The blind judge leaned back and his face beamed and glowed as if transfigured.
“Well spoken,” he said. “You have the makings of a man. I now lay my sentence upon you: From now on, through all your days under the sun, you shall always think like a man, act like a man, be a man. Better to die a man any time, than live a beast forever in time. The Ecclesiast was wrong. A dead lion is always better than a live dog. Go free, regenerate son, go free.”
But, as the peon, at a signal from the mestiza, started to rise, the blind judge stopped him.
“In the beginning, O man who but this day has been born man, what was the cause of all your troubles?”
“My heart was weak and hungry, O Holy One, for a mixed-breed woman of the tierra caliente. I myself am mountain born. For her I put myself in debt to the haciendado for the sum of two hundred pesos. She fled with the money and another man. I remained the slave of the haciendado, who is not a bad man, but who, first and always, is a haciendado. I have toiled, been beaten, and have suffered for five long years, and my debt is now become two hundred and fifty pesos, and yet I possess naught but these rags and a body weak from insufficient food.”
“Was she wonderful?—this woman of the tierra caliente?” the blind judge queried softly.
“I was mad for her, Holy One. I do not think now that she was wonderful. But she was wonderful then. The fever of her burned my heart and brain and made a task-slave of me, though she fled in the night and I knew her never again.”
The peon waited, on his knees, with bowed head, while, to the amazement of all, the Blind Brigand sighed deeply and seemed to forget time and place. His hand strayed involuntarily and automatically to the head of the mestiza, caressed the shining black hair and continued to caress it while he spoke.
“The woman,” he said, with such gentleness that his voice, still clear and bell-like, was barely above a whisper. “Ever the woman wonderful. All women are wonderful ... to man. They love our fathers; they birth us; we love them; they birth our sons to love their daughters and to call their daughters wonderful; and this has always been and shall continue always to be until the end of man’s time and man’s loving on earth.”
A profound of silence fell within the cavern, while the Cruel Just One meditated for a space. At the last, with a touch dared of familiarity, the pretty mestiza touched him and roused him to remembrance of the peon still crouching at his feet.