Robbins might have run at him, but such a move must have only added the wings of fear to the gardener’s flight.
I had a better plan, a swifter messenger, for that key was decidedly essential to our comfort, and even heroic measures might be pardoned in the effort to secure the talisman that would prove our “open sesame.”
Accordingly, as quick as a flash I rushed to the fore, giving Robbins no time to act, and as I jumped I drew from its place of concealment the reliable little firearm which I had learned through excessive target practice to use almost as well as an expert.
“Stand, or you are a dead man!”
That was what I shouted in Spanish—at least I tried to say it, though assured later on by little Carmencita that what I so fiercely ejaculated was more to the effect that I took the fellow for a ghost come back from the dead, and was ordering him to return to the kingdom of the departed shades.
Never mind; my fierce demeanor should surely have convinced him that he was in dire peril unless he surrendered.
The fool did not have sense enough to see he had not the ghost of a chance to escape—or perhaps he took it for granted that I was as abominable a pistol shot as his countrymen.
When I saw that he meant to disregard my stern command, and that there was immediate danger of both man and key slipping through our fingers, I realized that the time had come for action rather than words.
Now it was not in my heart to kill the poor devil—I had never sent a human being into the other world as yet, though coming uncommonly near it while attacked by Italian brigands on one occasion, and later on when some heathen Chinese thought me a soft mark on the outskirts of old Canton.
Besides, this fellow was in the alcalde’s pay, and only did his duty in the premises.