The Firebrand

"I am no inlander," he said, "I am of the sea-coast of Tarragona. I have never been south of Tortosa in my life; but there does not live a man who has conducted more good cigars and brandy to their destination than old Pépe of the Eleven Wounds!"

The sergeant with grave courtesy reached him a well-rolled cigarette.

"I have heard of your fame, brother," he said; "even at Ronda and on the Madrid-Seville road your deeds are not unknown. But what of this venture to-night? Have you enough men, think you, to overpower the town watchmen and the palace-guards?"

The old gipsy tossed his bony hands into the air with a gesture of incomparable contempt.

"The palace guards are fled back to Madrid," he cried, "and as to the town watch they are either drunk or in their dotage!"

Meantime the main body of the gipsies waited patiently in the background, and every few minutes their numbers were augmented by the arrival of others over the various passes of the mountains. These took their places without salutation, like men expected, and fell promptly to listening to the conversation of the two great men, who sat smoking their cigarettes each on his own stone in the wide wild corrie among the rocks of the Guadarrama which had been chosen as an appropriate rendezvous.

Singularly enough, after the sergeant had shown the scarlet mark of the strangling ring about his neck, no one of all that company doubted for a moment that he was indeed the thrice-famous José Maria of Ronda. None asked a question as to his whence or whither. He was José Maria, and therefore entitled not only to be taken at once into the secrets of Egypt, but also, and it pleased him, to keep his own.

And very desperate and bloody some of 'his own' were. In the present instance, plunder and bloodshed were to proceed hand in hand. No quarter was to be given to old or young. The plague-stricken sick man and the watcher by the bed, the woman feeding her fire of sticks under her puchero, the child asleep on its pillow, the Queen in the palace, the Princess in her nursery – all were to die, quickly and suddenly. These men had sworn it. The dead were no tale-tellers. That was the way of Egypt – the ancient way of safety. Were they not few and feeble in the midst of innumerable hordes of the Busne? Had they not been driven like cattle, abused like dogs, sent guiltless to the scaffold, shot in batches by both warring parties? Now in this one place at least, they would do a deed of vengeance at which the ears of the world would tingle.

The Sergeant sat and smoked and listened. He was no stranger to such talk. It was the way of his double profession of Andalucian bandit and Carlist guerrilero, to devise and execute deeds of terror and death. But nothing so cold-blooded as this had José Maria ever imagined. He had indeed appropriated the governmental mails till the post-bags almost seemed his own property, and the guards handed them down without question as to a recognised official. He had, in his great days, captured towns and held them for either party according to the good the matter was likely to do himself. But there was something revolting in this whole business which puzzled him.

"Whose idea was all this?" he asked at last. "I would give much to see the Gitano who could devise such a stroke."

The grim smile on the countenance of old Pépe of the Eleven Wounds grew yet more grim.

"No gipsy planned it and no man!" he said sententiously. "Come hither, Chica!"

And out from among the listening throng came a girl of thirteen or fourteen, dressed neatly and simply in a grey linen blouse belted at the waist with a leather belt. A gay plaid, striped of orange and crimson, hung neatly folded over her shoulder, and she rested her small sunburnt hand on the silver hilt of a pistol. Black elf-locks escaped from beneath a red silk kerchief knotted saucily after the fashion of her companions. But her eyes, instead of being beady and black with that far-away contemplative look which characterises the children of Egypt, were bright and sunny and blue as the Mediterranean itself in the front of spring.

"Come hither, Chica – be not afraid," repeated old Pépe of the Eleven Wounds, "this is a great man – the greatest of all our race. You have heard of him – as who, indeed, has not!"

Chica nodded with a quick elfish grin of intense pleasure and appreciation. "I was listening," she said, "I heard all. And I saw – would that I could see it again. Oh, if only the like would happen to me!"

"Tell the noble Don José who you are, my pretty Chica," said Pépe, soothingly.

But the child stamped her sandalled foot. It was still white at the instep, and the sergeant could see by the blue veins that she had not gone long barefoot. The marks of a child either stolen for ransom or run away from home owing to some wild strain in the blood were too obvious to be mistaken. Her liberty of movement among the gipsies made the latter supposition the more probable.

