, taking nothing with them. In a quarter of an hour the
hole was dug. The rose-tree, being in the way, was dragged out and
thrown to one side. La Giralda, who began to think of her donkey and
goats, hastily deposited the babe within, and upon the white linen the
red earth fell first like thin rain, and afterwards, when the sheet was
covered, in lumps and mattock-clods. For La Giralda desired to be gone,
suddenly becoming mindful of the precepts of the Sergeant.

"No priest has blessed the grave," she said; "I can say no prayers over
her! Who is La Giralda that she should mutter the simplest prayer? But
when the Master of Life awakes the little one, and when He sees the look
she will cast on her poor puppet of wood, He will take her to His bosom
even as La Giralda, the mother of many, would have taken her! God, the
Good One, cannot be more cruel than a woman of the heathen!"

And so with the broken pottery for a monument, and the clasp of infant
hands about the wooden doll for a prayer to God, the dead babe was left
alone, unblessed and unconfessed--but safe.

* * * * *

Meanwhile we must go over the hill with Sergeant Cardono. Whatever his
thoughts may have been as he trudged up the barren glens, seamed and
torn with the winter rains, no sign of them appeared upon his sunburnt
weather-beaten face. Steadily and swiftly, yet without haste, he held
his way, his eyes fixed on the ground, as though perfectly sure of his
road, like a man on a well-beaten track which he has trod a thousand
times.

For more than an hour he went on, up and ever up, till his feet crisped
upon the first snows of Penalara, and the hill ramparts closed in. But
when he had reached the narrows of a certain gorge, he looked keenly to
either side, marking the entrance. A pile of stones roughly heaped one
upon the other fixed his attention. He went up to them and attentively
perused their structure and arrangement, though they appeared to have
been thrown together at random. Then he nodded sagely twice and passed
on his way.

The glen continued to narrow overhead. The sunshine was entirely shut
out. The jaws of the precipice closed in upon the wayfarer as if to
crush him, but Sergeant Cardono advanced with the steady stride of a
mountaineer, and the aplomb of one who is entirely sure of his
reception.

The mountain silence grew stiller all about. None had passed that way
(so it seemed) since the beginning of time. N