"What?" he said.
"Some of the priests had already fallen into his hands and the hands of his crew. Then they it was whom he forced to advance first against the monastery--to fire the brass cannon they had brought with them against their brethren; forced them to do so, so that those brethren should not know them, should shoot them down first.
"Also," said the Alcáide, "it might have been to prevent their firing at all. In open war a great commander would, perhaps, have availed himself of such a cunning ruse."
Then I knew for sure this man had been, or was, a soldier.
More, much more, was told by Eaton--'tis best I set down nothing further--then the end came, The sentence was passed; he, too, was doomed to die, by my side, on the Sunday that should later be appointed.
"Break off," the Bishop said. "Justice will be done." Whereupon he glanced down at his papers--I wondering that he could see them with those purblind eyes--while, pausing in his attempt to rise, he "Yet there was another. The youth"--and here I pricked up my ears, for of Juan I had heard nothing since taken to the prison in the ramparts--"the youth who fought by the side of this man--this spy--this Inglés. How comes it he is not before us?"
For a moment, as it seemed to me, the Alcáide hesitated, then he said:
"He is not well. He was hurt in the mêlée; he cannot be brought before us for some days. Later, if necessary, he can be tried."
Although I had drawn as far away from Gramont as I could since I had learned his true nature and character and the bloodshed of which he had been guilty, I could not prevent myself from letting my eyes fall on him now; and I saw that for the first time there was a look of eagerness in his eyes, that he was watching the younger of those judges, watching as though filled with an intensity of feeling as to what might next be said.
"If necessary, Capitan Morales," the Regidór said, speaking now for almost the first time, "if necessary! By all reports he is as bad as his elder comrades. A wild cat, all say. Why should it not be necessary?"