BY a quick, sharp tug, Rafael swerved Coronela out of reach. To his own surprise, he was not frightened. His mind was filled with one idea, and his will braced to one purpose. He must save his little sister and Uncle Manuel’s choice mule from the peril into which his foolhardy performance had brought them. Coronela could not make speed down that rocky descent. She would have to pick her way and the robber could soon catch her. All this flashed through Rafael’s thought as he jerked the mule aside. The next instant he had leapt to the ground and dealt her a stinging slap.

“Hold on tight, Pilarica! ArrÉ, Coronela!”

The mule, Pilarica clinging to her neck, sprang away and the man sprang after, with the boy in pursuit. Rafael remembered his popgun,—a frail weapon, but it served. It was already charged with Uncle Manuel’s pointed pewter button, and as mule and man turned at right angles from their first course, which had brought them to the brink of a precipice, Rafael dodged in front and delivered his bullet full in the convict’s forehead. It struck with enough force to draw blood that trickled down into the man’s eyes, blinding and confusing him. Before he fully realized what had happened, Coronela had made good her escape, for he dared not give her chase after she had come into view from the road.

With a curse he lunged toward the boy, who, intent only on drawing the enemy away from Coronela and her precious burden, fled back up the mountain as fast as his legs could spin. As he ran, his watch was jolted from its pocket under his belt and, glinting in the sun, bobbed at the end of its chain. He ran well, for all that trudging across Castile had developed good muscle in those stocky little legs, but the criminal who, weak from years of confinement, ran clumsily, was nevertheless almost upon him, when Rafael bolted into a cleft in a giant rock,—a cleft too narrow for a man’s shoulders to enter. Turning to face the opening while turn he could, Rafael wriggled and wormed his way until even a small boy could get no further. Then he stood at bay, not precisely with his back to the wall, but to a granite crack, breathing hard from his scamper, but conscious only of a thrilling excitement.

“Come out of there,” called the convict fiercely, “or I’ll shoot you.”

“Shoot away,” returned Rafael, wondering if the man really had a gun.

He hadn’t, not even a popgun. He picked up a stone to cast at the child, but memory plucked at his arm and held it back,—the memory of his own blithe, adventurous boyhood. For the sake of the lad he used to be, before high spirit had led him on to a rash enterprise that blundered suddenly into crime, the convict’s scarred, unhappy heart softened toward the courageous youngster trapped in that fissured rock.

“Hand out your watch,” he called again, “and I’ll let you go.”

Rafael’s watch! His father’s good-bye gift! The gift that meant his father’s faith in him! No, that father should not have cause again to say that his son was a heedless boy who could not guard his own pockets.

“I will not,” he shouted defiantly.

“Hand it out this minute, before the snakes get at you.”

Snakes! Rafael’s legs jumped, but not his heart.

“I will not.”

“Oh, very good! I’ll leave you for a few days to think it over,” returned the convict, proceeding to wedge a big rock into the narrow opening. Adding smaller stones, he roughly walled up the entrance, so shutting Rafael into a straiter cell than his own too extensive experience of prisons had ever encountered. He meant to lurk again among the crags until the search for the boy should be over and then come back under the starlight for the watch, since a bit of silver in hand might make all the difference to a fugitive between escape and capture. At the least, he could trade it for food and a knife. But the officers had him before nightfall and, in all the dreary years that came after, no thought of his misdeeds tortured the prisoner so much as the remembrance of a little boy he had left to perish in a lonely rock.

Rafael’s chief uneasiness, at first, was about those threatened snakes. What if the crack behind him should be full of them,—clammy serpent coils swaying for the spring! Would they begin at his ankles? He stood first on one foot and then on the other, while he squirmed and twisted out of his extreme retreat. Then he flung himself with all his force against the rock that had been wedged into the opening. It did not stir. He set his shoulder to it; he shoved with a strength that seemed greater than his own; he battered his body against it in desperate endeavor; but it held fast. The boy’s hands were bleeding when he dropped exhausted to the ground, a little huddle of despair. But despair would never do. He was up again and, this time, working with all the skill and patience he could command to dislodge the smaller stones. After an eternity of effort, the highest of these was jolted from its place and fell on the outside, leaving a peep-hole through which the blessed light looked strangely in, as if wondering to find its friend Rafael shut in a den like this. The hole was so far up that it showed him only a violet glimpse of sky, but even that comforted and calmed the boy, who sat down quietly and knit his brows in thought. What would his father tell him to do? His duty, of course. But what was one’s duty in a pinch like this? To get out if he could, and if he couldn’t to behave himself manfully where he was. Nothing could be plainer than that. Rafael decided to call for help, even at the risk of bringing back his enemy, but his shouts, though he did his best, seemed shut into that granite cleft with him. He attacked the great rock again, and the stones, but without any other result than to tire himself out. At last the creeping fear, against which he had been half unconsciously fighting all the time, was getting the better of his fortitude. For one horrible instant he fancied that the narrow walls were closing in to crush him. Again he struggled to his feet. He must do anything, anything, rather than sit still and be afraid. He clambered, often slipping back, up to the little peephole and listened, listened, listened until he heard, or thought he heard, the thudding tramp of the mule-train far down the road and the click-clack, ding-dong, tinkle-tinkle of its assorted bells. Oh, surely Coronela would have gone safely down; surely Pilarica would send Uncle Manuel and Pedrillo to his relief. He must let them know where he was. He must rig some kind of a signal. There was something yet that he could do,—something to save him from the terror.

