CHAPTER XIII.

PEDRO THE CONTRABANDISTA.

After a painful and anxious hour elapsed, and we had traversed about two miles of a steep and craggy ascent, until we reached a part of the mountain range which was entirely covered by a little forest of laurels. Above us, in the dark blue sky, the moon was hanging like a large silver globe, and the flood of clear cold light it diffused over the distant landscape enabled us to distinguish objects with great minuteness. Thus I could trace the gleaming course of the Guadalquiver, as it wound down from Seville past Borminos, the mouth of the Guadamar, and the hills that overhang Dos Hermanos; while other sierras in the distance undulated afar off, like the waves of a petrified sea, if such a simile may be allowed me. Light glinted at times upon the river. It came from a passing steamer. Down there in the valley was the civilisation of our own time; yet we were about to perish by the hands of outlaws, whose bearing and character were worthy of the middle ages, or the mistier time that lies beyond them.

Jack Slingsby and I had scarcely spoken during our steep and rapid clamber, but our thoughts were the same; anxiety--intense anxiety--for our fate; repugnance for our captors, and a natural horror of dying a barbarous death at their hands, on these remote and lonely mountains; far from help, far from justice and from civilisation; a death, of which our friends, our relations, and our comrades would never hear--would never know; for our fate would become a mystery, which all the captains general, the ambassadors, the chargés des affaires, and even the correspondents of the "Times" would be unable to clear up or unravel,--as it was the purpose of these wretches, whose prey we had become, to hide for ever our remains, and the very means of our death, as completely as if we had been flung into Mount Etna.

In this sequestered part of the mountain chain, hidden among the thickly-twined laurels, the wild and straggling vines, and the densely-matted jungle of gourds, and other luxuriant creepers, there suddenly yawned a chasm in the granite rocks--a black profundity of unknown depth. The gaping rent was about twenty feet broad by some hundred in length, but its mouth was greatly diminished by the bordering foliage and wild plants that overhung it. Far down, perhaps five hundred feet below (for the bottom was unseen), there rolled with a deep, hoarse, roaring sound the Rio de Muerte--the River of Death--a subterranean tributary of the Guadalquiver; and its strange and hollow voice as it gurgled, surged, and bellowed through the clefts and fissures in the heart of the mountains, filled me with a pang of horror. Here we paused, and our captors muttered one to another under their thick beards, smoked their paper cigaritos, and leaned leisurely on their short escapetas, or long-barrelled muskets, and seemed to await the approach of Fabrique de Urquija, who was some yards behind us, and came up very much at his ease.

"My God!" said my friend, "if it be their purpose to--to----"

"To throw us down there, you would say? My dear Slingsby, such seems indeed to be their dreadful purpose, and I see here but little hope of mercy or of charity, where bribes greater than those of that infamous major have failed before a savage idea of honour and the fulfilment of a villanous trust."

"Heaven help us!"

"If these are not your prayers, señores," said one fellow in Spanish, with a slight Murcian accent, "you had better betake yourselves to them, for in less than ten minutes you will be at the bottom of this terrible place, and be swept through the bowels of the mountain towards the Guadalquiver."

The man spoke gently and with some emotion; it was evident that his dreadful life had not yet obliterated every remnant of civilisation and humanity. There was, moreover, something terribly impressive in his words, when heard amid the hoarse rush of that deep and subterranean torrent, whose waters came we knew not from where, and traversed depths and caverns, of which we could have no conception, in their way to the valley below.

There was a refined cruelty in bringing us to such a place, and to die such a death; for the mind "shrunk back upon itself and trembled," when contemplating the dark profundity through which this mysterious torrent poured.

"Pray, good señores, pray," said this man, kindly again, as he touched me on the shoulder, "down upon your knees, for here comes the capitano, and he never tarries with his prisoners on the brink of the Rio de Muerte, or the Cima de Cabra."

"What does the fellow say?" asked poor Slingsby, who looked a little pale, and whose nether lip was tightly clenched.

"He bids us lose no time, but to pray."

"Pray!" reiterated Jack, fiercely; "I pray to Heaven only that my hands were loose for one moment, that I might strike a blow for life or for revenge."

