"FUEGO!"
The straggling volley of musketry broke like a thunder peal upon the silence of the night, and echoed with a hundred reverberations among the mountains, till it was heard, perhaps, by the sentinels in Valencia. Red blood spirted from the wounds of the victims, some of whom leaped wildly up and fell heavily on the ground. The grey smoke rolled over them in the torch-light, and when it was lifted upward like a vapoury curtain by the midnight wind, Quentin could see the sixteen hapless Frenchmen all lying upon the earth. Six were screaming in agony, imploring the Spaniards to end it—to finish the vile work they had begun—writhing in blood and beating the ground with their heels; but then there were ten, who, alas! lay still enough, with red currents streaming from the wounds in their yet quivering corpses.
Half killed and gasping painfully, the old French captain struggled into a sitting posture, but fell back again, as another volley poured in at ten paces ended the butchery.
In a few minutes more they were stripped, even to their boots, and flung quite nude and scarcely cold into the pits at the foot of the breastwork, four being cast into each.
In the pocket of the poor officer who had wept there was found a lady's miniature, and three locks of fair hair that had evidently belonged to little children. The loose earth was heaped over the dead, the torches were extinguished, and, like a dissolving view or some horrible phantasmagoria, the whole affair passed away and was over.
In the horror excited by the scene and all its details, Quentin forgot his mission, his despatch, almost his own identity; a sickness and giddiness came over him, till he was roused by the voice of Lazarillo, his guide, who said in the most matter-of-fact way—
"Follow me, senor—perhaps Don Baltasar can receive you now."
The house to which he was conducted was the most important in the place, and had been for ages its chief posada or caravanserie, where the muleteers passing between Oporto, Lisbon, and the southern and eastern provinces of Spain, had been wont to halt and refresh. It was said to have been for a time the residence of the Scoto-Spaniard Don Iago Stuart, who, with the Sabrina and Ceres, two Spanish frigates, fought Lord Nelson for three hours in the Mediterranean, in 1796, with the loss of one hundred and sixty men.
The under story was appropriated to the stabling of horses, mules, and burros, and from thence a rickety wooden stair led to the upper floor, the walls of which were cleanly whitewashed, the floors covered, not with carpets, which in Spain would soon become intolerable with insects, but with thin matting made of the esparto grass or wild rush.
Military arms and household utensils were hung upon the walls or placed on the wooden shelves; the stiff-backed chairs and sofas were already occupied by some of the before-mentioned picturesque and motley actors in the late scene, and a large branch candlestick, that whilom had evidently figured on the altar of some stately church, with its cluster of sputtering candles, gave light to the long apartment, and enabled Quentin to examine it, and to see seated at the upper end, a man in a kind of uniform, writing, occasionally consulting an old and coarsely engraved map of Alentejo, and referring from time to time to the Padre Trevino and others, who leaned on their muskets, and who, lounging and laughing, smoked their cigaritos about his chair.