“The bedroom the girl used to have is that one, on the terrace not far from where the stairs go up to the roof. The bedroom has a lattice window, high up, looking out on the trees. There’s a big laurel de India grows outside. It appears the girl climbed on a table and knocked the iron lattice of the window loose, while she was living here, and that Guillermo, by taking a jump from the bough—a very risky thing, but then he was one of that sort—could land on the window-sill and pull himself into the room.
“Apparently he and the other two men were going to get the scalp and pillage the house before the others could enter. So the first one, the man I killed, climbed the tree, and with a long pole shoved in the lattice of the window, and so got into the room, and up the terrace stairs.
“Martin, my man, who was waiting on the other stairs, ready if they tried to blow out the iron door, heard the smash of the window and rushed round just as the second bandit—the one you shot—was crouching on the window-sill to jump down into the room. The window is quite small, and high up.
“Before Martin could do anything the man had jumped down on top of him and stabbed him twice with his machete. Then he took Martin’s knife and came up the stairs, when you shot him in the head.
“Martin was on the floor when he saw the hands of a third man gripping through the window. Then the face of Guillermo. Martin got up and gave the hands a slash with the heavy machete, and Guillermo fell smash back down on to the rocks under the wall.
“When I came down, I found Martin lying outside the door of that room. He told me—They came through there. Patrón. Guillermo was one of them.
“Guillermo broke his thigh on the rocks, and the soldiers found him. He confessed everything, and said he was sorry, and begged my pardon. He’s in the prison hospital now.”
“And Maruca?” said Kate.
“They’ve got her too.”
“There will always be a traitor,” said Kate gloomily.