"I?"
"Who else but you? Did you not try, no later than last night, to assassinate a man in an ambuscade you laid for him?"
"Yes; but that man is my enemy."
"Well! Suppose, for a moment, we are friends of that man!"
"But it is not so. It cannot be."
"Why not? What makes you suppose so?"
Don Stefano shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
"You must think me very foolish," he said, "if you would try to make me believe that quibble."
"It is not so much one as you imagine."
"Nonsense! If I had fallen into the hands of that man, he would have had me conveyed to his camp, in order to revenge himself on me in the presence of the bandits he commands, and to whom the sight of my punishment would, doubtlessly, have been too agreeable for him to have tried to deprive them of the delightful sight."