He never once looked round. But his back seemed not quite so rigid nor his old white head so erect. All at once there were about the unmistakable signs of an old, old man. And in the slow pace of the faithful nag, there seemed something that wanted to linger yet was urged on by pride, inexorable and pitiless.
"Oh, mi pobre padre!" wailed Felicidad after him. "His heart breaks and he is lonely! And there is only old whining Pedro and the childish Teresa to welcome him back to the gloomy casa!"
Save for the creaking of the saddle, the soft pad-pad of the horse's hoof-falls, nothing answered from down the goat path. For the first time then, in all that intolerable eternity of death and disease and lusting vengeance, Felicidad wilted in a swoon to the ground.
CHAPTER XXXIX
"By gad!" exclaimed Carson, leaping to the side of Felicidad and lifting her tenderly in his arms. "There will yet be a wedding down in the casa of Torreblanca y Moncada outside Granada! Come, Jacinto; lend us your aid. Get horses! We must overtake the hidalgo doctor!"
"There are no horses in Minas de la Sierra," returned Quesada. "There are only mules and borricos which the serranos use to sleigh their cords of pine down to the lower torrents, and to carry their panniers of white manzanilla into the towns."
"Anything!" urged the American. Felicidad in his arms was showing signs of recovering consciousness. "Mules, borricos, anything upon which we can ride!"
"Muy bueno," assented Quesada readily. "It is very good, and I will go along with you. They say Jacinto Quesada is dead; I can ride the roads with impunity. And the roads are paved with gold for such as I!"
"I will go also," volunteered Morales—"I, and what remains of my cuadrilla. In his offices down in Seville sits my manager, the Senor Don Arturo Guerra, signing contract after contract; and these contracts I must soon fulfill, or lose much money and much prestige with the presidentes of the bull rings and the aficionados of Spain."