Peter the Renegade
by S. R. Crockett
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE FOUR – The Treasure of Ten Thousand.
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE FOUR – The Treasure of Ten Thousand.
Peter Blake, Scottish adventurer, late of the East India Company’s service, later still scout-master to His Majesty’s 4th Dragoons, has lost despatches and almost wrecked an army by one foolish drinking bout in the wine-cellars of a captured town. Sir John Moore is falling back to the sea. The French, under Soult, are following in overwhelming numbers. Peter, having only the gallows to expect, slips out between the armies and finds a new life as a Captain of Spanish guerrilla fighters. Angry at the death of two companions – renegades like himself – he starts off, greatly reinforced, to help the French to capture Moore at Corunna. But the sight of the red uniforms, and especially some of the words of a young officer – a fellow-countryman of his own – work a sudden conversion. To enable the British to hold out till the ships come, he captures the dangerous French batteries and destroys the guns. He has now set off all alone with Froyla to recover ten thousand pounds of the treasure abandoned by General Moore, with which he will buy the rights of the man who, by a family arrangement, must necessarily marry the girl. They have been waiting among the mountains till the passes are clear of Soult’s army, now pouring southward out of Gallicia to oppose Sir Arthur Wellesley, whose landing is reported from Lisbon.
The tide flowed on, glittering breastplates of Lagrange’s Cuirassiers, plumed shakos, pale blue lancers, all aflutter with gold and embroidery, little, nimble, crisp-headed, chattering Provençal infantry men, good at a charge and the very devil to swarm up an enemy’s entrenchments. A great sight were the gorges of Escaldos those short June nights of Soult’s famous forced march, when the very name of Wellesley sent that huge army southward with the rush and fury of a dam broken loose. A memorable watch they kept, these two alone upon the mountain verge – the girl with her hand on the man’s shoulder, and her eyes going to and fro between the rivers of flashing steel and thundering hoofs and the man’s face. For Froyla was now at the stage when she wondered all the time what he was thinking, and strove to divine the thought.
At last they had drawn themselves away from the marvel of force and discipline which was a night march of Napoleon’s veterans.
The real danger came afterwards. The gorges emptied and filled – filled and emptied. And so long as the gold and steel, the crimson and black, the sky-blue and silver marched and rode, or drove light mule teams, swagging cannon and lumbering wagon, Froyla and Peter were safe on their heights. But afterwards, at a safe distance from Soult’s inexorable rearguards, came the plunderers, the worst of all the free companies, scouring the country for all that was left or had dropped behind.
Then Peter and Froyla betook themselves to the cave where were the mules, for it was well to be ready.
Froyla examined the ammunition and provender. Peter arranged such temporary defences as would enable them to stand a siege, supposing always that they were not rushed. A bend in the road beneath and a Devil’s Thumb of rock afforded an excellent rifle range. They practised assiduously, till Peter could hit the mark every time, and Froyla about three times out of every five.
Assuredly with a couple of rifles apiece they could make it unpleasant for anyone coming that way.
But time passed, and still they abode in silence and peace, cleaning their rifles and talking incessantly in low tones, as if someone were dead in the next room.
On the afternoon of the third day of their residence in the charcoal-burner’s hut a man appeared. Froyla spotted him from far, and through the old three-draw marine telescope (‘Puig Hijos, Calle Ferdinando, Barcelona 1789’) they kept him in sight. Unless he came as a spy, one man could do them no harm. He might be anyone – a mountaineer seeking his goats abandoned among the peaks, or their landlord, the charcoal-burner himself, prepared to light the furnace and resume possession of his cabin of split pine saplings, with the bark still on and the resin still oozing, a cruel trap for the hair when you leaned too confidently against it.
Their visitor advanced carefully. They could see him in the dim, bluish light of the old telescope, with something vaguely marine about him, a foreshortened water-beetle moving painfully upward through a vague glimmer of mist.
It could not be the charcoal-burner, because obviously he did not know the way. He made casts from side to side of the road like a questing collie.
Yet he sought for something, for he bent often and examined the ground with attention, particularly in the soft places. The goatherd then, or someone spying upon them? The dim bluish silhouette in the lenses of ancient Puig (pronounced ‘push’) revealed nothing except a country-cut coat and white linen trousers (or bragas, pattern old as the Romans), with the yellow hose cross-gartered in white, common to all the peasantry of the North from the Aragon to the Atlantic headlands.
Steadily and quietly the man made his way, trudging up the narrow glens, seamed and torn with the torrents of a thousand winter floods. His eyes were upon the ground, following the unseen sign, but every now and then he would straighten himself and stand gazing upward, as if daring them to make a mark of him.
Presently, however, he would pass in front of the rock they had called the Devil’s Thumb; and then they must make up their minds as to whether or not he was to be allowed to pass.
For an hour he mounted, nowise hasting or troubling himself save about the direction, which he certainly followed with uncanny exactness. Now and then a pile of stones attracted his attention. There are a good many such along every Spanish mountain path, and merely signify that some man, name unknown or forgotten, had died a violent death on that spot. The new-comer examined each of these, carefully perusing their structure and examining their arrangement with the air of a man who gains valuable information.
They lost him a while as the gorge continued to narrow. But Peter, his rifle at his shoulder, watched both ridges so that he could not possibly escape unseen. Presently he would come out almost in front of the black monolith of the Devil’s Thumb, and there he must be stopped.
Froyla’s eye was glued to the telescope. Peter fastidiously depressed his guiding sight a hair’s breadth, and kept the small glittering speck of his hind-sight steady on the black basalt pillar.
It was very silent up there on the Sierra when a man’s life hung in the crook of Peter’s finger – not a bird’s note, not a bee, not even the jingling accoutrement of the mules whisking their tails in the rock shelter behind.
Peter’s rifle cracked, and all the circle of the hills gave back the report. At the very feet of the man by the rock a little puff of dust sprang up and hung an instant in the air.
The climber paused, noted the smoke high above him, straightened himself, and leaning against the black Devil’s Thumb in an attitude of careless ease, rolled and lit a cigarette.
It was a challenge in form.
