"Little caballero of the handsome face, there is a great tree at the entrance to this barranca—a wild olive that stands alone and waiting like a young bandolero who attends in patience until the coming of nightfall and his brown Gypsy love. There will be a fine moon to-morrow night."
"It is of no importa!" said Quesada, without looking back. "There shall be no more meetings of you and me. Go thou with God!"
The girl quivered beneath the scorning words like a flame harshly blown upon. But suddenly she pulsed rigid; a heat sharp as pepper, bitter as bile, violent as the sun, coursed through her veins; her face grew ashy and drawn, her dusky eyes glittered like a cat's. Like a cat she was then, like a beautiful she-leopard wounded into a barbarous and terrible ferocity.
"Go thou!" she screamed—"Go thou with Satanas, the foul-smelling, the gangrened! You are not a man; you are a putrescent sore, an ulcer, a leprosy! I hate you, I loathe you, and I will have your life taken from you some day!"
She ran after him, shrilly screaming her rage. She was a virago, a witch-woman! She picked up a stone and flung it after him. It struck the horse of Felicidad upon the withers. She picked up more stones and flung these. And a thousand vile curses she flung also. Coming thus from a woman's lips, they were worse than an abomination of sound; they were a pollution, a hideous obscenity.
Even Quesada's ruffians were appalled. For himself, Quesada was most glad that the horse of Felicidad was the one struck by the first stone. In a panic, it galloped away. She was soon out of earshot.
They hurried after her.
CHAPTER XV
Not at once did the girl Paquita return to the camp of the Gitanos. Her low broad brow clouded with sullen anger, her dusky eyes somber and morosely smoldering, she clambered swiftly down the rocks of the watercourse. In the precipitancy of her descent, in the headlong hurry and indecorum with which she moved through swale and sunlight and between boulders and clumps of rhododendron, there was yet something of cold decision and steadfastness to purpose. She came out, at last, on the tiny beach of white sand beside the pool.