In February of the year 1809, when the French were sat down before
Saragossa—then enduring its second and more terrific siege within a
period of six months—it came to the knowledge of the Duc d’Abrantes,
at that time the General commanding, that his army, though undoubtedly
the salt of the earth, was yet so little sufficient to itself in the
matter of seasoning, that it was reduced to the necessity of
flavouring its soup with the saltpetre out of its own cartridges. In
this emergency, d’Abrantes sent for a certain Ducos, captain on the
staff of General Berthier, but at present attached to a siege train
before the doomed town, and asked him if he knew whence, if anywhere
in the vicinity, it might be possible to make good the deficiency.
Now this Eugène Ducos was a very progressive evolution of the times,
hatched by the rising sun, emerged stinging and splendid from the
exotic quagmires of the past. A facile linguist, by temperament and
early training an artist, he had flown naturally to the field of
battle as to that field most fertile of daring new effects, whose
surprises called for record rather than analysis. It was for him to
collect the impressions which, later, duller wits should classify.
And, in the meantime, here he was at twenty a captain of renown, and
always a creature of the most unflagging resourcefulness.
“You were with Lefebvre-Desnouettes in Aragon last year?” demanded
Junot.
“I was, General; both before the siege and during it.”
“You heard mention of salt mines in this neighbourhood?”
“There were rumours of them, sir—amongst the hills of Ulebo; but it
was never our need to verify the rumours.”
“Take a company, now, and run them to earth. I will give you a week.”
“Pardon me, General; I need no company but my own, which is ever the
safest colleague.”
Junot glared demoniacally. He was already verging on the madness which
was presently to destroy him.
“The devil!” he shouted. “You shall answer for that assurance! Go
alone, sir, since you are so obliging, and find salt; and at your
peril be killed before reporting the result to me. Bones of God! is
every skipjack with a shoulder-knot to better my commands?”
Ducos saluted, and wheeled impassive. He knew that in a few days
Marshal Lannes was to supplant this maniac.
* * * * *
Up and away amongst the intricate ridges of the mountains, where the
half-unravelled knots of the Pyrenees flow down in threads, or
clustered threads, which are combed by and by into the plains south of
Saragossa, a dusky young goatherd loitered among the chestnut trees on
a hot afternoon. This boy’s beauty was of a supernal order. His
elastic young cheeks glowed with colour; his eyebrows were resolute
bows; his lips, like a pretty phrase of love, were set between dimples
like inverted commas. And, as he stood, he coquetted like Dinorah to
his own shadow, chasséd to it, spoke to it, upbraiding or caressing,
as it answered to his movements on the ground before him—
“Ah, pretty one! ah, shameless! Art thou the shadow of the girl that
Eugenio loved? Fie, fie! thou wouldst betray this poor Anita—mock the
round limbs and little feet that will not look their part. Yet, betray
her to her love returning, and Anita will fall and kiss thee on her
knees—kiss the very shadow of Eugenio’s love. Ah, little shadow! take
wings and fly to him, who promised quickly to return. Say I am good
but sad, awaiting him; say that Anita suffers, but is patient. He will
remember then, and come. No shadow of disguise shall blind him to his
love. Go, go, before I repent and hold thee, jealous that mine own
shadow should run before to find his lips.”
She stooped, and, with a fantastic gesture, threw her soul upon the
winds; then rose, and leaned against a tree, and began to sing, and
sigh and murmur softly:
“‘At the gate of heaven are sold brogues
For the little bare-footed angel rogues’—
Ah, little dear mother! it is the seventh month, and the sign is still
delayed. No baby, no lover. Alack! why should he return to me, who am
a barren olive! The husbandman asks a guerdon for his care. Give me my
little doll, Santissima, or I will be naughty and drink holy-water:
give me the shrill wee voice, which pierces to the father’s heart,
when even passion loiters. Ah, come to me, Eugenio, my Eugenio!”
She raised her head quickly on the word, and her heart leaped. It was
to hear the sound of a footstep, on the stones far below, coming up
the mountain side. She looked to her shirt and jacket. Ragged as they
were, undeveloped as was the figure within them, she had been so
jealous a housewife that there was not in all so much as an eyelet
hole to attract a peeping Tom. Now, leaving her goats amongst the
scattered boulders of the open, she backed into the groves,
precautionally, but a little reluctant, because in her heart she was
curious.
