"Sangre de Cristo!" his dry lips fluttered. "It is Don Jaime himself!"
But no! Don Jaime could not be here. Had he not left the hidalgo doctor, that every morning, in the village above in the sierras?
A grave calmness came upon him then, and a questing thoroughness. Who was the man? Somehow his features seemed familiar. Was it only because of that striking resemblance to Don Jaime?
He noticed, all at once, that there was visible on the body, under the powdering of dust from the road, a kind of red-edged blue jacket. On one sleeve was a single red chevron, and to one side, almost hidden in the dust, the shimmer of a patent leather hat. With a stifled gasp, recognition leaped full-fledged into his brain. The man was Senor Don Esteban Alvarado, the aged sergeant of the Guardia Civil!
No more than a few weeks before, Quesada had seen the sergeant in the gorge below Minas de la Sierra, dominant with life and lording it over the apelike policeman Montara. To find the sergeant now only a still black huddle in the road was a distinct shock to the bandolero. He knew that just the day before either the sergeant or Montara had shot Ferou.
Almost incredulous, Quesada felt the body for signs of life. But the sergeant was dead. His body was not what one could call warm, yet neither was it cold with that soft stickiness so instinctively repulsive to the living touch. The sergeant had been killed only a short time before. A caking of dust on the torso of his jacket showed where the blood had oozed from a bullet wound in the chest, and quickly dried.
"It was that shot I heard!" the bandolero surmised. "But who killed him? And why?"
Of the sudden, he remembered the old woman who had passed him in the road, crying softly to herself. He bounded back around the bend. But in the intervening jiffy of time, the shadows of the defile had swallowed her from sight.
"She is the sergeant's poor old wife," he said to himself. "She must have come upon him, slain like a dog in the road. I knew Don Esteban, his wife, and son lived in these hills. Now the poor old woman is gone to pray before the Christ of the Pass for the eternal welfare of his departed soul. May it rest in peace!"
He came back to the black huddle, still profoundly puzzled as to whom had done the killing. He turned the body over into that posture in which he had found it. He retrieved his fallen revolver.