ust indignation for an
outrage such as human beings rarely commit! This you know!--you to whom
Solara basely sold his daughter!--you who plotted with the aged
scoundrel that the charge of abduction and murder might fall upon the
Viscount's innocent shoulders when you, Luigi Vampa, were the guilty
man!"

The brigand chief started and grew pale beneath the paint and cosmetics
with which his visage was thickly coated.

"You have been deceived, Signor Count!" he stammered, taken at a
disadvantage, but nevertheless speaking guardedly and endeavoring to put
on a bold front. "The girl herself, Annunziata Solara, will swear to you
that the Viscount Giovanni Massetti was her abductor and the author of
her ruin!"

"Yes," replied Monte-Cristo, bitterly, "she will and does say so, for
she has been completely blinded by the cunning, fiendish stratagems you
resorted to, aided and abetted by that infamous miscreant old Pasquale
Solara, for whom a lingering death upon the rack of the ancient Spanish
Inquisition would not be a sufficient punishment!"

"You speak very confidently, Signor Count," said Vampa, resuming his
cool self-possession. "Pray tell me how you are going to prove all
this?"

"I should be foolish, indeed, did I do so," replied Monte-Cristo, seeing
the brigand chief's trap and adroitly avoiding being caught in it.
"However, suffice it to say that I can and will make good all I have
asserted! Even Annunziata Solara herself shall be thoroughly convinced!"

"Signor Count," said Vampa, pleadingly, "we have long been good friends,
have long understood each other perfectly. Do not let the idle tales
designing persons have poured into your ears destroy that friendship and
that understanding!"

"I have heard no idle tales from designing persons," retorted the Count.
"What I have heard was a plain and simple statement of the truth. I know
how old Solara summoned you with his signal whistle, how you bargained
with him for his beautiful daughter and how you finally bought her of
him! I know how you abducted the girl while her infamous father waited
outside the cabin with a torch, how you bore her away in your arms
through the forest, murdering her brother and in turn encountering my
son Esperance and the Viscount Massetti. I know how you carried her to
the hut you had prepared, how you kept her a close prisoner there
guarded by members of your band until your shameful object was
accomplished! I know how you wrote that lett