"It's about religion," sang out the fat Ferreira. The two men bent their shoulders and eyed one another with tigerish eyes as they prepared for a second spring; but their comrades rushed upon them and held them apart. "Miguelite hunchback!" snarled the one. "Liberal nigger!" hissed the other. "Hold your tongues!" roared the captain, firing a volley of oaths. They held their tongues. But the Viscount did not hold his. "Captain," he piped out, "this is mutiny, rank mutiny. Nigger, Liberal Nigger, indeed! Surely you will do your duty. This man is a Miguelista. He is a spy and a traitor. He must be shot." "Let your Excellency mind his business with the Abbot and I'll mind mine with my men," retorted the officer thoroughly roused and, ignoring the Viscount's sputterings, he strode up to the soldier who had cried "Liberal nigger" and demanded: "José, you were wounded in Oporto?" "Three times," said José sullenly. There was a saber wound in his cheek and two fingers were gone from his left hand. As he spoke he laid his thumb and two fingers upon some third wound hidden by his thread-bare coat. "And cholera? You had cholera?" "Yes, Senhor Captain. They gave me up for dead. A monk saved my life. And by all the saints of God," he cried, raising his voice to a shout, "I'll be shot before I do such dirty work as this." The Viscount threw out two stumpy arms wide. But the captain was too cunning for him. "And sunstroke?" he put in quickly. "I remember. Sunstroke. What do you mean enlisting again when you know you ought to be in a mad-house? Where do you live?" "At Pedrinha das Areias." "Near Oliveira?" "It is fourteen leagues from here." "Then take yourself off." "Senhor Captain--" "Take yourself off before you are shot or hanged. Ferreira, Da Silva, take his weapons. He can keep his horse because it's his own." The scared peasant flushed and would have answered. But his boor's personality was top-heavy and lop-sided, and he went down like a skittle before the captain's next ball. "Go home this instant!" bellowed the captain. And helped by the friendly hustling of his wiser comrades, José soon found himself hoisted on his old horse and ambling under the camellias toward his mother's roof-tree. Meanwhile a lay-brother had returned from the Abbot's cell. In a loud voice and with a ceremonious air he said: "The most excellent and most reverend Lord Abbot is at the service of your Excellencies." III The cell of the Abbot was a room about twenty feet square. Its furniture consisted of a small painted table, two stools, two straight-backed chairs, a portrait of Saint Benedict, a very large crucifix of ebony and ivory, an old oak desk covered with papers and a narrow bed.