"Ladrones--ladrones--fly, señores!" cried Pedro, as he leaped on his horse and dashed at full speed towards Trohniona, followed by several musket-bullets, while the raterillo vanished in the twilight as if the earth had swallowed him up. In a moment we were surrounded by a crowd of armed banditti--oh, there was no mistaking them!--I was collared and pinioned just as my foot was in the stirrup, and poor Jack Slingsby was knocked off his horse by the butt-end of a long Spanish gun; our swords and revolvers, our watches, rings, purses, and cigar-cases; our horses and valises, all in a moment became the spoil of the Egyptians, and we found ourselves prisoners at the mercy of--Fabrique de Urquija! CHAPTER XII. LA RIO DE MUERTE. Dark-visaged and black-bearded, with long sable hair hanging over their collars from under their battered sombreros, or gathered up in net-work cauls, the robbers presented every picturesque variety of Spanish costume. Some wore jackets of black or olive-coloured velvet, richly covered with needlework on the breast and seams; their waists were girt by bright-coloured sashes, and their legs encased in velvet small-clothes and leathern gaiters; while others were sans shirts and sans shoes; scantily attired in rough zamarras of sheepskin, with tattered breeches--their brawny legs and muscular chests being bare. All were well armed with muskets, Albacete knives, and pistols, and all were ferocious, resolute, and reckless alike in spirit and in aspect. A glance showed me all this, as we were dragged by them through an olive thicket, where, upon the prostrate column of some old Roman temple, we found their leader seated. The moon had now risen brightly above the mountains, and in the sashed and armed figure before me, with a jacket glittering with embroidery, his carbine resting in the hollow of his right arm, I recognised our former acquaintance whom we had met by the wayside between Castellar and Estrelo, and with whom we were hobbing and nobbing over a cigar and bota, when poor sister St. Veronica came to ask alms of us. The cruelties of which, on that occasion, he had so freely avowed himself guilty, and those other traits of character, such as the affair of the camphine lamp and the neckcloth so pleasantly padded with guncotton, occurred to us; and I must own, that when we found ourselves bound as prisoners and confronting the cold, stern and impassible visage of this celebrated Spanish outlaw, a restless anxiety made our hearts throb with new and undefined emotions. In all things his bearing and disposition were similar to those of his friend* whom he betrayed in 1853, and whose atrocities have been published, like his own, at length in the columns of the "Heraldo de Madrid." Neither Slingsby nor I had ever been in such a desperate predicament before, as the reader may easily conceive; thus we could scarcely realise it, and, naturally enough, indignation was uppermost in our minds.