The footsteps came on toilfully, and presently the man who was
responsible for them hove into sight. He wore the dress of an English
officer, save for the shepherd’s felt hat on his head; but his scarlet
jacket was knotted loosely by the sleeves about his throat, in order
to the disposition of a sling which held his left arm crookt in a
bloody swathe. He levered himself up with a broken spear-shaft; but he
was otherwise weaponless. A pistol, in Ducos’s creed, was the argument
of a fool. He carried _his_ ammunition in his brains.
Having reached a little plateau, irregular with rocks shed from the
cliffs above, he sat down within the shadow of a grove of chestnut and
carob trees, and sighed, and wiped his brow, and nodded to all around
and below him.
“Yes, and yes, and of a truth,” thought he: “here is the country of my
knowledge. And yonder, deep and far amongst its myrtles and
mulberries, crawls the Ebro; and to my right, a browner clod amongst
the furrows of the valleys, heaves up the ruined monastery of San
Ildefonso, which Daguenet sacked, the radical; whilst I occupied (ah,
the week of sweet malvoisie and sweeter passion!) the little inn at
the junction of the Pampeluna and Saragossa roads. And what has become
of Anita of the inn? Alack! if my little _fille de joie_ were but here
to serve me now!”
The goatherd slipped round the shoulder of a rock and stood before
him, breathing hard. Her black curls were, for all the world,
bandaged, as it might be, with a yellow napkin (though they were more
in the way to give than take wounds), and crowned rakishly with a
dusky sombrero. She wore a kind of gaskins on her legs, loose, so as
to reveal the bare knees and a little over; and across her shoulders
was slung a sun-burnt shawl, which depended in a bib against her
chest.
Now the one stood looking down and the other up, their visions
magnetically meeting and blending, till the eyes of the goatherd were
delivered of very stars of rapture.
Was this a spirit, thought Ducos, summoned of his hot and necessitous
desire? But the other had no such misgiving. All in a moment she had
fallen on her brown knees before him, and was pitifully kissing his
bandaged arm, while she strove to moan and murmur out the while her
ecstasy of gratitude.
“Nariguita!” he murmured, rallying as if from a dream; “Nariguita!”
She laughed and sobbed.
“Ah, the dear little happy name from thy lips! A thousand times will I
repeat it to myself, but never as thou wouldst say it. And now! Yes,
Nariguita, Eugenio—thine own ‘little nose’—thy child, thy baby, who
never doubted that this day would come—O darling of my soul, that it
would come!”—(she clung to him, and hid her face)—“Eugenio! though
the blossom of our love delays its fruitage!”
He smiled, recovered from his first astonishment. Ministers of
coincidence! In all the fantastic convolutions of war, the merry, the
danse-macabre, should not love’s reunions have a place? It was nothing
out of that context that here was he chanced again, and timely, upon
that same sweet instrument which he had once played on, and done with,
and thrown aside, careless of its direction. Now he had but to stoop
and reclaim it, and the discarded strings, it seemed, were ready as
heretofore to answer to his touch with any melody he listed.
He caressed her with real delight. She was something more than
lovable. He made himself a very Judas to her lips.
“Anita, my little Anita!” he began glowingly; but she took him up with
a fevered eagerness, answering the question of his eyes.
“So long ago, ah Dios! And thou wert gone; and the birds were silent;
and under the heavy sky my father called me to him. He held a last
letter of thine, which had missed my hands for his. Love, sick at our
parting, had betrayed us. O, the letter! how I swooned to be denied
it! He was for killing me, a traitor. Well, I could not help but be.
But Tia Joachina had pity on me, and dressed me as you see, and
smuggled me to the hills, that I might at least have a chance to live
without suffering wrong. And, behold! the heavens smiled upon me,
knowing my love; and Señor Cangrejo took me to herd his goats. For
seven months—for seven long, faithful months; until the sweetest of
my heart’s flock should return to pasture in my bosom. And now he has
come, my lamb, my prince, even as he promised. He has come, drawing me
to him over the hills, following the lark’s song of his love as it
dropped to earth far forward of his steps. Eugenio! O, ecstasy! Thou
hast dared this for my sake?”
“Child,” answered the admirable Ducos, “I should have dared only in
breaking my word. _Un honnête homme n’a que sa parole._ That is the
single motto for a poor captain, Nariguita. And who is this Señor
Cangrejo?”