"Threats are absurd, señor," said Fabrique de Urquija, throwing the end of his cigar with perfect deliberation into the chasm that yawned before us: "and bribes are alike useless----"

"Can it be, brave Spaniards," said I, becoming desperate, and encouraged by the evident sympathy of one to endeavour to soften the rest; "can it be that you will prove so cruel and so merciless to two unoffending strangers, who----"

"Silence, señores!" exclaimed Fabrique, in a voice of thunder, while drawing a pistol from his belt; "in attempting to tamper with my followers you but anticipate your fate. Iago Pineda--Stephano el Corcovado, over with them! dost thou hear me? presto! or by the mother of God, this bullet shall see the brains of some of you."

He ground his teeth; his eyes shot fire, and his broad nostrils seemed to dilate as he gave this savage order.

Stephano the humpbacked, and the other who was named Iago Pineda, and who was no other than our sympathetic friend, threw down their escopetas and grasped me. They were powerful and muscular men--aye, men of iron frames and iron hearts, and a sickening emotion rose within me as their hands were roughly laid upon my pinioned arms. The moonlit mountains and the far-stretching Vega swam around me; the forms of our murderers were multiplied a thousandfold; the perspiration fell heavily from my brow, and a half-arrested cry to Heaven for that pity which men denied us here, arose to my lips as they were about to hurl me downward; when, lo! Pineda paused, looked back, and listening, relinquished my right arm.

"Do you think, do you dare to disobey?" cried Fabrique, as he levelled a brass-barrelled pistol full at his head; "to work at once, vile mutineer, or por vida del demonic----"

"Hold--para--detenedos!" cried a breathless voice, and a man mounted on horseback, and armed with a long gun, dashed his jennet at full speed through the laurel bushes into the midst of the free company.

"Who cries hold?" demanded Fabrique, almost choking with passion, while turning his pistol against the intruder; and all his people cocked or clubbed their muskets in high alarm.

"I do--I, your brother Pedro the contrabandista."

"Oho, and what seek you here?"

"The safety of these two Caballeros, who at Gibraltar saved me from the guarda costa of Hernan de Lucena in the first place, and from the chain and the scourge in Her Majesty's galleys in the second place."

"How! was it you, brother Pedro, whose felucca was concerned in this business?" asked Fabrique, with an altered voice.

"Yes, Fabrique, it was my little craft, La Buena Fortuna, which the Lieutenant De Lucena pursued till a shot from the Mole fort shortened him by two feet. I claim their lives, for they are my friends and patrons, and would have supped with me to-night at Trohniona had not your devilish fellows came upon us like a herd of wild cats, just when I was kicking and cuffing yonder rascally raterillo, who has made off with all my dollars. So I fled from the wayside-well, for I knew not whose free company your lads had the honour to be, and feared they might relieve me alike of life and all care for my packages."

Jack and I now began to breathe a little more freely; for as all this took place in less time than I have taken to write it, there was some difficulty in realising the conviction that we had been waylaid, doomed to death and saved, with such rapidity: yet so it was, and so ended the scene of that night to which I can never recur without a chill of awe and horror, blended with a very decided sensation of anger and just indignation.

Notwithstanding the alleged solemnity with which his word was plighted to the malevolent major of the sainted regiment of Lagos, "in the kingdom of Algarve," Fabrique relinquished his cruel purpose, unbound us at his brother's request, and restored to us our arms, horses, and little baggage--everything, in short, not even excepting the letter of poor Paulina. He gave us cigars, a hearty quaff from his bota, and then a bow so low that his black velvet sombrero almost swept the dewy sward. He then drew off with all his band towards the Sierra de Honda, and in two hours afterwards we were comfortably seated by the kitchen fire in the posada of Trohniona, at supper with his brother the contrabandista, who was en route for San Lucar.

For some time after, throughout the night in which these startling events occurred, in fancy I saw before me the cold, stern visage and fierce glaring eyes of Urquija, and above all other sounds I seemed to hear the deep hoarse rush of the subterranean Rio de Muerte.