Part 34

Within a few miles of Calatayud, a narrow path, little more than a foot-track, leads down from the hills on to the highroad to Saragossa. Just before joining the highway, the path winds between two low bluffs that screen it from the sight of wayfarers below. Indeed, any muleteer or arriero unacquainted with the country might almost pass unawares the spot where road and hill-path meet, so completely is it hidden by the ash-gray contours of the hills.

About the time when Jack dismounted at the gate of the Casa Alvarez, a man was making his way downward along this narrow track, urging a heavily-laden mule with low cries to hasten its flagging pace. He was a young man, in the costume of a muleteer; his cheeks were pale and sunken, his eyes unnaturally bright. Every now and again he would throw an anxious backward glance over his shoulder, not consciously, as if he feared pursuit, but as though in obedience to some impulse of which he was hardly aware.

When he approached the point where the track joined the road he stepped to the mule's head and brought the animal to a stand-still, looking from left to right as if in doubt. After a moment's hesitation he tied the mule to one of the rare saplings that grew at the side of the track, and advanced warily towards the highway, pausing at short intervals, and bending his head forward to listen. There was no sound save the silver trill of a lark far above, and the soughing of a light breeze as it lapped the edges of the hills. The man moved forward again, still more cautiously; rounding a knoll, he came to the road, that stretched in gentle undulations for several hundreds of yards in a straight line east and west. No one was in sight. The man gave a sigh of relief, followed by one of those quick uneasy backward glances that seemed to be habitual with him. Rapidly scanning the road once more, he returned to the mule, released the bridle from the tree, and slowly led the laden animal down the path.

He was within a dozen paces of the dusty highway when he halted suddenly, dragging heavily upon the reins. His dusky, olive-hued features paled, the hand that grasped the bridle trembled nervously; his whole attitude was one of dire apprehension. For a moment he stood intently listening, his eyes fixed in a wide stare; then, wheeling the mule sharply round and prodding the weary beast desperately with the knife he drew from his belt, he raced back along the track. For a full quarter of a mile he continued his upward course; then he stopped, and again turned his head towards the road in the attitude of listening. At first he could hear nothing but the throbbing of his heart and the quick breathing of the mule by his side; but gradually the clatter of many hoofs on the hard road became more and more audible through the clear air, though the horsemen were hidden from view by the obstructing hills. They arrived at what he judged to be the place he had just left. He heard "Halt!" in a rough stentorian tone. The voice was Spanish, and its effect on the anxious listening man was as that of a galvanic shock. With a smothered cry he dashed forward, dragging the unwilling mule, which he goaded with alternate stabs of the knife and whispered words half of menace half of entreaty.

There was no halting now. For mile after mile they continued their flight, until, when both mule and man were exhausted, they at length stopped at the edge of a wild gorge high up in the mountains. There, for the first time since he fled the voice, the man looked carefully around. The place was evidently new to him. In his flight he had diverged at the first opportunity from the track, along which he had come, not then alone, earlier in the day. The new path was more difficult than the old; it wound away from his obvious destination; it led, indeed, almost due north into the heart of the mountain country--the Sierra de Moncayo, the precipitous granite range where King AEolus had his mythic throne. But the fugitive knew not, cared not, whither he went, so long as it was away from the voice of his countrymen. And he avoided, with the shrinking of dread, the track he knew.

One thing was remarkable during his late impetuous flight. He seemed to have forgotten his strange trick of glancing backward over his shoulder. Many times he turned half round to see if he was followed, but consciously, less abjectly, for all his panic fear.

When he had rested for a few minutes, he rose and carefully scanned the surrounding country, debating with himself what course to follow. His view was circumscribed by the irregular masses of bare rock and sparsely wooded slopes that formed the horizon. But he appeared at last to have made up his mind, for, pulling the mule slowly round on the narrow track, he took a few steps as if to return in the direction from which he had come. But his bearing was timid, uncertain, vacillating, and when a mountain eagle swept from its eyry, and screamed just above his head, he started as if struck, hauled his poor beast feverishly across the track, and once more pressed in hot haste towards the north.

