Like a furious wild boar, he entered the fields, trampling down the plants, jumping over the irrigation streams, breaking off the canes; if he diverged from the road, it was only to reach Pimentó's farm more quickly.
Some one was at the door. The blindness of anger and the twilight shadows prevented him from distinguishing if it was a man or a woman, but he saw how the person with one leap sprang in and closed the door suddenly, frightened by that vision on the point of raising his gun and firing.
Batiste stopped before the closed door of the farm-house:
"Pimentó!... Thief! Come out!"
And his voice amazed him as though it was another's.
It was a voice which was trembling and shrill, high-pitched and suffocated by anger.
No one answered. The door remained closed; closed the windows and the three loop-holes at the top which lighted the upper story, the cambra, where the crops were kept.
The scoundrel was probably gazing at him through some crack, perhaps even cocking his gun to fire some treacherous shot from one of the high small windows. And instinctively, with that foresight of the Moor always alert in suspecting all kinds of evil tricks of the enemy, he hid behind the trunk of a giant fig-tree which cast its shade over Pimentó's house.
The latter's name resounded ceaslessly in the silence of the twilight accompanied by all kinds of insults.
"Come down! You coward! Come out, you thug!"