The cautious ascent ceased, perhaps half way up the stairs, and after a long silence, Febrer heard a low voice, a voice meant for him alone. It was the voice of the Ironworker. It invited him to step outside, it called him coward, uniting to this insult outrageous indignities against the detested isle of Majorca where Jaime was born.
Jaime sprang from his couch with a sudden impulse, the springs creaking loudly beneath him. As he arose to his feet in the dark, with his revolver in his hand, he began, to feel nothing but scorn for his challenger. Why heed him? It were better to go back to bed. There was a long pause, as if the enemy, when he heard the creaking springs, stood waiting for the inhabitant of the tower to come out. Time passed, and the hoarse and insulting voice once more pierced the calm of night. It called him coward again; it invited the Majorcan to come out. "Come out, you son of a——"
At this insult Febrer trembled, and thrust his revolver back into his belt. His mother, his poor mother, pale and sick, and as sweet as a saint, whose memory was evoked by the greatest of infamies in the mouth of that criminal!
He started instinctively toward the door, colliding after a few steps with the barricade of tables and chairs. No; not the door. A rectangle of blue and hazy light was framed by the dark wall. Jaime had opened the window. The starry light faintly illuminated the contraction of his countenance, a cold grin, desperate, cruel, which gave him resemblance to the knight commander Don Priamo and other navigators of war and destruction whose dust-covered portraits were hanging in the great house in Majorca.
He seated himself on the window, threw his legs over the sill, and cautiously began to descend, feeling with his toes for the hollows in the wall.
As his feet touched earth he drew his revolver from his belt, and bending low, one hand on the ground, he crept around the base of the tower. His feet became entangled in the roots of the tamarisks which the wind had bared, and which sunk in the earth like a tangled skein of black serpents. Each time that he was stopped by a mesh of roots, each time that a stone rolled down or made a sound, he stopped, holding his breath. He was trembling, not with fear, but with the eagerness of the hunter who fears he may arrive too late. He longed to fall upon the enemy, to lay hands upon him while he stood near the door muttering his deadly insults!
Dragging himself along the ground, he came to where he could see the lower end of the stairway, then the upper steps, and finally the door, which stood out white in the light of the stars. Nobody! The enemy had fled.
In his surprise he stood erect, intently watching the black and undulating spot of bushes which extended around the foot of the stairway. Suddenly a red serpent, a streak of flame, followed by a tiny cloud and a thunder clap, leapt from out the tamarisks. Jaime thought he had been struck in the breast by a stone, a hot pebble, perhaps flung into the air by the concussion from the detonation.
"It's nothing!" he thought.
But at the same instant he found himself lying on the ground flat on his back.