"It is that Jacinto Quesada!" he said, terribly moved. "He has come upon my poor old father alone in the road, and he has killed him without ruth. By the Wounds of Christ!" he swore, lifting his right hand to heaven—"I will seek out this murderer; I will hound him down; at last, remorselessly, I will kill him! I have taken my oath."
In the thick shadow of the bend, Jacinto Quesada smiled bitterly to himself. Just as he had forecasted, just so had matters shaped themselves. He was blamed for the crime of another!
But the captain, Luis Guevara, was speaking:
"This proves that Montara is mistaken—the Wolf-Cub is still alive! As you say, mi pobre Miguel, without ruth he has killed your father, an old, honored, and brave member of the police!
"Carajo! Only once before, in the case of that traveling Englishman, has Quesada killed a man. His conscience will be more disturbed by this atrocity than by his usual crimes. Surely now, after this vile deed of blood, will he seek out a priest and beg forgiveness of God!
"Pronto, mis camaradas! Don Esteban has not been long dead. If we ride to the nearest church, we may be in time to capture Quesada while he makes his confession!"
"But there are few men of the cloth in these hills, and fewer churches," objected Miguel Alvarado. "I know; I was born in the portilla above this pass. My old mother still lives there."
"You do not think that Quesada is a heretic, despite his sacrilegious abuse of the bullfighters' chapel of Seville!"
Miguel shook his head.
"No. I think that he will go, straightway, to the shrine of the Christ of the Pass. It is but a little way on, in a lonely pocket of this gorge. For miles around serranos, burdened by sins, kneel before the shrine, and pray, and beg absolution or ease of mind."