"Owe our lives! Owe our lives to him! To one who trafficked with my girl's honour as against her father's freedom; a man who betrayed his trust to his own country as a means whereby to gratify his own evil desires! And for you--for me--what do we owe him? The chance of my escape came from another's hand than his."
"From another's! You could have escaped even without that vile compact made between--God help us--Juana and him?"
"Ay--listen. You stood by my side in the court when they tried us; you heard a voice in that court; saw the man who called out in loud tones to the man, Morales. You saw him, observed, maybe, that he bore about him the signs of a sailor."
As he spoke there came to me a recollection of something more than this--a recollection of where I had seen that man again, of how it was he who crouched behind the fallen masses of blasted rock in the passage beneath the bed of the river through which I had passed to freedom; also, I remembered the great gold rings in his ears, and the glistening of one upon the guarding of his cloak as he shrank back into the darkness.
"I remember him," I said, "very well--also, I saw him again, on the night that mute led me forth, helped me to escape."
"'Tis so. That man saved me, was bent on saving me from the moment he saw my face in the court. He is a Biscayan--yet we had met in other lands; once I had saved his life--from Eaton. He--that doubly damned traitor--that monster of sin--had taken him prisoner in a pink he owned, yet had not captured her without a hard fight, in which this man, Nuñez Picado, nearly slew him. Then, this was Eaton's revenge: He bound him and set him afloat in a dismantled ketch he had by him, that to which Picado was bound being a barrel of gunpowder. And in that barrel was one end of a slow match, the other end alight and trailing the length of the ketch's deck."
"My God!"
"So slow a match that it would take hours ere it reached the powder, hours in which the doomed wretch would suffer ten thousand-fold the tortures of the damned. Yet one thing Eaton forgot--forgot that those hours of long drawn-out horror to his victim were also hours in which succour might come. And it was so. I passed that craft drifting slowly to and fro off Porto Rico. In the blaze of the noontide I saw a brighter, redder light than the sparkle of sun on counter and brass--when I stepped on board the ketch there was not a foot of the slow-match left--not an hour longer of life left to the man. Only, the bitterness of death was over for him then--he was a raving maniac, and so remained for months."
"He has at last repaid you in full."
"Ay! In full. He knew the secret way into the ramparts; all was concocted, all arranged for our escapes."