“The Count, curse him!” the fellow ejaculated with a hideous grimace, and then lay still with the look stamped on his face.
Ompertz turned away with all a soldier’s indifference mingled with disgust.
“A narrow escape, sire,” he laughed, grimly respectful. “I thank Heaven I was here to help your Highness out of the trap.”
“I shall not forget your service if ever fate gives me the power to reward it,” Ludovic replied, grasping the soldier’s hand. “I wish, though, you had not been so quick with those last two fellows. When we got the advantage, their deaths were not necessary.”
“Pardon me, sire,” Ompertz insisted deferentially, “it never pays to let a snake go when you have him under your heel. Mercy is thrown away upon such reptiles as those. Worse, it breeds danger, and we have, I fancy, enough to face as it is.”
“That is true,” Ludovic agreed, with a troubled look. “I seem to have fallen now into a very vortex of difficulty and danger. Still, I may be thankful that luck has so far been on my side, and that Heaven has sent you, my friend, to help me.”
They went to the carriage. Inside, lying back in the seat which Ruperta had occupied on their long drive, with a ghastly grin on his ashen face, was a dead man.
“I gave that fellow no chance to take a second aim at your Highness,” Ompertz observed grimly. “It was a pretty trap, and I hope we may be well out of it.”
The carriage was now to be no more thought of, so, taking from it such of their belongings as might be useful, as well as a spare pistol of the dead man’s, they made their way from the place of bloodshed.
“What I cannot understand,” Ludovic remarked, as they went cautiously down the gorge, “is the Count’s motive in this attempt.”