“Torture, old man. That’s what we’re being saved for, I’m very much afraid. A Peruvian guerilla is never a gentle-minded animal at the best of times, and Garcia is noted as being the most vindictive brute to be found between the Andes and the Pacific. Then if you’ll kindly remember how you and I have harried him, and shot down his men, and cut off his supplies, and made his life a torment and a thing of tremors for the last four weeks, you’ll see he had got a big bill against us. If he’d hated us less, he’d have had us shot at sight when we were caught; as it is, I’m afraid he felt that a couple of bullets in hot blood wouldn’t pay off the score.”
“If he thinks the matter over calmly, he’ll not very well avoid seeing that if he wipes us out there’ll be reprisals to be looked for.”
“And a fat lot,” replied Methuen grimly, “he’ll care for the chance of those. If we are put out of the way, he knows quite well that there are no two other men in the Chilian Service who can keep him on the trot as we have done. No, sir. We can’t scare Garcia with that yarn. You think that because we’re alive still there’s hope. Well, I’ve sufficient faith in my theory for this: If anyone offered me a shot through the head now, I’d accept it, and risk the chance.”
“You take the gloomy view. Now the man’s face is not altogether cruel. There’s humour in it.”
“Then probably he’ll show his funniness when he takes it out of us,” Methuen retorted. “Remember that punishment in the ‘Mikado’? That had ‘something humorous’ in it. Boiling oil, if I don’t forget.”
Involuntarily I shuddered, and the raw-hide ropes cut deeper into my wrists and limbs. I had no great dread of being killed in the ordinary way, or I should not have entered the Chilian Army in the middle of a hot war; and I was prepared to risk the ordinary woundings of action in return for the excitements of the fight. But to be caught, and held a helpless prisoner, and be deliberately tortured to death by every cruelty this malignant fiend, Garcia, could devise, was a possibility I had not counted on before. In fact, as the Peruvians had repeatedly given out that they would offer no quarter to us English in the Chilian Service, we had all of us naturally resolved to die fighting rather than be taken. And, indeed, this desperate feeling paid very well, since on two separate occasions when Methuen and myself had been cornered with small bodies of men, and would have surrendered if we could have been guaranteed our lives, we went at them each time so furiously that on each occasion we broke through and escaped. But one thinks nothing of the chances of death and maiming at those times. There is a glow within one’s ribs which scares away all trace of fear.
“I suppose there’s no chance of rescue?” I said.
“None whatever,” said Methuen, with a little sigh. “Think it over, Calvert. We start out from the hacienda with an escort of five men, sing out our adios, and ride away to enjoy a ten days’ leave in the mountains. The troops are left to recruit; for ten days they can drop us out of mind. Within twelve hours of our leaving them, Garcia cleverly ambushes us in a cañon where not three people pass in a year. The poor beggars who form our escort are all gastados.”
“Yes, but are you sure of that?” I interrupted. “I saw them all drop off their horses when we were fired upon, but that doesn’t prove they were dead. Some might have been merely wounded, and when the coast cleared, it is just possible they crawled back to our post with the news. Still, I own it’s a small chance.”
“And you may divest yourself of even that thin rag of hope. Whilst you were being slung senseless across a horse, I saw that man without the ears go round with a machete, and—well, when the brute had done, there was no doubt about the poor fellows being as dead as lumps of mud. Ah, and talk of the devil——”