The Frenchman's whole malignant soul was bunched and crouched in his eyes. He threw after the golden form of the girl a look searing and blasting. It was as if, now that the vengeance of the hidalgo had failed him, he would kill the girl himself with that one glare from his slaty eyes.
Don Jaime's lips clicked together. Looking piercingly through the doorway, his agate eyes lunged like sharp knives at the venomous Frenchman and the white trembling girl. In a voice chill as a glacial wind, he spoke.
"After I have fulfilled here my duty to the sick," he said—"after that, by the Life, I slay!"
He would say no more. His lips tightened into a line thin and grim as if chiseled in stone.
He went down and up the line of platforms, dosing each sufferer in turn. To some he gave stimulants and astringents; to those in the more severe stages of the disease, he doled out opiates.
He went from cabana to choza outside, bringing brandy and nutritive food to the convalescing. He was leaving the choza of one villager when Quesada, dogging his steps, plucked him by the sleeve.
"You have seen, senor don hidalgo?" asked the bandolero. "The Frenchman Ferou is up here, also."
"I know," nodded Don Jaime austerely. "He is wherever trouble is. He is the scum that gathers where things are filthy, an abomination to be squashed under the heel! Za!" he ended, with profound loathing. "He is a human leech!"
Quickly then, as they approached the next cabana, he related with characteristic frankness and bitter contempt, all he had seen and heard that morning in the gorge at the foot of the goat path.
Quesada showed little surprise. What could one expect from the French vulture!