“One of these wolves, these mountain apes,” he began sourly, “has dared to play a little part in imitation of a man—of me, in short—with the grotesque result one would expect from such a travesty. As regards the animal himself, it matters not at all. But he has injured me in a degree so monstrous that his blood alone cannot wash out his crime!”
Lalor looked at the Chief, who had moved and was hanging over the edge of the terrace with the threatening poise of a hawk, scanning the figures beneath, who, manifestly conscious of the deadly gaze, lay motionless in varied and picturesque attitudes round the fires.
“One Pablo has captured and held to ransom a lady of wealthy though not noble family. It came to my knowledge as all events come, and I descended the mountains and caught the fellow red-handed,” the Chief went on. “I returned, bringing both with me. The señorita had been frightened, even maltreated! Psst!” Don Q. emitted a hiss of contempt and malevolence. “Then I considered what I should do.”
Lalor comprehended that last evening’s four good hours of bleak and scowling silence had been spent by the brigand in making up his mind how he might adequately punish the wrongdoer. The outcome of these terrible musings appeared to be a letter that Don Q. now unfolded before the young Englishman.
“What do you think of this, señor?” he asked, “I will read it to you, omitting the compliments of greeting with which you are familiar. I address myself to the Governor of the Prison of Castelleno.”
“What?” ejaculated Lalor, “not the man whose ears—”
Don Q. bowed in his courtly manner.
“Whose ears I regretted being obliged to add to my little museum up here in the mountains—the same, señor.” He began to read, “Don Q. has the honor to send herewith the person of Pablo Gomez, formerly of his band, who has committed the unpardonable indiscretion of holding to ransom on his own responsibility the Señorita Doña Manuela de Lucas. Don Q., as all who acquaint themselves with the great events of the day are aware, has never, during his long, memorable and blameless career, held to ransom a lady. Don Q. trusts that his excellency the Governor of the Prison of Castelleno will, as a man of honor, clear the name of Don Q. of the stigma cast upon it by the horrible action of the scoundrel, Pablo Gomez, and garrotte the fellow on the highest point of the prison roof in the sight of all the world.’ After that the usual greetings of farewell. Does it appear to you, señor, that I have made my meaning perfectly comprehensible?”
“Very much so,” replied Lalor.
The Chief clapped his hands and Robledo, his trusted servant, came running up the path to the cave. Giving orders to bring Pablo and the señorita into his presence, Don Q. resumed,
“You must understand, dear friend, that the rabble of the plains are but too glad to soil the record of a man so much better than themselves. I could naturally cause Pablo to be killed in many excellent ways. I could, for instance, blindfold him and request him to walk ten paces forward—the ninth step including a fall of four hundred feet. This little promenade, when explained beforehand to the person of whom there is question, causes a highly unpleasant quarter-of-an-hour, señor.”
Lalor assured the Chief he could well believe it.
“But in that case they who hate me in the plains would inevitably accuse me of departing from my rule of never causing annoyance to a lady. I have resolved to send Pablo to be dealt with by the law of Spain, so that the true story of the matter may reach my revilers.”
Lalor opened his lips to speak, but after hesitation forbore. The brigand was not one with whose counsels it was well to meddle uninvited. At the moment a group of men, haling with them a reluctant captive, appeared climbing the path. In front of them walked a handsome woman of, perhaps, twenty years of age.
He rose and with conspicuous elegance of movement, swept his hat to the ground. “Señorita, I kiss your feet.”
The girl grew whiter as she gazed at the bald-browed vulture aspect of Don Q. She turned to Lalor and, reading pity in his glance, she begged him in broken words to plead for her.
“There will be no need, señorita,” replied Lalor, in halting Spanish, “Señor Don Q. is your best friend.”
“I beg you, señorita, to accept my most humble apologies for the indignity with which this miscreant has treated you.” The Chief pointed to Pablo, whose face expressed hang-dog terror, “I have written to the Governor of the Prison of Castelleno to deal with him to the utmost severity of the law. While you, lady, shall be conducted with all care and tenderness to your family.”
