The bandolero did not credit his own ears. He was too astounded to laugh.
"Hola!" he gasped. "What is this now? You, my chicken, would be a bandolero! And you came all the way down here to recruit with me! Por los Clavos de Cristo!"
Then soberly and slyly, for he was beginning to see good fun in the little fellow:
"But do you not know that it is a rule, a convention, of us good bandoleros to ride alone? Solitary and single-handed, we are safer and stronger than if a troop of cabalgadores surrounded us. There is no one so swift and slippery and elusive as a bandolero who rides alone, and no one so free from fear of treachery—he trusts no man and no man he dreads."
"True. You understand your business, I see," said Jacinto Quesada.
He was only thirteen; yet he spoke slowly, with deliberation and discernment and a great air of mannish profundity. He had got something from Don Jaime's books, this mountaineer's bantling!
"But there are times," he qualified, "when even the most superb bandolero needs assistance in some serious and signal business. Have you not yourself a dorado, a camarada, who rides with you on your greater crimes, the Nino de Arahal? Certain folk have told me of the Nino; they said he shared the glory of those enterprises which made imperative a show of numbers and strength; do not tell me these folk lied! I had hoped to dispossess this camarada and dorado of yours, this Nino de Arahal, and to attain to the envied place down from which I threw him headlong!
"But the Nino," he added, arrogating to himself judicial authority—"let us forget him! Za! he is only an insignificant frog! Your wish to ride unhindered and alone, of that I would speak! Maestro, when I become your dorado, we will ride together always, for we will commit only imposing and glorious crimes!"
Said Pernales softly:
"But how would you dispossess the Nino de Arahal?"