The growing nameless fear in Ferou's brain bourgeoned, at that command, into noisome bloom. His jaw slacked and began an incontrollable quivering. His eyes glittered in a pasty sweating face.
"Mais non, mais non!" he cried, lapsing in his extremity into his native tongue. "Not that, monsieur! You cannot demand that! The clothes, they are dirty, foul!"
It was only the subterfuge of a time of dire peril. His eyes darted wildly about. They sought Morales. Morales had been very tender with the sick. Perhaps—
But Morales was leveling his own revolver at him with a hand only a trifle less steady than that of the doctor. His face, parchment-dry and sunken of flesh from the ravages of disease, was forbidding with grim determination.
"Put them on!" persisted Don Jaime.
Solemnly then and very laboriously, with jaw still quivering and shaking hands, Ferou dressed in the sheepskin zamarra, rough corduroys, and alpagartas of the bandolero. Don Jaime himself clapped upon Ferou's blond head the high-pointed hat of Quesada.
"Now, march!" he exploded. "March toward that great rock on the brink of the village!"
All the Frenchman's dismal fears became quick and instant. He was sure now! The nostrils of his predatory nose twitching and working, his whole pasty face working and grimacing, with unrestrainable fear, like a horrible mask of rubber, he groveled on his knees and held out his two arms to the doctor in abject supplication.
"Mercy, Don Jaime! Mon Dieu, you would not have me shot like a dog!"
"March!" the hidalgo insisted. His voice rang with metallic timbre; his gray eyes flashed as if they were bits of flint upon which steel had struck. He shoved the muzzle of his pistol against the Frenchman's chest.