"For what good?" she murmured despairingly, "The coffer is lost."
"I am not of your opinion; I believe, on the contrary, that it has fallen into the hands of a man who intends to make use of it, for what purpose I am ignorant, but I shall know it, be assured."
"As you insist on it, listen to me, then, Don Pablo, though what I have told you is extremely vague."
"A gleam, however weak it may be, will suffice to guide me, and perhaps enable me to discover what I seek."
"May Heaven grant it!" she sighed; "This is all I can tell you, and it is quite impossible for me to say certainly whether I am not mistaken, for, at the moment, terror so troubled my senses that I cannot say positively I saw what I fancied I saw."
"Well, go on," the young man said, impatiently.
"When Harry fell, struck by a bullet, and was writhing in the last throes, two were near him, one already wounded, Andrés Garote the ranchero, the other, who stooped over his body, and seemed riffling his clothes—"
"Who was he?"
"Fray Ambrosio. I even fancy I can remember seeing him leave the poor hunter with a badly restrained movement of joy, and hiding in his bosom something which I could not distinguish."
"No doubt but he had seized the coffer."