Kate had now no time
to send back her compliments in a musical halloo. The Alcalde missed
breaking his neck on this occasion very narrowly; but his neck was of
no use to him in twenty minutes more, as the reader will soon find.
Kate rode right onwards; and, coming in with a lady behind her, horse
bloody, and pace such as no hounds could have lived with, she ought to
have made a great sensation in Cuzco. But, unhappily, the people were
all in bed.
The steeple-chase into Cuzco had been a fine headlong thing,
considering the torrent, the trench, the wounded horse, the lovely
lady, with her agonizing fears, mounted behind Kate, together with the
meek dove-like dawn: but the finale crowded together the quickest
succession of changes that out of a melodrama can ever have been
witnessed. Kate reached the convent in safety; carried into the
cloisters, and delivered like a parcel the fair Andalusian. But to
rouse the servants caused delay; and on returning to the street through
the broad gateway of the convent, whom should she face but the Alcalde!
How he escaped the trench, who can tell? He had no time to write
memoirs; his horse was too illiterate. But he _had_ escaped;
temper not at all improved by that adventure, and now raised to a hell
of malignity by seeing that he had lost his prey.
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