Part 15 (1/2)

I must have a hat also.”

He disappeared through the window and returned in a moment with a broad-brimmed felt hat he had found in the hall. Mollie handed him her pink scarf with a border of wild roses, and walking composedly up to the end of the long piazza he stood perfectly still, waiting for the music to begin. Jimmie struck up a Spanish dance with the sound of castanets in the ba.s.s.

”How's that for a tune?” he called out.

”Very good, very good,” answered Jose. Then he started the strange dance while the others watched spellbound.

The boys, who had been rather scornful of a man's dancing fancy dances, confessed afterwards that there was nothing effeminate in Jose's dancing, no pirouetting and twisting on one toe like Jimmie Butler's one accomplishment in ballet-dancing. They gathered that it was a sort of bullbaiting dance. It began with a series of advances and retreats, with a springy step always in time to the throb of the music.

The young Spaniard was very graceful and lithe. He seemed to have forgotten that he was on the piazza of foreigners in a strange country.

The dance grew quicker and quicker. Suddenly he drew a long curved dagger from his belt and made a lunge at some imaginary obstacle, probably the bull he was baiting.

Bab, who was nearest the dancer, rose to her feet quickly, and then sat down rather limply.

”The knife, the knife!” she said to herself. ”It is the highwayman's knife!”

And now the handsome dancer was kneeling at Mollie's feet offering her the scarf.

He had risen and was bowing to the company, when whir-r-r! something had whizzed past his head, just scratched his forehead and then planted itself in the wooden frame of the window behind him.

Was Barbara dreaming; or had she lost her senses?

The knife in the wall was the same, or exactly like the knife Jose had been using in the dance.

In a moment everything was in wild confusion.

”Go into the house, ladies!” commanded the major.

The four boys leaped from the piazza, to run down the a.s.sa.s.sin, so they thought, but the figure vaguely outlined for an instant in the shadows of the trees, was as completely hidden as if the earth had opened and swallowed it up.

Jose, in a big chair in the drawing room, was being ministered to by Miss Sallie and the girls, while the major, with a gla.s.s of water, was standing over him on one side and the housekeeper, on the other, was binding his head with a linen handkerchief.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Whir-r-r! Something Whizzed Past His Head.]

”Major,” Miss Sallie was saying, ”this country is full of a.s.sa.s.sins and robbers. I believe we shall all be murdered in our beds. I am really terribly frightened. We have had nothing but attacks since we left New York. And, now, this poor young man is in danger. Who could it have been, do you suppose, and what good did it do to hurl a knife into the midst of a perfectly harmless company like that!”

”The country is a little wild, Sallie,” replied the major apologetically, ”but I have never heard of anything like this happening before. Of course, there are highwaymen everywhere. There are those Gypsies in the forest. Perhaps it was one of them.”

Just then the boys returned, and the attention of the others was distracted from Jose, who still sat quietly, his lips pressed together.

Barbara, who had been standing a little way off, turned to him quickly.

”The knife?” she asked, but stopped without finis.h.i.+ng, for Jose had fixed her glance with a look of such appeal that she could say no more.

”By the way,” observed Jimmie Butler, ”where is the knife?”

”Sticking in the wall of course,” replied Stephen.

The two boys ran out on the piazza, but returned empty-handed.

”Mystery of mysteries!” cried Jimmie, ”the knife is gone!”