“You go far, senor?”

“Not now.  I have come far, but my journey is near to a very happy ending.”

“So?”

“Yes.  I have come to marry Miss Elena Ashley, at Auburn, to whom I have been long betrothed.”

She tapped her white teeth with her fan.

“And yet you linger at Mountaineer House?”

“Horses are expensive, and I am not rich.  I walked.  I was tired.  I saw you in your garden, and you are very beautiful.”

Rosa’s capricious vanity was touched.  The whim seized her to save this exuberant young bridegroom from the fate before him.

“Do you see that peddler — old Rosenthal — close to the bar?  He brought in a large and rich pack tonight.  It lies in the next room.  Do you go there at once.  I will come soon, and together we will select a gift for your bride.  Go quickly!”

She passed again behind the bar.  Jack Phillips was at one end, lame Jim Driscoll at the other, Tom Bell in the middle.  Rosa paused near a branching candelabra which had once graced the altar of a Spanish church.

“Is Jose below?” whispered Bell.  She nodded.  “Why did you save that boy, just now?  A new lover?” She directed upon him a level glance of hate.

“I do what pleases me, senor.”  She raised her arm high, beginning the first stamping measure of a Spanish dance.  Instantly there was a curious rumbling noise in the stable underneath.  Rosa swept over the candelabra.  All the lights in the place were struck out.  Phillips and Driscoll slipped two great bolts, and the entire bar-room floor swung downward on hinges.

The chute to purgatory was open!

There was bedlam in that dank pass to the region of shades, and no quarter was shown to any man; only cries of “The String!  The String!” from members of the gang in order to distinguish the robbers from the robbed, in the darkness.  There were curses, the kicking and squealing of horses in their stalls; a verse from the Talmud recited in Yiddish (which suddenly stopped), and above it all the high and hysterical laugh of a woman.

The boy turned from the peddler’s pack as Rosa entered the room.  “What is that horrible noise?”

“A fight.  Come, you had better go.”  She led him down a dark stair to another section of the cellar.  “Jose,” she called.  An evil looking Mexican pushed open a rough door.  “You shall take this man out through the second tunnel.”

“Si, senora.”

“And, Jose, he shall reach the outer opening alive, and with all his belongings.  He has no money.  Do you hear?” Jose grunted.  “Go, now, under, cover of the noise.”

“But the gift for Elena!”

Rosa laughed mockingly.  “What a child it is!  My gift to Elena tonight, is you — her lover.  Ask her to thank me with a prayer from her pure heart for my sins.”

Jose led the young man through a long, damp, evil-odored passage underground, and out through a trapdoor at the extreme end of the garden.  A shrub grew on top of the door, surrounded by a bed of fragrant wild pansies.  Jose kicked the staring youth away from the entrance and vanished into the earth looking, in the lantern-light like a malevolent fiend returning to the realm of everlasting fire.