“You are about to set me free?” cried the girl.
“Doubtless, you have heard many things of me, Doña Manuela,” replied Don Q. sadly. “Have those stories ever included one of cruelty or imprisonment imposed upon a woman?”
“No, no, señor. You are good, you deprive me of words!” she faltered. “How can I thank you?”
“Very easily, most beautiful flower. Be good enough to make it well known in the plains that, in whatever manner I may deal with men, my bearing toward ladies is above reproach.”
“I will tell them all you have done for me! You saved me!” by a slight gesture she made evident her horror of Pablo. “I thank you with all my heart, señor.”
Don Q. turned to Lalor.
“My friend,” he said softly, “you will go with this lady to the lower pass. May I beg the favor of you? You can reassure her as these rough ones never can.”
Lalor expressed his delight at the commission, and on his return a few hours later to the cave he found Don Q. in unusually good spirits.
“By this time the civil guards have charge of our good Pablo,” he remarked, “Robledo will see him enter the gates of the prison, and in a day or two will bring to us the news of the execution. Perhaps, dear friend, you think I have shown weakness in allowing that rascal to get off so cheaply, considering his crime in causing distress to the señorita, who is indeed as beautiful as rumor declared her to be. But what will you? I, of all persons, cannot afford to lose my hitherto unsullied name.
“A good name is like snow, the faintest stain has power to sully it!” The Chief shook his head with an air of profound conviction; then, changing his tone, “But the matter is now done with. Come, friend, light your pipe, and let us wander among the flowers of memory. The world has its wonderful histories, but few are more full of romance than that of our old Spain. It pleases me at times to reflect that countless generations have dwelt in those fat plains below us, but that until I came here, these higher gorges of the sierra have been desolate, and have seldom echoed to the voices of midget humanity.”
“You have never thought of retiring from the sierras—from your profession?” inquired Lalor.
Don Q., who had been huddled by the fire, sat up. The glancing flames played over him, and never had the contrast between his fragile body and fierce heart been so apparent.
“But, señor, you appear not to comprehend this matter!” he exclaimed, his thin voice taking on the sibilant sound of anger. “Your question is ill-considered. It proves that you have failed to understand the motives which led me to adopt my present profession. In business, perhaps, as in that of the wineseller or the dealer in vegetables, which has as its object the amassing of a competence, one hears of persons retiring. But have you ever heard of a poet, an author, an artist, retiring?”
Lalor hastened to acknowledge that he had not.
“The same rule applies to me,” pursued the Chief haughtily. “When I first came up into the sierras I was already rich. Now I am immensely so. But the excitements of my life and the greatness of my career are as dear to me as ever, and the idea of leaving them is intolerable!
“Also, would it suit with my dignity to sue for a pardon?” he resumed more quietly. “And, having got it, to become a mere politician? A man of my eminence cannot disappear. No, seññor, the feud between the law and myself will never be ended until I am dead. And w
hen the names which today appear notable in the land, are forgotten, men will still speak of Don Quebrantahuesos. My fame and my doings have enriched the Spanish language!”
Lalor knew that the strange man who spoke thus, spoke the bare truth. Perhaps his intelligence had become warped by many years of seclusion, but without question the Chief meant all that he said.
“Señor, have you no fear of capture?” Lalor could not withhold the question.
“Ah, no, my dear friend, none,” the thin claw-like fingers were spread to the blaze, “none whatever. I shall die at my own time and in my own fashion.”
The young author sighed. He had grown almost attached to the strange, inhuman outlaw, whose nature, as he now knew, could he touched to such fine issues.
“Why do you sigh?” Don Q. asked in his courteous way.
“Pardon me,” exclaimed the young man impetuously, “but who of us can say that luck will forever be on his side? You are here alone. Those about you are wolves—you have called them so. And wolves will drink one another’s blood. Listen to me, England offers a safe retreat.”
