Ponies and riders plunged behind a huge brown boulder down the road and out of sight. Quesada snapped up. Active as an ape, he slung the canvas packs over his shoulders and leaped down the brushy side of the gorge. What time the stony defile echoed and reechoed with the distance-dimming clangor of pounding hoofs and turbulent shouts, he sped, on his long mountaineer's legs, up the convolutions of the goat path to the empested barrio.
The crang of a carbine suddenly spearing aloft from down the gorge caused him to halt on the great rock at the brink of the village. He looked back. He smiled somberly.
"That will be my poor horse," he remarked. "He has halted for the Guardia Civil!"
CHAPTER XXV
To Jacinto Quesada, returned after an absence of over a week, the village of Minas de la Sierra wore an inexplicably strange appearance. Gone utterly—mud and thatch and wooden shutters—were the chozas in which the widowed mother of the mountain boy, Gabriel, had lain sick and the white-haired Villarobledo had died. Where the huts had stood were now only empty spans.
Before the other huts had been built a covered wooden flume, as for the carrying off of sewage. Down the old Moorish gutter in the center of the uneven street coursed a clear quick stream with cold reflections and tiny gurgling noises that seemed to tempt one to drink.
Otherwise, nothing stirred in the chill morning sunlight. No serranos stood in the low doorways of the cabanas or hovered about the cork-oak tree in the center of the barrio. The village seemed a village of the dead.
Quesada hastened across the street, muddy and slippery from the heavy fog of the night prior. As he did, of a sudden from the direction of the little whitewashed chapel, there drifted down to his ears a continuous moaning and groaning. It sounded bodiless and unearthly in the thin air of that high altitude.
He knew thereat. Carson, the American, following out his scheme of sanitation, had segregated the sick. The tiny village chapel had been converted into a hospital. Within in the painful obscurity, behind those apertures that were now screened against flies with flimsy calico, men were moving back and forth on solemn and fearful tasks.