Did he mean to make his threat good, or was it a blank cartridge? I did not believe that the attempted abduction had been discovered, and that statement of his threw doubt on everything else. Moreover, he had told and acted lie after lie in the former interview, and had done so cleverly enough to hoodwink me completely. He had declared on his honour that he was in earnest now, and his manner had been tremendously earnest. But a man who could lie as he had would probably not hold his word of honour much more highly than his word without such a pledge. So I put that aside as a mere touch of play-acting. As I thought it all over, it seemed to me that he had overplayed his part. If he had meant to shoot me, that reference to his associates founded, as I believed it to be, on a lie about the plot having been discovered, was an unnecessary exaggeration of my danger, intended to appeal to my fears. Yet, if I were wrong, my shrift was to be a very short one. To form a judgment on a man’s probable motives, when the penalty of a mistake means death, is a very ugly task, and I seemed to have scarcely begun to think when he came back. I was still sitting on the bed and a glance at the paper showed him it was blank. “You persist in refusing, then?” “I haven’t had time to decide.” “I won’t give you any longer,” he said, very sternly. “There’s one point you must clear up. About Mademoiselle Dominguez,” I said firmly. “I will answer you with your own words this morning. It is for me, not you, to impose conditions. But her safety will be secured.” “Then you can have my decision. As soon as she and I are across the frontier, you can have the letter you want.” “You mean you will not write it otherwise? I warn you.” “I mean I will not write it otherwise,” I replied; “I’ll see you hanged first. Do what you will.” He called in the three men who were waiting at the door, and in a very few words told them the part I had taken on the previous night, and that I intended to betray everything I knew to the authorities. Before he had half finished there was no question about their verdict. I read it in faces dark and fierce as a cyclone cloud; in the threatening looks from eyes ablaze with wrath; in the execrations hissed and growled between teeth clenched fast in hate, and in the gleam of the half-drawn weapons as the strenuous fingers clutched at them instinctively. White-hot with passion they were, and possessed with but one common motive and resolve--to defend themselves by exacting the uttermost penalty for my treachery. Jury and judges and executioners in one, Barosa knew how to play upon their feelings, and I saw that I was condemned and sentenced almost as soon as the first words had left his lips.