e weakness of that man,
they must be satisfied. They must be. I could not doubt it; I could not
believe it. Everything seemed improbable; everything seemed possible. If
they descended I would, I thought, have the strength to carry her off,
away into the darkness. If there was any truth in what I had overheard
them saying, that the depths of the cavern concealed an abyss, we would
cast ourselves into it.

The feeble, consenting pressure of her hand horrified me. They would
not come down. They were afraid of that place, I whispered to her--and
I thought to myself that such cowardice was incredible. Our fate was
sealed. And yet from what I had heard....

We watched the daylight growing in the opening; at any moment it might
have been obscured by their figures. The tormenting incertitudes of that
hour were cruel enough to overcome, almost, the sensations of thirst,
of hunger, to engender a restlessness that had the effect of renewed
vigour. They were like a nightmare; but that nightmare seemed to clear
my mind of its feverish hallucinations. I was more collected, then, than
I had been for the last forty-eight hours of our imprisonment. But I
could not remain there, waiting. It was absolutely necessary that I
should watch at the entrance for the moment of their departure.

The morning was serenely cool and, in its stillness, their talk filled
with clear-cut words the calm air of the ravine. A party--I could not
tell how many--had already come up from the schooner in a great state
of excitement. They feared that their presence had, in some way, become
known to the peons of the _hacienda_. There was much abuse of a man
called Carneiro, who, the day before, had fired an incautious shot at
a fat cow on one of the inland _savannas_. They cursed him. Last
night, before the moon rose, those on board the schooner had heard the
whinnying of a horse. Somebody had ridden down to the water's edge in
the darkness and, after waiting a while, had galloped back the way he
came. The prints of hoofs on the beach showed that.

They feared these horsemen greatly. A vengeance was owing for the man
Manuel had killed; and I could guess they talked with their faces over
their shoulders. "And what about finding out whether the _Inglez_ was
there, dead or alive?" asked some.

I was sure, now, that they would not come down in a body. It would
expose them to the danger of being caught in the cavern by the peons.
There was no time for a thorough se