“Señor Don Rafael!” cried a hoarse voice at break of day. “Rise, your grace! for strange things have happened while we have slept! Ay, Señor, if the demon himself has not carried away Pedro the gatekeeper, who can tell us how he has gone?”
“Gone!” echoed the voice of Don Rafael from within.
“Gone, Señor, and left not even so much as his shadow; yet the doors are locked, and not even in the postern is there so much as a crack, nor the key in the lock. The muleteers, who were to be upon the road at cock-crow, have waited until both they and their beasts are cramped with standing, and all to no purpose.”
“Is this true?” exclaimed Don Rafael, presently appearing with a serape thrown over his shoulders, and shivering in the morning air. “Ay, man, thou hast a tongue like a woman’s. And Pedro, thou sayest, is gone?”
The man drew one hand sharply across the other, as who should say, “vanished!” though his lips ejaculated, “Gone, Señor; and who is to open the door now that it is shut? And who could shut the door upon Pedro but Satan himself?”
“Who, indeed?” said Don Rafael, gravely. “Think you so bulky a fellow could creep through the keyhole of the postern and take the key with him? By good fortune, he brought me the key of the great door as usual, and here it is. If the Devil hath carried away one gatekeeper on his shoulders, it is but fair he should send me another; and thou, Felipe, shall be the man.”
Felipe stared a moment; then with a transient change of expression which might be of intelligence, or simply a vague smile at his own good fortune, extended his hand for the keys; and suddenly mute with the weight of his unexpected promotion trudged down the stone stairs, across the silent inner court and the outer one, where by this time the household servants were exchanging exclamations of wonder and alarm with the impatient muleteers. Felipe unlocked the wide doors, threw them open with a clang, sank into Pedro’s place upon the stone bench, and thereafter reigned in his stead.
The wonder of Pedro’s disappearance grew greater and ever greater, until the boy Pepé said sulkily he had been played a shabby trick. Had not he said to Pedro the night before, when the Señor Don Rafael had told them that the General Vicente Gonzales was in El Toro, that for a word he himself would go to him there; and doubtless Pedro had stolen away alone, like the surly fox that he was. But the saints be praised, the road was open to one man as well as another.
“Hush!” said one in a warning tone; “though Pedro may have a fancy for a cleft head or broken bones, must we all cry for the same? Go to thou Pepé! thou art scarce old enough to leave the shade of thy mother’s reboso. Did I not see thee sucking thy thumb but last Saint John’s day?”
There was a roar of laughter, and though Pepé raged, no one heeded his wrath; the talk was all of Pedro. That he had gone to be a soldier was universally believed; that Don Rafael, and not the Devil, had aided his going was not for a moment thought of. The women crossed themselves, and the men spat on the floor emphatically,—yet there had been more mysteries than that in the life of Pedro.