'What is this little animal?' the Tartar asked, cocking one eye in a knowing way and examining him with a sort of boozy gravity. But Omobono really could not find a word. His captor shook him playfully. 'What is your name, you funny little beast?' he enquired, and he roared with laughter by way of answering himself. Giustina, strange to say, was the only one to join in his mirth, and she laughed quite prettily, to the inexpressible surprise of her parents, who were shocked and grieved, as well as scared almost to death. 'Come, come!' laughed the Tartar, shaking the little man like a bean-bag. 'If you cannot speak, you can at least give up your keys, and I will see for myself if there is any money!' Thereupon he seized the bunch of keys which the secretary wore at his belt, and wrenched it off with a pull that snapped the thong by which it hung. Again Giustina laughed, but a little more nervously now; her mother sat transfixed, open-mouthed, with an almost idiotic expression. Again the two merchants glanced at each other, and then both looked towards the door. Between his fright and the terrible indignity of having his keys torn from him, Omobono had never been nearer to fainting in his life. 'Robbery!' he gasped. 'Rank robbery!' Tocktamish sent him spinning into the nearest corner by a turn of the wrist, after which the ruffian took another mouthful of meat, and slowly filled his glass while he was disposing of it. Omobono had steadied himself in the corner, but his face was deadly white, and his lips were moving nervously in a delirium of terror. 'Messer Carlo needs ten thousand ducats before sunset,' observed the Tartar before he drank. Polo and Cornèr started to their feet; to their commercial souls the mere mention of such a demand was more terrifying than all the crooked weapons that gleamed in Tocktamish's broad belt. 'Ten thousand ducats!' they repeated together in a breath. 'Yes!' roared the Tartar, in a voice that made the glasses on the table shake together and ring. 'Ten thousand ducats! And if I do not find the money in the house, you two must find it in yours! Do you understand?' [Illustration: 'Yes!' roared the Tartar. 'Ten thousand ducats! And if I do not find the money in the house, you two must find it in yours! Do you understand?'] They understood, for his voice was like thunder, and he had risen too, and towered above them with his full glass in one hand and Omobono's keys in the other. Then, being already tolerably drunk, he solemnly raised the keys to his lips, thinking that he held the glass in that hand, and rolled his eyes terribly at the two merchants; and he set the glass down with an emphatic gesture, as if it had been the bunch of keys, and it broke to pieces, and the yellow wine splashed out across the table and ran down and streamed upon the mosaic floor.