Nature has her own kindnesses in store for us all, and when Rafael, having rigged his signal, lost his slight footing and tumbled, bumping his head, in falling, on a projecting stone, she promptly put him to sleep, so that he lay untroubled and unafraid on the rocky floor of his prison. He did not hear the excited barking of dogs, as a tall, grave shepherd, his sheepskin garments fragrant with thyme, met a rescue party of mingled muleteers and pilgrims searching the mountainside and guided them to the neighborhood of the cleft rock.

“It was about here, sir,” the shepherd was saying to Uncle Manuel. “I was on that summit yonder and started down as soon as I saw that the young master was in danger. Hey, Melampo! Hey, Cubilon! Find the trail, Lobina!”

“What nice names!” observed Pilarica, fearlessly patting one of the gaunt beasts. Uncle Manuel frowned. This was no place, no errand, for a girl. He had left her behind with Tia Marta. But that grumpy Bastiano, who could refuse the child nothing, had set her on Shags and—it served him right—had had that reluctant donkey to drag up the rough ascent.

“Ay, my little lady,” the shepherd was saying to Pilarica. “All our dogs have these names, for such were the names of the sheepdogs of Bethlehem who went with their masters to see the Holy Child in the stable.”

Pilarica smiled up into the wind-worn face of the speaker with happy confidence. She had noticed him from the road as he stood upon the summit, a majestic figure against the sky, and had thought in her childishness that he looked like God, keeping watch over the world.

“And when the shepherds met the other wise men at the door,” she asked, “did the dogs bark at the camels?”

“Has the girl no heart,” thought Uncle Manuel, “to be talking of such far-off things, when her brother may be—”

But not even in his silent thought could Uncle Manuel finish the sentence. Lobina was sniffing at a fresh red stain upon a stone.

Pilarica saw her uncle’s distress and wondered at it. She did not understand distress. Her soul was still pure sunshine that marvelled at the shadow. But she slipped, for love and pity, her slender hand into his hard grip. In a moment he pushed her, not ungently, from him.

“Take the child back,” he ordered Bastiano. “You should not have brought her.”

“She thought she could help,” growled the muleteer.

“Help! Of what possible help could a girl be here? This is man’s work.”

And Uncle Manuel’s eyes anxiously questioned Pedrillo, who had been on his knees examining the blood-stain.

“Why! I can tell you where Rafael is,” cried Pilarica. “He’s in there.”

And the small brown finger pointed to a tatter of red, that waved, on the end of what seemed to be an alder reed, from a rock near by. “That’s Rafael’s magic cap,—all that’s left of it. He always carries it in his blouse. He has tied it to his popgun. He’s hiding in the rock.”

It did not take the muleteers a moment to tear away the stones that closed the entrance, but when Uncle Manuel stooped into the cleft and lifted out the inert little body, a dreadful silence fell upon the group,—a silence soon broken by Pilarica’s cheerful pipe:

“Rafael! Wake up! It isn’t bed-time yet.”

At that sweet, familiar voice the lids fluttered, and the black eyes, bewildered, brave, looked up into Uncle Manuel’s face.

The Pilgrim of the Thorn, as Pilarica called him, instantly had his water-gourd at the white lips, and Rafael revived so rapidly that he was soon sitting upon his uncle’s knee. He even glanced at his watch, with his usual air of careless magnificence in performing this action, and was amazed to find that only one hour had passed since they left the rivulet. Every man of them wanted to carry him down to the road. The boy hesitated to make a choice, but when the vigorous old peasant-woman, who had puffed up the mountainside after the rest, put in her claim, he decided at once.

“I’ll ride Shags,” he said.