Harper said nothing, but when he turned and flung himself into the chair his eyes were eloquent, and there was for almost an hour a tense silence in the room. It seemed interminable to Appleby, but at last there was a tramp of feet outside, and they rose simultaneously, Harper flushed and Appleby a trifle gray in face. Then there were footsteps on the stairway, and Morales came in with two or three files of cazadores behind him. He glanced at the two men, and his face grew a trifle harder, while a little vindictive sparkle crept into his eyes. Still, his voice was coldly even. “I had the honor of making you a proposal last night, Senor Appleby,” he said. Appleby nodded. “I am sorry that I found I could not entertain it,” he said. Morales let his hand fall on the hilt of his sword. “Then there is only one course open to me. I place these men in your custody, sergeant, and until you hand them over in the guardroom at Santa Marta you will be answerable for them.” The sergeant made a little sign, two men moved forward, and in another minute Appleby and Harper went down the stairway and saw a section of cazadores waiting in the patio. XXIV — RESPITED A FAINT light was creeping in through the narrow window when Appleby awoke in a little upper room in the cuartel at Santa Marta. Worn out by the tense anxiety he had undergone he had at last slept restlessly, and for a moment or two he was only sensible that his surroundings were unfamiliar. Simply as he had lived at San Cristoval the room seemed unusually bare, while his limbs ached a little, and he wondered why he was lying on a thin strip of matting, and what Harper, who lay close beside him, apparently asleep, was doing there. Then he shook himself into wakefulness as memory came back, and the events of the preceding night arranged themselves before him. He remembered his brief trial by Morales and a handful of officers, who deferred to him—for Santa Marta was under martial law—the written process declaring his offences, and the smile in Morales’ dark eyes when he admitted that he had nothing to urge in extenuation. One point alone he contested, and that was that he and Harper had supplied the insurgents with arms from San Cristoval, but the process proved that rifles had been carried into the factory, and his assertion that it was done without his knowledge only called forth a smile of incredulity. Then came the sentence, which Appleby listened to with the unconcern of desperation, and Harper, standing with great hands clenched and face dark with passion, answered with a torrent of furious invective in luminous American and Castilian, until two cazadores dragged him away.