It is well known that Tammany, for reasons political or otherwise, protected criminals. Well, even as did Tammany, so does Caciquismo. A Spanish criminal may be captured, tried before a magistrate and all; but if he be one in good standing with the caciques, never is he sent to the Carcel de la Corte or Ceuta. The invisible eight arms of the gigantic octopus uncoil and reach out, the thousand ducts along those arms open to spew a flood of favors and gold, and magistrate and prosecutor are bought and paid for, and the men of the Civil Guard who cannot be bought, who are incorruptible, are in the Spanish courts betrayed!
Therefore, the men of the Guardia Civil are most high-handed and cruel. The criminal caught in the deed never reaches the Spanish jail. He is shot down on the spot. Bigots for justice are the men of the Guardia Civil!
Carajo! but there was wailing in Minas de la Sierra when came the news of Juan Quesada's death. So many men had gone away and been murdered by the police, and so few were left! Women who had been made widows in the selfsame way as Jacinto Quesada's mother came to the hut and sought to comfort her. But she would not be comforted. For three days she lay on the earthen floor of her hut and beat her hands and her head against the dust. Then she commenced vomiting and swooning like one sick unto death.
They thought it was the cholera. The cholera was forever scaling the high mountains and skulking into the village in the night. A man of the village went for the doctor, Don Jaime de Torreblanca y Moncada. He lived but a few miles from Granada, and the man had to go all down the hills to summon him.
Torreblanca y Moncada was what is called a "hard man." He was a grandee by birth and breeding, a hidalgo of the old granite-jawed, eagle-stern and eagle-haughty Spanish sort—the Cortes y Monroy sort, the Hernan de Soto sort. He worshipped his ancient name, his high hidalgo blood. His personal honor was to him more precious than life, more sacred than a sacrament, inviolable, consecrated.
When a young man, he had married a woman of race and beauty. She had run off with a Gypsy picador. Don Jaime had put a Manchegan knife down his boot and set off after them, vowing to follow them to the end of the earth even, and to kill them both. But the train, in which the guilty ones fled, had not reached Jaen when it was wrecked, and they both were crushed out of all semblance to two sinful lovers.
With composure and reserve, Don Jaime heard the news. He did not even laugh harshly or curse God for robbing him of his revenge. Only grim, quiet and morose, he returned to his dishonored house and to his baby daughter that had been robbed, sacrileged, and orphaned.
He was quite a rememberable-looking man. His hair had whitened quickly in the years that followed; his skin, from exposure to wind and weather, was a deep swarth; and his eyes were gray. Not many Spaniards have gray eyes. The eyes of Torreblanca y Moncada were a clear, cold, agate gray. All in all, there was about his appearance, especially the long aquiline nose, the stony eyes and pointed white beard, something which seemed to harken back to the days of ruffs and ready swords—the days of the terrible Spanish infantry, the Armada, the Bigotes, the "bearded men" the Conquistadores.
The mountaineers of Minas de la Sierra knew fear of him and awe. For them he had only a contemptuous eye and a bitter smile and a harsh imperious way. They said he had a granite boulder for a heart. But he was very tender with the sick.
He was the sort of physician who looks upon his business of serving the ailing as a sacred commission from on high. He was like one who had taken Holy Orders with his doctor's degree. No Jesuit was more slave to his oaths; no Jesuit worked with more zeal for God and the Society than did Don Jaime for Humanity and Science. The most poverty-abased labrador, the most filthy beggar, had but to summon him, and he would arise from his table or his bed and ride across Spain to him who needed healing.