He saw himself, a lad of ten years, rendered desperate by her screams as only a child becomes desperate. He saw himself charging at the terrible hidalgo, screaming like a little animal, tearing at the doctor's trousers with his finger nails, trying to leap up and upon him. He felt the fall of the quirta upon his head. It was acutely stinging as in reality. His jaws snapped together; they snapped together just as they had snapped, in that dim past day, upon the doctor's wrist. And a grim satisfaction tingled the edges of his locked teeth. It was for all the world as if, again, his teeth had sunk into flesh!
"Ah, you son of a mangy she-wolf!" sounded in his brain. "How's the wolf-cub to-day?"
He looked quickly about him. There on the wall he saw that which he had not noticed before. A painting of the doctor—Don Jaime himself, his hair whitened by years and by sorrow, and his gray eyes glinting out from his deep swarth face like remote stars in an intolerant heaven.
"Todopoderoso Dio'!" groaned Quesada, shuddering. "Pity Felicidad indeed when he finds her!"
With a kind of desperation, in one jerk he tore the desired pages from the book, then hied himself quickly out of the room.
"It is a haunt of ghosts!" he said almost superstitiously.
He entered the doctor's laboratory. Here, from chests and racks and trays, he collected the relieving and remedial agents praised in the torn pages—opium pills, preparations of starch and laudanum, ammonia, salt, powdered aromatic chalk, astringents and laxatives. Down in the cellar, he secured some cobwebbed bottles of old brandy and clear wine.
He made several trips to his shaggy pony, picketed outside in the road. He secured what he had gathered in the canvas packs slung from the saddle. He left without once meeting the aged Teresa or again bothering the butler, Uncle Pedro.
He returned up the hills through the passes and green corries. He shoved the horse ahead at a persistent canter, yet such was the grade and such the growing leg-weariness of the cob that slow days were consumed in the journeying. At last, in the dim fresco of a certain nightfall, he found himself back in that forested dell where he had commanded Rafael Perez to remain on guard.
But no chill ululations answered his imitations of the hoot of the eagle owl. He rode through the brush and across the stream. Back in the clearing, the door of the log cabin was swinging forlornly in the rising wind; within, was only dark obscurity and emptiness. Rafael Perez had fled with the other two!