The delicate yellow hand went up to deprecate further urging.
“I thank you, Señor Lalor, for your thoughts of me. I, too, will sigh when the day comes that I can with safety send you to the coast to take ship for your own land. As for me, have no fear. When I die, it will be here. And unborn men will fear to linger alone among the sierra, where the great Chief of the sequestradores lies asleep.”
* * * *
To follow the proper sequence of events one must pass down through the Boca de Jabili to the thicket of laurestinus bushes nestling in a romantic gorge among the lower slopes of the sierra. There Robledo left Pablo bound, while he hid himself on an overhanging ledge, where he lay at his ease in the sun and kept watch on events in the ravine below.
The pair of civil guards, whose duty it was to patrol that locality, presently rode into view, and, with much caution, for treachery is not unknown to the corps, approached the spot where a mysterious note had told them they would find the robber, Pablo Gomez. All turned out as the note foretold, and Robledo heard one of the men remark,
“The goatherds say Don Q. is the devil; but he does not lie to us—that is strange.”
The watcher on the ledge above shook his head dubiously. For his own part he believed that the Chief must be playing a very deep game indeed. In due time he came down from his ledge and, by taking leisurely short cuts, kept the civil guards and their prisoner in view to the moment when the gates of the prison closed behind them.
His orders were to await in the town until news of the execution of Pablo should be made public. This news was not long in coming. On the third day reports circulated that Pablo Gomez, the brigand of the sierra, had expiated his many crimes.
Robledo was free to return to the mountains, but one little half-hour must still be snatched to further his own affairs. Perhaps our readers may remember a certain woman with a fine ankle and lustrous eyes, whom Don Luis had once seen from a balcony and admired; also that those dark eyes were lit with lovelight for the dirty, brave, and picturesque Robledo. The thought of them tempted him to delay. It was nightfall when he strolled into a narrow street with his guitar and sang a serenade of passion and farewell under a barred window, until the moonbeams showed him the flashing eyes and teeth of his Isabelilla behind the bars.
At the moment, a sound of hurrying footsteps came down the street, and Robledo and his guitar were at once swallowed up in the darkness of a neighboring doorway.
The two men appeared striding swiftly along the line of shadow, but as they drew near Robledo’s hiding place, a shaft of moonlight through a break in the house-roofs caught the half-muffled profile of one of them. Robledo first started and crossed himself, then with a quick, monkey gesture he put out his hand and touched the cloak of this person as he passed.
This was no apparition, but Pablo Gomez, very much in the flesh.
Robledo comprehended that this meant some serious trouble was brewing against the whole band of the sequestradores in the sierra. He himself could not guess what it might be, but he would hasten back to Don Q., who knew everything, who could defeat every stratagem.
Robledo inserted one lean brown hand behind a bar and drew himself up to the window until the comely, powdered face and his own sun-browned one were close together, and a brief whispering ensued. Two minutes later he dropped down, wiped some powder from his lips, and slid away through the shadows. On the second day he was urging his mule at a speed it had never before attained, through the Boca de Jabili.
“Well, my child,” said Don Q., gently, when Robledo once more stood before him. “You have fulfilled my commands or you would not be here?”
“Yes, lord.”
“And the vile Pablo has been garrotted?”
“No, lord.”
“Corpse of a scullion! You have dared to disobey me!”
“No, lord, no! On the third day it was spoken on authority from the prison that Pablo was dead, and that his excellency the Governor had given fifty pesetas to pay for masses for his soul.”
“Go on.”
“I desired to see the dead body, and I went with the crowd to the prison, but none was admitted. So I waited, for it is not good for a poor man to bring news on hearsay to my lord.”
The Chief nodded impatiently.
“When dark fell I went to the house of my cousin, for I was doubtful,” Robledo went on with nervousness.
