When he had rested for a few minutes, he rose and carefully scanned the surrounding country, debating with himself what course to follow. His view was circumscribed by the irregular masses of bare rock and sparsely wooded slopes that formed the horizon. But he appeared at last to have made up his mind, for, pulling the mule slowly round on the narrow track, he took a few steps as if to return in the direction from which he had come. But his bearing was timid, uncertain, vacillating, and when a mountain eagle swept from its eyry, and screamed just above his head, he started as if struck, hauled his poor beast feverishly across the track, and once more pressed in hot haste towards the north.
For some time he marched on rapidly. Then the fatigue of travelling over the steep uneven track again made itself felt; his pace slackened; he moved along behind the mule as if mechanically, while mechanically he still urged it forward with his knife. For minutes at a stretch he seemed as in a dream, immersed in dark thought. Again he glanced fearfully backward, not as though seeking a visible object of menace, not at the frowning hills, but with eyes that attempted to pierce the infinite for a something beyond. At moments he started from his waking nightmare to a full consciousness of his position among these bleak inhospitable hills. The phantoms dogging his thoughts then vanished, giving place to real cares—physical pain, a sense of desolation. At such times he searched anxiously for a path to the west, whereby making a circuit he might reach his goal, avoiding the highroad, where he had so narrowly escaped the hands of his countrymen the guerrilleros. But the track wound on, swerving sometimes to right or left, yet leading remorselessly northward, no by-path branching towards Calatayud. He dared not turn back. The danger of the road, had he known it, was past; but the awful risk of capture made him sick with fear. He plodded on, sunk more and more in dark imaginings, until at last, when the red sun was sinking below the distant purple peaks on his left, the mule suddenly stopped, and, breathing heavily, dropped upon its knees. The poor brute was spent. The man awoke with a start from his reverie. He was on the edge of a deep gully; giant rocks hemmed him in on either side; the path—there was no path! For the first time he realized that the granite hills held him in their grip.
He looked at the mule, that lay with lolling tongue and starting eyes. The animal was famished. He had no food for it, none for himself; only now was he conscious of his own gnawing hunger. He loosened the girths, and, removing the heavy panniers from the mule's back, enabled it to rise. There was nothing to tie it to. Sinking down on a flat rock, he held the bridle and peered into the deepening gloom. He dared not move forward; one careless step in this wild place might hurl them both into an abyss. There he sat, and the darkness gathered, and the chill of night wrapped him round.
What were his thoughts as he waited and endured? Who shall say? Human justice may falter, may be long upon the road; Eternal Justice is instant, relentless, inevitable. The sense of doom was upon this man, as he held sombre vigil with the cold accusing stars.
It was an unkempt, haggard, agued figure that rose stiffly and dizzily from his hard couch as soon as the pale dawn came creeping through the narrow gully among the hills. He could just see the mule standing motionless a few yards away. He shuddered as his eye fell upon the brass-clamped coffers at its feet. Then he moved as if to pass away, leaving behind him both mule and treasure, the visible links that bound him to the past. But after a few staggering steps he hesitated, set his teeth in desperate resolve, and returning, painfully lifted the boxes on to the panniers, the mule standing with drooped ears, and shivering in the raw air. In the half-light he led the famished beast away from the ravine, searching the rocky ground narrowly for marks of its track. Here and there appeared a stone covered with gray lichen; at these the mule halted and licked a scanty, bitter meal. At one point a silver rivulet poured from a fissure and fell clattering upon the rocks far down the steep. There Miguel dropped to his knees and drank with the animal, then went on again.