For some time he marched on rapidly. Then the fatigue of travelling over the steep uneven track again made itself felt; his pace slackened; he moved along behind the mule as if mechanically, while mechanically he still urged it forward with his knife. For minutes at a stretch he seemed as in a dream, immersed in dark thought. Again he glanced fearfully backward, not as though seeking a visible object of menace, not at the frowning hills, but with eyes that attempted to pierce the infinite for a something beyond. At moments he started from his waking nightmare to a full consciousness of his position among these bleak inhospitable hills. The phantoms dogging his thoughts then vanished, giving place to real cares--physical pain, a sense of desolation. At such times he searched anxiously for a path to the west, whereby making a circuit he might reach his goal, avoiding the highroad, where he had so narrowly escaped the hands of his countrymen the guerrilleros. But the track wound on, swerving sometimes to right or left, yet leading remorselessly northward, no by-path branching towards Calatayud. He dared not turn back. The danger of the road, had he known it, was past; but the awful risk of capture made him sick with fear. He plodded on, sunk more and more in dark imaginings, until at last, when the red sun was sinking below the distant purple peaks on his left, the mule suddenly stopped, and, breathing heavily, dropped upon its knees. The poor brute was spent. The man awoke with a start from his reverie. He was on the edge of a deep gully; giant rocks hemmed him in on either side; the path--there was no path! For the first time he realized that the granite hills held him in their grip.

He looked at the mule, that lay with lolling tongue and starting eyes. The animal was famished. He had no food for it, none for himself; only now was he conscious of his own gnawing hunger. He loosened the girths, and, removing the heavy panniers from the mule's back, enabled it to rise. There was nothing to tie it to. Sinking down on a flat rock, he held the bridle and peered into the deepening gloom. He dared not move forward; one careless step in this wild place might hurl them both into an abyss. There he sat, and the darkness gathered, and the chill of night wrapped him round.

What were his thoughts as he waited and endured? Who shall say? Human justice may falter, may be long upon the road; Eternal Justice is instant, relentless, inevitable. The sense of doom was upon this man, as he held sombre vigil with the cold accusing stars.

It was an unkempt, haggard, agued figure that rose stiffly and dizzily from his hard couch as soon as the pale dawn came creeping through the narrow gully among the hills. He could just see the mule standing motionless a few yards away. He shuddered as his eye fell upon the brass-clamped coffers at its feet. Then he moved as if to pass away, leaving behind him both mule and treasure, the visible links that bound him to the past. But after a few staggering steps he hesitated, set his teeth in desperate resolve, and returning, painfully lifted the boxes on to the panniers, the mule standing with drooped ears, and shivering in the raw air. In the half-light he led the famished beast away from the ravine, searching the rocky ground narrowly for marks of its track. Here and there appeared a stone covered with gray lichen; at these the mule halted and licked a scanty, bitter meal. At one point a silver rivulet poured from a fissure and fell clattering upon the rocks far down the steep. There Miguel dropped to his knees and drank with the animal, then went on again.

It was nearly two hours before he saw, on the far side of a deep ravine, a foot-path winding about a wall of rock. Was it the path he had left? He did not know. Only the guerrilleros he feared to meet could have told him that but one other path led across these barren heights. Leading the mule cautiously down one face of the ravine, he hauled it with infinite difficulty up the other. The poor beast, faint with hunger, had scarcely strength to crawl when at last it scrambled with its burden on to the track. But for the constant goad it would have fallen by the way. The path ran north and south; Miguel hesitated which direction to take. Northward he would have to scale steeper heights, but would increase his distance from the garden of his fear; southward, he might reach Calatayud and safety with the French, but who knew what danger might lie between? As the question beat this way and that in his tortured brain, his eyes lit upon a long, thin, jagged rock in which, in the gloom of the preceding evening, he had marked with a shudder a grotesque resemblance to a human form he would have given worlds to forget. Then he knew that he was upon the track from which he had wandered; he would persevere in the attempt to find a cross-path to the west. Surely there must be one that would lead, by however long a circuit, to his goal?