‘A bold fellow,’ growled Peter, ‘but he means mischief, or he would not take matters so coolly.’ And he adjusted his sights, this time – with the full intention of not missing twice.
Suddenly Froyla held up a hand.
‘Stop!’ she ordered. ‘Do not fire. It is my father, Don Severino. Let us go down to him!’
And with a shout of joy she dropped the spy-glass and ran straight down the hill towards the sullen obelisk of the Devil’s Thumb.
Peter followed with his piece ready to set to fire. But he soon shouldered his gun, for it was indeed Severino Cardoños who came nearer to him, his daughter upon his arm.
On his face there was an air of guileless simplicity. He was pleased with himself, for he had performed a notable feat of tracking. But he was quite ready to explain how the matter had been carried through.
‘I had the front of the big he-mule Buscar’s shoes turned up like hatbrims, because Buscar has an abominable habit of dragging his forefeet and stumbling upon the rasps left to bite into the path in dangerous places. So I looked for the trace of Buscar’s hoof-brims, and it was quite simple.’
Severino had come to warn Peter of sedition in the band. Juan Julio had not been silent. The tidings of the bargain had flown round the camp of the Feliçés. Juan Julia had sold their lands and properties to the stranger. They would be turned out of white houses, resplendent meadows, ancient vineyards and other yards. There would be no more Feliçés at all. The Cardoños would possess all, and they would be no more than gitanos, road trampers, petty thieves – all that Juan Julio might have forty, fifty, a hundred thousand duros to live upon in Madrid or Saragossa.
Don Severino and all the Cardoños had maintained that nothing should be altered. Everything should be as if Froyla had married Juan Julio. Every Feliçé should retain his own house, his meadows, his vineyards and fruit-trees, his ‘alps’ and pasturages, his rights of wood and water, all protected by legal entitlement.
But the obstinate tribe replied: ‘Why then so much money for nothing? There is some trick beneath.’ So Severino had come on to warn Peter not to go back to La Giralda with the money, but to pay it into the hands of the brothers Pereira of Bayonne, who were the bankers of all the North of Spain and had agencies in every town.
Severino watched the expression upon Peter’s face keenly. He expected that he would now see the folly of attempting to tamper with family arrangements, and with so clear a lesson before him would accept the position and settle down to the clearly defined and highly respectable functions of Prince Consort in the Platonic ménage of Froyla and the venerable Chief of the Feliçés.
But Peter never gave that solution a thought. He was thinking of the band and of those Feliçés who were reported to be mutinous.
‘They shall obey as soon as I look them between the eyes.’ He muttered rather than spoke the words. ‘They would not dare - they would not dare!’
Aloud he said, ‘Don Severino Cardoños, I honour you as my benefactor and I have honoured and respected the lady your daughter as though I were her blood brother. But we love one another. I have my own honour. I obey my own law. So before I return to La Giralda, we must find a priest who will marry us. You shall be our witness and give your consent.’
‘And the treasure?’ said Don Severino, ignoring on his side the demand for immediate marriage.
‘The treasure,’ said Peter, ‘I shall lodge it with the Pereiras in the name of my wife Donna Froyla Blake; so my promise will be fulfilled – so it shall be ready for Juan Julio whatever happens to me!’
‘But when there is no need?’ said Don Severino. ‘It is safer where it is in these troubled times.’
‘My word is my word,’ asserted Peter dourly. ‘I take the girl and I pay over the price.’
That night they slept both in the outer hut, while the couple of saddle-cloths hung over a stretched cord provided a sleeping room for Froyla. But with the coming of a third person a certain awkwardness over-shadowed the confident simplicity of their lives.
Peter meditated all night on the problems of life, and in the morning, rising early to stir the faggots from under the grey ash, he articulated the result of the night’s thoughts in this flinty formula:
‘Priest before payment.’
The three remained four days more in the charcoal-burner’s hut, and then, after diligent spying out of the land, they began to descend into the main gorge of Escaldos. The clean, eager airs of the hilltops, keen even in June, were left behind. They descended into a zone of shadow and quiet. The air grew soft, fragrant with the scent of mown hay and acacias in bloom.
But the mountains shut them more quickly in. The twilight came sooner. The dawn lingered longer, and only for a few hours each day the deep gorge sweltered and sweated under the direct rays of the sun.
It was silent and deserted down there. No one on the much-rutted powdery road, stamped hard by ten thousand feet of men and horses. Above on the arching branches of the trees a few handfuls of cherries had escaped the hasty gleaning of the French soldiers. Boughs had been roughly hacked down with sword cuts, but still a little higher, and often within a few yards of the track, Peter and Froyla found plenty of the ruby fruit, sweet-juiced, and now almost black with ripeness.
But everywhere the houses had been sacked. In Escaldos itself not a house remained entire. Fire had destroyed the roofs, and every scrap of wood had been carried off to keep the soldiers off the chill ground or barren rock at the next camping place.
It was with a sigh of thankfulness that Peter at last turned from the main gorge up one of the side defiles. He recognised the place immediately. There was his own blaze on the trees, the little cairn with the erect stone in the centre which his companions had set up, and before them the black overhanging rocks of La Catalina, the highest of the Sierras, blocking the way.
All that afternoon they advanced up the narrow cul de sac. That way there was no exit. They must return by the path they came, and in this lay their danger, for if Ney took it into his head to follow Soult through the gorges of Escaldos the cork was in the bottle indeed.
Peter, however, found no traces of recent passage either of man or beast. The place was desolate as when God made it, the black hills surrounding it, and a mere crack of blue sky roofing it irregularly in.
They camped for the night under an overhanging rock-shelf, beside which a pool was formed by the downward trickle of innumerable little rills from the springs in the hillside.
The place had been noted by Peter on the brief visit he had paid as a good place for a camping ground. But then he and his companions had passed hastily on. Nevertheless, Peter had been looking out for it ever since they turned out of the pass. Now he hobbled the mules at once, and after a good feed of barley and chopped straw he turned them out to graze on the scanty tufts of grass and self-sown sapling which pushed up sparsely and reluctantly among the rocks.
Severino slept like a tired soldier on the mule furniture, but in the eye of the pass, looking down towards Escaldos, Froyla and Peter kept watch.
