Appleby shook his head. “The trouble is that Morales will take care that all anybody of consequence knows is that two of the Sin Verguenza were extinguished in Santa Marta,” he said.
“Still, there’s another point. Morales doesn’t let up too easily on anything he means to put through, and he wouldn’t get very much out of either of us when we’re dead.”
Appleby turned upon him almost savagely. “Stop,” he said. “You know the thing is decided as well as I do. Yesterday took a good deal of the stiffening out of me—and in another hour or two we shall have a tolerably difficult part to play.”
Harper’s face grew suddenly grim. “Well,” he said a trifle hoarsely, “I guess we can face what is coming as well as a Spaniard can, and—I’ve got to admit it—nobody could expect any more from any man.”
Appleby made no answer, but it was by an effort that, feeling his comrade’s eyes upon him, he sat still, when the door opened and a cazadore came in. He laid down a piece of bread and a bottle of thin red wine, and then glanced at them compassionately.
“When will it be?” asked Appleby very quietly.
The man made a little gesture. “Soon, I think. There is a parade fixed in an hour from now.”
He went out, and Harper’s hands quivered a little as he held up the wine and glanced at Appleby.
“It’s not often I don’t feel inclined to eat, but I don’t seem to have much use for breakfast now,” he said. “Here’s to the folks who’ll wonder what has happened to us back there in the country we came from!”
He drank, and handed the wine to Appleby, who stood up as he put the bottle to his lips. It was, however, not Tony Palliser or Nettie Harding, but a woman with grave gray eyes, that now when the shadows were closing round him he drank to as it were reverently. She would, as Harper had suggested, never even know what had befallen him, but she seemed very near him then, and he felt the influence of her serenity upon him.