"Pues y que?" asked Morales sharply. "Why not?" And he snatched the revolver, with the words from Ferou's pocket.
The Frenchman seemed of a temperament to blow hot and cold by turns. He recovered almost immediately from his first fears. He shrugged his athletic shoulders. A man like a gutta-percha ball he was, resilient, full of elasticity, rebounding when struck. Behind Morales' back, slyly and covertly he smiled his calculating and very superior smile.
Now, following the striding long-legged figure of the bandolero, the nine cabalgadores pursued on and upward through the moon-shimmering night.
CHAPTER XXII
On the great rock at the brink of the village of Minas de la Sierra where, years before when he was yet a very little Spaniard, Jacinto Quesada had stood with his weeping mother and watched his father hurry down the mountainside on an enterprise of forlorn and fatal desperation, a boy in cotton knee breeches and bare brown legs, despite the mountain cold, stood waiting like some statue carved in basalt.
Behind him, into the dull gray wash of sky, the Picacho de la Veleta lifted its craggy head; off to the northeast bulked snowy old Muley Hassan, Cerro de Mulhacen, the highest peak of the peninsula; and all about, just brightening with the chill light of dawn, were the bleak spires of lesser mountains, shadowy defiles, dark and moaning gorges. Nothing moved in the leaden, glacial, desolate reaches save an immense lammergeyer that hovered on slow wings over its high eyrie like some black dragon of morbid fancy.
Presently, out of the gloom of a lower gorge, the shapes of men emerged into view and began mounting the fiber-line of goat path which curved and twisted and wound up to the barrio like a convoluted snake. It was Jacinto Quesada, leading the nine cabalgadores, weary from the long climb through the night.
The boy began crying out at the sight. It is an odd fact that sounds high on mountains lose in volume, but gain in distinctness and carrying power. The cries of the boy that were more like the bleating of a helpless ewe beset by wild dogs, dropped down to the men in the gorge.
"Oh, Jacinto, caballero of my soul!" he shrilled. "The mother of me, who waited in her last illness upon your own good mother—God rest her soul!—my own pobre mamacita is sick! Last night, her stomach turned upside down on her, and to-day her skin is blue and cold! Save her, Don Jacinto of my heart; save her to me, and the Holy Mother of God will kiss your brow with fortune!"