"I will prove to you that I am not unworthy of your great love, my little one. This Jacinto Quesada—za!"
He thundered away after his proud and haughty parent.
CHAPTER XVIII
Up from the misty profundities of the Llanos de Jaen climbed, like slow obstinate flies, the nine fantastic cabalgadores of Manuel Morales. Also, their guide, Aguilino. They were all afoot. With them, up the altitudes of the pass, yearned seven pack mules, heavy and swollen with great panniers of provisions.
The nine Quixotes and their scarred wolf of a guide had put two weeks of frugal living and heartbreaking toil between them and the barranca of Pepe Flammenca and his unwashed Gypsy clan. Right off, they had lost one horse and then another. The beasts had taken headers off mountainsides. They had consulted with their guide, the man Aguilino. He gave them to understand that horses were considered of very little worth in both the Sierra Morena and the Sierra Nevada. For a caravan of asses, they succeeded in bartering their horses with the arrieros, or muleteers, going down.
Now, after two weeks, they had at last won through the rolling torrent of mountains called the Sierra Morena. They were inching themselves up the long perpendicular miles of the windy gorge of the Llanos de Jaen.
The Llanos de Jaen is very narrow. One would think one could hurl a peseta across it, until one tried. Were it not for the chasmy gap of the Llanos de Jaen, the Sierra Morena and the Sierra Nevada would be one tremendous chain of mountains.
Half-way up, a mule stumbled in turning the flank of a precipice and took the leap, screaming like a soul thrown headlong to Hell. The nine Quixotes clung to the rock wall and felt sick to their stomachs. The mule seemed falling for a thousand years. They did not dare to look down and see it strike. The mule was the one the guide Aguilino had been leading. Perhaps a shove from him had sent it on its way to death. Again, perhaps not.
High above, upon the top of a glassy and steep risco or overhanging rock, a man had moored himself with a short rope of horsehide. He was Jacinto Quesada. But he did not look the bandolero of the plains. Garbed as he was in alpagartas or rope sandals, the better to grip the precipitous ascents, and in sheepskin zamarra and long shawl as protection against the cold, he looked the true mountaineer.