Some terror, offspring of his question, set her clinging to him once
more.
“What dost thou here?” she cried, with immediate inconsistency—“a
lamb among the wolves! Eugenio!”
“Eh!”—he took her up, with an air of bewilderment. “I am Sir Zhones,
the English capitaine, though it loose me your favour, mamsellee. Wat!
Damn eet, I say!”
She fell away, staring at him; then in a moment gathered, and leapt to
him again between tears and laughter.
“But this?” she asked, her eyes glistening; and she touched the
bandage.
“Ah! that,” he answered. “Why, I was wounded, and taken prisoner by
the French, you understand? Also, I escaped from my captors. It comes,
blood and splint and all, from the smashed arm of a sabreur, who,
indeed, had no longer need of it.”
“For the love of Christ!” she cried in a panic. “Come away into the
trees, where none will observe us!”
“Bah! I have no fear, I,” said Ducos. But he rose, nevertheless, with
a smile, and, catching up the goatherd, bore her into the shadows.
There, sitting by her side, he assured her, the rogue, of the
impatience with which he had anticipated, of the eagerness with which
he had run to realize this longed-for moment. The escapade had only
been rendered possible, he said truthfully, by the opportune demand
for salt. Doubtless she would help him, for love’s sake, to justify
the venture to his General?
But, at that, she stared at him, troubled, and her lip began to
quiver.
“Ah, God!” she cried; “then it was not I in the first place! Go thy
ways, love; but for pity’s heart-sake let me weep a little. Yes, yes,
there is salt in the mountains, that I know, and where the caves lie.
But there are also Cangrejo—whom you French ruined and made a
madman—and a hundred like him, wild-cats hidden amongst the leaves.
And there, too, are the homeless friars of St. Ildefonso; and, dear
body of Christ! the tribunal of terror, the junta of women, who are
the worst of all—lynx-eyed demons.”
He smiled indulgently. Her terror amused him.
“Well, well,” he said; “well, well. And what, then, is this junta?”
“It is a scourge,” she whispered, shivering, “for traitors and for
spies. It gathers nightly, at sunset, in the dip yonder, and there
waters with blood its cross of death. This very evening, Cangrejo
tells me——”
She broke off, cuddled closer to her companion, and clasping her hands
and shrugging up her shoulders to him, went on awfully—
“Eugenio, there was a wagon-load of piastres coming secretly for
Saragossa by the Tolosa road. It was badly convoyed. One of your
generals got scent of it. The guard had time to hide their treasure
and disperse, but him whom they thought had betrayed them the tribunal
of women claimed, and to-night——”
“Well, he will receive his wages. And where is the treasure
concealed?”
“Ah! that I do not know.”
Ducos got to his feet, and stretched and yawned.
“I have a fancy to see this meeting-place of the tribunal. Wilt thou
lead me to it, Nariguita?”
“Mother of God, thou art mad!”
“Then I must go alone, like a madman.”
“Eugenio, it is cursing and accurst. None will so much as look into it
by day; and, at dusk, only when franked by the holy church.”
“So greatly the better. Adios, Nariguita!”
It took them half an hour, descending cautiously, and availing
themselves of every possible shelter of bush and rock, to reach a
strangely formed amphitheatre set stark and shallow amongst the higher
swales of the valley, but so overhung with scrub of myrtle and wild
pomegranate as to be only distinguishable, and that scarcely, from
above. A ragged track, mounting from the lower levels into this
hollow, tailed off, and was attenuated into a point where it took a
curve of the rocks at a distance below.
As Ducos, approaching the rim, pressed through the thicket, a toss of
black crows went up from the mouth ahead of him, like cinders of paper
spouted from a chimney. He looked over. The brushwood ceased at the
edge of a considerable pit, roughly circular in shape, whose sides, of
bare sloping sand, met and flattened at the bottom into an extended
platform. Thence arose a triangular gibbet, a very rack in a devil’s
larder, all about which a hoard of little pitchy bird scullions were
busy with the joints. Holy mother, how they squabbled, and flapped at
one another with their sleeves, it seemed! The two carcasses which
hung there appeared, for all their heavy pendulosity, to reel and rock
with laughter, nudging one another in eyeless merriment.
Ducos mentally calculated the distance to the gallows below from any
available coign of concealment.
