"Hold tight with your little hands, my Felicidad!" he remarked. "It will be fast riding for quite awhile."
"Ah, thankfully I go with you, Jacinto!" she said, after a little, despite the unevenness and hardship of their fast pace. "Jacques Ferou whispered to me that he would show me, once we got to Madrid, how the Apaches, the depraved criminals of Paris, treat those women who to them are unfaithful!"
CHAPTER IX
After lumbering slowly across the rickety Arroyo Seco bridge, the Seville-to-Madrid swung eastward on its gleaming rails and pursued, across the desert uplands, a course parallel to that of the bandoleros. From the coach windows on one side, the passengers could see Rafael Perez, Ignacio Garcia, and Pio Estrada fleeing across the parched and tawny flat on their plunder-laden, loping Manchegan ponies. They were speeding for the distant gray and purple mountains.
A jump behind these worthies and rapidly overtaking them were Jacinto Quesada and the golden-haired girl. Distinctly the passengers could make out Felicidad and her kidnaper. And the sight was as a red muleta to a Miura bull.
A young bride stolen from her husband! A young girl abducted by highwaymen! That was she behind the last of the retreating bandoleros—see the flying green skirt, see the glint of her golden hair in the sun! They were taking her off with them, carrying her away into the savage mountains! Had there been no men among all those creatures in trousers scattered throughout the train—no men to rise in their masculinity and to sacrifice their lives if need be, but at all hazards to prevent this abominable crime?
Women screamed, and women prayed. Hideous visions rose before their eyes; visions of the bandoleros in some craggy retreat shaking dice for possession of the girl! One of the black-clad nuns fainted outright.
On its gleaming rails, the Seville-to-Madrid swerved once again. With distance, the fleeing horsemen grew small, smaller. They were little as bounding rabbits; then they were little as low-skimming birds. And then at last they lost themselves in the ocean of ilex and thorny acacia, the dun immensity of sand.
The Seville-to-Madrid had been under way for a full twenty minutes and was nearing the steel cantilever bridge over the river Zancura, when a man, lurching heavily and looking very sick, picked his steps slowly and cautiously along the footboard on the right side of the train—that footboard used by the train guards in going from compartment to compartment of the many-coached continental-style caravan, collecting tickets and locking the doors between stops. The man clung to door knobs, window jambs and window sills. And gradually he worked forward along half the length of the train.