As soon as my feet were set free from the stirrup-leathers, I was dragged out of the saddle, my limbs were fast lashed together, both at the knees and ankles, and I was rudely cast upon the ground—where I lay, helpless as a bale of merchandise.
During all the time that this action was going forward, the robber chief stood near me, grinning gleefully at my forlorn position, taunting me with my impuissance, and applying to me every ugly epithet to be found in the vocabulary of the Spano-Mexican tongue.
His most favourite allusions were to the “putita” inside the hut, to which he kept pointing, ironically entreating me to protect her; at the same time telling me in plain and most disgusting terms, the fate that was in store for her.
He could not have devised a more excruciating mode of torment. No ill he could have inflicted on my person could have been more painful than this torturing of my soul. I loved the girl whose dishonour was thus freely foreshadowed; and knowing the character of her captor, I could have no doubt about the fulfilment of his atrocious promise.
All the more was I pained, now that I had learnt how involuntary was the Jarocha’s presence among the brutal rabble that surrounded her; all the more, that I fancied in that cry—which escaped her lips on recognising me as her fellow-prisoner—an accent of interest not to be mistaken.
The look with which she had regarded me was eloquent of the same interest; its muteness only showing the intensity of her sorrowful surprise.
I could not help framing conjectures as to what was to be the spectacle, of which I was to form the conspicuous figure. Its dénouement I could only guess—death in some shape or other. Lola’s fate I knew; and my own—all but the mode of its accomplishment. Death in some dire fashion, by some of those horrid devices so well known to the ruffians who surrounded me, under the sanction of the lex talionis, at the time in full practice throughout the land.
Rayas had for the moment left me, and had gone inside the hut, where the Jarocha was kept.
The brace of bandits still stood over me. There was a peculiar grin upon their faces—an expression that bespoke demoniac delight, as if anticipating some scene that combined the comic with the cruel.
I noted a similar expression upon the faces of their comrades, who had gathered in groups in front of the jacale within which their chief had for the moment disappeared.