was. Basilio was not naturally superstitious, especially after having
carved up so many corpses and watched beside so many death-beds,
but the old legends about that ghostly spot, the hour, the darkness,
the melancholy sighing of the wind, and certain tales heard in his
childhood, asserted their influence over his mind and made his heart
beat violently.

The figure stopped on the other side of the balete, but the youth
could see it through an open space between two roots that had grown
in the course of time to the proportions of tree-trunks. It produced
from under its coat a lantern with a powerful reflecting lens, which
it placed on the ground, thereby lighting up a pair of riding-boots,
the rest of the figure remaining concealed in the darkness. The figure
seemed to search its pockets and then bent over to fix a shovel-blade
on the end of a stout cane. To his great surprise Basilio thought he
could make out some of the features of the jeweler Simoun, who indeed
it was.

The jeweler dug in the ground and from time to time the lantern
illuminated his face, on which were not now the blue goggles that so
completely disguised him. Basilio shuddered: that was the same stranger
who thirteen years before had dug his mother's grave there, only now
he had aged somewhat, his hair had turned white, he wore a beard and
a mustache, but yet his look was the same, the bitter expression,
the same cloud on his brow, the same muscular arms, though somewhat
thinner now, the same violent energy. Old impressions were stirred
in the boy: he seemed to feel the heat of the fire, the hunger, the
weariness of that time, the smell of freshly turned earth. Yet his
discovery terrified him--that jeweler Simoun, who passed for a British
Indian, a Portuguese, an American, a mulatto, the Brown Cardinal, his
Black Eminence, the evil genius of the Captain-General as many called
him, was no other than the mysterious stranger whose appearance and
disappearance coincided with the death of the heir to that land! But
of the two strangers who had appeared, which was Ibarra, the living
or the dead?

This question, which he had often asked himself whenever Ibarra's death
was mentioned, again came into his mind in the presence of the human
enigma he now saw before him. The dead man had had two wounds, which
must have been made by firearms, as he knew from what he had since
studied, and which would be the result of the chase on the lake. Then
the dead man mu