The lieutenant acted as guide, and the soldiers soon entered a path scarce traced through a very thick wood, and at the end of about three quarters of an hour reached a large clearing, in the middle of which stood the announced rancho. The officer gave his men orders to dismount. The latter eagerly obeyed; for they seemed anxious to rest after their fatigue.
Leaping from his horse, don Melchior entered the rancho, in order to assure himself of the condition it was in. But he had hardly set his foot in the interior, ere he was suddenly seized, rolled in a sarape, and bound and gagged, even before he had the time to attempt a useless defense.
At the end of some minutes, he heard a clanking of sabres, and a regular sound of footsteps outside the rancho; the soldiers, or at least a portion of them, were going away, without paying any attention to him.
Almost at the same moment he was seized by the feet and shoulders, lifted up, and carried off. After a few rapid steps, it seemed to him as if his bearers were taking him down steps that entered the ground; then, after about ten minutes march, he was softly laid on a bed, composed of furs as he supposed, and left alone. An utter silence prevailed around the prisoner, he was really alone. At length a slight noise became audible, this noise gradually increased, and soon became loud; it resembled the walk of several persons, whose footsteps grated on sand.
This noise suddenly ceased. The young man felt himself lifted up and carried off once more. They carried him for a very considerable distance, and the bearers relieved each other at regular distances.
At length they stopped again; from the fresher and sharper air that smote his face, the prisoner conjectured that he had left the tunnel and was now in the open country. He was laid down on the ground.
"Set the prisoner at liberty," a voice said, whose dry metallic sound struck the young man.
His bonds were at once unfastened, and the gag and the handkerchief that covered his eyes removed.
Don Melchior leaped on his feet and looked around him. The spot where he found himself was the top of a rather lofty hill in the centre of an immense plain. The night was dark, and a little to the right in the distance gleamed like so many stars, the lights of the houses in Puebla. The young man formed the centre of a rather large group, drawn up in a circle round him. These men were masked, each of them held in his right hand a torch of ocote wood, whose flame agitated by the wind, threw a blood red hue over the country, and imparted to it a fantastic appearance. Don Melchior felt a shudder of terror run over his whole body, he understood that he was in the power of that mysterious Masonic association, of which he was himself a member, and which spread over the whole of Mexico, the gloomy ramifications of its formidable ventas. The silence was so profound on the hill, all the men so thoroughly resembled statues in their cold immobility, that the young man could hear his own heart beating in his breast.
A man stepped forward.