It was nearly two hours before he saw, on the far side of a deep ravine, a foot-path winding about a wall of rock. Was it the path he had left? He did not know. Only the guerrilleros he feared to meet could have told him that but one other path led across these barren heights. Leading the mule cautiously down one face of the ravine, he hauled it with infinite difficulty up the other. The poor beast, faint with hunger, had scarcely strength to crawl when at last it scrambled with its burden on to the track. But for the constant goad it would have fallen by the way. The path ran north and south; Miguel hesitated which direction to take. Northward he would have to scale steeper heights, but would increase his distance from the garden of his fear; southward, he might reach Calatayud and safety with the French, but who knew what danger might lie between? As the question beat this way and that in his tortured brain, his eyes lit upon a long, thin, jagged rock in which, in the gloom of the preceding evening, he had marked with a shudder a grotesque resemblance to a human form he would have given worlds to forget. Then he knew that he was upon the track from which he had wandered; he would persevere in the attempt to find a cross-path to the west. Surely there must be one that would lead, by however long a circuit, to his goal?
He turned wearily towards the north and instinctively glanced back across the hills, now variously tinted by the ascending sun. As he did so his eyes dilated, and for some moments he stood as if rooted to the ground. In the clear distance two figures mounted on mules were coming towards him. Even while he looked he saw one, the smaller of the two, pointing in his direction. The other drew rein for an instant, then both urged their mules to a trot. A bend in the path hid them from view, and Miguel leapt round, knowing that he was in very truth a hunted man. For nearly a day he had been pursued by the phantom of his crime. He had run from the shadow of a sound, fled from the perils his own imagination had created. Terror of he knew not what had left him all unstrung. But now that vengeance dogged him in real bodily form his mind braced itself to meet it. Only for a moment did his heart quail with misgiving; he reeled slightly, and clutched at the mule's bridle for support; then, recovering himself instantly, he struck the jaded beast, and with a fierce cry drove it before him up the path.
Suddenly the track bent eastward, it ceased to rise, he seemed to be on the northern slope of the watershed up which he had toiled during the previous day. He topped the crest. The path stretched downwards before him; and, scattering the loose stones to right and left, Miguel raced on with the mule until at a turn in the track a vast and brilliant panorama opened before his yearning eyes. Below him, at the edge of the long slope, stretched a rolling wooded country intersected by numerous watercourses shining in the morning sun. Far away on the horizon a silver streak wound and doubled on itself. It must be the river Ebro. Could he but gain the rich champaign below, he hoped that, for a time at least, he would be safe. In some copse or covert, vineyard or olive-ground, even in the byways of some hamlet, he might find a temporary refuge. But with the thought itself its utter hopelessness was borne in upon him. His pursuers must be closing in fast, although the windings of the track hid them from him when at intervals he turned to see. Panting himself, he dragged his panting beast with reckless haste, though in his inmost consciousness sure that the road was too long, the time too short. One solitary hope remained to him. If he left the mule with its retarding load, abandoned the prize for which he had staked his all, he might perhaps even yet find some rocky defile, some favouring grove, wherein to hide and baffle pursuit. But no, the renunciation was too great for his blighted soul. For the treasure he had schemed and sinned; he could not, dared not, let it go.
Scrambling on down the mountain track, he spied at length, some hundreds of feet below him, a narrow hillroad to which his headlong course must lead him by and by. Its farther side bordered a ravine. The road seemed near at hand, but as he continued his flight he found that the downward track zigzagged on the face of the slope, so that sometimes two or three of its coils lay immediately beneath him. There was no shorter way. Approaching the end of the last of these windings, he was warned by the clatter of dislodged stones that his pursuers were now hard upon his heels. He threw a quick glance upward; there, two hundred feet above him, the riders crossed his sight, following at headlong speed the first winding of the track. Without pause he raced staggeringly along.
All unknowing, he had himself been watched for some time from below. At the edge of the hill-road, hidden from him by a jutting mass of rock, a man was resting, seated on a boulder, eating a frugal meal from a wallet hung at his neck. He was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man, with wasted cheeks; thin, unkempt locks straggled from beneath his cap; his long tangled beard was snowy white. His attitude was of one in pain. At first he watched the impetuous muleteer dully, without attention; then he started, paused in lifting a piece of bread, and stared long with quickening breath. As the mule turned the last of the zigzags a sunbeam flashed on the brass of one of the boxes. The seated man rose; his eyes, opened to their fullest width, now fixed themselves with a glare of the intensest hatred upon the fugitive approaching, until once more he was hidden from sight.