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158 for my cloak. I began to share in my servant's fears; but I judged it better to keep my anxiety to myself, and continued to advance, certain besides of being in the right road, although it was becoming rapidly darker and darker. Abrupt precipitous rocks, with whitened crests, rose before and on each side of us. Already the mountains were throwing their long shadows across the valleys; the evening mist was mounting in light flakes from the deep bottoms in which the brooks purled to the mountain tops that the sun was touching with his departing beams; and the Giant Peak, which seemed to me so near, rose always at the same distance, encircled with a purple halo, overtopping the neighboring heights with an appearance of gloomy majesty, as if placed there as the guardian of the mysterious treasures inclosed in the bowels of the Sierra.

"You know the proverb, master," continued Cecilio: "those who go to seek wool often come back shorn. Something tells me that we have got our selves into a terrible mess. Who can this Don Tomas be whom every body on the road knows, but whom we can never catch? Some bandit chief, I fear, who has his own reasons for not showing himself; and I think," he continued, in a low tone, "that these gorges are not so solitary as they seem. Mother of Jesus! did you not see the gleam of a musket-barrel among those branches up there?"

I carried my eyes involuntarily in the direction pointed out by Cecilio; it was nothing but the wind agitating the thick branches which crowned the crest of a precipice, and I could not see far on account of the fog. I affected to laugh at my servant's fears, when I thought I heard a sound resembling the click