The mountaineers of Minas de la Sierra knew fear of him and awe. For them he had only a contemptuous eye and a bitter smile and a harsh imperious way. They said he had a granite boulder for a heart. But he was very tender with the sick.
He was the sort of physician who looks upon his business of serving the ailing as a sacred commission from on high. He was like one who had taken Holy Orders with his doctor's degree. No Jesuit was more slave to his oaths; no Jesuit worked with more zeal for God and the Society than did Don Jaime for Humanity and Science. The most poverty-abased labrador, the most filthy beggar, had but to summon him, and he would arise from his table or his bed and ride across Spain to him who needed healing.
He was the only physician who would journey up the mountains to Minas de la Sierra. It mattered not to him that there were long climbing miles of perilous goat-paths along howling gorges; it mattered not to him that the mountaineers never had money to pay him his just due. He was indeed a "hard man," haughty as Satanas, and grim and dour. But even as his personal honor was to him more precious than life, so was his physician's honor a covenant with Jehovah, tyrannical and imperious to command him.
The old men of Minas were sitting under the cork-oak in the center of the village when the hidalgo doctor came out of the hut of the sick woman.
"Is it not the great illness, Don Jaime?" asked one of the old men, old Castro. He was thinking of the dread cholera.
"No. She is merely sick with despair."
"Ah, that is the great illness of Spain! All Spain is sick with despair!"
"Carajo! but you are right, my father!" answered the Senor Doctor in his bitter way. "Spain despairs. And why not? Spain famishes. There is no food for honest men to eat. And men turn dishonest, thinking by crime to appease their gnawing bellies. They became contrabandistas, salteadores de camino, abigeos, ladrones. And the men of the Guardia Civil take them out on the mountainside and murder them.
"Our forefathers," he philosophized, "were refugees from the fall of Troy. Black was their national color; black for their lost cause. They should put a black stripe with the red and yellow stripes of our modern Spanish flag. A black stripe for despair."
"Bueno, Don Jaime!" said the old men. One added:
"We have not studied at Salamanca like you, but we know what we know. Every night the hungry children cry themselves to sleep. Our own porridge bowls are never full. We have seen our sons grow desperate. We have seen them one by one go away. There was Benito, my youngest. He became a contrabandista, and the Civil Guard murdered him. There was Adolpho, the son of my sister Teresa. He also went the same way. There was Santiago Reyes and Mateo Pacheco and Ignacio Parral. And now follows Juan Quesada."
"What would you?" asked the Senor Doctor, with sudden brutality. "The Guardia Civil must keep the peace of Spain. And Spaniards must steal to live. It is dog eat dog. It will always be dog eat dog while men are Spaniards and Spaniards starve."
He turned abruptly away and entered once more the hut of Jacinto Quesada's mother. When he came out again, he said to the women clustered about the door:
"She is forever kissing the child Jacinto and moaning, 'My poor Jacintito! What will become of thee, thou pale tiny one? My poor, poor Jacintito!'
"It is better that he should be taken away from her until she is herself again. His presence here only deepens her despair. I will carry him with me down the mountain to my casa outside Granada and keep him there for a time. I have not much—what Spaniard is rich?—but he will be fed well; he will be given the same food as is given my own daughter, Felicidad."
"Ah, Don Jaime, you have the heart of gold!" cried one woman, her eyes moist and tender.
"The Mother of God reward you, and mend your broken heart, proud Torreblanca y Moncada!" cried another. And the others would have burst out in a full litany of praises, had not the Senor Doctor fiercely said:
"Don't stand there making the monkey of me, you mountain jades! Quita de ahi! Pronto! Get the peasants' brat into his jacket and alpagartas, and wrap him warmly in his shawl. I desire to get out of this accursed hole as quick as possible. It smells bad, and I itch. The place is lousy!"
CHAPTER II
In the great harsh fist of the hidalgo doctor Jacinto Quesada, who was then ten years old, put his little trembling hand and went down the mountains, and entered a new world.
The casa of Don Jaime was large, decayed, dingy, and full of lizards that lived between the crumbling adobe bricks. But it seemed to Jacinto Quesada a sumptuous palace. Besides the hidalgo doctor, there lived in the sumptuous palace two old servants and a pretty little girl with golden hair and legs round and pudgy as would have been the legs of Jacinto, had his father lived and prospered.
In the great rooms that were so bare with poverty, the two children played together. The eyes of the little Jacinto, alert to see all in this new strangeness, had noted a peculiar thing. One day he said to Felicidad:
"Do you love your father, the Senor Doctor?"
The child knuckled her brow.
"It is not the love," she said thoughtfully. "Don Jaime is a very grand and haughty hidalgo; it is not his desire that I should love him. But I fear him much!"
Came a day when Felicidad was very naughty. She tore leaves from the huge old sheepskin-bound books in the great gloomy library, and cut them into paper dolls. It was Don Jaime's one delight to read and reread, in the long hot afternoons, those yellow-leaved, richly illuminated ancient volumes. Pedro, one of the old servants, informed the doctor of Felicidad's naughtiness. The doctor's face went ashy; he shook all over with rage. He brought out a short whip of horsehide, a quirta such as vaqueros use. With the quirta he lashed Felicidad's legs and back unmercifully.
Her screams drove like knives into little Jacinto Quesada's heart. He was but ten years old and he was much afraid of the terrible hidalgo. But as the whip pitilessly descended again and again, and Felicidad screamed and writhed in agony, a hot anger welled up in him; he became desperate as only a child becomes desperate; he went mad.
Screaming himself, he charged at the doctor and tore at his trousers with his finger nails, and tried to leap up and upon him. The quirta rose again and fell upon his head. Then he caught at the doctor's wrist and sunk his teeth into it. With bulldog tenacity he hung on, until he was beaten into insensibility, and his jaws forced open.
Strangely, Don Jaime conceived a sort of liking for Jacinto Quesada after that. He took to calling him The Little Wolf of the Mountains. It became his wont to greet Jacinto, when he stumbled across him in the great bare house, with a look of savage admiration and the words:
"Ah, here is the wolf-cub! And how are the fangs to-day, hungry scrawny one?"
Upon a time, Don Jaime, his hand still in bandages, discovered Jacinto alone in the dusky library, bent over a quaint old account of the battles and triumphs of the swineherd Pizarro.
"When did you learn to read, son of a mangy she-wolf?" asked the doctor in great surprise.
"When I was but five. My mother taught me letters. She is a woman of honest birth and of education," answered Jacinto proudly. "When she was a child, she was sent to the convent of Santa Ursola in Granada."
"And what do you think of this swashbuckler, Pizarro? He robbed the Indians of their golden