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 beefa 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.
"I pronounce judgment," he spoke. "You have received many blows. Each blow on your body is quittance in full of the entire debt to the haciendado. Go free. But remain in the mountains, and next time love a mountain woman, since woman you must have, and since woman is inevitable and eternal in the affairs of men. Go free. You are half Maya?"
"I am half Maya," the peon murmured. "My father is a Maya."
"Arise and go free. And remain in the mountains with your Maya father. The tierra caliente is no place for the Cordilleras-born. The haciendado is not present, and therefore cannot be judged. And after all he is but a haciendado. His fellow haciendados, too, go free."
The Cruel Just One waited, and, without waiting, Henry stepped forward.
"I am the man," he stated boldly, "sentenced to the death undeserved for the killing of a man I did not kill. He was the blood-uncle of the girl I love, whom I shall marry if there be true justice here in this cave in the Cordilleras."
But the Jefe interrupted.
"Before a score of witnesses he threatened to his face to kill the man. Within the hour we found him bending over the man's dead body that was yet warm and limber with departing life."