"For what reason?"
"Being on the wrong side of the Pyrenees," replied the Spaniard, with a cruel grin.
"Shot—and without mercy?"
"Precisely so, senor."
"By whose order?"
"One who does not like his orders questioned—Don Baltasar de Saldos."
"Is he capable of such an act?"
"Capable! Santiago! The French have made his heart as hard as if it had been dipped in the well of Estremoz (beyond the mountains), which turns everything to flinty rock."
As if to enhance the torture of their anticipated doom, the Spaniards went slowly and deliberately about the selection of a firing party, which consisted of no less than sixty men, who loaded in a very irregular manner, and, as their steel ramrods flashed in the torch-light and went home with a dull thud on the ball cartridges, a thrill seemed to pass through the prisoners.
One, a grim-visaged and grey-moustached old captain of grenadiers, folded his arms, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled in scorn and defiance. Doubtless, since the fall of the Bastile and the days of the barricades, he had seen human lives lavished with a recklessness that hardened him; but there was another officer who covered his face with his handkerchief and wept; not in cowardice, for his gallant breast was covered with the medals of many an honourable field; but perhaps his heart at that moment was far away with his wife and little ones in some sunny vale of Languedoc, or by the banks of the silvery Garonne.