The silence was broken only by the croak of the raven high among the rocks, the hissing of a stone slide on the slopes, and the deep sonorous pour of a score of waterfalls from the heights.
Peter and Froyla talked in whispers, her head on his shoulder, and her fingers plaited about his arm. She fell asleep while Peter was telling her of his dreams – how they would go to America and do great things, found cities, and build them, become owners of immense wheat-fields, orchards, dairies – all of which was perfectly the same to Froyla so that Peter was going with her. That being settled, she slept, warm, peaceful and invincibly safe within the circle of an arm, while Peter, with a heart troubled by that delicately warm proximity, looked resolutely out into the night.
The next morning Severino was left behind to watch the narrow entrance to the upper reach of the gorge where the treasure was hidden. Peter went on fifty yards ahead with his rifle over his arm. Froyla came behind with the two mules. They had progressed thus two hours when all at once Peter darted forward, caught at the edge of a dwarf pine clinging to the edge of a precipice, and appeared to launch himself into the abyss. Froyla hastened forward, leaving the mules to follow, and in an instant was standing beside him on a broad shelf, the floor of a former cave from which the side next the cañon had been wrenched out in some convulsion. Beneath the torrent roared and fretted, and in the dim alcoves at the back many small boxes like tea-chests were piled. The treasure at last, and quite untouched, just as Peter and his companions had left it! With a cold chisel and a pocket hammer Peter soon opened the first chest which came to hand. No doubt about it – good honest English guineas, neatly done up in rolls of a hundred. Ten of these would therefore make a thousand, and a hundred the exact count of ten thousand.
‘Your price, Froyla,’ said Peter exultingly, as he laid the firm little packages out side by side on the dry stone floor. Then he bade her go and bring the mules close up one after the other to receive their load.
Peter had little sacks ready in which he placed the rouleaux of coin. These were passed up one by one to Froyla, who placed them carefully in the panniers, bedding each down with heath and bracken, so that no noise of clinking coin might be heard.
When everything was complete Peter carefully effaced all marks of their passage, and the cavalcade took its way down to where Severino was anxiously awaiting their coming.
As soon as she saw her father Froyla leaped on a rock and waved her neckerchief. All was well then. The stranger who had cast a spell over his daughter, and indeed over all the clan of Cardoños, had been speaking the truth.
It was with a trembling avidity that the chief dipped his hand among the rolls of gold. He turned his face towards Peter, and his eyes were eager as those of a child who asks permission. Peter nodded his head, and with extreme care old Cardoños unrolled a pile of glittering pieces fresh from the mint. His eyes grew strange and reminiscent. A mist rose before them.
‘Where did you find all that?’ he said, and the words sounded hoarse and strange in his own ears.
‘Froyla knows,’ Peter answered calmly. ‘It is her Treasure.’
Severino looked longingly up at the glen. Had he been alone he would have gone there to search for it. But he understood that Peter was not a man to be trifled with on such an occasion.
They took their way back down the glen, their eyes and ears keen to catch the first intimations of the passage of troops through the Gorge of Escaldos. But the footmarks of the mules were still upon the dust where they had turned aside to the right, and Severino pointed out the smooth shuffling plough made by the turned-up horn of Buscar’s right forefoot.
‘No one has passed this way since,’ he said, confidently, and filled with an equal desire to be done with the dangerous trap, they urged the laden mules towards the upper entrance. The scout-master went on ahead, and Froyla and her father brought up the rear. The little side glens were more numerous towards the entrance of the gorge, and Peter arranged that the mules should be hidden in one of those, exactly as in a side street of a town, till he should signal from the corner of the next. Then the beasts would be urged to the new shelter, while again the scout-master went ahead to spy out the way.
At last the arid steepness of the hills opened out and it was possible by striking up among the chestnut trees to cross the last shoulder into the plain. The worst of the danger was now over; but not on that account did Peter relax the smallest part of his vigilance.
He went on ahead through pleasant shades of oak and chestnut, his eye keenly alert for any sign of French cavalry or Spanish irregulars.
And at last, just as they were descending into the Vale of Ludo, Peter came quite unexpectedly upon a man. He had evidently been propped up against the trunk of a tree, but had collapsed, and slipped down into an attitude which bespoke mortal weakness.
‘Molinos!’ muttered Peter, and without attempting any succour he turned instantly back to signal Froyla and her father to take the higher road with the mules.
The presence of Molinos in that place might be the result of some tragedy in the band, or again it might be a trap. In one case or the other, Peter, rendered cautious by his knowledge of the man, did not propose to run any risks.
He returned to Molinos, and forcing the neck of his silver flask between his clenched teeth, he turned the priest’s head back. The fiery liquid caused him to open his eyes, coughing and spluttering.
‘Ah! The Englishman,’ he muttered. ‘Good day, Englishman! See how they have arranged me – their leader! Proper and grateful, is it not? Another sup from that bottle.’
‘I think,’ said Peter, ‘you had better let me look at your wounds.’
And putting two fingers in the mouth after the fashion of the Galloway shepherds, he whistled shrilly. Severino came down immediately at his slow hillman’s trot, which yet so swiftly covers the ground.
‘Ah, Don!’ said the wounded man, as Cardoños bent his knee to receive the muttered benediction; ‘they have left your poor cura out here to die with as many holes in him as a colander! But I shall be glad of your help to get as far as Ludo, where I have well-wishers. Ah, if only I could see the white towers of my village church again I should grow well. I have had enough of storming and fighting. I shall make my submission to the bishop, shave my tonsure, dust my old breviary, and till the day you bury me under the chestnuts I shall no more be Captain Molinos of the Free Companies, but only Padre Esteban, parish priest of La Giralda. And all for a nothing.’ Molinos continued, ‘for a letter, a little letter which I wrote and sent to General Lagrange, warning him that the attack of the Free Companies was for such an hour of such a night. It was, indeed the day and hour fixed, but I meant to change it – after I had received the reward. But the Frenchman – twenty thousand devils enter by his eye-holes! – cursed be Lagrange through the high, the middle and the deep, deep hell! – threw back my little letter at the messenger, saying that he had now no need to spend money on Gallegan traitors. Let them go dig truffles with their swine-snouts! He was marching southwards with Soult. Little mattered it to him that he delivered to the devil a poor cura who had tried to serve him! He tossed my letter to Paulo Santa Anna, who, not being able to read himself, pouched it and brought it back to those who could.
