It was burning some thirty feet above my head; and the sheer wall on the other side caught up and sent across into my face the crackling of dry branches, the loud excited talking, the arguments, the oaths, the laughter; now and then a very shriek of joy. Manuel was giving orders. Some advanced the opinion that the cursed _Inglez_, the spy who came from Jamaica to see whom he could get for a hanging without a priest, was down there, too. So that was it! O’Brien knew how to stir their hate. I should get a short shrift. “He was a fiend, the _Inglez_: look how many of us he has killed!” they cried; and Manuel would have loved to cut my flesh, in small pieces, off my bones--only, alas! I was now beyond his vengeance, he feared. However, somebody was left. He must have thrown himself flat, with his head over the brink, for his yell of “Castro!” exploded, and rolled heavily between the rocks. “Castro! Castro! Castro!” he shouted twenty times, till he set the whole ravine in an uproar. He waited, and when the clamour had quieted down amongst the bushes below, called out softly, “Do you hear me, Castro, my victim? Thou art my victim, Castro.” Castro had crept into the passage after me. He pushed his head beyond my shoulder. “I defy thee, Manuel,” he screamed. A hubbub arose. “He’s there! He is there!” “Bravo, Castro,” Manuel shouted from above. “I love thee because thou art my victim. I shall sing a song for thee. Come up. Hey! Castro! Castro! Come up.... No? Then the dead to their grave, and the living to their feast.” Sometimes a little earth, detached from the layer of soil covering the rock, would fall streaming from above. The men told off to guard the cornice walked to and fro near the edge, and the confused murmur of voices hung subdued in the air of the cleft, like a modulated tremor. Castro, moaning gently, stumbled back into the cave. Seraphina had remained sitting on the stone seat. The twilight rested on her knees, on her face, on the heap of cold ashes at her feet. But Castro, who had stood stock-still, with a hand to his forehead, turned to me excitedly: “The peons, _for Dios!_” Had I ever thought of the peons belonging to the _estancia?_