“One could not hide close enough to hear anything,” he murmured,
shaking his head in aggravation; “and this junta of ladies—it will
probably talk. What if it were to discuss that very question of the
piastres? Nariguita, will you go and be my little reporter at the
ceremony?”
Anita, crouching in the brush behind him, whispered terrified: “It is
impossible. They admit none but priests and women.”
“And are not you a woman, most beautiful?”
“God forbid!” she said. “I am the little goatherd Ambrosio.”
He stood some moments, frowning. A scheme, daring and characteristic,
was beginning to take shape in his brain.
“What is that clump of rags by the gallows?” he asked, without looking
round.
“It is not rags; it is rope, Eugenio.”
He thought again.
“And when do they come to hang this rascal?” he said.
“It is always at dusk. O, dear mother!” she whimpered, for the young
man had suddenly slipped between the branches, and was going swiftly
and softly down the pit-side.
Already the basin of sand was filled with the shadows from the hills.
Ducos approached the gibbet. The last of the birds remaining arose and
dispersed, quarrelling with nothing so much as the sunlight which they
encountered above.
“It is an abominable task,” said the aide-de-camp, looking up at the
dangling bodies; “but—for the Emperor—always for the Emperor! That
fellow, now, in the domino—it would make us appear of one build. And
as for complexion, why, he at least would have no eyes for the
travesty. Mon Dieu! I believe it is a Providence.”
There was a ladder leaned against the third and empty beam. He put it
into position for the cloaked figure, and ran up it. The rope was
hitched to a hook in the cross-piece. He must clasp and lever up his
burden by main strength before he could slacken and detach the cord.
Then, with an exclamation of relief, he let the body drop upon the
sand beneath. He descended the ladder in excitement.
“Anita!” he called.
She had followed, and was at hand. She trembled, and was as pale as
death.
“Help me,” he panted—“with this—into the bush.”
He had lifted _his_ end by the shoulders.
“What devil possesses you? I cannot,” she sobbed; “I shall die.”
“Ah, Nariguita! for my sake! There is no danger if thou art brave and
expeditious.”
Between them they tugged and trailed their load into the dense
undergrowth skirting the open track, and there let it plunge and sink.
Ducos removed the domino from the body, rolling and hauling at that
irreverently. Then he saw how the wretch had been pinioned, wrists and
ankles, beneath.
Carrying the cloak, he hastened back to the gallows. There he
cautiously selected from the surplus stock of cord a length of some
twelve feet, at either end of which he formed a loop. So, mounting the
ladder, over the hook he hitched this cord by one end, and then,
swinging himself clear, slid down the rope until he could pass both
his feet into the lower hank.
“_Voilà!_” said he. “Come up and tie me to the other with some little
pieces round the waist and knees and neck.”
She obeyed, weeping. Her love and her duty were to this wonder of
manhood, however dreadful his counsel. Presently, trussed to his
liking, he bade her fetch the brigand’s cloak and button it over all.
“Now,” said he, “one last sacramental kiss; and, so descending and
placing the ladder and all as before, thou shalt take standing-room in
the pit for this veritable dance of death.”
A moment—and he was hanging there, to all appearance a corpse. The
short rope at his neck had been so disposed and knotted—the collar of
the domino serving—as to make him look, indeed, as if he strained at
the tether’s end. He had dragged his long hair over his eyes; his head
lolled to one side; his tongue protruded. For the rest, the cloak hid
all, even to his feet.
The goatherd snivelled.
“Ah, holy saints, he is dead!”
The head came erect, grinning.
“Eugenio!” she cried; “O, my God! Thou wilt be discovered—thou wilt
slip and strangle! Ah, the crows—body of my body, the crows!”
“Imbecile! have I not my hands? See, I kiss one to thee. Now the sun
sinks, and my ghostly vigil will be short. Pray heaven only they
alight not on that in the bush. Nariguita, little heroine, this is my
last word. Go hide thyself in the bushes above, and watch what a
Frenchman, the most sensitive of mortals, will suffer to serve his
Emperor.”
It was an era, indeed, of sublime lusts and barbaric virtues, when men
must mount upon stepping-stones, not of their dead selves, but of
their slaughtered enemies, to higher things. Anita, like Ducos, was a
child of her generation. To her mind the heroic purpose of this deed
overpowered its pungency. She kissed her lover’s feet; secured the
safe disposition of the cloak about them; then turned and fled into
hiding.
