repare the
evening meal.

As the others made their preparations for the night, watering their
beasts and grooming them with the utmost care, the little crook-backed
imp from the village appeared on the brink of the _barranco_, his
sallow, weazened face peeping suspiciously out of the underbrush, and
his crutch performing the most curious evolutions in the air.

There was something unspeakably eerie in the aspect of the solitary
survivor of so many living people, left behind to prey like a ghoul on
the abandoned possessions of the fear-stricken living and the
untestamented property of the dead.

Concha shrank instinctively from his approach, and the boy, perceiving
his power over her, came scuttling like a weasel through the brushwood,
till little more than a couple of paces interposed between him and the
girl. Frozen stiff with loathing and terror, it was not for some time
that Concha could cry out and look round hastily for Rollo, who
(doubtless in his capacity of leader of the expedition) was not slow in
hastening to her assistance.

"That boy--there!" she gasped, "he frightens me--oh hateful! make him go
away!" And she clutched the young man's arm with such a quick nervous
grasp, that a crimson flush rose quickly to Rollo's cheek.

"No," muttered Etienne to himself as he watched the performance
critically, "she was never in love with you, sir! She never did as much
for you as that. But on the whole, with a temper like Mistress Concha's,
I think you are well out of it, Monsieur Etienne!" Which wise dictum
might or might not be based on the fox's opinion as to sour grapes.

All unconsciously Rollo reached a protecting hand across to the little
white fingers which gripped his arm so tightly.

"Go away, boy," he commanded; "do you not see that you terrify the
Senorita?"

"I see--that is why I stay!" cried the amiable youth gleefully,
flourishing his crutch about his head as if on the point of launching it
at the party.

Rollo laid his hand on the hilt of Killiecrankie with a threatening
gesture.

"If you come an inch nearer, I will give you plague!" cried the boy,
showing his teeth wickedly, "and your wench also. You will grow
black--yes, and swell! Then you will die, both of you. And there will be
no one to bury you, like those in the houses back there. Then all you
possess shall be mine, ha, ha!"

And he laughed and danced till a fit of coughing came upon him so that
he actually crowed in a kind of fiend