‘Lissengaray read it aloud to the band and said:
‘Thus it is you are betrayed. There is a Judas among you and he hath not received his thirty pieces of silver. What will you give the poor man instead?’
‘Then they bound my hands and blindfolded my eyes. I heard the chill whisper of many knives drawn from their sheaths, and then by their order and companies they passed and struck, some lightly (these were my friends) and others with the utmost ill-will of their right arms, till I fell down prone from loss of blood.’
‘But you had been propped up against a tree - so, at least we found you,’ said Peter.
‘Ah, yes,’ groaned the priest. ‘That would be Felix de Rey, my parish clerk, marguillier, and good servant. He would doubtless mean to come back to find me. But then –’tis as good as certain that they have put their daggers through him also. Ah! If Felix had not been lame, I should have made him my messenger to the French dog Legrange, and all this would not have happened. Oh, the devil’s animals upon whom be evil! Not a Christian among them – malediction befall them, sons of impure mothers!’
‘The devil is very sick,’ thought Peter as he bound up the dagger wounds, which were scattered over all parts of the priest’s body – the arms, back and breast chiefly.
However, none of these appeared in Peter’s experienced eye to put the priest’s life in danger, but he had certainly lost a great deal of blood, and it was evident that for a while he would be at leisure to repent of his sins and read his neglected breviary.
‘The devils,’ he murmured over and over as he passed from one fainting fit to another, while his wounds were being staunched, ‘they cut me to pieces – I, with my eyes blindfolded, and they compelling everyone to strike in turn – even my friends. But I know the ring-leaders!’
‘Whom,’ said Peter, ‘as a priest reconciled with God, it is your duty to forgive.’
‘I will – oh, I will!’ cried the priest; ‘only get me to some place of safety where I can be nursed.’
‘First of all, Father Molinos,’ said Peter, ‘I have a small service to require of you, and then I shall carry you at once to an hospital. You can administer the sacraments – well then marry us two. Froyla Cardoños and myself. You are the priest of our parish, and Froyla’s father shall be our witness. Besides, if you desire to live peacefully, I have means of causing the archbishop to raise his interdict.’
The wounded man was suddenly awake and alert.
‘I will see you frying in hell first!’ he exclaimed fiercely, trying to raise himself upon the palms of his hands. But he fell back exhausted by the effort. ‘I am dying,’ he groaned, ‘bring Don Ramon, the priest of Logo, that I may die confessed.’
‘You will be better presently,’ said Peter, who knew the effect of the tot of Angoulême brandy he was administering. ‘If you will not marry us we shall instantly be compelled to leave you as we found you, holy father, and go find Don Ramon for ourselves. But if you have forgotten your Latin, I have here a Church Ritual printed by Fabricius of Antwerp for your own diocese of Campostella. Here are also a pen and scrivener’s ink wherewith to write your certificate. Is that complete and clear? Now let me call down Donna Froyla.’
Again with palms hollowed like a conch-shell, he hooted three times, and presently through the glades of the wood came the tinkling of mule chains.
‘Tie them to the trees at the edge of the clearing and come hither,’ called out Peter. And as Froyla approached, Peter announced calmly, ‘Padre Molinos is about to marry us. Your father will do us the honour to serve as witness.’
Molinos propped against the tree, ghastly under his spotted bandages, glared at them speechless with wrath and amazement.
Peter prompted him.
‘Petrus Blake, vis accipere Froylam Cardoños hic presentum in legitimam uxorem - ’
The wounded priest repeated the words in a prolonged snarl as if he were spitting the Latin at them. One after another they responded. ‘Volo!’ while Peter, book in hand, checked the accuracy of the ceremonial to see that nothing necessary was omitted.
As the priest blessed the ring which Don Severino gave him from the half-dozen he wore, Peter whispered to Froyla:
‘After all, he is but a feeble rascal. All the time he is saying to himself, ‘A good little knife-thrust will cut any marriage bonds.’
‘Let him alone,’ Froyla answered. ‘After his office is said we shall see.’
‘In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.’
Molinos sank back and closed his eyes. A little more brandy and the certificate was written, signed, and witnessed.
‘We shall have it proclaimed and transcribed as soon as we reach La Giralda,’ said Peter as he slipped the stamped parchment into his old leather pocket-book.
Faithfully they conveyed Molinos to the house of his friend Don Ramon. Faithfully they paid down the ten thousand English guineas to Israël Goldsmidt, Pereira’s agent in Ludo, the only man whom neither side dared rob, because he represented the power from which all in turns had borrowed, and might need to borrow again.
Israël accepted the deposit with perfect calmness. It was made in the name of Froyla Blake, wife of Peter Blake, of Rerrick in Scotland, and La Giralda in the country of Gallicia.
The next Sunday was the feast of the Virgin, and at La Giralda the vicar, the Abbé Jaime, read in a loud voice the certificate of marriage signed by his cura, and placed in his hands by the bride’s father, while in the presence of the congregation Froyla put into the hands of Juan Julio the bank certificate and a deed of gift of the ten thousand guineas English moneys to the said Juan Julio and his heirs, in consideration of which moneys Froyla Blake and her heirs became the possessors and overlords of La Giralda, exactly as if she had married Juan Julio Feliçé. All existing rights of tenancy were to be respected, and the purchase money to be divided according to valuation among the family of which he was the head.
As for the band, it was constituted more strongly than ever. The Cardoños were now more dominant, and looked upon their new leader as their legitimate chief. His reputation for wealth went abroad, and it was currently reported that if he would he could lend to emperors and kings even as he did the great house of the Pereiras of Bayonne.
Israël Goldsmidt had said it, and who should know if not he?
