"Hola, mis Guardias Civiles! Jacinto Quesada—he is here!"
An answering shout spiraled up from the deeps of the gorge. Then, on the heels of it, one long slithering shaft of sound. The crang of a carbine!
Ferou threw up his arms and, his face black with congested blood, half spilled forward as if he had been struck by a blow between the shoulders. He swayed back and forth on the balls of his feet, caught himself, hung still for intolerable moments. Then, as is usually the case with a man killed by a bullet, he tottered backward, slipped on the crumbling lip of the rock and went over, clutching with white clawing hands at the brink, twisting, turning, and shrieking—shrieking for minutes afterward, shrieking hideously!
CHAPTER XXXV
Doctor Torreblanca Y Moncada strategically overcame the trouble engendered by cremation. He had the serranos burn whole trees and from the ashes, by percolation through water, produce a leaching of lye. Then, a goodly distance from the water supply coursing through the old Moorish flume, on the lip of the gorge where a void had been left by the dismantling of the two infected cabanas, he had the men of the pueblo dig a deep pit. Therein he purposed burying the dead in sheets of the burning alkali.
On the morning following that on which poetic justice had come to Ferou, he approached Quesada, who was superintending the work of digging the pit. Save for a certain wolfish gauntness, the bandolero was almost himself.
"Jacinto," he said, "do you feel hardy enough, my haggard one, to journey down these hills to my casa near Granada?"
The Moorish oblong eyes of the bandolero showed surprise and a shade of fear.
"I am easily strong enough by now, Don Jaime. But—"