There was a noisy rustling and crackling of the gorse as the men scrambled afoot. Well, suddenly above the noise, from the foliage-embowered darkness up the road, exploded a voice of command:
"Throw up your hands, you Jacinto Quesada!"
It was the voice of the Frenchman. He stepped into the moonlight. Tall and blond, his ashy skin drawn tight with virulent resolution over his hawklike face, his slate-colored eyes showing bright as an animal's, he pointed his large-calibered revolver at the bandolero.
Quesada obeyed with quick dispatch. Yet he found occasion to whisper to the others, "I have told you the truth, senores. I am altogether in your hands."
Whether they should intervene just then or allow things to take a certain limited course, the American and the matador were uncertain. How much had the Frenchman heard? Did he know that he himself was accused of crime, of thievery and abduction, and of worse than crime—failure to share with them while they were enduring the intolerable pangs of starvation? Was this but a bold move to retrieve favor in their eyes? Carson and Morales decided, all at once to wait.
Never removing the menace of the revolver, slowly Jacques Ferou drew near.
"Carson," he instructed with biting command, "you search him. He has my roll of five-thousand peseta bills!"
Plainly then Carson realized that the Frenchman could not have overheard Quesada's history of that money. This was but a presumptuous and shameless attempt to recover the doctor's bills!
"He hasn't your money, Ferou!" objected Carson with promptitude and energy. "He just has told us that he turned those bills over to Felicidad, whose dowry they were."
It was, of course, a lie. Quesada had explained quite definitely, in the course of his story, that he was holding the purse against an occurrence he dreaded. He knew, with a fearful certitude, that Doctor Torreblanca y Moncada must soon hear where his disgraced daughter had found refuge; and then would he come, stony of eye and agate of heart, to wreak vengeance upon her. Quesada intended to produce the bills, at that trying moment, in the hope that their appearance would have the effect of mitigating the awful anger of the haughty Don Jaime.