Quesada swung completely around in the saddle to face the sullen trio.
"Carajo! Do you think to trifle with Jacinto Quesada! What is all this muttering going on here?"
Garcia shrugged his shoulders noncommittally and a bit fearfully; the erstwhile Aguilino remained taciturn and lowering of dark brow; but with a strange audacity that was almost insolence, Estrada ventured:
"Oh, you will soon learn, Don Jacinto of the high hand!"
Quesada cursed them angrily for the whelps of dogs; then swung round in the saddle, dug his heels into the horse's flanks, and headed full-tilt through the brush. Once back in the trampled band of heath and brambles, which was the road through the dell, he sped the nag at a gallop up the dark green corry.
But topping the rise and dropping down on the other side, he reined in the cob the better to reconsider the sullen manner and incomprehensible words of his trio of dorados.
"The knaves have been bitten by some foul plan," he surmised. "It is not that they intend to rob me of all share in the booty. Seguramente, no! I told them they were welcome to the entire lot. Something else is afoot, God knows what!"
Coming out of the mournful Pass of the Blessed Trinity, some time later, he took that one of the three roads which diverged most sharply from the course pursued by the cabalgadores in climbing up. After a good time more, he rode through the myrtle and orange trees of the Alpujarras and, following the Darro, slanted down toward the Moorish city of Granada, gleaming white on the sides of the hills.
A few miles outside the city, upon the great hasped door of the crumbling adobe casa of Torreblanca y Moncada, Quesada knocked echoingly. After an appreciable space, the little mullion window in the door was opened, and an old white-haired man peered out with bright eyes. He was Pedro, the butler.
"Ah, Mother of God!" he exclaimed, a strange quavering note in his voice. "It is Jacinto Quesada about whom all Spain talks!"