CHAPTER XIX
The guide did not squirm. He could not squirm. He was stiff with terror of the misty abysmal depths below. Yet, somehow, he managed to stutter:
"Heart of God, senor, don't! You will lose yourselves—in these savage mountains—without me to guide you! You will all starve to death! Maestro, for the love of Mary the Pitiful, don't, don't!"
There was something of truth in what the guide said. Morales put him back upon the path. But he said with bitterness and brooding menace, "We will lose no more mules. You will see to that, eh, my trustworthy man?"
Aguilino worked more cleverly after that.
In the dusk of the following night, Turiddu, the mule led by Morales himself, went over a cliff, almost dragging the matador along. There was no use blaming the guide, Aguilino. He had not been near the doomed ass during the long morning and the longer afternoon.
Besides, twenty times that day the beast had come within an ace of its eventual finis. Since dawn, it had conducted itself in a contrary and restive manner; it had shied without seeming cause, reared and plunged forward in sudden frights, caracoled and beat the path with its hoofs, and whinnied, snorted, and shaken its head as though unaccountably irritated. It seemed a mule spirited and unrestrainably stimulated by an overfeeding of oats; a mule intoxicated, possessed of a demon!
What had befallen Turiddu in the shadowy darkness of the prior night, Dios sabe! Yet the Gypsies have a jockey trick which might explain the whole mystery. When selling or bartering mules and borricos, they drop a tiny nodule of quicksilver into the long ears of the beasts.
Have you ever suffered a drop of water in the ear and been unable to move a hand to flick it out? The nodule of quicksilver is as irritating as that. It is wet and never still. It frets the mules and causes them to liven up their paces and seem more mettlesome.
Morales and his cabalgadores watched the guide with deep but indefensible suspicion. Vexedly they wondered and worried. Finally, in the next few days, they were provoked into savage anger when three more mules took it upon themselves to act unconventionally, and then die in fits, one, two, three.