CHAPTER XXXVII
CUT DOWN
It must have been a little before six o'clock on the following morning, when I was suddenly aroused from sleep, and, opening my eyes, saw my father, half-dressed, bending over me with his hand on my shoulder.
"Wake up, Hugh!" he cried, "wake up!"
I sat up in bed, bewildered and amazed. My father, with an anxious face, was rapidly putting on his boots.
"What has happened?" I asked, springing out of bed. "Is there anything wrong?"
"Dress yourself quick, and follow me. I am going to José's. Pietro has just come, and says that there was some desperate fighting last night between the brigands and some travellers on their way to Palermo. Two of the brigands were killed, but they have captured the man who killed them. Pietro thinks he was an Englishman. They will hang him this morning unless we can prevent it. Hurry, Hugh, and come after me. You don't know what those fellows are if they can lay their hands on any one who has killed one of their band. Sure as fate they'll hang him. I fear that we may be too late now. I shall take the mountain road."
All the time my father had been talking he had been completing a hasty toilet, and, now he had finished, he hurried from the room, and directly afterwards I heard Jacko cantering down the avenue. In a very few minutes I too was dressed and following him on foot.
Our villa was about four miles and a half from the hill on which Monsieur José and his friends had pitched their habitation, and it was uphill all the way, and a very rough road. The path—it was a mere mountain track—was covered with loose stones, and in many places was but a few feet wide. Below sloped, with the abruptness of a precipice, the green hillside, dotted with olive-trees and aloe shrubs, and above the vegetation grew more and more stunted, and great masses of rock jutted out and lay about the barren brown summit. I was running towards the sea, and the soft invigorating breeze which blew steadily in my teeth seemed to lend me an added vigour, for when I caught my father up, close to our destination, I was as fresh as at the start. Side by side we reached the chasm-like gorge which separated the range of hills which we had been traversing from the solitary one behind which was the brigands' dwelling-place. Here we halted, and my father, dismounting, put two of his fingers in his mouth and whistled a peculiar screech-like whistle, which I had often vainly tried to imitate.
At first there was no answer, save the echoes which came mockingly back again and again. Again he gave the signal, and this time one of the band made a cautious appearance from behind a knoll of trees, and, seeing who we were, came forward and threw a rough bridge, formed from the trunk of a tree, across the chasm. We were on the other side in a moment, and I hurried up the steep hillside, whilst my father remained behind to exchange a few sentences with the man whose vile patois I could not pretend to understand. He caught me up at the summit, and, without stopping, ran down the green footpath, calling out to me—
"Quick, Hugh, we shall only be just in time. They are going to hang him!"