He turned wearily towards the north and instinctively glanced back across the hills, now variously tinted by the ascending sun. As he did so his eyes dilated, and for some moments he stood as if rooted to the ground. In the clear distance two figures mounted on mules were coming towards him. Even while he looked he saw one, the smaller of the two, pointing in his direction. The other drew rein for an instant, then both urged their mules to a trot. A bend in the path hid them from view, and Miguel leapt round, knowing that he was in very truth a hunted man. For nearly a day he had been pursued by the phantom of his crime. He had run from the shadow of a sound, fled from the perils his own imagination had created. Terror of he knew not what had left him all unstrung. But now that vengeance dogged him in real bodily form his mind braced itself to meet it. Only for a moment did his heart quail with misgiving; he reeled slightly, and clutched at the mule's bridle for support; then, recovering himself instantly, he struck the jaded beast, and with a fierce cry drove it before him up the path.

Suddenly the track bent eastward, it ceased to rise, he seemed to be on the northern slope of the watershed up which he had toiled during the previous day. He topped the crest. The path stretched downwards before him; and, scattering the loose stones to right and left, Miguel raced on with the mule until at a turn in the track a vast and brilliant panorama opened before his yearning eyes. Below him, at the edge of the long slope, stretched a rolling wooded country intersected by numerous watercourses shining in the morning sun. Far away on the horizon a silver streak wound and doubled on itself. It must be the river Ebro. Could he but gain the rich champaign below, he hoped that, for a time at least, he would be safe. In some copse or covert, vineyard or olive-ground, even in the byways of some hamlet, he might find a temporary refuge. But with the thought itself its utter hopelessness was borne in upon him. His pursuers must be closing in fast, although the windings of the track hid them from him when at intervals he turned to see. Panting himself, he dragged his panting beast with reckless haste, though in his inmost consciousness sure that the road was too long, the time too short. One solitary hope remained to him. If he left the mule with its retarding load, abandoned the prize for which he had staked his all, he might perhaps even yet find some rocky defile, some favouring grove, wherein to hide and baffle pursuit. But no, the renunciation was too great for his blighted soul. For the treasure he had schemed and sinned; he could not, dared not, let it go.

Scrambling on down the mountain track, he spied at length, some hundreds of feet below him, a narrow hillroad to which his headlong course must lead him by and by. Its farther side bordered a ravine. The road seemed near at hand, but as he continued his flight he found that the downward track zigzagged on the face of the slope, so that sometimes two or three of its coils lay immediately beneath him. There was no shorter way. Approaching the end of the last of these windings, he was warned by the clatter of dislodged stones that his pursuers were now hard upon his heels. He threw a quick glance upward; there, two hundred feet above him, the riders crossed his sight, following at headlong speed the first winding of the track. Without pause he raced staggeringly along.

All unknowing, he had himself been watched for some time from below. At the edge of the hill-road, hidden from him by a jutting mass of rock, a man was resting, seated on a boulder, eating a frugal meal from a wallet hung at his neck. He was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man, with wasted cheeks; thin, unkempt locks straggled from beneath his cap; his long tangled beard was snowy white. His attitude was of one in pain. At first he watched the impetuous muleteer dully, without attention; then he started, paused in lifting a piece of bread, and stared long with quickening breath. As the mule turned the last of the zigzags a sunbeam flashed on the brass of one of the boxes. The seated man rose; his eyes, opened to their fullest width, now fixed themselves with a glare of the intensest hatred upon the fugitive approaching, until once more he was hidden from sight.

