arted as she saw dashing down the
mountain highway what looked to her unpractised eye like a whole band of
Moorish cavalry with glimmering lances and streaming pennons.

Pedro faced the charge with drawn sword. Theresa knelt on the ground
with silver crucifix upraised, expecting instant martyrdom, while the
old Moorish tramp, Abd-el-'Aman, believing discretion to be the better
part of valor, quietly dropped down by the side of the rocky roadway,
for well he understood who were these latest comers.

The Moorish cavalry, which proved to be three Spaniards on horseback,
drew up before the young crusaders.

"So, runaways, we have found you," cried one of them, as he recognized
the children. "Come, Theresa, what means this folly? Whither are you and
Pedro bound?"

"We were even starting for a crusade against the Moor, Brother Jago,"
said Theresa, timidly, "but our Infidel friend here--why, where hath he
gone?--says that there are neither Infidel castles nor Moorish armies
now, and that therefore we may not be crusaders."

"But I know that he doth lie, Brother Jago," cried little Pedro, more
valiant still when he saw to what his Moorish cavalry was reduced. "He
is the King of Cordova, come here to spy out the land, and I was about
to cut off his head when you did disturb us."

Big brother Jago de Cepeda and the two servants of his father's house
laughed long and loudly.

"Crusaders and kings," he cried; "why, we shall have the Cid himself
here, if we do but wait long enough."

"Hush, brother," said young Pedro, confidentially, "say it not so
loudly. I did tell the Infidel that I was Ruy Diaz of Bivar, the Cid
Campeador--and he did believe me."

And then the cavalry laughed louder than ever, and swooping down
captured the young crusaders and set the truants before them on their
uncomfortable Cordova saddles. Then, turning around, they rode swiftly
back to Avila with the runaways, while the old Moor, glad to have
escaped rough handling from the Christian riders, grasped his staff and
plodded on toward Avila and Valladolid.

So the expedition for martyrdom and crusade came to an ignominious
end. But the pious desires of little Theresa did not. For, finding
that martyrdom was out of the question, she proposed to her ever-ready
brother that they should become hermits, and for days the two children
worked away trying to build a hermitage near their father's house.

But the rough and heavy pieces of granite with which