It was an improvisation; they stamped their feet to the slow measure; they shouted in chorus the one word “Leap!” raising a ferocious roar; and between whiles the song of voice and strings came to me from a distance, softened and lingering in a voluptuous and pitiless cadence that wrung my heart, and seemed to eat up the remnants of my strength. But what could I have done, even if I had had the strength of a giant, and a most fearless resolution? I should have been shot dead before I had crawled halfway up the ledge. A piercing shriek covered the guitar, the song, and the wild merriment. Then everything seemed to stop--even my own painful breathing. Again Castro shrieked like a madman: “Señorita--your gold. Señorita! Hear me! Help!” Then all was still. “Hear the dead calling to the dead,” sneered Manuel. An awestruck sort of hum proceeded from the Spaniards. Was the senorita alive? In the cave? Or where? “Her nod would have saved thee, Castro,” said Manuel slowly. I got up. I heard Castro stammer wildly: “She shall fill both your hands with gold. Do you hear, hombres? I, Castro, tell you--each man--both hands------” He had done it. The last hope was gone now. And all that there remained for me to do was to leap over or give myself up, and end this horrible business. “She was a creature born to command the moon and the stars,” Manuel mused aloud in a vibrating tone, and suddenly smote the strings with emphatic violence. She could even stay his vengeance. But was it possible! No, no. It could not be--and yet.... “Thou art alive yet, Castro,” he cried. “Thou hast eaten and drunk; life is good--is it not, old man?--and the leap is high.” He thundered “Silence!” to still the excited murmurs of his band. If she lived Castro should live, too--he, Manuel, said so; but he threatened him with horrible tortures, with two days of slow dying, if he dared to deceive. Let him, then, speak the truth quickly. “Speak, ‘viejo’. Where is she?” And at the opening, fifty yards away, I was tempted to call out, as though I had loved Castro well enough to save him from the shame and remorse of a plain betrayal. That the moment of it had come I could have no doubt. And it was I myself, perhaps, who could not face the certitude of his downfall. If my throat had not been so compressed, so dry with thirst and choked with emotion, I believe I should have cried out and brought them away from that miserable man with a rush. Since we were lost, he at least should be saved from this. I suffered from his spasmodic, agonized laugh away there, with twenty knives aimed at his breast and the eighty-foot drop of the precipice at his back. Why did he hesitate? I was to learn, then, that the ultimate value of life to all of us is based on the means of self-deception. Morally he had his back against the wall, he could not hope to deceive himself; and after Manuel had cried again at him, “Where are they?” in a really terrible tone, I heard his answer: