“You hold this, señorito, while I go after Shebotha. Botheration take that old hag! She’ll be a bother to us, to say nothing of the extra weight for our poor horses. After all, she’s not very heavy—only a bag of bones.”
“But, Gaspar; are you in earnest about our taking her along with us?” asks Cypriano.
“How are we to help it, hijo mio! If we leave her here, she’d be back in the town before we could get started; that is, if we have the good luck to get started at all. I needn’t point out what would be the upshot of that. Pursuit, as a matter of course, pell mell, and immediate. True, we might leave her tied to the post, and muffled as she is. But then she’d be missed by to-morrow morning, if not sooner, and they’d be sure to look for her up here. No likelier place for such as she, among these scaffolds; except tied to a scaffold of another sort, and in a somewhat different style.”
The gaucho pauses, partly to enjoy his own jest, at which he is grinning, and partly to consider whether Shebotha can be disposed of in any other way.
Cypriano suggests another, asking—
“Why couldn’t we take her in among these trees, and tie her to one of them? There’s underwood thick enough to conceal her from the eyes of anyone passing by, and with the muffle over her head, as now, she couldn’t cry out that they’d hear her.”
“’Twould never do,” rejoins Gaspar, after an instant of reflection. “Hide her as we might, they’d find her all the same. These redskins, half-naked though they are, can glide about among bushes, even thorny ones, like slippery snakes. So many of them, they’d beat every bit of thicket within leagues, in less than no time. Besides, you forget their dogs. Scores they have—ay, hundreds, some of them keen-scented as beagles. Carrai! they’d smell the nasty witch half-a-mile off, and so discover her whereabouts to their masters.”
“True,” returns Cypriano, seeing the plan he has proposed would not do. “In that way they would find her, no doubt.”
“And if they didn’t,” interposed Ludwig, speaking from a sentiment of humanity, “it would be dreadful.”
“Dreadful! what do you mean?” asks Cypriano, looking puzzled. “For them not to find her is just what we want.”