And very desperate and bloody some of 'his own' were. In the present instance, plunder and bloodshed were to proceed hand in hand. No quarter was to be given to old or young. The plague-stricken sick man and the watcher by the bed, the woman feeding her fire of sticks under her _puchero_, the child asleep on its pillow, the Queen in the palace, the Princess in her nursery--all were to die, quickly and suddenly. These men had sworn it. The dead were no tale-tellers. That was the way of Egypt--the ancient way of safety. Were they not few and feeble in the midst of innumerable hordes of the _Busne_? Had they not been driven like cattle, abused like dogs, sent guiltless to the scaffold, shot in batches by both warring parties? Now in this one place at least, they would do a deed of vengeance at which the ears of the world would tingle. The Sergeant sat and smoked and listened. He was no stranger to such talk. It was the way of his double profession of Andalucian bandit and Carlist _guerrilero_, to devise and execute deeds of terror and death. But nothing so cold-blooded as this had Jose Maria ever imagined. He had indeed appropriated the governmental mails till the post-bags almost seemed his own property, and the guards handed them down without question as to a recognised official. He had, in his great days, captured towns and held them for either party according to the good the matter was likely to do himself. But there was something revolting in this whole business which puzzled him. "Whose idea was all this?" he asked at last. "I would give much to see the _Gitano_ who could devise such a stroke." The grim smile on the countenance of old Pepe of the Eleven Wounds grew yet more grim. "No gipsy planned it and no man!" he said sententiously. "Come hither, Chica!" And out from among the listening throng came a girl of thirteen or fourteen, dressed neatly and simply in a grey linen blouse belted at the waist with a leather belt. A gay plaid, striped of orange and crimson, hung neatly folded over her shoulder, and she rested her small sunburnt hand on the silver hilt of a pistol. Black elf-locks escaped from beneath a red silk kerchief knotted saucily after the fashion of her companions. But her eyes, instead of being beady and black with that far-away contemplative look which characterises the children of Egypt, were bright and sunny and blue as the Mediterranean itself in the front of spring. "Come hither, Chica--be not afraid," repeated old Pepe of the Eleven Wounds, "this is a great man--the greatest of all our race. You have heard of him--as who, indeed, has not!" Chica nodded with a quick elfish grin of intense pleasure and appreciation. "I was listening," she said, "I heard all. And I saw--would that I could see it again. Oh, if only the like would happen to me!" "Tell the noble Don Jose who you are, my pretty Chica," said Pepe, soothingly.