Several Christians enjoying the benefit of safe conduct were free to come and go among these Algerines, and the Redemptorist Fathers enjoyed thorough freedom, as through them the ransoms were chiefly effected. A Spanish gentleman being set at liberty, carried a letter from our hero home to his family, and in consequence the brave old hidalgo, his father, mortgaged his little estate, took the dowries of his two daughters, and forwarded all to his son for the liberation of himself and his brother, who was also in captivity. When he presented himself to Dali Mami with his sum in his hands the renegade cripple only laughed at him. He and Rodrigo were men of too much importance to be ransomed for so trifling a sum. {21} The cruel viceroy of Algiers having spent his allotted time in charge of that nest of vultures, was replaced by a governor still more cruel, under whom Cervantes made a desperate effort to escape, and carry off forty or fifty fellow-captives with him. He paid his brother's ransom, and he, when set at liberty, managed to send a vessel near the spot where Miguel had his companions in safety in a grotto of a certain garden. Through some mismanagement the descent failed, and the hiding-place was revealed by the treachery of a trusted individual. All were brought before the new Viceroy Hassan, and Cervantes avowed himself the chief and only plotter among them. Hassan used flattery, promises, and threats to induce the intrepid Spaniard to criminate a certain brother Redemptorist as privy to the plot, in order that he might come at a much coveted sum of money which he knew to be in his possession. All was in vain. Cervantes was not to be turned from the path of loyalty, and when every one expected sentence of death to be pronounced on him at the moment, Hassan became suddenly cool, and merely ordered him to be removed.