Then with the stealthy movement of a cat the worn, panting wayfarer glided from the brink of the ravine to the opposite side of the road, and crouched down under cover of the rocks that had hidden him from the man above. Almost ceasing to breathe, he drew his knife, and waited. His movements suggested that he expected the muleteer to emerge into the road between himself and the animal. But not thus was the event ordered. Rounding the last turn of the path, Miguel, to avoid a projecting rock, had changed sides; thus when, after a few seconds, he reached the junction of path and road, the mule was between him and the man who lay there waiting, ready to strike. The anticipated moment was come. But Miguel was snatched from human vengeance; for him was reserved another fate. With an inarticulate cry of baffled rage the ambuscader sprang forward as if to overtake the mule, but, under the impetus gained during the last few yards of the hill-path, the beast was still moving quickly in an oblique direction across the road. Miguel at one and the same moment heard the cry and saw the flash of the knife. Till then he was unaware of his enemy's presence, so absorbed was his attention with the path ahead and the progress of the pursuers behind. At the cry he gave a startled side-long glance at the wild menacing features glaring at him across the mule's neck. In that dark look he read his doom.

It fell more quickly than any of the four persons--the actors themselves, the spectators above--could have thought possible. The two riders on the steep hill-path had now come within full sight of the scene passing on the road. As they gazed, holding their breath, they saw the mule between the two men staggering across the road. Startled by the sudden flash of the uplifted blade, the poor beast swerved towards the ravine, driving Miguel, all unconscious, on to the brink. He had already slipped towards the almost perpendicular descent before he realized his peril; then he clutched wildly at the slackened bridle, dragging the mule after him. It stumbled at the edge; burdened with its treasure-laden panniers it could not recover its footing, and in a moment man and beast, with one mingled scream of terror, disappeared into the yawning gulf.

The spectators above had halted, transfixed by the appalling tragedy. Then they hastened downward impetuously. The older man had fallen forward on the very edge of the ravine. Jack feared that he would follow Miguel Priego to destruction. But when, reaching the road, he threw himself from his mule and stooped to the prone figure, he found that the man had fainted, overcome by his fierce passion and the agitation of the last tense moments. Then for the first time Jack was aware of the thunderous roar of a torrent, and looking into the ravine he saw a white flood swirling over the rocks hundreds of feet below.

"Pepito," he said in a strained voice, "clamber down carefully. See what has become of Don Miguel--if anything can be done for him."

While the boy was gone on his perilous errand Jack loosened the clothing of the prostrate man, fetched water from a mountain-rill, and bathed his head. He opened his eyes, but there was no speculation in them. They wandered vacantly and closed again. Jack looked at him pityingly, and, as he looked, felt vaguely that the worn features were familiar to him. They reminded him of someone he had known as a child in Barcelona, a man who had mended his toys for him, and carried him on his back when tired; who had petted him and scolded him by turns, and whom he had alternately plagued and domineered over. Was it Jose Pinzon? Jack could scarcely believe it. The Jose he had known was a man touching his prime, strong, stalwart, bright-eyed, raven-haired; the man lying before him was bent and aged, wasted, hoary, decrepit. Yet the likeness to the old Jose was remarkable. Was it possible that the faithful servant had not been killed in Galindo's sortie, as Juanita had believed?

It was three-quarters of an hour before Pepito returned from his descent of the precipice. Nothing living could have survived so terrible a fall; Miguel must instantaneously have gone to his account. Fragments of the boxes, but for which the mule might have regained its footing, lay scattered on the rocks, and out of the ruin Pepito had recovered but one relic--one gold pendant,--which he handed to his master; all else had been swept away by the torrent. Then he helped him lift the poor wayfarer to the back of his mule, and together they bore him to a muleteer's cabin in the hills.

For three days the man lingered there, unconscious for the most part, and in intervals of consciousness talking at random of people and things that were quite strange to his hearers. Jack nursed him with every care; but it was evident from the first that his days were numbered. On the third evening, when the sun was near setting and the cicalas had commenced their chant, the man opened his eyes wide and looked amazedly about him. He made an effort to rise, but fell back upon the rough blanket that formed his bed. He seemed to be listening. Jack, watching him, saw for the first time a glimmer of intelligence in his eyes. Through the open door came the sound of hoofs rapidly approaching. There was a strange eagerness in the man's upward gaze. The sound ceased; Pepito came into the hut, followed by a young lady and a priest fetched in hot haste from Carinena. The former bent over the bed and looked hard at the pallid face; the latter fell on his knees and began to recite the prayers for the dying.