As for the Señora Froyla Blake, she hunted out her mother’s provision of lace and linen, to which Juan Julio good-naturedly added all that was to be found in the Feliçé family chests. So that Froyla walked like a slender dusky queen in the shadow of priceless mantillas, and swung her legs no more on tables and window sills, but like a wise married woman did her best to keep her husband quiet and contented at home.
Which thing, in the thirty-second year of his age, was little likely to happen to Peter Blake.
The tide flowed on, glittering breastplates of Lagrange’s Cuirassiers, plumed shakos, pale blue lancers, all aflutter with gold and embroidery, little, nimble, crisp-headed, chattering Provençal infantry men, good at a charge and the very devil to swarm up an enemy’s entrenchments. A great sight were the gorges of Escaldos those short June nights of Soult’s famous forced march, when the very name of Wellesley sent that huge army southward with the rush and fury of a dam broken loose. A memorable watch they kept, these two alone upon the mountain verge – the girl with her hand on the man’s shoulder, and her eyes going to and fro between the rivers of flashing steel and thundering hoofs and the man’s face. For Froyla was now at the stage when she wondered all the time what he was thinking, and strove to divine the thought.
At last they had drawn themselves away from the marvel of force and discipline which was a night march of Napoleon’s veterans.
The real danger came afterwards. The gorges emptied and filled – filled and emptied. And so long as the gold and steel, the crimson and black, the sky-blue and silver marched and rode, or drove light mule teams, swagging cannon and lumbering wagon, Froyla and Peter were safe on their heights. But afterwards, at a safe distance from Soult’s inexorable rearguards, came the plunderers, the worst of all the free companies, scouring the country for all that was left or had dropped behind.
Then Peter and Froyla betook themselves to the cave where were the mules, for it was well to be ready.
Froyla examined the ammunition and provender. Peter arranged such temporary defences as would enable them to stand a siege, supposing always that they were not rushed. A bend in the road beneath and a Devil’s Thumb of rock afforded an excellent rifle range. They practised assiduously, till Peter could hit the mark every time, and Froyla about three times out of every five.
Assuredly with a couple of rifles apiece they could make it unpleasant for anyone coming that way.
But time passed, and still they abode in silence and peace, cleaning their rifles and talking incessantly in low tones, as if someone were dead in the next room.
On the afternoon of the third day of their residence in the charcoal-burner’s hut a man appeared. Froyla spotted him from far, and through the old three-draw marine telescope (‘Puig Hijos, Calle Ferdinando, Barcelona 1789’) they kept him in sight. Unless he came as a spy, one man could do them no harm. He might be anyone – a mountaineer seeking his goats abandoned among the peaks, or their landlord, the charcoal-burner himself, prepared to light the furnace and resume possession of his cabin of split pine saplings, with the bark still on and the resin still oozing, a cruel trap for the hair when you leaned too confidently against it.
Their visitor advanced carefully. They could see him in the dim, bluish light of the old telescope, with something vaguely marine about him, a foreshortened water-beetle moving painfully upward through a vague glimmer of mist.
It could not be the charcoal-burner, because obviously he did not know the way. He made casts from side to side of the road like a questing collie.
Yet he sought for something, for he bent often and examined the ground with attention, particularly in the soft places. The goatherd then, or someone spying upon them? The dim bluish silhouette in the lenses of ancient Puig (pronounced ‘push’) revealed nothing except a country-cut coat and white linen trousers (or bragas, pattern old as the Romans), with the yellow hose cross-gartered in white, common to all the peasantry of the North from the Aragon to the Atlantic headlands.
Steadily and quietly the man made his way, trudging up the narrow glens, seamed and torn with the torrents of a thousand winter floods. His eyes were upon the ground, following the unseen sign, but every now and then he would straighten himself and stand gazing upward, as if daring them to make a mark of him.
Presently, however, he would pass in front of the rock they had called the Devil’s Thumb; and then they must make up their minds as to whether or not he was to be allowed to pass.
For an hour he mounted, nowise hasting or troubling himself save about the direction, which he certainly followed with uncanny exactness. Now and then a pile of stones attracted his attention. There are a good many such along every Spanish mountain path, and merely signify that some man, name unknown or forgotten, had died a violent death on that spot. The new-comer examined each of these, carefully perusing their structure and examining their arrangement with the air of a man who gains valuable information.
They lost him a while as the gorge continued to narrow. But Peter, his rifle at his shoulder, watched both ridges so that he could not possibly escape unseen. Presently he would come out almost in front of the black monolith of the Devil’s Thumb, and there he must be stopped.
Froyla’s eye was glued to the telescope. Peter fastidiously depressed his guiding sight a hair’s breadth, and kept the small glittering speck of his hind-sight steady on the black basalt pillar.
It was very silent up there on the Sierra when a man’s life hung in the crook of Peter’s finger – not a bird’s note, not a bee, not even the jingling accoutrement of the mules whisking their tails in the rock shelter behind.
Peter’s rifle cracked, and all the circle of the hills gave back the report. At the very feet of the man by the rock a little puff of dust sprang up and hung an instant in the air.
The climber paused, noted the smoke high above him, straightened himself, and leaning against the black Devil’s Thumb in an attitude of careless ease, rolled and lit a cigarette.
It was a challenge in form.
‘A bold fellow,’ growled Peter, ‘but he means mischief, or he would not take matters so coolly.’ And he adjusted his sights, this time – with the full intention of not missing twice.
Suddenly Froyla held up a hand.
‘Stop!’ she ordered. ‘Do not fire. It is my father, Don Severino. Let us go down to him!’
And with a shout of joy she dropped the spy-glass and ran straight down the hill towards the sullen obelisk of the Devil’s Thumb.
Peter followed with his piece ready to set to fire. But he soon shouldered his gun, for it was indeed Severino Cardoños who came nearer to him, his daughter upon his arm.
On his face there was an air of guileless simplicity. He was pleased with himself, for he had performed a notable feat of tracking. But he was quite ready to explain how the matter had been carried through.
‘I had the front of the big he-mule Buscar’s shoes turned up like hatbrims, because Buscar has an abominable habit of dragging his forefeet and stumbling upon the rasps left to bite into the path in dangerous places. So I looked for the trace of Buscar’s hoof-brims, and it was quite simple.’