* * * * *
At dusk, with the sound of footsteps coming up the pass, the crows
dispersed. Eugène, for all his self-sufficiency, had sweated over
their persistence. A single more gluttonous swoop might at any moment,
in blinding him, have laid him open to a general attack before help
could reach him from the eyrie whence unwearying love watched his
every movement. Now, common instance of the providence which waits on
daring, the sudden lift and scatter of the swarm left his hearing
sensible to the tinkling of a bridle, which came rhythmical from the
track below. Immediately he fell, with all his soul, into the pose of
death.
The cadence of the steely warning so little altered, the footsteps
stole in so muffled and so deadly, that, peering presently through
slit eyelids for the advent of the troop, it twitched his strung
nerves to see a sinister congress already drawn soundless about the
gibbet on which he hung. Perhaps for the first time in this stagnant
atmosphere he realized the peril he had invited. But still the
gambler’s providence befriended him.
They were all women but two—the victim, a sullen, whiskered
Yanguesian, strapped cuttingly to a mule, and a paunchy shovel-hatted
Carmelite, who hugged a crucifix between his roomy sleeves.
Ducos had heard of these banded _vengeresses_. Now, he was Frenchman
enough to appreciate in full the significance of their attitude, as
they clustered beneath him in the dusk, a veiled and voiceless huddle
of phantoms. “How,” he thought, peeping through the dropped curtain of
his hair, “will the adorables do it?” He had an hysterical inclination
to laugh, and at that moment the monk, with a sudden decision to
action, brushed against him and set him slowly twirling until his face
was averted from the show.
Immediately thereon—as he interpreted sounds—the mule was led under
the gallows. He heard the ladder placed in position, heard a strenuous
shuffling as of concentrated movement. What he failed to hear (at
present) was any cry or protest from the victim. The beam above
creaked, a bridle tinkled, a lighter drop of hoofs receded. A pregnant
pause ensued, broken only by a slight noise, like rustling or
vibrating—and then, in an instant, by a voice, chuckling,
hateful—the voice of the priest.
“What! to hang there without a word, Carlos? Wouldst thou go, and
never ask what is become of that very treasure thou soldst thy soul to
betray? The devil has rounded on thee, Carlos; for after all it is
thou that art lost, and not the treasure. That is all put away—shout
it in the ears of thy neighbours up there—it is all put away, Carlos,
safe in the salt mines of the Little Hump. Cry it to the whole world
now. Thou mayst if thou canst. In the salt mines of the Little Hump.
Dost hear? Ah, then, we must make thee answer.”
With his words, the pit was all at once in shrill hubbub, noise
indescribable and dreadful, the shrieking of harpies bidden to their
prey. It rose demoniac—a very Walpurgis.
“No, no,” thought Ducos, gulping under his collar. He was almost
unnerved for the moment. “It is unlawful—they have no right to!”
He was twisting again, for all his mad will to prevent it. He would
not look, and yet he looked. The monk, possessed, was thrashing the
torn and twitching rubbish with his crucifix. The others, their
fingers busy with the bodkins they had plucked from their mantillas,
had retreated for the moment to a little distance.
Suddenly the Carmelite, as if in an uncontrollable frenzy, dropped his
weapon, and scuttling to the mule, where it stood near at hand, tore a
great horse pistol from its holster among the trappings, and pointed
it at the insensible body.
“Scum of all devils!” he bellowed. “In fire descend to fire that lasts
eternal!”
He pulled the trigger. There was a flash and shattering explosion. A
blazing hornet stung Ducos in the leg. He may have started and
shrieked. Any cry or motion of his must have passed unnoticed in the
screaming panic evoked of the crash. He clung on with his hands and
dared to raise his head. The mouth of the pass was dusk with flying
skirts. Upon the sands beneath him, the body of the priest, a
shapeless bulk, was slowly subsiding and settling, one fat fist of it
yet gripping the stock of a pistol which, overgorged, had burst as it
was discharged.
* * * * *
The reek of the little tragedy had hardly dissipated before Ducos
found himself. The sentiment of revolt, deriving from his helpless
position, had been indeed but momentary. To feel his own accessibility
to torture, painted torture to him as an inhuman lust. With the means
to resist, or escape, at will, he might have sat long in ambush
watching it; even condoning it as an extravagant posture of art.
