These things, however, he kept to himself.  He had not sent for his father to talk to him of Juanita.  Men never discuss a woman in whom they are really interested, though fools do.

“That horse didn’t fall,” said Marcos to his father.  “He was thrown.  There was a wire across the road.”

“There was none when I got there,” replied Sarrion.

“Then it had been removed.  I saw it as we fell.  My foot caught in it or I could have thrown myself clear in the usual way.”

Sarrion reflected a moment.

“Let me look at the note that Zeneta wrote you,” he said.

“You will find it in my pocket, hanging behind the door.  I was a fool.  I was in too great a hurry.  Now that I think of it, Zeneta would not have written a note like that.”

“Then he never wrote it at all,” said Sarrion, who had found the paper and was reading it near the window.  The clear morning light brought out the wrinkles and the crow’s-feet with inexorable distinctness on his keen narrow face.

“What does it mean?” he asked at length, folding the letter and replacing it in the pocket from which he had taken it.

Marcos roused himself with an effort.  He was sleepy.

“I think it means that Evasio Mon is about,” he answered.

“No man in the valley would have done it,” suggested Sarrion.

“If any man in the valley had done it he would have put his knife into me when I lay on the road, which would have been murder.”

He gave a short laugh and was silent.

“And the hand inside the velvet glove does not risk murder,” reflected Sarrion, “They have not given up the game yet.  We must be careful of ourselves.”

“And of Juanita.”

“I count her as one of ourselves,” replied Sarrion quickly, for he heard her voice in the passage.  With a brief tap on the door she came in.  She was struggling with Perro.

“You have had long enough for your secrets,” she said.  “And now Marcos must go to sleep.  I have brought Perro to see him.  He is so uneasy in his canine mind.”

Perro, low-born and eager, needed restraint to keep him from the bed where his master lay, and Juanita continued to hold him while she spoke.

“You must remember,” she said, “that it is owing to Perro that you are here at all.  If he had not come back and awakened us all you would have been on the road still.”

Sarrion glanced sharply at her, his attention caught by her version of that which had really happened.  She did not want Marcos to know that it was she who had heard Perro; she, who had insisted that something had happened to Marcos.

“And some Jesuit coming along the road might have found you there,” she said, “and pushed you over.  It would have been so easy.”

Marcos and Sarrion glanced at each other, and possibly Juanita saw the glance as she held Perro back from his master.

“You do not know, Marcos, how they hate you.  They could not hate you more if you were a heretic.  I have always known it, because Father Muro was always trying to find things out about you in confession.  He asked questions about you—­who your confessor was; if you did a pilgrimage.  I said—­be quiet, Perro!—­I said you never did a pilgrimage, and you were always changing your confessor because no holy father could stand the strain for long.”