"This is it—to follow me where I go; only I exact your word of honour, as soldiers and gentlemen, that you will be dumb as to what you may see and hear. On this condition I engage to enable you to reach, with very little delay, the advanced posts of your army. Do you accept?"
"Yes, we accept heartily, caballero," cried the two officers.
"Enough, gentlemen," said Zeno Cabral; "we make a new contract which, I am convinced, will be as loyally kept as the first. Come, then, gentlemen; we have already been here a long time."
"Proceed, sir," answered the count; "we follow."
They set out.
They proceeded thus till the evening, without exchanging a single word. Why should they speak? They had nothing to say.
At the moment when the sun disappeared behind the snowy peaks of the Cordilleras, on a sign from the partisan, the horsemen stopped.
Night was coming on, but the darkness was yet only so deep that the landscape, half veiled by the shadows of evening, appeared all the grander.
The path had by degrees become broader; it now formed a route bordered right and left by high forests of cork trees, through which it passed under magnificent arches of foliage; a thick, coarse grass reached nearly to the chests of the horses; and a waterfall, bounding in disordered masses from the top of a chaos of rocks, formed to the right of the travellers a large silvery sheet, in which the pale moon was reflected.
"We have arrived, gentlemen," said Zeno Cabral; "you can quit your saddles."