In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael

by Katharine Lee Bates

“Hand out your watch,” he called again, “and I’ll let you go.”

Rafael’s watch! His father’s good-bye gift! The gift that meant his father’s faith in him! No, that father should not have cause again to say that his son was a heedless boy who could not guard his own pockets.

“I will not,” he shouted defiantly.

“Hand it out this minute, before the snakes get at you.”

Snakes! Rafael’s legs jumped, but not his heart.

“I will not.”

“Oh, very good! I’ll leave you for a few days to think it over,” returned the convict, proceeding to wedge a big rock into the narrow opening. Adding smaller stones, he roughly walled up the entrance, so shutting Rafael into a straiter cell than his own too extensive experience of prisons had ever encountered. He meant to lurk again among the crags until the search for the boy should be over and then come back under the starlight for the watch, since a bit of silver in hand might make all the difference to a fugitive between escape and capture. At the least, he could trade it for food and a knife. But the officers had him before nightfall and, in all the dreary years that came after, no thought of his misdeeds tortured the prisoner so much as the remembrance of a little boy he had left to perish in a lonely rock.

Rafael’s chief uneasiness, at first, was about those threatened snakes. What if the crack behind him should be full of them,—clammy serpent coils swaying for the spring! Would they begin at his ankles? He stood first on one foot and then on the other, while he squirmed and twisted out of his extreme retreat. Then he flung himself with all his force against the rock that had been wedged into the opening. It did not stir. He set his shoulder to it; he shoved with a strength that seemed greater than his own; he battered his body against it in desperate endeavor; but it held fast. The boy’s hands were bleeding when he dropped exhausted to the ground, a little huddle of despair. But despair would never do. He was up again and, this time, working with all the skill and patience he could command to dislodge the smaller stones. After an eternity of effort, the highest of these was jolted from its place and fell on the outside, leaving a peep-hole through which the blessed light looked strangely in, as if wondering to find its friend Rafael shut in a den like this. The hole was so far up that it showed him only a violet glimpse of sky, but even that comforted and calmed the boy, who sat down quietly and knit his brows in thought. What would his father tell him to do? His duty, of course. But what was one’s duty in a pinch like this? To get out if he could, and if he couldn’t to behave himself manfully where he was. Nothing could be plainer than that. Rafael decided to call for help, even at the risk of bringing back his enemy, but his shouts, though he did his best, seemed shut into that granite cleft with him. He attacked the great rock again, and the stones, but without any other result than to tire himself out. At last the creeping fear, against which he had been half unconsciously fighting all the time, was getting the better of his fortitude. For one horrible instant he fancied that the narrow walls were closing in to crush him. Again he struggled to his feet. He must do anything, anything, rather than sit still and be afraid. He clambered, often slipping back, up to the little peephole and listened, listened, listened until he heard, or thought he heard, the thudding tramp of the mule-train far down the road and the click-clack, ding-dong, tinkle-tinkle of its assorted bells. Oh, surely Coronela would have gone safely down; surely Pilarica would send Uncle Manuel and Pedrillo to his relief. He must let them know where he was. He must rig some kind of a signal. There was something yet that he could do,—something to save him from the terror.

Nature has her own kindnesses in store for us all, and when Rafael, having rigged his signal, lost his slight footing and tumbled, bumping his head, in falling, on a projecting stone, she promptly put him to sleep, so that he lay untroubled and unafraid on the rocky floor of his prison. He did not hear the excited barking of dogs, as a tall, grave shepherd, his sheepskin garments fragrant with thyme, met a rescue party of mingled muleteers and pilgrims searching the mountainside and guided them to the neighborhood of the cleft rock.

“It was about here, sir,” the shepherd was saying to Uncle Manuel. “I was on that summit yonder and started down as soon as I saw that the young master was in danger. Hey, Melampo! Hey, Cubilon! Find the trail, Lobina!”