“I was an honest soldier till I met that Hilo!” was his lament years after, while awaiting the hour of his execution. And it was the obduracy of the same young gentleman, aided by his own failure to win the heiress, which had reduced him to the necessity of relying upon Hilo’s attaining his twenty-fifth year and sole right of property; a fib, by the way, of the party interested, which the captain was by this time too near gone not to catch at with proverbial eagerness. “If I can only keep him in sight,” he used to think fifty times a day with an oath, “until I get back my ducats, I’ll take pay for my dog’s life;” and at nights he would wake muttering the words and feeling the edge of his weapon, when Hilo would exclaim—“Can’t you leave off grinding your tusks in that savage fashion, you Dutch boar!” The captain saw how a little misadventure in the shape of his dear young friend’s decease, might deprive him of all chance of restoration, and no mother could be more precious of her charge: Hilo might involve himself in difficulties and be slain in a brawl; it was this worthy soul’s chief business to guard against such a mishap, or extricate him when fairly in: or he might fly into an ungovernable rage and harm himself, or tempt the captain into doing so; so the latter eschewed all cause of contention, and humbled himself where humility became a necessity. For Carlo’s phlegmatic temperament was incapable of fear, and nothing would have gratified him more than a bout with the young gentleman—who, seeing his advantage, or from mere recklessness, tried his ability to bear and forbear to the utmost limit. “Wait till I get my ducats back!” Wolfang consoled himself with muttering under his breath on such occasions, champing his jaws and keeping his fingers stalwortly from his dagger-hilt. The pair were standing over the body of the maître-de-camp, Carlo with the papers in his hand taken from the breast of the dead lieutenant’s doublet, when Hilo cried: “Hark! the camp is in motion yonder above. Come, Wolf, stir your clumsy legs before we are missed.” And Wolfang trotting after his master thrust the crumpled missives into his own doublet—“It’s no use to throw away any thing in the dark,” he said; “I did a note of hand once so, and somebody else got the good of it; one of these days I’ll find time to spell it out”—where they remained many days, now and then taken out and returned, without much progress made in their elucidation, for the warlike captain was not much of a scholar, and found opportunity for only cursory examinations. A destination very different was the captain’s pocket, it may be remarked, from that designed by the writer, Don Pedro, who, about the time Carlo pocketed the letters, was conversing with Señor Inique as to their efficiency in De Haye’s hands.