“I did not understand you thus,” said Fabian, who, without seeming to attach much importance to that which was said or done around him, relapsed into the melancholy silence which had become habitual to him.
Gayferos turned his horse’s head round, and the four travellers continued their journey in silence.
At the expiration of an hour, during which Gayferos and the Canadian only exchanged a few words in a low tone, and to which Fabian, always absorbed in thought, gave no attention, the recollections of a past, not very remote, crowded upon the memory of the three travellers. They were again crossing the plain which extends beyond El Salto de Agua, and a few minutes afterwards they reached the torrent itself which foams down perpetually between the rocks. A bridge, the same size as the former one, replaced that which had been precipitated into the gulf below by those men who now slept their last sleep in the valley of gold, the object of their ambition.
The Canadian here dismounted.
“Now, Fabian,” said he, “here Don Estevan was found; the three bandits (I except, however, poor Diaz, the tenor of the Indians) were there. See, here are still the prints of your horse’s hoofs—when he slipped from this rock, dragging you downwards in his fall. Ah! Fabian, my child, I can even now see the water foaming around you—even now hear the cry of anguish I uttered. What an impetuous young man you then were!”
“That I no longer am,” said Fabian, smiling sadly.
“Oh, no! at the present time your manner is imbued with the firm stoicism of an Indian warrior who smiles at the tortures of the stake. In the midst of these scenes your face is calm, yet I am convinced the recollections they recall to you must be harrowing in the extreme; is it not so, Fabian?”
“You are mistaken, my father,” replied Fabian; “my heart resembles this rock, where, though you say so, I no longer trace my horse’s hoofs; and my memory is mute as the echo of your own voice, which you seem still to hear. When, before suffering me to return and live forever removed from the inhabitants of yonder deserts, you required as a last trial that I should again behold a spot which might recall old recollections, I told you those recollections no longer existed.”
A tear dimmed the Canadian’s eye, but he concealed it by turning his back to Fabian as he remounted his mule.
The travellers then crossed the bridge formed of the trunks of trees.