"Jose! Jose!" whispered Juanita; "you know me, my dear friend?"

"My mistress!" he murmured faintly.

She clasped his hand; a look of glad content shone for a brief moment in the sick man's eyes. There was a silence; then, as the light faded, came the solemn voice of Padre Consolacion:

"Domine, in manus tuas animam suam commendamus!"

*CHAPTER XXXVI*

*Sergeant Wilkes wants to know*

Mr. Lumsden and Me--Me and Mr. Lumsden--A Lady in the Case--The Pleasure of your Company--O'Hare and the Ladies--The Grampus takes Cover--The Eve of Parting--The Age Limit--Poor Mr. Dugdale!--The Question

"Want to know about the fight at Corunna, do you? Hanged if you ain't always wanting to know something. Well, attention! dress by the right! and stand easy while I endeavour to reconstruct the situation."

The scene was the quay at Lisbon; the speaker was Sergeant Wilkes; the audience was a knot of green-coated recruits who, to judge by their docility, regarded the sergeant with admiration and awe. Since he had won the three stripes Wilkes had lost nothing of his loquacity, and had, indeed, cultivated a vocabulary of words long enough to match his new importance.

"Here you are, then; that there stands for the formidable French battery at the summit of the eminence"--he placed a jack-knife on the wall before him,--"this here stands for General Disney's brigade"--he put a plug of black tobacco at a distance from the knife,--"this here stands for the Reserve of that exemplary and notorious general Ted Paget"--he ranged two pebbles to the right of the tobacco,--"and this here," taking up one of the pebbles, "is Captain O'Hare's company. Look at him well, 'cos 'twas Captain O'Hare's company, and me in it, that won the battle on that most fatal and obstrepolous day. We was a-going up the hill towards that there battery, when blowed if we didn't get variegated with a lot of French dragoons in among the farmyards. Then up comes Mr. Lumsden, and says to me, 'Corp'ril Wilkes,' he says--I was only a corp'ril then, you understand--'Corp'ril Wilkes,' he says, 'we've got to shove down that there wall and drive the mounseers out. You an' me can do it if we puts our backs into it,' says he. 'Right you are, sir,' says I, 'we'll fustigate the mounseers and extipulate them to the last individual.' Them were the words I used. Well--"

"I say, sargint," said Corporal Bates, strolling across the road, "that's a smart little craft a-spanking up the river there. Looks like a despatch-boat, eh?"

"Don't interjeculate," said Wilkes irritably. "You always must put your spoke in. I was just telling the young 'uns how Mr. Lumsden and me won the fight at Corunna; who cares for a despatch-boat?--which it ain't, but only a common sloop."

"Go on, sargint, if you please," said one of the men.

"Well, as I was saying, Mr. Lumsden and me was just a-going to shove down the wall what was intermediate between us and the mounseers when--"

"Hold hard a bit, sargint," put in Bates; "ain't that there little chap on the boat there rather like the gipsy brat what Mr. Lumsden took up with?"

"Corp'ril Bates, if you keep on interrupting your superior orficer I shall rejuce you. Gipsy brats is neither here nor there; what the young 'uns want to know is how me and Mr. Lumsden licked the French at Corunna."

"That's him; that's Pepito!" cried Bates, heedless of Wilkes' increasing irritation. "P'r'aps he'll be able to tell us what's become of his master."

Bates sheered off, and Wilkes resumed his much-interrupted narrative. He was in the middle of a very vivid description of how Mr. Lumsden and himself fought eight Frenchmen at the wall, when he became aware of a commotion at some distance along the quay. Chagrined to find the attention of his audience wandering, he stood up, exclaiming:

"What are the rampaging Vamooses at now?--hang them!"