The bandolero snorted, but held his peace. He took the steaming earthen bowl proffered him; then quaking like one palsied, exerting a deal of effort so as not to spill a drop of the precious haricot, he slowly retraced his steps toward the sick bay.
Here he glanced back over one shoulder. The serranos had returned to the business of stirring the puchero; they were not watching him. In he staggered, through the chapel doorway, to share the soup of the stew with the sick matador, Manuel Morales.
Minutes clicked by—a good ten minutes.
Within the cabana where Carson convalesced, Felicidad was sitting in a chair at the American's bedside, her golden head nodding with drowsiness, when the blut of approaching feet on the earthen floor startled her into alertness. She saw the slim gray-suited form of the Frenchman darkening the doorway. Her blue eyes widened and filled with apprehension and deep abhorrence. She shuddered involuntarily and shrunk back in the chair.
But Ferou only bowed in mock respect.
"Senor Carson," he addressed the American, "my serranos are stewing, out in the street, a fine savory ragout of meat and lentils. Would you care for some of the soup? It would be very strength-giving."
Carson, his angular hollow-cheeked face white as the pillow pressed about it, made no answering movement of head or mouth. With eyes deep-sunken and chilly blue as high mountain lakes, he looked up at the Frenchman unblinkingly.
"It will be very simple, monsenor," continued Ferou suavely, the hard lines deepening about his mouth in a grim smile. "All you have to do is to give me one of your five-thousand peseta bills! Since yesterday, the price of lentils and meat has soared on these mountains. But to you who are so rich, that is no importa. Only five thousand pesetas for a bowl of soup!"
All at once, like an unexpectedly loosed avalanche, the girl was on her feet, her blue eyes coldly ablaze like points of steel.
"You—you thief! You know he has left only one bill of five thousand pesetas! You have taken all the others! Oh, you rapacious hawk, you vile, vile vulture!" she cried out, shuddering with horrid remembrance and a sudden increase of detestation. "You would rob him of his all, everything! You would have him end his days in want and misery, just like the pobre padre of me!"