“With a guitar?” sneered the Chief venomously.
“It is true, lord.” The robber crossed himself, for Don Q.’s knowledge always seemed uncanny, “I carried my guitar in order to make those who met me believe that my service was to a lady’s eyes, not to my lord of the sierra.”
“And the name of the cousin is Isabelilla, is not that so?”
“Yes, lord.” Robledo was apprehensive; but the importance of his news gave him courage. “While I waited to enter her house, two men came down the street. One was the porter of the prison gate, and the other had the face of Pablo.”
A spasm of fury seemed to shake Don Q.
“Ah, infamy!” he whispered half to himself; then louder. “And what did my good Robledo think? That he had seen a ghost?”
“No, lord, for I spoke to my cousin at the window—no more. Isabelilla had heard—for her mother has washing from the prison of the laces and the linens of her excellency, Doña Catalina—that one said at the prison that Pablo had been spared, and another executed in his name. That is all!”
Don Q.’s peaked nose sank from sight in the breast of his folded cloak, and he sat brooding in his bird-like attitude for many minutes.
At length—“Robledo.”
“Yes, lord.”
“You will give this money, it is five hundred dollars, to thine Isabelilla.”
Robledo bowed and muttered his eager gratitude to the Chief for this gift.
“Also there is a message for Isabelilla.”
“Yes, lord.”
“Say to her that if she fails to procure the earliest news of all that passes in the prison, I will cut off the nose of her cousin Robledo.… Go!”
Even in the rewards of the fierce, vulture-like Chief, there was always the hint of a threat. It was not only characteristic of him, but justified by deep knowledge of the human material he dwelt with. Robledo departed into the valley, treading very softly.
Lalor, seeing that Don Q. pulled his hat over his brows and returned to brooding over the fire, left the Chief to himself. No doubt some treachery was intended, and Lalor hardly wondered at the fact when he recalled a certain story about the ears of the Governor of the Prison of Castelleno which had been told to him with many gestures of horror.
In the evening, however, Don Q. became positively gay, and, departing from his usual custom of never drinking any but the thinnest of cou
ntry wine, broke a bottle or two with Lalor of a flavor seldom tasted by an English palate. He even got out his guitar and sang in his high, thin voice a forgotten drinking song.
While pouring out another glass of wine he asked abruptly:
“You have heard of the Governor of Castelleno? He is, in truth, a vain fellow, but I believed in his honor. I have been too generous. Never again, señor, will I trust in nobility of class compelling nobility of action.”
Lalor inquired what he supposed the authorities meant to do.
“They have given Pablo his life on the condition that he betrays me. That, of course, is clear. They have never been able to find the hidden way to this valley: Pablo Gomez is to tell them the secret and lead them here!” he laughed with sibilant mockery. “So the Governor dreams of my capture—dreams that Pablo will guide him to my unknown retreat? It is well! For Pablo will find no path to follow. And more, señor, I say to you, that before many days are over, the monks of Castelleno will have grown husky with singing masses for the soul of that very infamous gentleman and calumniator, Don Hugo, Governor of the Prison of Castelleno.”
* * * *
Days passed, and spies departed from the valley and found their way back again; ragged goatherds and charcoal-burners came cringing and crossing themselves into the presence of the Chief, who seemed to tear out the inmost soul of each with his questions and the glare of his malignant eyes. Lalor listened, marveling more and more at the intuition with which Don Q. pierced to the bottom of every man’s knowledge, and drew from him details of himself, his neighbors, and his surroundings, thus gathering a mass of minute information. He understood that such knowledge being translated meant—power that to the peasants seemed superhuman.
News from the plains grew more and more ominous. Stories floated up of cavalry and infantry arriving and encamping outside the town of Castelleno because the barracks were full. Then in the dusk of one starlit night half-a-dozen messengers followed upon one another’s heels with the news that a systematic movement had begun towards the sierra.
The Victorian Villains Megapack Page 38