The Firebrand

by S. R. Crockett

So they rode on together over the great tawny brick-dusty wastes of Old Castile, silent mostly, but the silence occasionally broken by speech, friendly enough on either side. Behind them pounded La Giralda, gaunt as the sergeant himself, leather-legginged, booted and spurred, watching them keenly out of her ancient, unfathomable gipsy eyes.

And ever as they rode the Guadarrama mountains rose higher and whiter out of the vast and hideous plain, the only interruption to the circling horizon of brown and parched corn lands. But at this season scrub-oak and juniper were the only shrubs to be seen, and had there been a Cristino outpost anywhere within miles, the party must have been discerned riding steadily towards the northern slopes of the mountains. But neither man nor beast took notice of them, and a certain large uncanny silence brooded over the plain.

At one point, indeed, they passed near enough to distinguish in the far north the snow-flecked buttresses of the Sierra de Moncayo. But these, they knew, were the haunts of their Carlist allies. The towns and villages of the plain, however, were invariably held by Nationals, and it had often gone hard with them, had not Sergeant Cardono detached himself from the cavalcade, and, venturing alone into the midst of the enemy, by methods of his own produced the materials for many an excellent meal. At last, one day the Sergeant came back to the party with an added gloom on his long, lean, leathern-textured face. He had brought with him an Estramaduran ham, a loaf of wheaten bread, and a double string of sausages. But upon his descending into the temporary camp which sheltered the party in the bottom of a barranco, or deep crack in the parched plateau overgrown with scented thyme and dwarf oak, it became obvious that he had news of the most serious import to communicate.

He called Rollo aside, and told him how he had made his way into a village, as was his custom, and found all quiet—the shops open, but none to attend to them, the customs superintendent in his den by the gate, seated on his easy chair, but dead—the presbytery empty of the priest, the river bank dotted with its array of worn scrubbing boards, but not a washerwoman to be seen. Only a lame lad, furtively plundering, had leaped backward upon his crutch with a swift drawing of his knife and a wolfish gleam of teeth. He had first of all warned the Sergeant to keep off at his peril, but had afterwards changed his tone and confessed to him that the plague was abroad in the valley of the Duero, and that he was the only being left alive in the village save the vulture and the prowling dog.

"The plague!" Sergeant Cardono had gasped, like every Spaniard stricken sick at the very sound of the word.

"Yes, and I own everything in the village," asserted the imp. "If you want anything here you must pay me for it!"

The Sergeant found it even as the cripple had said. There was not a single living inhabitant in the village. Here and there a shut door and a sickening smell betrayed the fact that some unfortunates had been left to die untended. Etienne and John Mortimer were for different reasons unwilling to taste of the ham and bread he had brought back, thinking that these might convey the contagion, but La Giralda and the Sergeant laughed their fears to scorn, and together retired to prepare the evening meal.

As the others made their preparations for the night, watering their beasts and grooming them with the utmost care, the little crook-backed imp from the village appeared on the brink of the barranco, his sallow, weazened face peeping suspiciously out of the underbrush, and his crutch performing the most curious evolutions in the air.

There was something unspeakably eerie in the aspect of the solitary survivor of so many living people, left behind to prey like a ghoul on the abandoned possessions of the fear-stricken living and the untestamented property of the dead.

Concha shrank instinctively from his approach, and the boy, perceiving his power over her, came scuttling like a weasel through the brushwood, till little more than a couple of paces interposed between him and the girl. Frozen stiff with loathing and terror, it was not for some time that Concha could cry out and look round hastily for Rollo, who (doubtless in his capacity of leader of the expedition) was not slow in hastening to her assistance.