"Muy bueno!" said the captain. "We will go at once to this shrine and wait there, in ambush, for Jacinto Quesada to come and confess his sin. We will listen, and then we will kill him!"
There was a creaking of leather as the men leaped into the saddles. Quesada shrunk back into the dark elbow of the jutting bend. He pressed the nervous horse in against the rock wall. To still any outcry he vised his hand over the trembling nostrils of the animal. He waited, hardly daring to breathe.
The gendarmes, following the lead of the captain, filed into the pass and looking straight ahead, unsuspecting the dark, went by him almost within arm's length.
He waited until they had all gone on, and the shadows of the pass had engulfed them. Then he did not dodge around the bend and pursue the decurrent way he had been going. He was seized with an unreasoning and irresistible impulse to follow the troop and witness whatever might be the outcome of their expedition to the shrine. Loosening but not removing his hand from the horse's nostrils, he stalked a goodly distance behind the party like a quiet long-legged shadow.
As they neared the boulder-hedged pocket which sheltered the shrine, a whisper sibilated through the ranks of the policemen. Some one was kneeling before the cross!
Noiselessly the gendarmes halted, dismounted, quickly hobbled their horses with the long reins, and crept stealthily forward between the boulders and the ragged prickly shrubbery. Quesada followed, a safe distance behind.
But it was only the old white-haired wife of Don Esteban who knelt before the pale figure of the Christ, with its crown of black horsehair and red-painted wounds. As he crept nearer, behind the police and between the weeds and rocks, Quesada heard her voice. In quavering tones, she was speaking aloud. She was confessing that she was the murderer of her husband, Sergeant Esteban Alvarado!
Thinking herself alone before the moon-white effigy of the crucified Saviour, in an anguish of soul, she was pouring out the whole pitiful story. For some time, she had been tortured by a harrowing secret. Her son, the darling of her life, although a member of the Guardia Civil like his father, was also a base poseur and highwayman!
It was his infamous plan to doff the policeman's uniform and steal out at night dressed to resemble the bandolero, Jacinto Quesada. Then, his crimes consummated, he would put the uniform on again. That honored uniform and the fact that all his crimes were laid, successfully and invariably, at the door of Jacinto Quesada, kept suspicion from resting upon him.
It had smote her with desolation to discover that her son was a stealthy outlaw. Since that long-ago time when her ancestors had been reclaimed from brigandage and become Miquelets, no one in her family ever again had turned criminal. They had all been policemen.