The externals were the same—crimson and gold mountains encircling tawny pastures. At this hour the widow’s cattle were usually to be seen forging slowly homeward across the sun-fired slopes. But now—in all the wide prospect occurred no sign of man or beast. Swept of all life, lonely and desolate, it ran off and away to the hills.
The house? Instinctively Bull swept his hand across his eyes. But the evil vision remained. In place of the bougainvillea draping all with purple clusters, a shriveled black lace hung around the windows that stared with fiery eyes from blackened walls. In agony of spirit that shook him with tremblings more severe than those on the tired horse, Bull rode on down the slope. Approaching, he caught first the crackle and murmur of the flames that still leaped within the seared walls, then a low wailing mixed with a feverish mutter of prayer.
A wild rush of hope swept his being—to die the next moment when, rounding the corner, he saw Terrubio’s woman. On her knees, hands raised in supplication, she was so absorbed in her prayers that she did not see or heed him till he laid his hand on her shoulder.
She did not start. Slowly, with the deliberation of a being shocked beyond emotion, she turned her head and looked up in Bull’s face. Though she was still under thirty, hers had been the quick withering that follows the early ripening of tropical countries. There was left only the lingering beauty of great Spanish eyes; and in their depths, half vacant, half wild, Bull saw, as in some brown pool, flitting reflections of the horrors in his own mind. Lips moving without sound, she stared at him for some seconds, then, suddenly clasping his knees, burst into a passion of tears.
At any other time Bull’s dominant racial contempt would have caused him to spurn her. Stooping now, he gently patted her head. Wise in his sorrow, he waited for the passing of the first convulsion.
“Aie!... Aie!” Soon she began to speak. “Aie! the poor señora ... and the niña ... where were they? The mercy of God? Pity of the Virgin? Aie! Aie! where were they?”
A second convulsion choked her utterance, and once again Bull waited with the patience of absolute despair; left her, as he had left the man on the train, to tell the tale in her own way.
“They came in from all sides, señor.” Her hands swept the round of the hills. “Only the old man, my father, that was out with the herds, escaped. He it was who sent up the smoke from the mountains. The señora was at breakfast with the niña in the patio when Terrubio, my man, came running from the stables with the brown wolves hard on his heels. White as the petals of the flower at her throat she was with her great fear. But she shook it off, señor, went forward to meet them with smiles and greetings. They must be hungry and tired! If they would rest for a while she would serve them with her own hands! And she had the child speak to them, trusting that her white youth might move in them some stir of pity. Aie! Pity! The pity of the tiger for the lamb it holds between its paws! Si, a white ewe in the midst of a ravening pack, she stood beating them off with her smiles.
“‘Enter, señores, and be seated. Food shall be brought you at once.’ Thus she spoke them.
“Because it served their wickedness, they swarmed in, that scum of beasts, into the sala, the kitchen, swarmed through the house, till it reeked with their evil presence.