and sausage and cheese — and then he said he would go on to San Miguel and send help for me. He could have taken everything I had, but he didn’t. He was insulted when I offered to pay him. ‘I am not a beggar,’ he said, and I’ve never seen anything so haughty in my life — ‘I am El Rojo.’ ”
“Then why is Señor Copas so frightened?”
“They’re all frightened of El Rojo.”
Her finely penciled brows drew together.
“El Rojo?” she said. “Who is El Rojo?”
“ ‘The greatest bandit since Villa. They’re all scared because there’s a rumor that he’s in the district. You ought to be scared, too. They’re all offended if you aren’t scared of El Rojo... He really is a great character, though. I remember once the Government decided it was time that something drastic was done about him. They sent out half the Mexican army to round him up. It was the funniest thing I ever heard of, but you have to know the country to see the joke.”
“They didn’t catch him?”
The Saint chuckled.
“One man who knew the country could laugh at three armies.”