“I’ll not risk passing that awful old woman; that I won’t,” he avowed, boldly turning Coronela out of the highway and urging her up the sheer side of the mountain. “Hold on to me tight, Pilarica, for Coronela will have to scrabble here.”
The spirited mule, invigorated by her hour of grazing, took the pathless slope lightly and steadily, but a tumult of calls and laughter showed that the children were recognized and the purpose of their daring detour surmised. Rafael, half expecting to see the rotund figure of the lively old dame leaping after him from crag to crag, recklessly pushed Coronela on. When at last she slipped and slid, struck a level ledge, regained her footing by a gallant effort and stood trembling, they were far up the mountainside, quite shut away from all view of the road by masses of ribbed and jagged rock. Such a wild, lonely place as it was! These rocks, all notched and needled and bristling, had a savage look. There was an angry rock with horns that threatened them, and an ugly rock with teeth that grinned at them. And out from behind the most wicked-looking rock of all peered a man, a red-eyed, haggard, desperate fellow, who had broken jail a week before and, hunted like a wolf, was skulking in the hills, waiting his chance to escape from Galicia and then from Spain. Those bloodshot eyes of his stared greedily at the superb mule and his hand shot out to clutch the bridle.
XVIII
RAFAEL’S ADVENTURE
BY a quick, sharp tug, Rafael swerved Coronela out of reach. To his own surprise, he was not frightened. His mind was filled with one idea, and his will braced to one purpose. He must save his little sister and Uncle Manuel’s choice mule from the peril into which his foolhardy performance had brought them. Coronela could not make speed down that rocky descent. She would have to pick her way and the robber could soon catch her. All this flashed through Rafael’s thought as he jerked the mule aside. The next instant he had leapt to the ground and dealt her a stinging slap.
“Hold on tight, Pilarica! Arré, Coronela!”
The mule, Pilarica clinging to her neck, sprang away and the man sprang after, with the boy in pursuit. Rafael remembered his popgun,—a frail weapon, but it served. It was already charged with Uncle Manuel’s pointed pewter button, and as mule and man turned at right angles from their first course, which had brought them to the brink of a precipice, Rafael dodged in front and delivered his bullet full in the convict’s forehead. It struck with enough force to draw blood that trickled down into the man’s eyes, blinding and confusing him. Before he fully realized what had happened, Coronela had made good her escape, for he dared not give her chase after she had come into view from the road.
With a curse he lunged toward the boy, who, intent only on drawing the enemy away from Coronela and her precious burden, fled back up the mountain as fast as his legs could spin. As he ran, his watch was jolted from its pocket under his belt and, glinting in the sun, bobbed at the end of its chain. He ran well, for all that trudging across Castile had developed good muscle in those stocky little legs, but the criminal who, weak from years of confinement, ran clumsily, was nevertheless almost upon him, when Rafael bolted into a cleft in a giant rock,—a cleft too narrow for a man’s shoulders to enter. Turning to face the opening while turn he could, Rafael wriggled and wormed his way until even a small boy could get no further. Then he stood at bay, not precisely with his back to the wall, but to a granite crack, breathing hard from his scamper, but conscious only of a thrilling excitement.
“Come out of there,” called the convict fiercely, “or I’ll shoot you.”
“Shoot away,” returned Rafael, wondering if the man really had a gun.
He hadn’t, not even a popgun. He picked up a stone to cast at the child, but memory plucked at his arm and held it back,—the memory of his own blithe, adventurous boyhood. For the sake of the lad he used to be, before high spirit had led him on to a rash enterprise that blundered suddenly into crime, the convict’s scarred, unhappy heart softened toward the courageous youngster trapped in that fissured rock.