“Yes, I just now caught sight of his dress among the trees,” shouted another.
“Hurra for the reward of the lucky one who captures him!” echoed several.
“Courage, comrades! Onward, on!”
The Duke trembled with alarm, as these sounds reached his ear. The tramp of feet was heard hurrying close by the place of their concealment—they passed—they mounted the bank,—their voices grew less distinct, and at greater distances from each other, as if they had extended their line. Gradually the noises altogether ceased, and the Duke and his companion breathed more freely. Manoel ventured to look out, and, as far as he could see, no one appeared.
“What shall we now do, my good Manoel?” asked his master.
“We must remain quietly here till the night,” was the answer; “we may then with some degree of safety be able to reach the interior of the country before the morning breaks; but never must we allow ourselves to be discovered by daylight on the road.”
“This is a very uneasy posture I am in,” observed the Duke.
“It is better than your Excellency would enjoy on the scaffold,” pithily answered the servant; and the master made no further complaints. “Hark! what sound is that? Footsteps approach—silence, for our lives!” whispered Manoel.
When the Desembargador had despatched the soldiers in pursuit of the fugitives, he had also ordered the Notary, Senhor de Leiro, to accompany them, an office that respectable personage was not very well qualified to perform, seeing that, although his fingers, from constant practice, were active and pliant, his legs, as for many years they had never moved faster than a sedate walk, were very far from being so. He had also read that the van of an advancing army was a far more dangerous post than the rear; and, as it was said that the terrible Duke had fired at the King, he felt that he would make very little ceremony in shooting him outright; he therefore allowed the fighting party to precede him, while he advanced in a more dignified way in the same direction. By the time, however, that he reached the side of the dell, the soldiers had already run completely out of sight. He sighed as he thought of the toil before him; but his duty peremptorily called on him to proceed; or it might have been that he dreaded the loss of his situation if he neglected it; so he managed to reach the bottom of the glen, and to scramble again up the opposite side. Here, however, fatigue overpowered him, and he was obliged to seat himself down on the bank to rest. While there, hoping that the soldiers would quickly return with the prisoners, and thus save him further exertion, and, bemoaning his hard fate, he observed a heap of dried boughs at the bottom of the glen begin to move, and a man’s head protrude beyond it.
“Ah!” he thought, “that head belongs to one of the criminals, to a certainty. Now, if I were a strong man, I would capture him myself; but as I am not, I had better not attempt it, for he may think fit to give me a quietus instead.”