eir heads. Corporals moved with
swinging lanterns posting sentries all round the walls wherever there
was a door or an opening. Sotillo was taking his measures to protect his
conquest as if it had indeed contained the treasure. His desire to
make his fortune at one audacious stroke of genius had overmastered his
reasoning faculties. He would not believe in the possibility of failure;
the mere hint of such a thing made his brain reel with rage. Every
circumstance pointing to it appeared incredible. The statement of
Hirsch, which was so absolutely fatal to his hopes, could by no means
be admitted. It is true, too, that Hirsch's story had been told so
incoherently, with such excessive signs of distraction, that it really
looked improbable. It was extremely difficult, as the saying is, to make
head or tail of it. On the bridge of the steamer, directly after his
rescue, Sotillo and his officers, in their impatience and excitement,
would not give the wretched man time to collect such few wits as
remained to him. He ought to have been quieted, soothed, and reassured,
whereas he had been roughly handled, cuffed, shaken, and addressed in
menacing tones. His struggles, his wriggles, his attempts to get down on
his knees, followed by the most violent efforts to break away, as if he
meant incontinently to jump overboard, his shrieks and shrinkings and
cowering wild glances had filled them first with amazement, then with
a doubt of his genuineness, as men are wont to suspect the sincerity of
every great passion. His Spanish, too, became so mixed up with German
that the better half of his statements remained incomprehensible. He
tried to propitiate them by calling them hochwohlgeboren herren, which
in itself sounded suspicious. When admonished sternly not to trifle he
repeated his entreaties and protestations of loyalty and innocence again
in German, obstinately, because he was not aware in what language he was
speaking. His identity, of course, was perfectly known as an inhabitant
of Esmeralda, but this made the matter no clearer. As he kept on
forgetting Decoud's name, mixing him up with several other people he had
seen in the Casa Gould, it looked as if they all had been in the lighter
together; and for a moment Sotillo thought that he had drowned every
prominent Ribierist of Sulaco. The improbability of such a thing threw
a doubt upon the whole statement. Hirsch was either mad or playing a
part--pretending fear and distraction on t