He, poor wretch! dared not spring off for the life of him. It was a perfect pandemonium.
At last Hafran commanded Simplex to sound an alarm.
Simplex blew him an alarm accordingly.
"You rascal!" cried the robber captain, "it was with just such an alarm as that that they startled us at the Devil's Castle; were you the devil's trumpeter on that occasion?"
Perhaps the drink which Simplex had already taken had flown to his head, perhaps he thought it might go worse with him if he did not make a clean breast of it, at any rate he replied:
"Yes, 'twas I!"
"The devil it was!" cried Hafran furiously. "I'll cut you in two this very instant. Don't you know that you drove us into the very jaws of the devil with your d——d trumpet, and that forty of our comrades went straight to hell in consequence! Stay where you are on that barrel, that I may cut you in two at a blow!"
With that he drew his broad palash from its sheath, and grasped it with both hands.
But this time Simplex did not take the matter as a joke, but sprang down from the barrel and fled to his protector, Janko, who, laughing with hideous glee, warded off with his sword the strokes which Hafran aimed at poor Simplex, all the while opening wide his yellow-stained jaws, which with their yellow fangs looked like the jaws of a lion.
"Serve you all right!" cried he as he warded off Hafran's blows. "What! fifty of you to be scared by a single trumpeter! Let him be in peace! He has to carry a message to my sweetheart. Whoever touches him is a dead man!"