n, who sat smoking
their cigarettes each on his own stone in the wide wild corrie among the
rocks of the Guadarrama which had been chosen as an appropriate
rendezvous.

Singularly enough, after the sergeant had shown the scarlet mark of the
strangling ring about his neck, no one of all that company doubted for a
moment that he was indeed the thrice-famous Jose Maria of Ronda. None
asked a question as to his whence or whither. He was Jose Maria, and
therefore entitled not only to be taken at once into the secrets of
Egypt, but also, and it pleased him, to keep his own.

And very desperate and bloody some of 'his own' were. In the present
instance, plunder and bloodshed were to proceed hand in hand. No quarter
was to be given to old or young. The plague-stricken sick man and the
watcher by the bed, the woman feeding her fire of sticks under her
_puchero_, the child asleep on its pillow, the Queen in the palace, the
Princess in her nursery--all were to die, quickly and suddenly. These
men had sworn it. The dead were no tale-tellers. That was the way of
Egypt--the ancient way of safety. Were they not few and feeble in the
midst of innumerable hordes of the _Busne_? Had they not been driven
like cattle, abused like dogs, sent guiltless to the scaffold, shot in
batches by both warring parties? Now in this one place at least, they
would do a deed of vengeance at which the ears of the world would
tingle.

The Sergeant sat and smoked and listened. He was no stranger to such
talk. It was the way of his double profession of Andalucian bandit and
Carlist _guerrilero_, to devise and execute deeds of terror and death.
But nothing so cold-blooded as this had Jose Maria ever imagined. He had
indeed appropriated the governmental mails till the post-bags almost
seemed his own property, and the guards handed them down without
question as to a recognised official. He had, in his great days,
captured towns and held them for either party according to the good the
matter was likely to do himself. But there was something revolting in
this whole business which puzzled him.

"Whose idea was all this?" he asked at last. "I would give much to see
the _Gitano_ who could devise such a stroke."

The grim smile on the countenance of old Pepe of the Eleven Wounds grew
yet more grim.

"No gipsy planned it and no man!" he said sententiously. "Come hither,
Chica!"

And out from among the listening throng came a girl of thirteen or
fourteen, dres