He was about to mount and ride on, when abruptly he halted, one foot in the stirrup. An enlightening but bitter thought had suddenly shocked his brain.
For a long time now, crimes had been committed which he never had a hand in, but which in every case had been laid at his door. Automobiles had been held up, toreros' chapels invaded, men robbed and even killed by a young man described as Jacinto Quesada when, all the time, Quesada himself had been quarantined in Minas de la Sierra.
There was a sinister purpose, a foul plan underlying the criminal's habit of masquerading and posing as Jacinto Quesada. Behind the personality of Quesada, he was cloaking his own identity and committing crimes without a suspicion pointing toward himself. What could be more probable than that this same criminal had killed the old policeman?
"It was that masquerader!" the bandolero exclaimed to the night. And he swore: "By the Nails of Christ!"
He circled by the prone body in the road, his horse nervous and quivering with instinctive fright. He kicked the nag into a brisk canter. He sought thus in action to quiet the thoughts which now were bothering his brain. He pursued the descent.
But the turgid thoughts would not be stifled. They fluttered in his head like the pale moonbeams on the rock walls. They filled him with gloom as profound as the shadow-haunted deeps of the narrow way.
He, Jacinto Quesada, had discovered the corpse. Was that not strange, portentous? It seemed to him now as if the hand of God were foreshadowing, in this grisly discovery, some tragic misfortune about to befall him. The masquerader had committed the crime of blood. Well, the penalty for it would strike most surely upon Quesada's head! Of that, he felt superstitiously certain!
He made the sign of the horned hand in an attempt to avert the impending evil. But no use. His mind would not still, nor would the misgivings die. He reined in the nag.
"There is but one thing for me to do," he announced to himself. "I must return to the side of the corpse, and kneel and say a prayer for his soul in purgatory. A mere word of requiescat is not enough. He was mine enemy in life; I must show complete Christian forgiveness toward him, now that he is dead. That alone will prevent a curse from falling upon me!"
He was kneeling in prayer beside the dead sergeant and had reached the words: "May his soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace," when, all at once from down the road, his ears were assailed by a startling sound—the hoof beats of approaching horses!