"Do you think so?" Don Aníbal exclaimed eagerly. "Oh! could I but believe it. Oh, heaven! Have I not suffered enough?"
He let his head droop on his chest again, and burst into tears. There was something affecting in the sight of this strong man, who was so utterly crushed by grief and cried like a child. His friends regarded him with the most earnest compassion; they did not dare offer him consolations whose inutility they recognized; but the sadness displayed on their features sufficiently proved the sympathy they felt with him.
The sun had set a long time but the hunter did not appear, and the anxiety became general. No one spoke, but each mentally calculated the hours that had elapsed, and began to think that the Canadian's absence threatened to become indefinitely prolonged. Moonshine alone did not seem to feel any anxiety or surprise, because he alone of the persons who surrounded him knew what difficulties the hunter would have to surmount in procuring positive information, and discovering on the sand or in the grass the flying traces of a man who, with the diabolical prudence of his race, had doubtless tried to efface every mark of his passage.
At about ten o'clock, at the moment when the moon, disappearing between two clouds, plunged the clearing into complete darkness for a few minutes, Moonshine, who, as an attentive sentry, had undertaken to watch over the safety of all his comrades, suddenly heard the cry of the whippoorwill rise softly and plaintively in the silence. The Canadian listened; the same cry was repeated thrice at regular intervals.
"It is he," the Canadian muttered, as he returned the same signal.
Almost immediately a man entered the clearing, leading his horse by the bridle—it was Oliver Clary. He walked to the hacendero, and laid his hand on his shoulder.
"Up, Don Aníbal," he said to him, "within twenty-four hours we shall have recovered those whom you thought lost."
"At last!" the hacendero shouted wildly as he leapt to his feet.