“What do you mean by that?... Red or gray, it’s all one.... Those men belong to Huascar’s band, and helped him.... That seems pretty clear to me.”
“Quite right, quite right. I agree with you now, young sir,” replied Natividad, puffing by Dick’s side as they hurried toward the railway station. “Yes, indeed. They are all in it.... The Red Ponchos.... The Priests of the Sun.” Dick stopped dead. Natividad’s last words at last made him understand. He remembered, in a flash, all the legends told by Aunt Agnes and old Irene. And they had seen fit to laugh.
“Good God!” he groaned, and began running again. As he ran, he shouted to his companion:—“But we’ll catch them yet, and you’ll arrest them all!”
“I shall do what I can. But there are at least thirty of them, and there are not enough troops in Callao to send a squadron in pursuit.... Every soldier the city could spare has been sent into the sierra against Garcia.”
“You can telephone to Lima.”
“And they’ll take me for a madman, as they did ten years ago,” replied Natividad enigmatically.
“Will we get to Chorillos before them?”
“Yes, there’s a train in ten minutes’ time.”
“It seems to me we would have done better to follow on horseback. Then we could have found out where they were going. Thirty of them, are there? Only damned Indians, though. I wouldn’t mind tackling the lot myself.”
“This way is the best....” And Natividad added in an undertone: “They wouldn’t believe me ten years ago. Well, it’s beginning again.” Dick, intent on reaching the railway station, did not hear him. He could only think of those mysterious Indians on the highroad out there. “We shall lose their track,” he groaned.