"I used only one bullet on Neque," Clubfoot warned him in a quiet, grim voice. "There's one left for you, Herr Leutnant, aye, and more to spare for other mutinous blackguards like you...."
Von Hagel stepped back, broken, cowed. And Clubfoot cried:—
"While this puppy wastes our time, the man we want, the man who can lead us to the five hundred thousand dollars in gold, is skulking trapped in a cave not a thousand yards away. Fools that you are, don't you understand that you have but to let him know that the English girl is in our hands and he will throw up the sponge? Otherwise...."
He paused deliberately and looked at Marjorie from under his heavy brows. The crowd shouted back at him in German the word on which he had rested.
"Sonst?"
"Otherwise he must know that I shall hand this delicate English lady to the tender mercies of any of our brave companions who has fallen a victim to her beauty—Black Pablo, for instance, or our handsome steward, Pizarro...."
At that the crowd roared approval. Black Pablo, his guitar slung across his back, a squat, toad-like creature, obese and disgusting, slouched over to the girl. He contrived to summon up from the depths of his single dull and fish-like eye an expression which made her shrink back in horror. Then, amid a burst of laughter, "handsome" Pizarro, the stunted mulatto cook, was pushed out of the grass. He shambled towards Marjorie, his eyeballs flashing white in his yellow pock-marked face.
"Go, children!" cried Clubfoot. "Drag this spy from his hole and bring him to me. This time he shall speak, by God!—or we shall finish with it once and for all!"
Again he looked at Marjorie. The gold in his teeth flashed as he smiled with cruel malice. Then, as though overcome by the demand he had made on his strength, he dropped back on his blankets once more.
The hollow was all astir as the men set out. They had camped at the foot of the terraced rock on the high ground overlooking the clearing with the grave, beyond it the broad sweep of Horseshoe Bay between the curved arms of land enclosing the lagoon.