Once again Quesada recalled the sullen manner and incomprehensible words of the trio when he last had met them. He shook his head gloomily.
"Something surely is afoot!" he murmured. "They mutter against me, they disobey me with impunity. The dogs of ladrones, they may have turned traitor! Instead of keeping an eye on the road, Perez may have put the Guardia Civil on my track. Porvida, it will go hard with them if such proves true! They'll never live to get the reward. Dios hombre, I swear it!"
His temper sharpened and embittered by the discovery, he vented it in harsh kicks against his pony's flanks. The wearied nag extended itself. By late dawn, Quesada rode into the gorge from which the goat-path looped up to the empested village.
Presently, as they wound through the gorge, unusual signs of alertness began to show in the tired cob. He lifted his head, pricked up his ears. He was just about to neigh when the bandolero, on the watch, leaned over and clamped his hand tightly upon his nostrils. From ahead, on the instant, breathed into Quesada's ears the neigh of recognition of another horse.
The bandolero leaped from the saddle. With one hand firm on the muzzle of the pony, the other on the butt of the long-barreled revolver protruding from his holster, tensely he stood waiting and hearkening.
Into his nostrils drifted the acrid smell of a wood fire. He heard a clipping staccato sound as of some one chopping faggots. He saw, some hundred feet ahead, a thin whitish smoke voluting up from the green tops of the pines and alders, and merging into the fog cloak above. There was a camp of men in the gorge.
His vague suspicions of the three dorados congealed into quick and firm convictions.
"It is the Guardia Civil," he surmised. And he swore; "By the Nails of Christ!"