“I will answer you with your own words this morning. It is for me, not you, to impose conditions. But her safety will be secured.”
“Then you can have my decision. As soon as she and I are across the frontier, you can have the letter you want.”
“You mean you will not write it otherwise? I warn you.”
“I mean I will not write it otherwise,” I replied; “I’ll see you hanged first. Do what you will.”
He called in the three men who were waiting at the door, and in a very few words told them the part I had taken on the previous night, and that I intended to betray everything I knew to the authorities.
Before he had half finished there was no question about their verdict. I read it in faces dark and fierce as a cyclone cloud; in the threatening looks from eyes ablaze with wrath; in the execrations hissed and growled between teeth clenched fast in hate, and in the gleam of the half-drawn weapons as the strenuous fingers clutched at them instinctively.
White-hot with passion they were, and possessed with but one common motive and resolve—to defend themselves by exacting the uttermost penalty for my treachery. Jury and judges and executioners in one, Barosa knew how to play upon their feelings, and I saw that I was condemned and sentenced almost as soon as the first words had left his lips.
They were some of those who had been suspicious of me when the “test” of my good faith had been made, one of them being the young fellow who on that night had endeavoured to draw a statement from me by pretending that he had been arrested and had turned informer. He was the most vindictive of them all now; and while Barosa was still speaking, he broke in with a loud fierce oath, and, carried away by his rage, he drew his revolver and fired point-blank at my head.
Barosa saw him and struck up his arm. “Marco!” he thundered. “Are you the sole judge?”
“The dog shall die,” he growled, in a muttered snarl of hate; and the other two scowlingly agreed with fierce and savage oaths.