“The señorita will lead the way,” he said. “You will follow, and I shall direct you from behind. You would be wise not to try and run away.”
He watched them file past him, and from the sounds that followed, the Saint deduced that El Rojo had taken the horses by their bridles and was towing them after him as he brought up the rear.
As they moved roughly parallel with the valley, the slope on their right became steeper and steeper until it was simply a precipice, and the rocks on their left towered bleaker and higher, and they were walking along a narrow ledge with the shadow of one cliff over them and another cliff falling away from their feet into a void of darkness. The path wound snake-like around the fissures and buttresses into which the precipice was sculptured, and presently, rounding one of those natural breastworks, they found themselves at a place where the path widened suddenly to become a natural balcony about twenty feet long and twelve feet deep — and then stopped. A natural wall of rock screened it from sight of the valley or the hills on the other side.
El Rojo followed them into the niche, leading the two horses, which he tied up to an iron ring by the mouth of a cave that opened in the rock wall at the end.
There was a dull glow of embers close by the mouth of the cave. The bandit stirred them with his foot, and threw on a couple of mesquite logs.
“Perhaps you are hungry,” said El Rojo. “I have little to offer my guests, but you are welcome to what there is.”
“I should like a cigarette as much as anything,” said the Saint. “But I’m not a very good contortionist.” The bandit considered him.
“I could untie you, señor, if you gave me your word of honor not to attempt to escape. It is, I believe, usual in these circumstances.”
His speeches had an elaborate theatricalism which came oddly out of his rough and ragged clothing.
“I’ll give you my word for two hours,” said the Saint, after a moment’s thought. “It can be renewed if necessary.”
“Es bastante. Y usted, señorita?”
“Conforme.”
“Entonces, por dos horas.”
El Rojo laid down his rifle and untied the Saint’s hands, but Simon noticed that he picked up the gun again at once, and that he kept it always within easy reach. The Saint understood the symptom well enough not to be disturbed by it. He lighted a cigarette and stretched himself out comfortably beside the fire and beside Teresa Alvarez, while the night closed down like a purple blanket and El Rojo brought out the bread and cheese and sausage and coarse red wine which are the staple fare in the mountains.
He said presently, “I take it that you have ideas about ransom.”
The bandit shrugged.
“I regret the necessity. But I am a poor man, and you must be charitable. Let us say that it was unlucky that you chose to travel this way.”
“But we were looking for you,” said Teresa.
El Rojo stopped with a knife-load of cheese halfway to his mouth.
“For me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I wanted to see you, and this gentleman was good enough to help me. We were not unlucky. We came here on purpose.”
“You pay me an unusual compliment, señorita. Could one ask what I have done to deserve such a distinguished honor?”
“I am looking for my husband,” she said simply.
He sat watching her.
“No comprendo. It is true that I often have the pleasure of entertaining travelers in the mountains. But, alas, they never stay with me for long. Either their friends are so desolate in their absence that they bribe me to ensure their safe and speedy return — or their friends are so unresponsive that I am forced to conclude that they cannot be very desirable guests. I am incapable of believing that a gentleman who had won the heart of the señora can have belonged to the latter category.”
“It is possible,” she said, without bitterness. “But I knew nothing of it.”
She was silent for a moment.
“It was two years ago,” she said. “He came here to Durango, to La Quinta. He was going into the mountains. No one ever heard of him again. I know that you were here then, and I wondered if you might have — entertained him. Perhaps I was foolish...”
El Rojo dug his knife in the cheese.
“Por Dios!” he said. “Is it like that that one lives in Mexico? You have lost your husband for two years, and it is not until today that you want to find him?”
“I don’t want to find him,” she said. “I want to know that he is dead.”
She said it quietly, without any force of feeling, as if it was a thought that she had lived with for so long that it had become a commonplace part of her life. But in the very passionlessness of that matter-of-fact statement there was something that sent an electric ripple up the Saint’s spine.
He had finished eating, and he was sitting smoking with his feet towards the warmth of the fire and his back leaning against the rock. On his left, Teresa Alvarez was looking straight ahead of her, as if she had been alone, and El Rojo’s eyes were riveted on her through the slits in his mask, so that the Saint almost felt as if he were an eavesdropper. But he was too absorbed in the play to care about that.
“I was very young,” said the girl, in that quiet and detached way that left so much emotion to be guessed at. “I was still in the convent school when I was engaged to him. I knew nothing, and I was not given any choice. I was married to him a few weeks later. Yes, these things happen. It is still the custom in the old-fashioned families. The parents choose a man they think will make their daughter a good husband, and she is expected to be guided by their wisdom.”
Her face was impassive in the firelight.
“I think he was unfaithful to me on our honeymoon,” she said. “I know he was unfaithful many times after that. He boasted of it. I might have forgiven that, but he boasted also that he had only married me for my dowry — and for what pleasure he could have out of me before he wanted a change. I found out that he was nothing but a shady adventurer, a gambler, a cheat, a petty swindler, a man without a shadow of honor or even common decency. But by that time I had no one to go to... My father and mother died suddenly six months after we were married, and I had never had any friends of my own. It will seem strange to you — it seems strange to me, now — but I never realized that I could leave him myself. I had never been brought up to know anything of the world. So I stayed with him. For four years... and then he came here, and I never saw him again.” The Saint could feel the suffering and humiliation and disillusionment of those four years as vividly as if she had told the story of them day by day, and his blue eyes rested on her with a new and oddly gentle understanding.
She went on after a while: “At first I was only glad that he had gone, and that I could have some peace until he returned. He had told me that he was going away for a holiday, but one day a man from the police came to see me, and I found out that he had gone away because for once he had not been so clever as he had been before, and there was a charge against him.
“Then I hoped that the police would catch him and he would go to prison, perhaps for many years, perhaps forever. But they never found him. And I hoped that he might have fallen over a precipice in the mountains, or that he had escaped to the other end of the world, or anything that would mean he would never come back to me. I didn’t mind very much what it was, so long as I never saw him again. But I was happy. And then, six months ago, I fell in love. And my happiness was finished again.”
“Because you were in love?” El Rojo asked, incredulously.
“Because I was not free. This man is everything that my husband never was, and he knows everything that I have told you. He wants to marry me. Before, I never cared where my husband was, or what had happened to him, but now, you see, I must know.”