“Then why is Señor Copas so frightened?”
“They’re all frightened of El Rojo.”
Her finely penciled brows drew together.
“El Rojo?” she said. “Who is El Rojo?”
“ ‘The greatest bandit since Villa. They’re all scared because there’s a rumor that he’s in the district. You ought to be scared, too. They’re all offended if you aren’t scared of El Rojo... He really is a great character, though. I remember once the Government decided it was time that something drastic was done about him. They sent out half the Mexican army to round him up. It was the funniest thing I ever heard of, but you have to know the country to see the joke.”
“They didn’t catch him?”
The Saint chuckled.
“One man who knew the country could laugh at three armies.”
For a little while the girl was wrapped in an unapproachable solitude of thought. Then she turned to the Saint again.
“Señor,” she said, “do you think you could help me find El Rojo?”
Even south of the border, he was still a Saint errant, or perhaps a sucker for adventure. He said, “I could try.”
They rode out on the dazzling stone track that winds beside the river — a track which was nothing more than the marks that centuries of solitary feet had left on the riot of tumbled boulders from which the hills rose up.
The Saint lounged in the saddle, relaxed like a vaquero, letting his mount pick its own way over the broken rock. His mind went back to the café where they had sat together over coffee, after lunch, and he had said to her, “Either you must be a journalist looking for an unusual interview, or you want to be kidnapped by El Rojo for publicity, or you’ve been reading too many romantic stories and you think you could fall in love with him.”
She had only smiled in her quiet way, inscrutable in spite of its friendliness, and said, “No, señor — you are wrong in all your guesses. I am looking for my husband.”
The Saint’s brows slanted quizzically.
“You mean you are Señora Rojo?”
“Oh, no. I am Señora Alvarez de Quevedo. Teresa Alvarez.”
Then she looked at him, quickly and clearly, as if she had made up her mind about something.
“The last time I heard of my husband, he was at the Fonda de la Quinta,” she said. “That was two years ago. He wrote to me that he was going into the mountains. He liked to do things like that, to climb mountains and sleep under the stars and be a man alone, sometimes — it is curious, for he was very much a city man... I never heard of him again. He said he was going to climb the Gran Seño. I remembered, when I heard the name, that I had read of El Rojo in the newspapers about that time. And it seemed to me, when I heard you speak of El Rojo, that perhaps El Rojo was the answer.”
“If it was El Rojo,” said the Saint quietly, “I don’t think it would help you to find him now.”
Her eyes were still an enigma.
“Even so,” she said, “it would be something to know.”
“But you’ve waited two years—”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I have waited two years.”
She had told him no more than that, and he had known that she did not wish to say any more, but it had been enough to send him off on that quixotic wild-goose chase.
He had been leading the way for two hours, but presently, where the trail broadened for a short distance, she brought her horse up beside his, and they rode knee to knee. “I wonder why you should do this for me,” she said.
He shrugged.
“Why did you ask me?”
“It was an impulse.” She moved her hands puzzledly. “I don’t know. I suppose you have the air of a man who is used to being asked impossible things. You look as if you would do them.”
“I do,” said the Saint modestly.
It was his own answer, too. She was a damsel in distress — and no damsel in distress had ever called on the Saint in vain. And she was beautiful, also, which was a very desirable asset to damsels in distress. And about her there was a mystery, which to Simon Templar was the trumpet call of adventure.
In the late afternoon, at one of the bends in the trail where it dipped to the level of the river, the Saint reined in his horse and dismounted at the water’s edge.
“Are we there?” she said.
“No. But we’re leaving the river.”
He scooped water up in his hands and drank, and splashed it over his face. It was numbingly cold, but it steamed off his arms in the hot dry air. She knelt down and drank beside him, and then sat back on her heels and looked up at the hills that hemmed them in.
A kind of shy happiness lighted her eyes, almost uncertainly, as if it had not been there for a long time and felt itself a stranger.
“I understand now,” she said. “I understand why Gaspar loved all this, in spite of what he was. If only he could have been content with it...”
“You were not happy?” said the Saint gently.
She looked at him.
“No, señor. I have not been happy for so long that I am afraid.”
She got up quickly and put her foot in the stirrup. He helped her to mount, and swung into his own saddle. They set off across the shallow stream; the horses picked their way delicately between the boulders.
On the far side, they climbed, following a trail so faint that she could not see it all, but the Saint rarely hesitated. Presently the trees were thicker, and over the skyline loomed the real summit of the hill they were climbing. The valley was swallowed up in darkness, and up there where the Saint turned his horse across the slope the brief subtropical twilight was fading.
Simon Templar lighted a cigarette as he rode, and he had barely taken the first puff of smoke into his lungs when a man stepped from behind a tree with a rifle leveled and broke the stillness of the evening with a curt, “Manos arriba!”
The Saint turned his head with a smile.
“You’ve got what you wanted,” he said to Teresa Alvarez. “May I present El Rojo?”
The introduction was almost superfluous, for the red mask from which El Rojo took his name, which covered his face from the brim of his sombrero down to his stubble-bearded chin, was sufficient identification. Watching the girl, Simon saw no sign of fear as the bandit came forward. Her face was pale, but she sat straight-backed on her horse and gazed at him with an unexpected eagerness in her eyes. Simon turned back to El Rojo.
“Qué tál, amigo?” he murmured genially.
The bandit stared at him unresponsively.
“Baje usted” he ordered gruffly. He glanced at the girl. “You too — get down.”
His eyes, after that glance, remained fixed on her, even after she was down from the saddle and standing by the horse’s head. The Saint wondered for the first time whether he might not have let his zest for adventure override his common sense when he deliberately led her into the stronghold of an outlawed and desperate man.
El Rojo turned back to him.
“The señorita,” he said, “will tie your hands behind you.”
He dragged a length of cord from his pocket and threw it across the space between them. The girl looked at it coldly.
“Go on,” said the Saint, “Do what the nice gentleman tells you. It’s part of the act.”
He could take care of such minor details when the time came, but for the present there was a mystery with which he was more preoccupied.
When the Saint’s hands had been tied, El Rojo pointed his rifle.