"While doing this, I observed that he carefully kept the dead face downwards, as if he lacked the courage to look upon it.
"Thirty silver duros, with the eagle and thunderbolt, soon glittered in his hands; but he dropped them, as if they had been red-hot, and threw up his arms in dismay, on finding among the folds of the torn veil a little piece of cow's horn, tipped with silver—an amulet worn by women as a protection against the mal de ojo, or evil eye.
"On beholding this, a shudder passed over his brown and muscular frame, and turning up the dead face, now livid, white and horrible, with fallen jaw, and glazed eyes, he exclaimed, in a piercing and terrible voice:
"'Mia madre! mia madre!'
"He had decapitated his own mother!"
CHAPTER V.
SUSPICION.
While the ladies listened breathlessly, and uttered proper exclamations of horror, the narrator, with their permission, lighted a cigar, and, squatting on the ground in the Texan mode, continued his story.
"Zuares grovelled in the dust, so dismounting, I picked up the blood-spotted dollars, and was in the act of pocketing them, when a musket flashed in the dark, leafy hollow, a bullet whizzed past my left ear, and——"
"What! did you actually take the poor woman's dollars?" exclaimed Morley.