Don Stefano still advanced, bowed over his horse's neck, with pale forehead and heaving chest, listening to the numerous sounds of the solitude, and trying to pierce with vivid glance the darkness that hid from him the point to which he was hurrying with the speed of a tornado.
After a ride of six hours, the Mexican suddenly uttered a yell of agony, as he violently pulled up his panting steed. Before him the Hacienda del Papagallo appeared, surrounded by a belt of flames. The magnificent building was now only a shapeless pile of smoking ruins, reflecting its ruddy flames on the sky for a considerable distance.
"My brother! My brother!" Don Stefano shrieked in his despair.
And he rushed into the furnace.
A mournful silence brooded over the hacienda. At every step the Mexican stumbled over corpses half-consumed by the flames and horribly mutilated. Mad with grief and rage, with his hair and clothes burned by the flames that enveloped him, Don Stefano continued his researches.
What was he seeking in this accursed charnel house? He did not himself know, but still he sought. Not a shriek, not a sigh! On all sides the silence of death!—that terrible silence which makes the heart leap, and ices the bravest man with fear!
What had taken place during Don Stefano's absence?—What enemy had produced these ruins in a few short hours?
The first beams of dawn were beginning to tinge the horizon with their fugitive opaline tints, and the sky gradually assumed that ruddy hue which announces sunrise. Don Stefano had passed the whole night in vain and sterile researches, and though he had constantly interrogated the ruins, they remained dumb.
The Mexican, overcome by grief, and compelled to acknowledge his own impotence, gave Heaven a glance of reproach and despair, and throwing himself on the calcined ground, he hid his face in his hands, and wept! The sight of this young, handsome, brave man weeping silently over the ruins whose secret he had been unable to discover must have been heartrending.
Suddenly, Don Stefano started up, with flashing eye, and a face on which indomitable energy was imprinted.