When at last he attained to manhood, he went down the mountains, stole a carbine and a horse, and became a bandolero errant and free.
He had hands of gold, that fire-hearted Spanish boy, for sticking up a troop of caballeros and their ladies out for a merienda or a bull-baiting on the parched plains about Madrid. And he had hands of gold for sticking up a diligence full of notables in the savage defiles of the Sierra de Guadalupe or the Sierra de Gredos or the Sierra de Guadarrama. And he had courage and originality. Why, he was still a mere novice as a bandolero, an apprentice hand, a novillero, when he took it into that round, young, handsome and arrogant Spanish head of his to way-lay and loot the Seville-to-Madrid Express!
Spanish highwaymen, you must know, are not in the habit of holding up passenger trains. To way-lay a lone muleteer in the mountains, to halt and rob a party of itinerant guitarists and dancers, or to pillage the hacienda of a rich rural cattle breeder are the conventional things to do. But to hold up the Seville-to-Madrid—it is unthinkable, it is not the will of God! Spanish highwaymen prefer to do less spectacular deeds and to live to see their grandchildren.
In the province of Ciudad Real, the Seville-to-Madrid Express crosses the river Zancura by means of a safe and modern steel cantilever bridge built by Le Brun, a French engineer. And a half hour before it reaches this steel bridge, the Seville-to-Madrid crosses another bridge, a bridge over a small tributary of the Zancura which is dry three fourths of the year. This bridge is not of steel; it is timbered. It was never built by Le Brun; it is flimsy, weather-worn, and liable to give under any unusual strain. It is called the Arroyo Seco Bridge.
Here, where the Arroyo Seco lies like a great brown gutter across the world, are the high parameras of La Mancha. There are no more desolate and lonely uplands in all Spain. Swarthy, sun-scorched and thirsty, they torture the eye with dusty dun distances and prone dun lines. You would think it an altogether unlikely place for a bandolero to stage a hold-up.
And here, a hundred yards below the Arroyo Seco bridge and close beside the railroad track, waited Jacinto Quesada one hot, dry, windless afternoon. He was seated upon a small sleek mouse-colored Manchegan pony. He wore corduroy leggins, a sheepskin zamarra, and a Cordovan sombrero that had once been white. His dress was that of the typical Manchegan herdsman. He looked like any one of the hundred or more vaqueros who lived the wild lonely life of the cattle country roundabout.
The Seville-to-Madrid showed in the southwest. Like a somber black snake it crawled slowly forward—like a black snake laggard and heavy after a great dinner of mice.
Spanish passenger trains are altogether unlike American passenger trains, for American passenger trains eat up distances like the brazen cars of old Northern gods. The passenger trains of Spain are most deliberate and slow. They halt for ten minutes at every wayside station, for no better reason than to allow the passengers to alight, unlimber their legs, and smoke the eternal cigarette. They are the very crawling snails of the earth!
Of course, the Seville-to-Madrid was an express, a through train. But you may be sure she was no fast train except when viewed through Spanish eyes. At fifteen miles the hour, morosely it crawled on. It neared the waiting Jacinto Quesada and, fearful of the flimsy wooden bridge beyond, slackened its pace to a painful glacier-slow flow.
As the wheezing locomotive lumbered up, Jacinto Quesada, with knees and one hand, held the shuddering pony motionless beside the track. The other hand he raised aloft. Pointedly, his eyes turned to that upraised hand; then to the locomotive's cab; then significantly, to the upflung hand once again.