The vision vanished; he was still in Pirovani’s former house, sitting beside the woman whom he had desired with all the fervor that men isolated and lonely feel for something that seems forever beyond their reach; and now his eager and hungry eyes rested upon her.
“Paris!” he repeated. “How I want to be there with you ... Elena. For you will allow me to call you Elena, won’t you?”
CHAPTER XVIII
TO young Watson it seemed that events were now following one another with the dizzy rapidity and the absurd lack of logical sequence characteristic of a dream, or of something equally independent of time and space.
First came shots; then there passed before his eyes several riders, some of them advancing at a gallop, while others, halting, fired at the mountaineers. In vain Piola raised both hands in the air, shouting,
“Don’t shoot, brother, we surrender!”
The men just arriving didn’t want to hear and went on firing in spite of Robledo’s shouts.
Piola’s comrade fell wounded; and at this Piola himself thought it advisable to fall to the ground and take refuge behind his horse.
The whole group of horsemen from La Presa were finally assembled on the same plateau in front of the ranch house; but Watson paid not the slightest attention to Robledo’s exclamations of astonishment at finding him there. Nor did he waste any time on the comisario’s salutations. Anyway these two recent arrivals promptly forgot him, and went to see what information they could get out of Piola by placing their revolver muzzles against his chest, while they demanded that he tell them what had been done with Celinda. Some of the other members of the rescue party dismounted to have a look at the man just wounded, as well as at the one hit a few minutes earlier by don Carlos.
What most attracted Watson’s attention in the whole strange scene was the presence of his own horse there, with Cachafaz importantly straddling him and pointing accusingly at the three prisoners.