The mother took the little Jacinto by the hand and led him to the village chapel. She knelt before the dingy altar a long time. Then she lit a blessed candle and prayed again. And then she handed the wick dipped in oil to Jacinto and said:
"Light a candle for thy father, tiny one."
"But why should I light a candle for our Juanito, mamacita?"
"It is that Our Lady of the Sorrows and the Great Pity will not let him be killed by the men of the Guardia Civil!"
"Men do not kill unless they hate. Do the men of the Guardia Civil hate, then, the pobre padre of me and the sweet husband of thee, mamacita?"
"It is not the hate, child! The men of the Guardia Civil kill any breaker of the laws they discover guilty-handed. It is the way they keep the peace of Spain."
"But our Juanito is not a lawbreaker, little mother. He is no lagarto, no lizard, no sly tricky one. He is an honest man."
"Hush, nino! There are no honest men left in Spain. They all have starved to death. Thy father has become a contrabandista And if it be the will of the good God, and if Pepe and Lenchito be shrewd to skulk through the shadows of night and swift to run past the policemen on watch, we will have sausages and garbanzos to eat, and those little legs of thine will not be the puny reeds they are now. Ojala! they will be round and pudgy with fat!"
The men of Minas de la Sierra were all woodchoppers and manzanilleros—gatherers of the white-flowered manzanilla. Their fathers had been woodchoppers and manzanilleros before them. But too persistently and too long, altogether too long, had the trees been cut down and the manzanilla harvested. The mountains had grown sterile, barren, bald. Not so many cords of Spanish pine were sledded down the mountain slopes as on a time; not so many men burdened beneath great loads of manzanilla went down into the city of Granada to sell in the market place that which was worth good silver pesetas.
There are no deer in the Sierra Nevada—neither red, fallow, nor roe. There are no wild boar. There is only the Spanish ibex. And what poor serrano can provision his good wife and his cabana full of lusty brats by hunting the Spanish ibex? He has but one weapon—the ancient muzzle-loading smooth-bore. And the ibex speeds like a chill glacial wind across the snow fields and craggy solitudes, and only a man armed with a cordite repeater can hope to bring him down.