at the daughter of these
people.

He would look at her with curiosity because she was alive, and also with
that feeling of familiarity and awe with which he had contemplated
in churches the inanimate and powerful statues of the saints, whose
protection is invoked in dangers and difficulties. His difficulty was
very great.

He could not remain hiding in an orchard for ever and ever. He knew also
very well that before he had gone half a day's journey in any direction,
he would be picked up by one of the cavalry patrols scouring the
country, and brought into one or another of the camps where the patriot
army destined for the liberation of Peru was collected. There he
would in the end be recognized as Gaspar Ruiz--the deserter to the
Royalists--and no doubt shot very effectually this time. There did not
seem any place in the world for the innocent Gaspar Ruiz anywhere.
And at this thought his simple soul surrendered itself to gloom and
resentment as black as night.

They had made him a soldier forcibly. He did not mind being a soldier.
And he had been a good soldier as he had been a good son, because of his
docility and his strength. But now there was no use for either. They had
taken him from his parents, and he could no longer be a soldier--not a
good soldier at any rate. Nobody would listen to his explanations. What
injustice it was! What injustice!

And in a mournful murmur he would go over the story of his capture and
recapture for the twentieth time. Then, raising his eyes to the silent
girl in the doorway, "Si, senorita," he would say with a deep sigh,
"injustice has made this poor breath in my body quite worthless to me
and to anybody else. And I do not care who robs me of it."

One evening, as he exhaled thus the plaint of his wounded soul, she
condescended to say that, if she were a man, she would consider no life
worthless which held the possibility of revenge.

She seemed to be speaking to herself. Her voice was low. He drank in the
gentle, as if dreamy sound with a consciousness of peculiar delight of
something warming his breast like a draught of generous wine.

"True, Senorita," he said, raising his face up to hers slowly: "there is
Estaban, who must be shown that I am not dead after all."

The mutterings of the mad father had ceased long before; the sighing
mother had withdrawn somewhere into one of the empty rooms. All was
still within as well as without, in the moonlight bright as day on the
wild