"Might it not have been wisdom to temporize for a time?"
"Santos! this is no time for trifling; so Baltasar rushed among the soldiers of our regiment of Navarre, and incited them to seize the governor at Villa Franca-del-Vierzo, a town on the road which leads from Corunna to Madrid, where they dragged him, almost naked, from the Marquis's palace.
"'Muera al Filangheri!" shouted Baltasar to the soldiers; 'unfix your bayonets, plant the ground with them, and toss the traitor in a blanket!'
"With shouts of acclamation at a suggestion so novel, they hastened to do as he suggested. The ground was soon planted thickly with three hundred bayonets, their sockets fixed in the earth, their sharp points upward. The breathless governor, pale and imploring mercy, was tossed thrice into the air from a blanket, as dogs are tossed on Shrove Tuesday. After the third toss, the blanket was withdrawn, and the hapless Filangheri fell crash on the bayonets. He was impaled in every part of his body at once; after this, leaving him miserably to die, the soldiers dispersed to join Baltasar's band of guerillas in the mountains of Herreruela; but this destruction of a king's officer caused Sir John Moore to deem him false to Ferdinand VII."
"How horrible is all this!" exclaimed Quentin.
"Desperate times and men, require desperate hearts and stern measures," said the muleteer Ramon, as he slung his long musket—which no doubt had a goodly charge of slugs in its barrel—and took a guitar which hung at the collar of one of his mules. "But we must not scare you, senor Inglese, as we shall surely do, if we talk longer thus; so now for something more cheerful:" and he began at once to sing, with a very mellow voice, a little romance, in which his companions joined with much laughter, and which began thus,—
"Tiempo es el Caballero,
The world will all divine;
Now my girdle is too narrow,
They'll see my shame—and thine!
"Tiempo es el Caballero—
When the maids my garments bring,
I see them wink and nod their heads,
I hear them tittering."*
* Poetry of Spain.
"We have come from Arronches and are going to Castello Branco, in Lower Beira, along the Portuguese frontier," said Ramon, "and yonder is the puebla at which we are to halt," he added, pointing to a few ruined walls that bordered the highway.