"For the dead?" he aspirated.
"Some one has died in La Fortuna. Father Jaíme was on watch, and he has just seen a corpse thrown into the river."
Strawbridge was shocked; he was more deeply shocked that this thing had happened on the very night and at the very hour when he and the señora would have made their flight. He fancied the soldiers coming down to the water's edge with a dead man at the moment he and the Spanish girl were passing in their boat. What a grim precursor of their honeymoon!
"Did they murder him?" he queried.
"I don't know. He may have died of disease or as a result of former torture."
The American moistened his lips.
To torture, to murder, to fling their victims into the river! The horror of Rio Negro, the misery of all Venezuela jellied around the drummer's heart.
"Are you going with us into the cathedral?" questioned the priest again.
The drummer was seized by a revulsion to all his slynesses and unstraightforwardness.