Free The Black Rider by Max Brand Page B

noble gentleman, Lucia?”
    Lucia wasn’t always graceful in her manners. Now she grunted as a man might have done, and a very rough man at that.
    “He has a sick look,” she said.
    “Guadalmo?”
    “He has had troubles enough to last him out the month,” said the girl, nodding her head sagely.
    “Of course, to be wakened by that fiend….”
    “A poor weak devil!” scoffed the girl. “Our great Guadalmo takes him by the throat and makes the devil beg!”
    “You do not believe?”
    “Of course I believe,” said Lucia, yawning a little. “I believe anything that is amusing! There is little enough, at that!”
    She could not be moved from this position. Guadalmo finished his recital in the midst of a silence which was a greater tribute than applause. He promised, however, that when he had a little spare time on his hands, he would hunt down this wretched road-haunter, this Black Rider, and cut him to shreds the very next time they encountered.
    Here Lucia spoke aloud: “The next time,
señor,”
she said, “will surely be the last. It will be the seventh. And that number is surely fatal, is it not?”
    To the surprise of everyone,
Señor
Guadalmo turned white and his face was glistening with perspiration.
    “I pray heaven,
señorita,”
he said in a shaken voice, “that you are not a prophet.”
    “Ah, ah!” cried Lucia. “I mean, of course, that the meeting will be fatal for him…for the Black Rider!”
    It was too late to give the thought that turn in the mind of Guadalmo. He seemed stricken. He sat bowed in his chair, his head in his hand.
    He said over and over: “There is a sort of fate in it, is there not? I meet him again and again…I alone. Six times he has encountered me…six times the breath of the devil has fanned my cheek. But all this is only a warning. The seventh time the devil will gather me in!”
    He removed from the table presently and went from the room. All remained in an uneasy silence for a moment behind him, and at length Torreño himselfmurmured: “Who would have believed this of the great Guadalmo?”
    His steward came in at that moment. He was full of excitement. He reported that, in a shallow bed of leaves in the forest, not far from the very spot where
Señor
Guadalmo had been found in close fight with the marauder, one of the peons had stumbled into a hidden sword and got a shrewd cut in the leg for his discovery. It was given to the steward, who instantly gave it, of course, to the master of the house. Could it be, by any chance, the weapon of the Black Rider, which had fallen from his hand? Torreño took the rapier and held it at arm’s length.
    “That is a rapier worthy of a gentleman, not a brigand,” he said. “I’ll swear that the Black Rider would rather have parted with so much flesh nearest his heart than to have lost this weapon. At least, we have one of the feathers of the crow, which is more than all the other hunters for him can say. But what if he comes back for it?”
    Here there followed an impressive little silence, and into it ran the sound of a far-off flute:
    “Ye highlands and ye lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl of Murray
And hae laid him on the green.
“Now wae be to thee, Huntly,
And wharefore did ye sae?
I bade ye bring him wi’you
And forbade ye him to slay.”
    Then
Señor
Torreño stood up. He sent for Guadalmo. He sent for half a dozen other of his most trustedmen—and then changed his mind and took with him the same number of Guadalmo’s practiced fighters.
    “This hand to hand fighting and this dueling,” he said, “is all very well. But I prefer a net which is sure of catching the bird.”
    The wounded servant limped along to show them the way; it was a perfect place. Low shrubbery enclosed a little hollow, and in that pool of leaves, stirred by only the strongest winds, the rapier had been found. Guadalmo and the rest instantly took cover among the shrubs. In the meantime orders were sent back for the rest