The Catalan was desperate. He cursed his folly in not stationing his confederate on the Darro instead of in the hovel in the Albaicin; but he had feared confusion and felt contemptuously sure of his ability to manage a mere girl. But he had had no experience of girls whom ranch life had made vigorous and fearless, and whose fathers had taught them the principles of boxing. Catalina parried his attempts to give her a stunning blow as deftly as she filled her nails with his skin and hair, and she was so well braced he could not trip her. Once he made a sudden dive for her feet with his hands, but she leaped aside and his nose came in contact with the rock.
Suddenly he turned his head. Far above, in the windows of the Hall of the Ambassadors, from which he had made his escape, he heard the sound of voices. That moment was his undoing. With the leap of a panther Catalina was on his back. She pressed her knees into his sides, dragged his head back with one arm, while with the other she pounded his unprotected face. He gave a mighty shake, but he might as well have attempted to throw off a wild-cat of her own forests. He might exhaust her in time, but so long as she had strength she would hang on, and with a low roar, that portended hideous vengeance, he started once more down the bluff.
As Edith Holmes led the race through the many corridors and apartments that lay between the court and the Hall of the Ambassadors she knew that the game was hers if she chose to play it. There was but one place in Granada where an outlaw would be secure, and that was in the Albaicin, and she knew the Alhambra too well not to be sure of the route Catalina’s abductor would take. But it was simple enough to persuade Over that the man would be more likely to take an underground route, escaping at the favorable moment by some opening known only to his kind.
The descent to the baths was on the way to the Hall of the Ambassadors, and as she ran down the long corridor her brain whirled with the obsession of the place, and she fancied herself for a moment one of the favorites who had reigned here in the days of Moorish splendor until a fairer captive threatened her own youth and beauty and love of life with a silken cord and a brief struggle in one of the chambers above. Over’s apparent devotion during the first part of the night had roused in her all the passion of which she was capable, and she could feel his hot, short breath on her neck as they ran. She had watched his surrender to Catalina’s beautiful dancing and his wild, instinctive leap to her rescue with bitter jealousy and fear. In a flash she had seen Catalina for what she was—a girl to rouse all the romantic passion in a man; and in all her loveliness, her ideal womanhood, and her changing moods, she had been his constant companion for three weeks in Spain! But thrust out of sight—the creature of a gypsy—internationally besmirched—Her feet turned to the threshold leading down to the old Moorish bath, where ten minutes could be wasted. But the American girl in her suddenly revolted. Another American girl was in hideous peril, and she shuddered with disgust even more than with pity.