Severino had come to warn Peter of sedition in the band. Juan Julio had not been silent. The tidings of the bargain had flown round the camp of the Feliçés. Juan Julia had sold their lands and properties to the stranger. They would be turned out of white houses, resplendent meadows, ancient vineyards and other yards. There would be no more Feliçés at all. The Cardoños would possess all, and they would be no more than gitanos, road trampers, petty thieves – all that Juan Julio might have forty, fifty, a hundred thousand duros to live upon in Madrid or Saragossa.
Don Severino and all the Cardoños had maintained that nothing should be altered. Everything should be as if Froyla had married Juan Julio. Every Feliçé should retain his own house, his meadows, his vineyards and fruit-trees, his ‘alps’ and pasturages, his rights of wood and water, all protected by legal entitlement.
But the obstinate tribe replied: ‘Why then so much money for nothing? There is some trick beneath.’ So Severino had come on to warn Peter not to go back to La Giralda with the money, but to pay it into the hands of the brothers Pereira of Bayonne, who were the bankers of all the North of Spain and had agencies in every town.
Severino watched the expression upon Peter’s face keenly. He expected that he would now see the folly of attempting to tamper with family arrangements, and with so clear a lesson before him would accept the position and settle down to the clearly defined and highly respectable functions of Prince Consort in the Platonic ménage of Froyla and the venerable Chief of the Feliçés.
But Peter never gave that solution a thought. He was thinking of the band and of those Feliçés who were reported to be mutinous.
‘They shall obey as soon as I look them between the eyes.’ He muttered rather than spoke the words. ‘They would not dare - they would not dare!’
Aloud he said, ‘Don Severino Cardoños, I honour you as my benefactor and I have honoured and respected the lady your daughter as though I were her blood brother. But we love one another. I have my own honour. I obey my own law. So before I return to La Giralda, we must find a priest who will marry us. You shall be our witness and give your consent.’
‘And the treasure?’ said Don Severino, ignoring on his side the demand for immediate marriage.
‘The treasure,’ said Peter, ‘I shall lodge it with the Pereiras in the name of my wife Donna Froyla Blake; so my promise will be fulfilled – so it shall be ready for Juan Julio whatever happens to me!’
‘But when there is no need?’ said Don Severino. ‘It is safer where it is in these troubled times.’
‘My word is my word,’ asserted Peter dourly. ‘I take the girl and I pay over the price.’
That night they slept both in the outer hut, while the couple of saddle-cloths hung over a stretched cord provided a sleeping room for Froyla. But with the coming of a third person a certain awkwardness over-shadowed the confident simplicity of their lives.
Peter meditated all night on the problems of life, and in the morning, rising early to stir the faggots from under the grey ash, he articulated the result of the night’s thoughts in this flinty formula:
‘Priest before payment.’
The three remained four days more in the charcoal-burner’s hut, and then, after diligent spying out of the land, they began to descend into the main gorge of Escaldos. The clean, eager airs of the hilltops, keen even in June, were left behind. They descended into a zone of shadow and quiet. The air grew soft, fragrant with the scent of mown hay and acacias in bloom.
But the mountains shut them more quickly in. The twilight came sooner. The dawn lingered longer, and only for a few hours each day the deep gorge sweltered and sweated under the direct rays of the sun.
It was silent and deserted down there. No one on the much-rutted powdery road, stamped hard by ten thousand feet of men and horses. Above on the arching branches of the trees a few handfuls of cherries had escaped the hasty gleaning of the French soldiers. Boughs had been roughly hacked down with sword cuts, but still a little higher, and often within a few yards of the track, Peter and Froyla found plenty of the ruby fruit, sweet-juiced, and now almost black with ripeness.
But everywhere the houses had been sacked. In Escaldos itself not a house remained entire. Fire had destroyed the roofs, and every scrap of wood had been carried off to keep the soldiers off the chill ground or barren rock at the next camping place.
It was with a sigh of thankfulness that Peter at last turned from the main gorge up one of the side defiles. He recognised the place immediately. There was his own blaze on the trees, the little cairn with the erect stone in the centre which his companions had set up, and before them the black overhanging rocks of La Catalina, the highest of the Sierras, blocking the way.
All that afternoon they advanced up the narrow cul de sac. That way there was no exit. They must return by the path they came, and in this lay their danger, for if Ney took it into his head to follow Soult through the gorges of Escaldos the cork was in the bottle indeed.
Peter, however, found no traces of recent passage either of man or beast. The place was desolate as when God made it, the black hills surrounding it, and a mere crack of blue sky roofing it irregularly in.
They camped for the night under an overhanging rock-shelf, beside which a pool was formed by the downward trickle of innumerable little rills from the springs in the hillside.
The place had been noted by Peter on the brief visit he had paid as a good place for a camping ground. But then he and his companions had passed hastily on. Nevertheless, Peter had been looking out for it ever since they turned out of the pass. Now he hobbled the mules at once, and after a good feed of barley and chopped straw he turned them out to graze on the scanty tufts of grass and self-sown sapling which pushed up sparsely and reluctantly among the rocks.
Severino slept like a tired soldier on the mule furniture, but in the eye of the pass, looking down towards Escaldos, Froyla and Peter kept watch.
The silence was broken only by the croak of the raven high among the rocks, the hissing of a stone slide on the slopes, and the deep sonorous pour of a score of waterfalls from the heights.
Peter and Froyla talked in whispers, her head on his shoulder, and her fingers plaited about his arm. She fell asleep while Peter was telling her of his dreams – how they would go to America and do great things, found cities, and build them, become owners of immense wheat-fields, orchards, dairies – all of which was perfectly the same to Froyla so that Peter was going with her. That being settled, she slept, warm, peaceful and invincibly safe within the circle of an arm, while Peter, with a heart troubled by that delicately warm proximity, looked resolutely out into the night.
