.

Meantime Ramon lay on his rock-ledge and wondered--where little Dolores
was, chiefly, and to this he often returned. If he had had time that
night would he have killed her? Sometimes he thought so, and then
again--well, she was so small, so dainty, so full of all gentle ways and
winsomenesses and--hell and furies, it was all deceit! She had been
deceiving him from the first! Those upward glances, those shy, sweet
confidences, sudden, irresistible revealings of her heart, he had
thought they were all for him. Fool! Three times fool! He knew better
now. They were practised on her husband that she might act them better
before her lover. God's truth, he would go down and kill her even now,
as he had killed that other. Why had he not waited? He could easily have
slain the soldiers who had rushed upon him, whom that hell-cat Manuela
had brought--ah, he was glad he had marked her for life.

* * * * *

"_Ping! Ping!_" Two rifle bullets sang close past the brigand's head
as he lay in his rocky fastness. He heard them splash against the damp
stone behind him, and the limestone fell away in flakes. A loose stone
rumbled away down and finally leaped clear over the cliff into the mist.

El Sarria's cavern lay high up on the slopes of the Montblanch, the holy
white mountain, or rather on an outlying spur of it called the Peak of
Basella. Beneath him, as he looked out upon the plain, three thousand
feet below, the mists were heaped into glistening white Sierras, on
which the sun shone as upon the winter snows of the far away Pyrenees.

As the sun grew stronger Ramon knew well that his mountain fastness
would be stormed and enveloped, by these delusive cloud-continents. They
would rise and dissipate themselves into the faint bluish haze of
noonday heat.

Already there appeared far down the cleft called the Devil's Gulf, which
yawned below the Peak of Basella, certain white jets of spray tossed
upwards as from a fountain, which were the forerunners of that coming
invasion of mist that would presently shut him out from the world.

But not a moment did Ramon waste. As quick as the grasshopper leaps from
the flicked forefinger, so swift had been El Sarria's spring for his
rifle. His cartouches lay ready to his hand in his belt of untanned
leather. His eyes, deep sunken and wild, glanced everywhere with the
instant apprehension of the hunted.

_Ping! Ping!_

Again the bullets came hissing past him