"Very well!" he said at length. He raised his carbine aloft and fired it into the air.
Briskly his three dorados, Rafael Perez, Ignacio Garcia, and Pio Estrada, rode into the clearing. It was noticeable then, in the light from the replenished fires, that no one of them was laden with the plunder from the hold-up of the Seville-to-Madrid. The chances were that they had left the telltale sacks of mail and conglomerate loot in the posada of some protecting cacique, or buried them between the concrete feet of some windmill, or cached them between the boulders in some gully in the foothills.
The three dismounted. With gratification they shook out their saddle-cramped limbs. Jacinto Quesada led his own horse and that of Felicidad over to one of the wagons and picketed them to a wheel. As he did, a nut-brown chit of a girl came and stood before him.
"You are that arrogant and absolute one, Jacinto Quesada!" she asked with rising inflection.
Jacinto Quesada nodded without speaking. The Gypsy girl looked at him in a way that gave him a singular feeling. Boldly she measured him with her eyes, appraised him. Her glance was at once inquisitive, prying, annoying, and yet ardent and approving. She had, too, the strange slow stare peculiar to persons of the Gypsy race, that fixed uncouth look that makes one feel much as if one were being hypnotized by a serpent.
"You are very young to be a bandolero," she remarked, half to herself.
Once again Quesada nodded without speaking.
"You are altogether unlike the bandoleros I have seen."
"It is the deed, senorita," said Quesada. "The deed makes us bandoleros—not the length of our limbs nor the cast of our faces."
"But you are very handsome!" she said. "You are as handsome as the very Hyperion himself!"