With the vigilant application of an eagle eying its meat circling all unaware beneath its lofty eyrie, Quesada had been watching the men climb laboriously up the sheer of the pass. Now, as the mule fell to its magnificent death, he nodded his head in approbation and remarked to himself:
"Rafael Perez has finally set to work, I see! That is the first poor mule. But the whole seven must be disposed of, before Morales and his men journey far through the Sierra Nevada."
The nine Quixotes did not know Quesada was perched there, far above them. Long ere they crawled up to the overhanging rock, he had disappeared completely. Yet they felt sure that somewhere beyond, among the snowy crags and moaning canyons of the Sierra Nevada, Quesada was pursuing his way with the girl Felicidad.
A day prior, just before leaping the Llanos de Jaen and coming out of the Sierra Morena, they had stumbled, in a hollow of the hills, upon a mud choza that had the gloomy aspects of a hiding place for bandoleros and moonshiners. The peasant and his wife who lived in the hut had said no to all their questions. No, they had not seen Jacinto Quesada. No, they never had heard of him, they lived so far away in the mountains, senores. Don Jesu, they would not know him from the great Morales himself!
But their half-witted son, a tall, shock-headed, ungainly lad, was struck by the appearance of the cavalcade and especially by the colorful, if oddly assorted trapping of Manuel Morales. Poor lad, he had never before seen such glorious caballeros.
As the disheartened men had made to lead on their mules, he had crept to the offside of Morales' beast and there, hidden from the view of his father, he had engaged in a quick, fearful pantomime.
"What is it?" queried Morales.
Vehemently the feeble-minded lad had pointed on ahead, on toward the Llanos de Jaen and the Sierra Nevada beyond.
"He has gone that way!" he whispered. "Si, Jacinto Quesada himself and a girl white as the snows that fall in these hills. He passed here two days since. Into the Nevadas, into the Nevadas, he has gone, senor don!"
Morales believed him, believed him even more implicitly than if his mind had been sound. Despite the dubious looks and shakes of the head upon the part of the guide Aguilino, all the cabalgadores agreed that the poor feeble-minded fellow would be incapable of perpetrating a deception. With energy and ardor they had pressed on.