"Ha, ha!" he cried. "You begin! But wait till I start—wait till you begin to feel some agony—till I begin to tear your eyes out! Then will you yell? When I get through with you—ha, ha!—when you are dead, perhaps weeks from now, you won't mind the rats any more! You may stay in here in this grave for the Yankees to find if they capture Morro as they say they will. Oh, I will make it a sight for them!"
Clif could not have stood the strain of that horrible ordeal much longer; he would have fainted away.
But then the fiendish Spaniard's impatience got the better of him. And he turned and crept toward the door again.
"I will get the instruments," he whispered, hoarsely. "The torture instruments. Santa Maria, what things they are! And how you will shriek!"
A moment later he turned the key and stepped out. He shut the door and locked it. And Clif was left alone in all the blackness and horror of that slimy place.
Never as long as he lives will he forget the agony of that long wait. He sat straining his ears and listening for the first sign of the fiend's return. He knew that he might come back any instant and begin his horrible, merciless tormenting.
Clif knew that man for a devil incarnate. He would sooner have looked for mercy in a hyena.
For Ignacio was of the race of the Inquisition; and of the horrors of the Inquisition this was a fair sample.
The wretched American knew that he was alone and that he could look for no rescue. He was buried in the very centre of the earth—or the centre of hades.
And his cries would be heard only by Ignacio.