Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/161

 say—yet there seems to be something familiar in the figure of another, the second, something in his bulky shoulders—what is it? do you know him, Juan?"

"Not that I know him, Padre, but we have met. If I am not greatly mistaken, it is Sebastian Alvitre."

"So it is! late brigand, now a citizen of parts, but a rascal in any guise. It is no good wind that blows such geese as these to our water."

Padre Ignacio halted a little way from the door of the mill, waiting for the lagging trio to overtake him. They came up to him red and sweating, short-winded and puffing, for it was a hot morning and they were men of weight.

"Good father, you can outwalk a horse!" Comisionado Felix declared.

"I come like a tortoise behind you!" the third man of the party laughed, wiping his mottled face with an immense silk handkerchief of infernal hues.

Sebastian Alvitre made no comment. He had come up short, like a man running against a wall in the dark, on seeing Padre Mateo and Juan beside the door. He threw up his head, his face betraying his surprise as plainly as an exclamation, and shifted a foot as if to fall back into a posture of defense. There was neither shame nor fear in the man, whatever his other emotions on coming face to face with the one who had stripped him of his weapons in the house of Fabio Dominguez, and