"Ah, I had forgotten; you Americans are all as rich as Monte Cristo. You and I will share the expense, then. We get off at the next stop and make our start after this Jacinto Quesada, do we not?"
CHAPTER X
The two were Spaniards. They wore the uniform of the Guardia Civil, and they rode hairy, vigorous little police ponies. They had been in the saddle since daybreak, persistently pushing southward. The cobs were dog-weary but as steady-paced as machines of clockwork; the men were hunched of shoulder, heavy-headed, their faces coated with a gray-brown powder of dust.
They drew rein atop a naked hummock in the immensity of sand and ilex and thorny acacia. At the hip of the younger and taller of the two was slung a pair of binoculars. The one, and then the other, trained these glasses upon the rolling, everlasting veldt and swept the horizon round, their scrutiny long, patient, and searching.
All the long morning and the longer, more dreary afternoon, they had seen upon the endless despoblado only half-wild cattle and half-wild asses, and an occasional high-soaring falcon or an ugly, three-foot-long eyed-lizard. And this time was not the first time they had paused to peer through the binoculars; they had paused often, and then continued on without remark. Now, however, as he put back the glasses in their leather sheath, the younger policeman rather bitterly said:
"There is no one abroad upon La Mancha. Not even a solitary salteador de camino hiding out from us of the Guardia Civil."
"Yet I tell you, Miguel—most surely are they out there somewhere!" returned his compañero; vehemently dissenting. "How could they have attained, so soon, to the Sierra Morena ahead—I ask you that!"
Touching their ponies with their barbed heels, they enterprised once more upon the long traverse. There was a terrible sun that day, a sun African in the ferocity of its passion. The sun glare tortured their eyes. It caused their lacquered three-cornered police hats, made of shiny patent leather, to reflect and flash like the mirrors of a heliograph. The men sweated until they were as dry as cinders and could sweat no more.
In the more subdued glare of the late afternoon, the two came at length to the brown rolling foothills toward which they had been making throughout the whole hideous day. The foothills billowed away, in undulations rising even higher and higher, until finally they became part of a distant and purple alpland of massive and lofty peaks—the exalted spires and crags of the Sierra Morena.