The cavalcade made no stop in San Augustin. There was no object for halting it there, and delay was the thing its commander most desired to avoid. As they went clattering through the pueblo, its people were a-bed, seemingly asleep. But not all. Two at least were awake, and heard that unusual noise—listened to it with a trembling in their frames and fear in their hearts. Two ladies they were, inside a house beyond the village, on the road running south. Too well they knew what it meant, and whither the galloping cohort was bound. And themselves unseen, they saw who was at the head; though they needed not seeing him to know. But peering through the jalousies, the moonlight revealed to them the face of Don Carlos Santander, in the glimpse they got of it, showing spitefully triumphant.
He could not see them, though his eyes interrogated the windows while he was riding past. They had taken care to extinguish the light in their room.
“Virgin Santissima! Mother of God!” exclaimed one of the ladies, Luisa Valverde, as she dropped on her knees in prayer, “Send that they’ve got safe off ere this!”
“Make your mind easy, amiga!” counselled the Condesa Almonté in less precatory tone. “I’m good as sure they have. José cannot fail to have reached and given them warning. That will be enough.”
A mile or so beyond San Augustin the southern road becomes too steep for horses to go at a gallop, without risk of breaking their wind. So there the Hussars had to change to a slower pace—a walk in fact. There were other reasons for coming to this. The sound of their hoof-strokes ascending would be heard far up the mountain, might reach the ears of those in the monastery, and so thwart the surprise intended for them.
While toiling more leisurely up the steep, any one chancing to look in the hunchback’s face would there have observed an expression indescribable. Sadness pervaded it, with an air of perplexity, as though he had met with some misfortune he could not quite comprehend.
And so had he. Before leaving the spot where the stiletto was taken from him, he had sought an opportunity to step back into that shady niche in the cliff where he had lost his treasures. The monté players, unsuspicious of his object, made no objection. But instead of there finding what he had expected, he saw only a pair of horse-halters: one lying coiled upon the ground, the head-stall of the other caught over the rock above, the rope end dangling down!
An inexplicable phenomenon, which, however, he had kept to himself, and ever since been cudgelling his brains to account for.
But soon after he had something else to think of: the time having arrived when he was called upon to give proof of his capability as a guide. Heretofore it had been all plain road riding; but now they had reached a point spoken of by himself where the calzada must be forsaken. The horses, too, left behind; everything but their weapons; the path beyond being barely practicable for men afoot.
Dismounting all, at a command—this time not given by the bugle—and leaving a sufficient detail to look after the animals, they commenced the ascent, their guide, seemingly more quadruped than biped, in the lead. Strung out in single file—no other formation being possible—as they wound their way up the zig-zag with the moonlight here and there, giving back the glint of their armour, it was as some great serpent—a monster of the antediluvian ages—crawling towards its prey. Silently as serpent too; not a word spoken, nor exclamation uttered along their line. For, although it might be another hour before they could reach their destination, less than a second would suffice for their voices to get there, even though but muttered.