The Argosy, Vol. XXV, No. 3 — page 78: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

462 THE ARGOSY. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘One man does not fight six,’’ I said contemptuously. ‘‘ Not at all; he follows them.’’ He made a sign, and the six troopers, all wearing Spanish capes and sombrero hats, closed about me and began to march up the hillside. Presently we struck upon a path winding into a higher wood of pines. I looked down and saw the camp below me—a nest cut out from the very heart of the forest. The idlers there were still seated at the table. Servants moved in aud out between the trees, bearing dishes and flasks of wine. Ximeno, the hunchback, stood at the door of the arbor. Apparently he had finished the instructions to Jussuf, Even upon those heights above the se the heat was almost unendur- able. I loosened the cloak and carried it upon my arm. ‘The traveling coat which old Benjamin had bought me weighed heavy as a wrap of furs. More- over, I had ridden all night and my limbs were so stiff that I stumbled often as I walked. For the threat of the man who guided me JI did not care a scudo. ‘To say that I believed him, that I imagined myself in any danger, would be to exaggerate my own foresight. Yet what was about to happen, what the night was to bring, I knew no more than the dead. Upward and still upward—I began to think at last that they would carry mie to the very summit of the mighty mountain which towered, a monarch of the peaks, above that valley of forest. ‘The pine woods seemed intermin- able. My fatigue was so great, my hunger for sleep so dreadful, that at last I stopped altogether and thought that I must swoon. ‘“Do what you like,’’ I said; ‘‘I go no further.’’ The troop halted, pressing closely about me. Some one put a flask to my lips and I drank a long draft. The guide, he who spoke kindly from the first, patted me upon the arm encouragingly. ‘“Excellency,’’ he said, ‘‘it is not a hundred paces now. ‘Take courage.”’ They gave me the support of their arms, and so we went on. I remember little of that walk save that it carried me ever upward—over a carpet of ‘moss, beneath a roof of pines. When the pines ceased we stood before a sheer precipice, at the foot of the mighty mountain itself, and in the face of this precipice there was a wicket gate barred with iron as the gate of a cage. The leader of the troop opened the grating with a key, and I followed him into that which appeared to bea great cave cut out from the rock of the mountain. But I had no will nor strength to examine the place, and seeing a rude bed of straw before me, I threw myself down upon it and instantly fell asleep. When you wake in a strange place, your first memories are not those of yesterday, but of a day remoter; of a scene unassociated with the new house to which you have come. I must have slept at least seven hours upon my bed of straw, for when I opened my eyes there was a shimmer of twilight already in the cave and the great heat of the day had passed. Indeed, the air was raw and fresh at such an altitude; and I remember that my first act, when I sat up in the straw, was to draw my cape around me and to recall the strange circumstances under which old Benjamin had bought it for Eomicbooks (S@)