He replaced the letters in the casket, closed it again, and carefully hid it in his bosom.
[CHAPTER XXXVIII.]
SMOKE IN THE MOUNTAIN.
The three adventurers rapidly left Bloodson's camp, and proceeded in the direction of the mountains, galloping silently side by side. They had a foreboding that the finale of this terrible drama was approaching, and involuntarily their thoughts were sad.
Man is so constituted that the feeling which has most power over him is sadness; human organisation is formed for struggling, and joy is only an anomaly; built to resist the hardest trials, the strongest man is frequently the one who yields most easily to great joy; hence, strange to say nothing more resembles happiness than sorrow; the symptoms are so completely the same, that a great joy annihilates the faculties almost as much as a great sorrow does.
At this moment, the three persons we are following were under the weight of an emotion such as we have described. At the instant when they expected the hopes they had so long entertained would be fulfilled, they felt an emotion which completely mastered them, and for which they could not account. They were about to play for a decisive stake. Ever since they had been contending with this rude adversary, they had ever found him standing in the track, returning them trick for trick, and although cruelly wounded, constantly retaining the victory. This time luck had turned; Heaven itself seemed to have interposed to make justice triumph, and the bandit, driven to his last entrenchments, was expecting them to be forced at any moment.
Still they did not conceal from themselves the difficulties of this final struggle, in which the squatter would escape the fate reserved him by death, unless they managed to deceive him by trickery. In such a state of mind, we may easily suppose that they said nothing, and reached the foot of the mountain without exchanging a syllable. Here they stopped.
"Caballeros," the gambusino said, "before going further, we shall not do badly, I fancy, by making some indispensable arrangements."
"What do you mean, my friend?" Don Pablo asked.