“So sorry you had to go,” he said, addressing the departed lord of day. He tried to look about him. “A nice fix I’m in,” he added.
He attempted to ride on in the dark, but, remembering the precipices, dared not touch rein. He thought of trusting to the instinct of the mare, but that soon failed him: the animal came to a full stop. The stillness grew profound, the night impenetrable.
Then, suddenly, there was a wild cacophony from the forest on his left. It shook the air and set the echoes clanging from cliff to cavern. The mare reared and snorted. Lights danced among the trees; the lights became leaping flames; the noise was identifiable as the clatter of dogs and the shouts of men. Cartaret subdued his mare just as a torch-bearing party of picturesquely-garbed hunters plunged into the road directly in front of him and came, at sight of him, to a stand.
In the flickering light from a trio of burning pine-knots, the sight was enough strange. There were six men in all: three of them, in peasant costume, bearing aloft the torches, and two more, similarly dressed, holding leashes at which huge boar-hounds tugged. A pair of torch-bearers carried a large bough from the shoulder of one to the shoulder of the other, and suspended feet upward from this bough—bending with the weight—was a great, gray-black boar, its woolly hair red with blood, the coarse bristles standing erect like a comb along its spine, its two enormous tusks prism-shaped and shining like prisms in the light from the pine-knots.
A deep bass voice issued a challenge in Eskura. It came from the sixth member of the party, unmistakably in command.
He was one of the biggest men Cartaret had ever seen. He must have stood six-feet-six in his boots and was proportionately broad, deep-chested and long-armed. In one hand he held an old-fashioned boar-spear—its blade was red—as a sportsman that scorns the safety of a boar-hunt with a modern rifle.
The torchlight, flickering over his tanned and bearded face, showed features handsome and aquiline, fashioned with a severe nobility. Instead of a hat, a scarf of red silk was wrapped about his black curls and knotted at one side. His eyes, under eagle-brows, were fierce and gray. Cartaret instinctively recalled his early ideas of a dark Wotan in the Nibelungen-Lied.
The American dismounted. He said, in English:
“You are the Don Ricardo Ethenard-Eskurola?”
He had guessed rightly: the big man bowed assent.