Salvador Carmen may have been twenty-six or twenty-eight years old. He was of middle height and athletic build, yet wiry withal, in splendid condition, and as hard as nails. Though darker than the average Spaniard, his short, wavy hair and powerful, clear-cut features showed that his blood was free from negro or Indian taint. His face bespoke a strange mixture of gentleness and resolution, melancholy and ferocity, as if an originally fine nature had been annealed by fiery trials, and perhaps perverted by some terrible wrong.
“Yes, señor, we carry our lives in our hands in this most unhappy country,” he continued, after a short pause. “Three years ago I was one of a family of eight, and no happier family could be found in the whole capitanio-general of Caracas…. Of those eight, seven are gone; I am the only one left. Four were killed in the great earthquake. Then my father took part in the revolutionary movement, and to save his life had to leave his home. One night he returned in disguise to see my mother. I happened to be away at the time; but my brother Tomas was there, and the police getting wind of my father’s arrival, arrested both them and him. My father was condemned as a rebel; my mother and brother were condemned for harboring him, and all were strangled together on the plaza there.”
“Good heaven! Can such things be?” I said, as much moved by his grief as by his tale of horror.
“I saw them die. Oh, my God! I saw them die, and yet I live to tell the tale!” exclaimed Carmen, in a tone of intense sadness. “But”—fiercely—“I have taken a terrible revenge. With my own hand have I slain more than a hundred European Spaniards, and I have sworn to slay as many as there were hairs on my mother’s head…. But enough of this! The night is upon us. It is time to make ready. When the zambo comes in, I shall seize him by the throat and threaten him with my dagger. While I hold him you must stuff this cloth into his mouth, take off his shirt and trousers—he has no other garments—and put them on over your own. That done, we will bind him with this cord, and lock him in with his own key. Are you ready?”
“I am ready.”
Carmen knocked loudly at the door.
Two minutes later the door opens, and as the zambo closes it behind him, Carmen seizes him by the throat and pushes him against the wall.
“A word, a whisper, and you are a dead man!” he hisses, sternly, at the same time drawing his dagger. “Open your mouth, or, per Dios—The cloth, señor. Now, off with your shirt and trousers.”
The turnkey obeys without the least attempt at resistance. The shaking of his limbs as I help him to undress shows that he is half frightened to death.
Then Carmen, still gripping the man’s throat and threatening him with his dagger, makes him lie down, and I bind his arms with the cord.