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Updated: June 7, 2025
In reply to Herrera's enquiries as to the original authors of this curious contrivance, and the manner in which he had discovered it, the Mochuelo informed him that the Frenchman, Roche, or El Tuerto, as his Spanish comrades styled him, had, previously to the war, been one of a band of outlaws, smugglers avowedly, and on occasion, as it was affirmed, something worse, who for a considerable period had carried on their illegal avocations in the Navarrese Pyrenees and their contiguous ranges.
"Every moment is a man's life. Three minutes more and I march." Torres rode after his friend. "And Baltasar?" said the Mochuelo to his lieutenant. "Lies yonder in the valley," was the reply of Velasquez, as he wiped his sword on his horse's mane, and returned it to the scabbard. "Wolves' meat, if they will have him."
Confused, bewildered, tortured by the ideas that crowded upon his heated brain, Herrera sat like an automaton upon his horse, unmindful of where he was, and utterly forgetting the dangers that surrounded him. He was roused by the Mochuelo from his state of abstraction. "We shall not reach Pampeluna without a skirmish," said the partisan, in a low but cheerful and confident tone.
A rocky pool received the foaming element, and fed a pellucid stream that soon disappeared amongst the trees, on its way to irrigate and fertilize the neighbouring fields. The water fell from the least elevated part of the mountain buttress above described, a height of seventy or eighty feet. "This is the place," said El Tuerto to the Mochuelo.
They were now busied in removing them, and the Mochuelo and Herrera, on approaching the edge of the rock, found the torrent once more plashing down its accustomed bed, and the strange staircase, by which their ascent had been accomplished, concealed by its flow.
A ball of another description had since proved fatal to the dragoon. He had fallen in one of the last actions of the war, fighting gallantly by the side of the Mochuelo, whose fortunes he had continued to share. Accompanied by his bride and father-in-law, Herrera was on his way to the villa near Tudela, now again the property of Count Villabuena.
To increase this facility, wooden pegs had in various places been driven into the interstices of the rock; but when the water flowed, both these and the steps were so far concealed as not to attract notice. Whilst Herrera gazed in mute astonishment at this singular staircase, the Mochuelo approached and tapped him on the shoulder.
He lost all self-command, his lip curled with a smile of scorn, his look and tone expressed the most cutting contempt as he again addressed the Mochuelo. "What!" cried he, "is this the renowned, the fearless guerilla, whose deeds have made him the dread of his foes and the admiration of his friends!
A contribution had been levied amongst the motley habilimented guerillas to equip him in a manner unlikely to attract suspicion, and it was in the dress of a peasant of the province that he departed on his hazardous mission. Herrera would fain have undertaken it, but for the arguments of the Mochuelo and Torres, who convinced him how much more effectually it would be performed by the muleteer.
He at last yielded to the young man's reiterated entreaties, and even permitted Torres to accompany his friend, but refused to give them any troops of the line, saying, however, that the Mochuelo might go, if willing. That he was so, the reader, after the glimpse that has been given of the guerilla's daring character and impatience of inaction, will have small difficulty in conjecturing.
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