"I am not pretty Chica, and I am not little," she cried angrily. "I would have you remember, Pépe, that I made this plan, which the folk of Egypt are to execute to-night. But since this is the great brigand Don José of Ronda, who was executed at Salamanca, I will tell him all about it."

She looked round at the dark faces with which they were surrounded.

"There are new folk among these," she said, "men I do not know. Bid them go away. Else I will not speak of myself, and I have much to say to Don José!"

Pépe of the Eleven Wounds looked about him, and shook his head. Gipsydom is a commonwealth when it comes to a venture like this, and save in the presence of some undoubted leader, all Egypt has an equal right to hear and to speak. Pépe's authority was not sufficient for this thing. But that of the Sergeant was.

He lifted his Montera cap and said, "I would converse a while with this maid on the affairs of Egypt. 'Tis doubtless no more than you know already, and then, having heard her story my advice is at your service. But she will not speak with so many ears about. It is a woman's whim, and such the wisest of us must sometimes humour."

The gipsies smiled at the gay wave of his hand with which Cardono uttered this truism and quickly betook themselves out of earshot in groups of ten and a dozen. Cards were produced, and in a few minutes half a score of games were in progress at different points of the quarry-like cauldron which formed the outlaws' rendezvous.

At once the humour of the child changed.

"They obeyed you," she said; "I like you for that. I mean to have many men obey me when I grow up. Then I will kill many – thousands and thousands. Now I can do nothing – only I have it in my head – here!"

The elf tapped her forehead immediately underneath the red sash which was tied about it. The Sergeant, though eager to hear her story and marvelling at such sentiments from the lips of a child, successfully concealed his curiosity, and said gently, "Tell me how you came to think of to-night – "

"Of what to-night?" asked the girl quickly and suspiciously.

"The deed which is to be done to-night," replied the Sergeant simply, as though he were acquainted with the whole.

She leaped forward and caught him by the arm.

"You will stay and go with us? You will lead us?" she hissed, her blue eyes aflame and with trembling accents, "then indeed will I be sure of my revenge. Then the Italian woman and her devil's brat shall not escape. Then I shall be sure – sure!"

She repeated the last words with concentrated fury, apparently impossible to one of her age. The Sergeant smoked quietly and observed her. She seemed absolutely transfigured.

"Tell me that you will," she cried, low and fierce, so that her voice should not reach the men around; "these, when they get there, will think of nothing but plunder. As if rags and diamonds and gold were worth venturing one's life for. But I desire death – death – death, do you hear? To see the Italian woman and her paramour pleading for their lives, one wailing over against the other, on their knees. Oh, I know them and the brat they call the little Queen! To-night they shall lie dead under my hands – with this – with this!"

And the girl flashed a razor-keen blade out of her red waistband. She thrust the hilt forward into the Sergeant's hands as if in token of fealty.

"See," she said, touching the edge lovingly, "is it not sharp? Will it not kill surely and swiftly? For months I have sharpened it – ah, and to-night it will give me my desire!"

It was the Sergeant's belief that the girl was mad, nevertheless he watched her with his usual quiet scrutiny, the power of which she evidently felt. For she avoided his eyes and hastened on with her story before he had time to cross-question her.

"Why do I hate them? I see the question on your lips. Because the Italian woman hath taken away my father and slain my mother – slain her as truly and with far sharper agony than she herself shall know when I set this knife to her throat. I am the daughter of Muñoz, and I swore revenge on the man and on the woman both when I closed my mother's eyes. My mother's heart was broken. Ah, you see, she was weak – not like me! It would take a hundred like the Neapolitan to break my heart; and as for the man, though he were thrice my father, he should beg his life in vain."

She snatched her knife jealously out of his hand, tried its edge on the back of her hand with a most unchildlike gesture, and forthwith concealed it in her silken faja. Then she laid her hand once more on the Sergeant's arm.

"You will lead us, will you not, José Maria?" she said pleadingly. "I can trust you. You have done many great deeds. My nurse was a woman of Ronda and told me of your exploits on the road from Madrid to Sevilla. You will lead us to-night. Only you must leave these three in the palace to me. If you will, you shall have also my share of the plunder. But what do I say, I know you are too noble to think only of that – as these wolves do!"

