"Silence, señores!" exclaimed Fabrique, in a voice of thunder, while drawing a pistol from his belt; "in attempting to tamper with my followers you but anticipate your fate. Iago Pineda—Stephano el Corcovado, over with them! dost thou hear me? presto! or by the mother of God, this bullet shall see the brains of some of you."
He ground his teeth; his eyes shot fire, and his broad nostrils seemed to dilate as he gave this savage order.
Stephano the humpbacked, and the other who was named Iago Pineda, and who was no other than our sympathetic friend, threw down their escopetas and grasped me. They were powerful and muscular men—aye, men of iron frames and iron hearts, and a sickening emotion rose within me as their hands were roughly laid upon my pinioned arms. The moonlit mountains and the far-stretching Vega swam around me; the forms of our murderers were multiplied a thousandfold; the perspiration fell heavily from my brow, and a half-arrested cry to Heaven for that pity which men denied us here, arose to my lips as they were about to hurl me downward; when, lo! Pineda paused, looked back, and listening, relinquished my right arm.
"Do you think, do you dare to disobey?" cried Fabrique, as he levelled a brass-barrelled pistol full at his head; "to work at once, vile mutineer, or por vida del demonic——"
"Hold—para—detenedos!" cried a breathless voice, and a man mounted on horseback, and armed with a long gun, dashed his jennet at full speed through the laurel bushes into the midst of the free company.
"Who cries hold?" demanded Fabrique, almost choking with passion, while turning his pistol against the intruder; and all his people cocked or clubbed their muskets in high alarm.
"I do—I, your brother Pedro the contrabandista."
"Oho, and what seek you here?"
"The safety of these two Caballeros, who at Gibraltar saved me from the guarda costa of Hernan de Lucena in the first place, and from the chain and the scourge in Her Majesty's galleys in the second place."
"How! was it you, brother Pedro, whose felucca was concerned in this business?" asked Fabrique, with an altered voice.