The next morning Severino was left behind to watch the narrow entrance to the upper reach of the gorge where the treasure was hidden. Peter went on fifty yards ahead with his rifle over his arm. Froyla came behind with the two mules. They had progressed thus two hours when all at once Peter darted forward, caught at the edge of a dwarf pine clinging to the edge of a precipice, and appeared to launch himself into the abyss. Froyla hastened forward, leaving the mules to follow, and in an instant was standing beside him on a broad shelf, the floor of a former cave from which the side next the cañon had been wrenched out in some convulsion. Beneath the torrent roared and fretted, and in the dim alcoves at the back many small boxes like tea-chests were piled. The treasure at last, and quite untouched, just as Peter and his companions had left it! With a cold chisel and a pocket hammer Peter soon opened the first chest which came to hand. No doubt about it – good honest English guineas, neatly done up in rolls of a hundred. Ten of these would therefore make a thousand, and a hundred the exact count of ten thousand.
‘Your price, Froyla,’ said Peter exultingly, as he laid the firm little packages out side by side on the dry stone floor. Then he bade her go and bring the mules close up one after the other to receive their load.
Peter had little sacks ready in which he placed the rouleaux of coin. These were passed up one by one to Froyla, who placed them carefully in the panniers, bedding each down with heath and bracken, so that no noise of clinking coin might be heard.
When everything was complete Peter carefully effaced all marks of their passage, and the cavalcade took its way down to where Severino was anxiously awaiting their coming.
As soon as she saw her father Froyla leaped on a rock and waved her neckerchief. All was well then. The stranger who had cast a spell over his daughter, and indeed over all the clan of Cardoños, had been speaking the truth.
It was with a trembling avidity that the chief dipped his hand among the rolls of gold. He turned his face towards Peter, and his eyes were eager as those of a child who asks permission. Peter nodded his head, and with extreme care old Cardoños unrolled a pile of glittering pieces fresh from the mint. His eyes grew strange and reminiscent. A mist rose before them.
‘Where did you find all that?’ he said, and the words sounded hoarse and strange in his own ears.
‘Froyla knows,’ Peter answered calmly. ‘It is her Treasure.’
Severino looked longingly up at the glen. Had he been alone he would have gone there to search for it. But he understood that Peter was not a man to be trifled with on such an occasion.
They took their way back down the glen, their eyes and ears keen to catch the first intimations of the passage of troops through the Gorge of Escaldos. But the footmarks of the mules were still upon the dust where they had turned aside to the right, and Severino pointed out the smooth shuffling plough made by the turned-up horn of Buscar’s right forefoot.
‘No one has passed this way since,’ he said, confidently, and filled with an equal desire to be done with the dangerous trap, they urged the laden mules towards the upper entrance. The scout-master went on ahead, and Froyla and her father brought up the rear. The little side glens were more numerous towards the entrance of the gorge, and Peter arranged that the mules should be hidden in one of those, exactly as in a side street of a town, till he should signal from the corner of the next. Then the beasts would be urged to the new shelter, while again the scout-master went ahead to spy out the way.
At last the arid steepness of the hills opened out and it was possible by striking up among the chestnut trees to cross the last shoulder into the plain. The worst of the danger was now over; but not on that account did Peter relax the smallest part of his vigilance.
He went on ahead through pleasant shades of oak and chestnut, his eye keenly alert for any sign of French cavalry or Spanish irregulars.
And at last, just as they were descending into the Vale of Ludo, Peter came quite unexpectedly upon a man. He had evidently been propped up against the trunk of a tree, but had collapsed, and slipped down into an attitude which bespoke mortal weakness.
‘Molinos!’ muttered Peter, and without attempting any succour he turned instantly back to signal Froyla and her father to take the higher road with the mules.
The presence of Molinos in that place might be the result of some tragedy in the band, or again it might be a trap. In one case or the other, Peter, rendered cautious by his knowledge of the man, did not propose to run any risks.
He returned to Molinos, and forcing the neck of his silver flask between his clenched teeth, he turned the priest’s head back. The fiery liquid caused him to open his eyes, coughing and spluttering.
‘Ah! The Englishman,’ he muttered. ‘Good day, Englishman! See how they have arranged me – their leader! Proper and grateful, is it not? Another sup from that bottle.’
‘I think,’ said Peter, ‘you had better let me look at your wounds.’
And putting two fingers in the mouth after the fashion of the Galloway shepherds, he whistled shrilly. Severino came down immediately at his slow hillman’s trot, which yet so swiftly covers the ground.
‘Ah, Don!’ said the wounded man, as Cardoños bent his knee to receive the muttered benediction; ‘they have left your poor cura out here to die with as many holes in him as a colander! But I shall be glad of your help to get as far as Ludo, where I have well-wishers. Ah, if only I could see the white towers of my village church again I should grow well. I have had enough of storming and fighting. I shall make my submission to the bishop, shave my tonsure, dust my old breviary, and till the day you bury me under the chestnuts I shall no more be Captain Molinos of the Free Companies, but only Padre Esteban, parish priest of La Giralda. And all for a nothing.’ Molinos continued, ‘for a letter, a little letter which I wrote and sent to General Lagrange, warning him that the attack of the Free Companies was for such an hour of such a night. It was, indeed the day and hour fixed, but I meant to change it – after I had received the reward. But the Frenchman – twenty thousand devils enter by his eye-holes! – cursed be Lagrange through the high, the middle and the deep, deep hell! – threw back my little letter at the messenger, saying that he had now no need to spend money on Gallegan traitors. Let them go dig truffles with their swine-snouts! He was marching southwards with Soult. Little mattered it to him that he delivered to the devil a poor cura who had tried to serve him! He tossed my letter to Paulo Santa Anna, who, not being able to read himself, pouched it and brought it back to those who could.
‘Lissengaray read it aloud to the band and said:
‘Thus it is you are betrayed. There is a Judas among you and he hath not received his thirty pieces of silver. What will you give the poor man instead?’
‘Then they bound my hands and blindfolded my eyes. I heard the chill whisper of many knives drawn from their sheaths, and then by their order and companies they passed and struck, some lightly (these were my friends) and others with the utmost ill-will of their right arms, till I fell down prone from loss of blood.’
‘But you had been propped up against a tree - so, at least we found you,’ said Peter.
