The seventh man in the room, although he was of the same fellowship, was curiously unlike his fellows. While the others were burly, well-set-up fellows, who held their heads high enough and thrust out their chests valiantly and sprawled their strong limbs at ease, the seventh man was a hunchback, short of stature and slender of figure, with a countenance whose quiet malignity contrasted decisively with the patent brutality of his comrades. The difference between the one and the others was accentuated even in dress, for, while the swashbucklers at the table loved to bedizen themselves with an amount of ferocious finery, and showed in their sordid garments a quantity of color that likened them to a bunch of faded wild flowers, the hunchback was clad soberly in black that was well-worn, indeed, and grizzled at the seams, but neatly attended. He sat in the window, reading intently in a little volume, and, again unlike his associates, while he read he nursed between his knees a long and formidable rapier. Those at the table paid him no heed; most of them knew his ways, and he, on his side, seemed to be quite undisturbed in his studies by the noise and clamor of the drinking-party, and to be entirely absorbed in the delights of literature. But if the hunchback student was quite content to let his companions be, and to find his pleasures in scholarship of a kind, it came about that one of his companions, in a misguided moment, found himself less content to leave the hunchback student undisturbed. It was the one of the company that knew least about him--Pinto the Biscayan, newest recruit in that huddle of ruffians, and therefore the less inclined than his fellows to let a sleeping dog lie. He had been drinking deeply, for your Biscayans are potent topers, and in the course of his cups he discovered that it irritated him to see that quiet, silent figure perched there in the window with its wry body as still as if it had been snipped out of cardboard, with its comical long nose poked over a book, with its colorless puckered lips moving, as if the reader muttered to himself the meaning of what he read, and tasted an unclean pleasure in so doing. So Pinto pulled himself to his feet, steadied himself with the aid of the table edge, and then, with a noiseless dexterity that showed the practised assassin, whose talent it is to pad in shadows, he crossed the room and came up behind the hunchback before the hunchback was, or seemed to be, aware of his neighborhood. "What are you reading?" he hiccoughed. "Let us have a peep at it." And before the hunchback could make an answer Pinto had picked the book quickly from the hunchback's fingers and held it to his own face to see what it told about.