Fra Diavolo's web in Tampico. And the relief! It
made her almost gay. "Ah, Michel--le beau sabreur!--and did you enjoy
it, mon ami?"

He alighted at her feet, and raised her hand to his lips.

"Monsieur," she demanded quick as thought, "my trunk?"

"Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, I did well to bring myself."

"You should have brought my trunk, sir, first of all. Deign to look at
this frock! No, no, don't, please don't. But tell me everything. What
could have happened to you last night? Why did you not meet me this
morning?"

His story was brief. Of his contemplated strategy at Tampico, there had
been a most lugubrious botching. The night before, when he started to
the fort for aid, Fra Diavolo's little Mexicans had waylaid him, bound
him, and dragged him back to the cafe, where Jacqueline that very moment
reposed in slumber. And there, in a back room without a window, he had
gritted his teeth until morning. As for the sailors, who were to return
to the ship for her trunk; well, more little Mexicans had fired on them
from the river bank. The small boat, riddled with shot, had sunk, and
the sailors, splashing frantically to keep off the sharks, had gained
the shore opposite. But they could neither get word to the ship, nor
cross back to Tampico.

"Yet," demanded Jacqueline, "how could you know all this, there in your
prison room?"

"Am I saying I did, name of a name? Well, those poor sailors wandered
about all night in the swamps across the river, and this morning they
ran into Colonel Dupin and his Contras, and the colonel was frothing
mad. He had only just stumbled on the bodies of Captain Maurel and some
of his men, who had been ambushed and murdered. Poor Maurel was dangling
from a tree among the vultures. Others were mutilated. Some had even
been tortured. And all were stripped, and rotting naked. Mon Dieu, mon
dieu, but it's an inferno, this country!"

"Yes, yes, but how did they find you?"

"Colonel Dupin simply brought the sailors back to Tampico and searched
that cafe, and got me out. The proprietor wasn't thought to be any too
good an Imperialist, anyway. They shot him, and then we came right along
here."

"Very nice of you, I am sure."

"Not at all. Dupin isn't thinking of anybody but your Fra Diavolo, who
must have killed Captain Maurel.--Was he here?"

"Who? Don Rodrigo?"

"Don Rodrigo?"

"Of course. He's the same as Fra Diavolo."

"You mean that bandit," cried Ney, "that terrible Rodrigue? But