LITMIR.BIZ

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you paid it me willingly. Surely you will not rob me!"

      Without attending to this expostulation, Paco secured the gold, and then rising to his feet, again repeated the question he had already twice put to his prisoner.

      "To whom is this letter?" said he.

      "You may read it yourself," returned Jaime, who, notwithstanding the intelligible hint to be tractable which he had already received, found it a hard matter to restrain his sulkiness. "It is addressed, and open."

      Read it, was exactly what Paco would have done, had he been able; but it so happened that the muleteer was a self-educated man, and that, whilst teaching himself many things which he had on various occasions found of much utility, he had given but a moderate share of his attention to the acquirement of letters. When on the road with his mules, he could distinguish the large printed capitals painted on the packages entrusted to his care; he was also able, from long habit, fluently to read the usual announcement of "Vinos y licores finos," inscribed above tavern doors; and, when required, he could even perpetrate a hieroglyphic intended for the signature of his name; but these were the extent of his acquirements. As to deciphering the contents or superscription of the letter now in his possession, he knew that it would be mere lost labour to attempt it. He was far too wary, however, to display his ignorance to the gipsy, and thus to strengthen him in his refusal to say for whom it was intended.

      "Of course I may read it," he replied "but here it is too dark, and I have no mind to leave you alone. Answer me, or it will be worse for you."

      Either suspecting how the case really stood, or through mere sullenness at the loss of his money, the gipsy remained, with lowering brow and compressed lips, obstinately silent. For a few moments Paco awaited a reply, and then walking to a short distance, he picked up something that lay in a dark corner of the vault, returned to the gipsy, and placing his hands upon the edge of the tall cask against which the latter was seated, sprang actively upon the top of it. Soon he again descended, and, upsetting the cask, gave it a shove with his foot that sent it rolling into the middle of the cellar. The gipsy, although motionless, and to all appearance inattentive to what passed, lost not one of the muleteer's movements. His head stirred not but his sunken beadlike eyes shifted their glances with extraordinary keenness and rapidity. At the moment when, surprised by the sudden removal of the cask, he screwed his head round to see what was going on behind him, a rope was passed swiftly over his face, and the next instant he felt his neck encircled by a halter. A number of strong hooks and wooden brackets, used to support shelves and suspend wine-skins, were firmly fixed in the cellar wall, at various distances from the ground. Over one of the highest of these, Paco had cast a rope, one end of which he held, whilst the other, as already mentioned, was fixed round the neck of the gipsy. Retiring a couple of paces, the muleteer hauled on the rope; it tightened round the neck of the unlucky Jaime, and even lifted him a little from the ground. He strove to rise to his feet from the sitting posture in which he was, but his bonds prevented him. Stumbling and helpless, he fell over on one side, and would inevitably have been strangled, had not Paco given him more line. The fear of death came over him. He trembled violently, and his face, which was smeared with blood from the scratches he had received in his passage through the bushes, became of an ash-like paleness. He cast a piteous look at Paco, who surveyed him with unrelenting aspect.

      "Not the first time I've had you at a rope's end," said he; "although the knot wasn't always in the same place. Come, I've no time to lose! Will you answer, or hang?"

      "What do you want to know?"

      "I have already asked you three times," returned Paco, impatiently, "who this letter is for, and what about."

      "For Zumalacarregui," replied Jaime; "and now you know as much as I do."

      "Why have I been kept in prison?" demanded Paco.

      "Why did you come with the lady?" replied the esquilador. "Had you stopped at Segura, no one would have meddled with you."

      "I came because I was ordered. Where is Doña Rita?"

      The gipsy hesitated, and then answered surlily. "I do not know."

      Paco gave the rope a twitch which brought the esquilador's tongue out of his mouth.

      "Liar!" he exclaimed; "I heard you speaking to her just now. What does she here?"

      "A prisoner," muttered the half-strangled gipsy.

      "Whose?"

      "Colonel Villabuena's."

      "And the Señor Conde. Where is he?"

      "Dead."

      "Dead!" repeated Paco, letting the rope go, grasping the esquilador by the collar, and furiously shaking him. "The noble count dead! When did he die? Or is it a lie of your invention?"

      "He was dead before I fetched the young lady from Segura," said Jaime. "The story of his being wounded, and wishing to see her, was merely a stratagem to bring her here."

      Relinquishing his hold, Paco took a step backwards, in grief and great astonishment. The answers he had forced from Jaime, and his own natural quickness of apprehension, were sufficient to enlighten him as to the main outline of what he had hitherto found a mystery. He at once conjectured Don Baltasar's designs, and the motives of Doña Rita's imprisonment and his own. That the count was really dead he could not doubt; for otherwise Baltasar would hardly have ventured upon his daughter's abduction. Aware that the count's duties and usual occupations did not lead him into actual collision with the enemy, and that they could scarcely, except by a casualty, endanger his life, it occurred to Paco, as highly probable, that he had met his death by unfair means, at the hands of Don Baltasar and the gipsy. The colonel he suspected, and Jaime he knew, to be capable of any iniquity. Such were some of the reflections that passed rapidly through his mind during the few moments that he stood beside Jaime, mute and motionless, meditating on what had passed, and on what he should now do. Naturally prompt and decided, and accustomed to perilous emergencies, he was not long in making up his mind. Suddenly starting from his immobility, he seized the end of the halter, and, to the horror of the gipsy, whose eyes were fixed upon him, began pulling furiously at it, hand over hand, like a sailor tugging at a hawser.

      "Misericordia!" screamed the horror-stricken esquilador, as he found himself lifted from the ground by the neck. "Mercy! mercy!"

      But mercy there was none for him. His cries were stifled by the pressure of the rope, and then he made a desperate effort to gain his feet. In this he succeeded, and stood upright causing the noose for a moment to slacken. He profited by the temporary relief to attempt another ineffectual prayer for pity. A gasping, inarticulate noise in his throat was the sole result; for the muleteer continued his vigorous pulls at the cord, and in an instant the unhappy gipsy felt himself lifted completely off the ground. He made one more violent strain to touch the earth with the point of his foot; but no – all was in vain – higher and higher he went, till the crown of his head struck against the long iron hook through the loop of which the halter ran. When this was the case, Paco caught his end of the rope round another hook at a less height from the ground, twisted and knotted it securely; then stooping, he picked up the esquilador's knife, re-entered the dungeon, and ascended the pile of casks erected below the window. On the top of these he sat himself down for a moment and listened. There proceeded from the wine-cellar a sort of noise, as of a scraping and thumping against the wall. It was the wretched gipsy kicking and struggling in his last agony.

      "He dies hard," muttered Paco, a slight expression of compunction coming over his features, "and I strung him up without priest or prayer. But, what then! those gitanos are worse than Jews, they believe neither in God nor devil. As for his death, he deserves it, the dog, ten times over. And if he didn't, Doña Rita's fate depends on my escape, and I could not leave him there to alarm the convent and have me pursued."

      His scruples quieted by these arguments, the muleteer again listened. All was silent in the vault. Paco cautiously put his head out at the hole through which he had dragged the gipsy. The coast was clear, the forest within thirty yards. Winding his body noiselessly through the aperture, he sprang to his feet, and with the speed of a greyhound sought the cover of the wood. Upon reaching the shelter of its foremost trees he paused, and turning round, looked back at the convent, hoping to see Rita at a window. But she had disappeared, and the

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