‘Ah, yes,’ groaned the priest. ‘That would be Felix de Rey, my parish clerk, marguillier, and good servant. He would doubtless mean to come back to find me. But then –’tis as good as certain that they have put their daggers through him also. Ah! If Felix had not been lame, I should have made him my messenger to the French dog Legrange, and all this would not have happened. Oh, the devil’s animals upon whom be evil! Not a Christian among them – malediction befall them, sons of impure mothers!’
‘The devil is very sick,’ thought Peter as he bound up the dagger wounds, which were scattered over all parts of the priest’s body – the arms, back and breast chiefly.
However, none of these appeared in Peter’s experienced eye to put the priest’s life in danger, but he had certainly lost a great deal of blood, and it was evident that for a while he would be at leisure to repent of his sins and read his neglected breviary.
‘The devils,’ he murmured over and over as he passed from one fainting fit to another, while his wounds were being staunched, ‘they cut me to pieces – I, with my eyes blindfolded, and they compelling everyone to strike in turn – even my friends. But I know the ring-leaders!’
‘Whom,’ said Peter, ‘as a priest reconciled with God, it is your duty to forgive.’
‘I will – oh, I will!’ cried the priest; ‘only get me to some place of safety where I can be nursed.’
‘First of all, Father Molinos,’ said Peter, ‘I have a small service to require of you, and then I shall carry you at once to an hospital. You can administer the sacraments – well then marry us two. Froyla Cardoños and myself. You are the priest of our parish, and Froyla’s father shall be our witness. Besides, if you desire to live peacefully, I have means of causing the archbishop to raise his interdict.’
The wounded man was suddenly awake and alert.
‘I will see you frying in hell first!’ he exclaimed fiercely, trying to raise himself upon the palms of his hands. But he fell back exhausted by the effort. ‘I am dying,’ he groaned, ‘bring Don Ramon, the priest of Logo, that I may die confessed.’
‘You will be better presently,’ said Peter, who knew the effect of the tot of Angoulême brandy he was administering. ‘If you will not marry us we shall instantly be compelled to leave you as we found you, holy father, and go find Don Ramon for ourselves. But if you have forgotten your Latin, I have here a Church Ritual printed by Fabricius of Antwerp for your own diocese of Campostella. Here are also a pen and scrivener’s ink wherewith to write your certificate. Is that complete and clear? Now let me call down Donna Froyla.’
Again with palms hollowed like a conch-shell, he hooted three times, and presently through the glades of the wood came the tinkling of mule chains.
‘Tie them to the trees at the edge of the clearing and come hither,’ called out Peter. And as Froyla approached, Peter announced calmly, ‘Padre Molinos is about to marry us. Your father will do us the honour to serve as witness.’
Molinos propped against the tree, ghastly under his spotted bandages, glared at them speechless with wrath and amazement.
Peter prompted him.
‘Petrus Blake, vis accipere Froylam Cardoños hic presentum in legitimam uxorem - ’
The wounded priest repeated the words in a prolonged snarl as if he were spitting the Latin at them. One after another they responded. ‘Volo!’ while Peter, book in hand, checked the accuracy of the ceremonial to see that nothing necessary was omitted.
As the priest blessed the ring which Don Severino gave him from the half-dozen he wore, Peter whispered to Froyla:
‘After all, he is but a feeble rascal. All the time he is saying to himself, ‘A good little knife-thrust will cut any marriage bonds.’
‘Let him alone,’ Froyla answered. ‘After his office is said we shall see.’
‘In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.’
Molinos sank back and closed his eyes. A little more brandy and the certificate was written, signed, and witnessed.
‘We shall have it proclaimed and transcribed as soon as we reach La Giralda,’ said Peter as he slipped the stamped parchment into his old leather pocket-book.
Faithfully they conveyed Molinos to the house of his friend Don Ramon. Faithfully they paid down the ten thousand English guineas to Israël Goldsmidt, Pereira’s agent in Ludo, the only man whom neither side dared rob, because he represented the power from which all in turns had borrowed, and might need to borrow again.
Israël accepted the deposit with perfect calmness. It was made in the name of Froyla Blake, wife of Peter Blake, of Rerrick in Scotland, and La Giralda in the country of Gallicia.
The next Sunday was the feast of the Virgin, and at La Giralda the vicar, the Abbé Jaime, read in a loud voice the certificate of marriage signed by his cura, and placed in his hands by the bride’s father, while in the presence of the congregation Froyla put into the hands of Juan Julio the bank certificate and a deed of gift of the ten thousand guineas English moneys to the said Juan Julio and his heirs, in consideration of which moneys Froyla Blake and her heirs became the possessors and overlords of La Giralda, exactly as if she had married Juan Julio Feliçé. All existing rights of tenancy were to be respected, and the purchase money to be divided according to valuation among the family of which he was the head.
As for the band, it was constituted more strongly than ever. The Cardoños were now more dominant, and looked upon their new leader as their legitimate chief. His reputation for wealth went abroad, and it was currently reported that if he would he could lend to emperors and kings even as he did the great house of the Pereiras of Bayonne.
Israël Goldsmidt had said it, and who should know if not he?
As for the Señora Froyla Blake, she hunted out her mother’s provision of lace and linen, to which Juan Julio good-naturedly added all that was to be found in the Feliçé family chests. So that Froyla walked like a slender dusky queen in the shadow of priceless mantillas, and swung her legs no more on tables and window sills, but like a wise married woman did her best to keep her husband quiet and contented at home.
Which thing, in the thirty-second year of his age, was little likely to happen to Peter Blake.
About the Author
S. R. Crockett was born in Balmaghie, Galloway, in 1859 and died in France on April 16th, 1914. During his life, he had over 60 novels published (many of them serialised) and hundreds of short stories/sketches appeared in the popular magazines. He was one of Scotland’s bestselling and best known authors in his day, but now is barely known of. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death, The Galloway Raiders has been set up and a major collection of 32 of his Galloway-based fictional works has been republished by Ayton Publishing Limited.
To find out more about S. R. Crockett, you can join The Galloway Raiders for FREE at www.gallowayraiders.co.uk
To find out more about S. R. Crockett, you can join The Galloway Raiders for FREE at www.gallowayraiders.co.uk