"Papers!" Don Sebastian stammered.
"Yes, general; your correspondence with a certain North American diplomatist, to whom you offered to deliver Sonora and one or two other provinces, if the United Sates supplied you with the means to seize the presidency of the Mexican Republic."
"And you have those papers?" the general said with ill-restrained anxiety.
"I have the letters, with your correspondent's answers."
"Here?"
"Of course," Valentine said with a laugh.
"Then you will die!" the general yelled, bounding like a panther on the hunter.
But the latter was on his guard. By a movement as quick as his adversary's, he seized the general by the throat, threw himself upon him, and laid his foot on his chest.
"One step further," he said coldly to the general's companions, who were running up at full speed to his aid, "one step, and he is a dead man."
Certainly the general was a brave man. Many times he had supplied unequivocal proofs of a courage carried almost to temerity: still he saw such resolution flashing in the hunter's tawny eye, that he felt a shudder pass through all his limbs—he was lost, he was afraid.