An astounded look that changed in a rush to one of stupefied dismay staggered his eyes. The revolver was gone! There was not even sheathed knife or belt!
Ferou watched the matador's eyes, his lids continuing to droop with pitiless analytical scrutiny. Significantly he tapped the heavy revolver that hung at his own belt. And he laughed, a thin chill laugh.
"You forget, monsenor. I am the only man armed in the barrio. It was at my suggestion that Senor Carson went about disarming the serranos. It was at my whisper, when your cuadrilla hesitated to shed their weapons, that you angrily threw off your own belt and gun. I have hidden them all!"
He threw up his sharp cinder-hued face in an accession of pride. Just as, on the Seville-to-Madrid, he had acted with Felicidad, so now he seemed to swell with pride, to grow and strut with importance, as he bared thus his real repulsive self to Morales.
"Monsenor," he exclaimed, "you do not know me; but the French police have long dreaded me as an adept and fearsome criminal. I am a White Wolf of Paris. I use my brain. I do not conceive and carry forward a plan in the one breath. I lay strings long in advance, and then, when the time is fit and proper, parbleu! I jerk.
"Ah, you understand, I see! It is thus now. I am ruler here. I am the only man armed in the village. What I say—"
Came an abrupt and alarming interruption from down the slant of the platform. Quesada sat rigidly up. His forehead pouring sweat, his eyes stark in his head, his hands clutching his chest, in a frightful voice he cried out:
"No, no! I never did it. Kill me if you will, but by the Life, you must believe me! It was some other man ... some other man!..."
His voice fainted away. With the exertion of shouting, with the fear of his grisly fancies, his face darkened with congested blood. Completely exhausted, he fell back upon the platform.
It was as if the interruption had come to strengthen the argument of Jacques Ferou. Overwhelmingly thereat Morales saw how powerless he was. Quesada was out of his mind; John Fremont Carson was on the rack of the plague; even the peones of his cuadrilla, who obedient to his command might have aided him, were stretched out on either hand, sick and helpless. The matador was completely at the mercy of the Frenchman.