"Ah," Don Sebastian murmured, "speak, I implore you, señor, for I am anxious to know all the obligations I owe you."
"Captain Don Isidro Vargas not only escorted the money I had conveyed to Palmar," he said in a sharp, quick voice, "but there was also a coffin. Well, general, why do you not ask me what has become of that coffin?"
An electric shock ran through the audience on hearing the ironical question so coldly asked by the hunter, whose eye, implacably fixed on the general, seemed to flash fire.
"What!" Don Sebastian exclaimed, "I can hardly think that you have committed sacrilege?"
Valentine burst into a loud and sharp laugh. "Your suppositions ever go beyond the object. I commit sacrilege, oh, no! I loved the poor girl too dearly when alive to outrage her after death. No, no, the betrothed of my friend is sacred to me; but as, in my opinion, the assassin can have no claim to the body of his victim, and you are morally your daughter's murderer, I have robbed you of this body, which you are not worthy to have, and which must rest by the side of him for whom she died."
There was a moment's silence. The general's face, hitherto pale, assumed a greenish hue, and his eyes were suffused with blood. Now and then he made superhuman efforts to speak, which were unsuccessful, but at length he yelled in a hoarse and hissing voice—
"It is not true; you have not done this. You cannot have dared to rob a father of his child's body."
"I have done it, I tell you," the hunter said coldly. "I have taken possession of the body of your victim, and now you understand me; never shall you know where this poor body rests. But this is only the beginning of my vengeance. What I wish to kill in you is the soul and not the body; and now begone, go and forget at Mexico, amid your ambitious intrigues, the scene that has passed between us; but remember that you will find me in your path everywhere and ever. Farewell till we meet again."
"One last word," the general exclaimed, affected by the deepest despair, "restore me my daughter's body; she was the only human creature I ever loved."
The hunter regarded him for a moment with an undefinable expression, and then said in a harsh and coldly-mocking voice, "Never."