"Carajo, yes!" grimly agreed the old sergeant. "And we of the Guardia Civil will shoot him from below!"
CHAPTER XXXI
A man wasted from disease sat, all this while, in the morning sunlight on a chair tilted back against one whitewashed wall of the village chapel. His young haggard face was screwed up, and he frowned through Moorish amber eyes toward where, some distance below, the Frenchman sprawled on the great rock at the brink of the village. He could not account for the unseemly posture and gesticulating hands and head of the Frenchman.
No word of Ferou's bartering reached him. He lacked even one clue to the strange and absorbing business going forward. He did not know that the waiting members of the Guardia Civil had advanced up the gorge and now, out of sight, down at the foot of the goat path, were making cold-blooded arrangement with the Frenchman for the delivery of his own living body!
Quesada lacked the strength which would urge him boldly to investigate. And he was too weak to concentrate his mind, for any length of time, on an apparently unsolvable problem. He shrugged aside his perplexity, after a little, and sunk back into that trick of strategic plotting so natural to the feeble in body but strong in spirit.
Twisting his head about, he looked through the doorway into the hospital. Within, in that fetid moaning place where lay the sick Morales, there were no attending serranos; they had finished their rounds for the nonce. Below on the great rock, the engrossing and unaccountable business had every appearance of engaging Ferou for some time. The way was clear.
Quesada thumped down his tilted chair and walked on weakly rickety legs to where, near the cork-oak tree in the center of the uneven street, a number of the villagers were brewing a puchero in a great iron pot.
"Come, mis paisanos!" he said in a voice surprisingly commanding for one so enervated from disease. "Ladle out to me a bowl of the stew."
"We have no orders to refuse you, Don Jacinto," answered one of the men obsequiously. "We only mind that Morales and the Americano should get none."