She cast a haughty glance around upon the gipsies at their card-play.

"I, that am of Old Castile and noble by four descents, have demeaned myself to mix with Gitanos," she said, "but it has only been that I might work out my revenge. I told Pépe there of my plan. I showed him the way. He was afraid. He told ten men, and they were afraid. Fifty, and they were afraid. Now there are a hundred and more, and were it not that they know that all lies open and unguarded, even I could not lead them thither. But they will follow you, because you are José Maria of Ronda." The Sergeant took the girl's hand in his. She was shaking as with an ague fit, but her eyes, blue and mild as a summer sky, had that within them which was deadlier than the tricksome slippery demon that lurks in all black orbs, whether masculine or feminine.

"Chica," he said, "your wrongs are indeed bitter. I would give much to help you to set the balance right. Perhaps I may do so yet. But I cannot be the commander of these men. They are not of my folk or country. They have not even asked me to lead them. They are jealous of me! You see it as well as I!"

"Ah!" cried the girl, laying her hand again on his cuff, "that is because they do not wish you to share their plunder. But tell them that you care nothing for that and they will welcome you readily enough. The place is plague-stricken, I tell you. The palace lies open. Little crook-backed Chepe brought me word. He says he adores me. He is of the village of Frias, back there behind the hills. I do not love him, even though he has a bitter heart and can hate well. Therefore I suffer him."

The Sergeant rose to his feet and looked compassionately down at the vivid little figure before him. The hair, dense and black, the blue eyes, the red-knotted handkerchief, the white teeth that showed between the parted lips clean and sharp as those of a wild animal. Cardono had seen many things on his travels, but never anything like this. His soul was moved within him. In the deeps of his heart, the heart of a Spanish gipsy, there was an infinite sympathy for any one who takes up the blood feud, who, in the face of all difficulties, swears the vendetta. But the slim arms, the spare willowy body, the little white sandalled feet of the little girl – these overcame him with a pitifully amused sense of the disproportion of means to end.

"Have you no brother, Señorita?" he said, using by instinct the title of respect which the little girl loved the most. She saw his point in a moment.

"A brother – yes, Don José! But my brother is a cur, a dog that eats offal. Pah! I spit upon him. He hath taken favours from the woman. He hath handled her money. He would clean the shoes they twain leave at their chamber door. A brother – yes; the back of my hand to such brothers! But after to-night he shall have no offal to eat – no bones thrown under the table to pick. For in one slaying I will kill the Italian woman Cristina, the man Muñoz who broke my mother's heart, and the foisted changeling brat whom they miscall the daughter of Fernando and the little Queen of Spain!"

She subsided on a stone, dropped her head into her hands, and took no further notice of the Sergeant, who stood awhile with his hand resting on her shoulder in deep meditation. There was, he thought, no more to be said or done. He knew all there was to know. The men had not asked him to join them, so he would venture no further questions as to the time and the manner of attack. They were still jealous of him with that easily aroused jealousy of south and north which in Spain divides even the clannish gipsy.

Nevertheless he went the round of the men. They were mostly busy with their games, and some of them even snatched the stakes in to them, lest he should demand a percentage of the winnings after the manner of Sevilla. The Sergeant smiled at the reputation which distance and many tongues had given him. Then, with a few words of good fellowship and the expression of a wish for success and abundant plunder, he bade them farewell. It was a great deed which they designed and one worthy of his best days. He was now old, he said, and must needs choose easier courses. He did not desire twice to feel the grip of the collar of iron. But young blood – oh, it would have its way and run its risks!

Here the Sergeant smiled and raised his Montera cap. The men as courteously bade him good-day, preserving, however, a certain respectful distance, and adding nothing to the information he had already obtained.

But Chica, seated on her stone, with her scarlet-bound head on her hand, neither looked up nor gave him any greeting as his feet went slowly down the rocky glen and crunched over the begrimed patches of last year's snow, now wide-pored and heavy with the heat of noonday.

CHAPTER XXIX