With a heart full of such exultation over the success of his trick
that for the moment he forgot the pain of his wound, he hurriedly
unpicked the knots of the shorter cords about him, and, jumping to the
ground, waited until the shadow of a little depressed figure came
slinking across the sand towards him.
“Eugenio!” it whispered; “what has happened? O! art thou hurt?”
She ran into his arms, sobbing.
“I am hurt,” said Ducos. “Quick, child! unstrap this from my arm and
bind it about my calf. Didst hear? But it was magnificent! Two birds
with a single stone. The piastres in pickle for us. Didst see,
moreover? Holy Emperor! it was laughable. I would sacrifice a
decoration to be witness of the meeting of those two overhead. It
should be the Yanguesian for my money, for he has at least his teeth
left. Look how he shows them, bursting with rage! Quick, quick, quick!
we must be up and away, before any of those others think of
returning.”
“And if one should,” she said, “and mark the empty beam?”
“What does it matter, nevertheless! I must be off to-night, after thou
hast answered me one single question.”
“Off? Eugenio! O! not without me?”
“God, little girl! In this race I must not be hampered by so much as a
thought. But I will return for thee—never fear.”
He still sat in his domino. She knelt at his feet, stanching the flow
from the wound the pistol had made in his leg. At his words she looked
up breathlessly into his face; then away, to hide her swimming eyes.
In the act she slunk down, making herself small in the sand.
“Eugenio! My God! we are watched!”
He turned about quickly.
“Whence?”
“From the mouth of the pass,” she whispered.
“I can see nothing,” he said. “Hurry, nevertheless! What a time thou
art! There, it is enough of thy bungling fingers. Help me to my feet
and out of this place. Come!” he ended, angrily.
He had an ado to climb the easy slope. By the time they were entered
amongst the rocks and bushes above, it was black dusk.
“Whither wouldst thou, dearest?” whispered the goatherd.
He had known well enough a moment ago—to some point, in fact, whence
she could indicate to him the direction of the Little Hump, where the
treasure lay; afterwards, to the very hill-top where some hours
earlier they had forgathered. But he would not or could not explain
this. Some monstrous blight of gloom had seized his brain at a swoop.
He thought it must be one of the crows, and he stumbled along, raving
in his heart. If she offered to help him now, he would tear his arm
furiously from her touch. She wondered, poor stricken thing, haunting
him with tragic eyes. Then at last her misery and desolation found
voice—
“What have I done? I will not ask again to go with thee, if that is
it. It was only one little foolish cry of terror, most dear—that they
should suspect, and seize, and torture me. But, indeed, should they do
it, thou canst trust me to be silent.”
He stopped, swaying, and regarded her demoniacally. His face was a
livid and malignant blot in the thickening dusk. To torture her? What
torture could equal his at this moment? She sought merely to move him
by an affectation of self-renunciation. That, of course, called at
once for extreme punishment. He must bite and strangle her to death.
He moved noiselessly upon her. She stood spellbound before him. All at
once something seemed to strike him on the head, and, without uttering
a sound, he fell forward into the bush.
* * * * *
Ducos opened his eyes to the vision of so preternaturally melancholy a
face, that he was shaken with weak laughter over the whimsicality of
his own imagination. But, in a very little, unwont to dreaming as he
was, the realization that he was looking upon no apparition, but a
grotesque of fact, silenced and absorbed him.
Presently he was moved to examine his circumstances. He was lying on a
heap of grass mats in a tiny house built of boards. Above him was a
square of leaf-embroidered sky cut out of a cane roof; to his left,
his eyes, focussing with a queer stiffness, looked through an open
doorway down precipices of swimming cloud. That was because he lay in
an eyrie on the hillside. And then at once, into his white field of
vision, floated the dismal long face, surmounted by an ancient
cocked-hat, slouched and buttonless, and issuing like an august Aunt
Sally’s from the neck of a cloak as black and dropping as a pall.
The figure crossed the opening outside, and wheeled, with the wind in
its wings. In the act, its eyes, staring and protuberant, fixed
themselves on those of the Frenchman. Immediately, with a little
stately gesture expressive of relief and welcome, it entered the hut.
“By the mercy of God!” exclaimed the stranger in his own tongue. Then
he added in English: “The Inglese recovers to himself?”
Ducos smiled, nodding his head; then answered confidently, feeling his
way: “A little, sir, I tank you. Thees along night. Ah! it appear all
one pain.”