With a curse he lunged toward the boy, who, intent only on drawing the enemy away from Coronela and her precious burden, fled back up the mountain as fast as his legs could spin. As he ran, his watch was jolted from its pocket under his belt and, glinting in the sun, bobbed at the end of its chain. He ran well, for all that trudging across Castile had developed good muscle in those stocky little legs, but the criminal who, weak from years of confinement, ran clumsily, was nevertheless almost upon him, when Rafael bolted into a cleft in a giant rock,--a cleft too narrow for a man’s shoulders to enter. Turning to face the opening while turn he could, Rafael wriggled and wormed his way until even a small boy could get no further. Then he stood at bay, not precisely with his back to the wall, but to a granite crack, breathing hard from his scamper, but conscious only of a thrilling excitement. “Come out of there,” called the convict fiercely, “or I’ll shoot you.” “Shoot away,” returned Rafael, wondering if the man really had a gun. He hadn’t, not even a popgun. He picked up a stone to cast at the child, but memory plucked at his arm and held it back,--the memory of his own blithe, adventurous boyhood. For the sake of the lad he used to be, before high spirit had led him on to a rash enterprise that blundered suddenly into crime, the convict’s scarred, unhappy heart softened toward the courageous youngster trapped in that fissured rock. “Hand out your watch,” he called again, “and I’ll let you go.” Rafael’s watch! His father’s good-bye gift! The gift that meant his father’s faith in him! No, that father should not have cause again to say that his son was a heedless boy who could not guard his own pockets. “I will not,” he shouted defiantly. “Hand it out this minute, before the snakes get at you.” Snakes! Rafael’s legs jumped, but not his heart. “I will not.” “Oh, very good! I’ll leave you for a few days to think it over,” returned the convict, proceeding to wedge a big rock into the narrow opening. Adding smaller stones, he roughly walled up the entrance, so shutting Rafael into a straiter cell than his own too extensive experience of prisons had ever encountered. He meant to lurk again among the crags until the search for the boy should be over and then come back under the starlight for the watch, since a bit of silver in hand might make all the difference to a fugitive between escape and capture. At the least, he could trade it for food and a knife. But the officers had him before nightfall and, in all the dreary years that came after, no thought of his misdeeds tortured the prisoner so much as the remembrance of a little boy he had left to perish in a lonely rock.