'And you were right, as you always are,' Captain Sarrasin struck in with admiring eyes fixed on his wife.
'Well, he is a poor creature, anyhow,' the Dictator said—and he spoke now to his friends in Spanish—'and not much up to his work. If he were worth anything in his own line of business he might have finished the job with that knife instead of stopping to open a conversation with me.'
'But he has been set on by someone to do this job,' Sarrasin said, 'and we might get to know who is the someone that set him on.'
'We shall not know from him,' the Dictator replied; 'he probably does not know who are the real movers. No; if there is anything serious to come it will come from better hands than his. No, my dear and kind friends, we can't get any further with him. Let the creature go. Let him tell his employers, whoever they are, that I don't scare, as the Americans say, worth a cent. If they have any real assassins to send on, let them come; this fellow won't do; and I can't have paragraphs in the papers to say that I took any serious alarm from a creature who, with such a knife in his hand, could not, without a moment's parley, make it do his work.'
'The man is a hired assassin,' Sarrasin declared.
'Very likely,' the Dictator replied calmly; 'but we can't convict him of it, and we had better let him go his blundering way.' The Dictator had meanwhile been riveting his eyes on the face of the captive—if we may call him so—anxious to find out from his expression whether he understood Spanish. If he seemed to understand Spanish then the affair would be a little more serious. It might lead to the impression that he was really mixed up in South American affairs, and that he fancied he had partisan wrongs to avenge. But the man's face remained imperturbable. He evidently understood nothing. It was not even, the Dictator felt certain, that he had been put on his guard by his former lapse into unlucky consciousness when Mrs. Sarrasin tried him and trapped him with the Sicilian patois. No, there was a look of dull curiosity on his face, and that was all.
'We'll keep the knife?' Sarrasin asked.
'Yes; I think you had better keep the knife. It may possibly come in as a pièce de justification one of these days. What's the value of your knife?' he asked in English, suddenly turning on the captive with a stern voice and manner that awed the creature.
'It's well worth a quid, governor.'
'Yes; I should think it was. There's a quid and a half for you, and go your ways. We have agreed—my friends and I—to let you off this time, although we have every reason to believe that you meant murder.'