Quesada led his horse back around the bend and out of sounding distance. He picketed him behind a feathery smoke-plant up the side of the gorge. Then he stole forward toward the camp.
He caught now, as he drew near, the clatter of tin as of men preparing breakfast, the tempting aroma of coffee, and the hot sizzle of frying meat. Creeping through the underwood on hands and knees, silent as a cat of the wilds, he came to where he could peer through an entangle of white buckthorn and genista, and out into a trampled space about an alder tree.
There were two men in the trampled space. They wore the blue, red-trimmed uniform of the Guardia Civil.
The one holding a blackened frying pan over the small blaze of faggots was facing toward Quesada. His uniform but poorly fitted his squat frame and broadly uncouth shoulders; it showed palpable signs of having been slept in the night before. His heavy-jawed, black-mustached face was sweating copiously from the hot nearness to the fire; he had tossed his tricorn police hat off his unkempt head and into the weeds behind; he looked, forsooth, more the type of brigand than ever did Quesada himself. He was the apelike gendarme, Pascual Montara.
The other, with back toward Quesada, was busying about the wiry, coarse-haired ponies to one side. He was a tall man, his uniform as trim on his military figure as if he had not spent the night on the ground, and his polished three-corner hat set snugly on his head, white linen sun-shield behind, in thorough preparation for the day's work. As he currycombed and brushed the ponies, there was visible on one sleeve the red-braided chevron of a sergeant.
"Hola, Don Esteban, mi sargento!" called Pascual at the fire. He put the frying pan down upon the trampled grass and lifted the coffee pot from its bed in the coals.
The tall man turned about and, in full view to the peeping Quesada, came striding toward the fire. His hair, closely clipped, showed white beneath his hat; yet there was in him no sign of the weakness of age. He had a short, knife-sharp white beard, a face as lean and haughty as a griffon vulture's. He was Sergeant Esteban Alvarado, father of the lover of the Gypsy Paquita, Miguel Alvarado.
The two men squatted cross-legged upon the ground opposite each other, and ate and drank in silence. But Montara, munching prodigiously, kept continually shaking his ugly head. Finally he said:
"Seguramente, yes! It is the wild-goose chase."
"Pascual Montara," said the old man severely, "your talk shows you unfaithful to your duty."