"Ah, forgive me, nino of my soul!" he whispered fervently. "I do not desire to be brutal. I desire only to save our good Felicidad from cruel death at her father's hands."
Gabriel smuggled his arm about the bandolero's neck. It was a mute but trustful answer. Quesada looked over one shoulder to call back through the doorway:
"Alfonso Robledo! You can walk. Lend a hand here, man! Follow me!"
Then down the long uneven street he ran, the blanketed form of Gabriel borne before him in his tight but tender arms.
Everything was happening with breathless velocity, in a rush, in hardly an appreciable flicker of time.
As Quesada went by, from deep in the shadowy doorways of their cabanas, the mountaineers of Minas de la Sierra peered forth at him. They were like so many beady-eyed lizards in so many dark crevices. At the first rustle of danger they had hid themselves.
No sound came from the huts. But once Quesada had put them behind two by two, there breathed up, from each cabana, an aghast whisper:
"Ah, God in Heaven! There goes Jacinto Quesada, and our own little Gabriel in the two brave arms of him! And Alfonso—Alfonso Robledo tottering after! What would they? Turn the hidalgo doctor from his terrible purpose? Ave Maria Purissima!"
Where trivial anxieties talk and gesticulate, there great anxieties stand dumb and make no sign.
Thus with the two principals in the on-sweeping tragedy. Mute and motionless as boulders of basalt, they stood transfixed against that steely background of cold sky and glacial desolate mountains—the one bulking high on horseback like some black-browed Destroying Angel, the other petrified below him in the street, a pale flower of a girl.