"I can tell you little, but what should be known to yourself. _Pobre nina_! She had made me her _confidant_,--having long been mine in my correspondence with Lola. O, senor! you have been kind to me. You are doubly so now. But why have you behaved so to Mercedes? Though I may never rise from this couch, I cannot help telling you it was dishonourable,--ay _cruel_!" "On what occasion, may I ask, has this cruelty occurred?" "You are mocking me, _amigo_? You must remember it. She gave you an appointment in the Alameda; and though you came, and she saw you, you went away without waiting to speak to her. After that slight she never saw you again! To win a woman's heart, and thus trifle with it! Was it not cruel? I ask, was it not cruel?" An overpowering surprise hindered me from making reply. There was something more to account for my remaining silent. Through the darkness long shrouding my soul, I discerned the dawning of day. "You cannot have forgotten the occasion?" continued the wounded man, still speaking reproachfully, "I myself have reason to remember it: since it brought me a message from Lola--the sweetest ever received from my _querida_. It was a written promise to be mine; a vow registered _en papel_: that sooner than enter the convent she would consent--_huyar-- huyar_. You know what that means?" Though I well understood the significance of the phrase, I was not in a state of mind to answer the interrogatory. I had one of my own to put-- to me of far more importance. "You received your letter through the window of a carriage? Was it not the writer herself who delivered it?" "_Por Dios_, no! The _billetita_ you speak of was from _Dolores_. She who gave it me was _Mercedes_!" I felt like folding Francisco Moreno in my friendliest embrace. I could have stayed by his bedside to nurse him, or, what was then more likely, to close his eyelids in death! I could have canonised him for the words he had spoken. To me they had imparted new life--along with a determination, that soon absorbed every impulse of my soul. I need not tell what it was. In less time than it would take to declare it, I was scaling the steeps of Ixticihuatl in search of my lost love-- once more, _Mercedes_! CHAPTER THIRTY SIX. THE BANDITS AT BAY. I went not without a guide, else I might have climbed Ixticihuatl in vain. The stage-driver still acted in this capacity. By good fortune he had made the ascent before--on some speculative expedition during a recess, when the ribbons were out of his hands; and he knew of a second "robbers' nest" still higher up than that chosen as the scene of the nuptials. It was a lone log hut, the residence of a reputed charcoal burner; but the situation was too high to be convenient for charcoal burning; and, in Sam Brown's opinion, the "carbonero" was in reality a _bandolero_. There was just a chance we might find Carrasco at this hut; if not, somewhere else among the mountains.