“But––” he stammered.

“No buts,” the fierce ranchero growled thunderously. “Not one, Don Anastasio, not while our country bleeds under the Austrian tyrant’s heel, not while there yet breathes a patriot to scorn peril and death, so only that he get the sinews of war.”

The curiously unctuous gesture grew menacing, brutal. Don Anastasio twitched and trembled before it. Under the towering and prismatic Fra Diavolo he cowered, an insignificant figure. The unrelieved black of his attire accorded with his meagre frame. It was secretive, miserly. A black stock 16covered a withered collar. A dingy silk tile was tightly packed over a rusted black wig. Boots hid their tops under the skirts of his coat, and the coat in turn was partly concealed under a black shawl. But there was one incongruous item. Boots, coat, hat and all were crusted with brine. He had evidently passed through salty spray, had braved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black. Just now his eyes, normally moist and avaricious, were parched dry by fear, as though a flame had passed over them. They might have rattled in their gaping sockets. Fear also helped him clutch his voice, which he paid out regardless of expense.

“You know, Don––” But Fra Diavolo scowled, and the name died on his lips. “You know,” he went on, “why you haven’t seen me for so long. It’s the blockade up there. It’s closer than ever now. This time I waited many nights for a chance to run in, and as many more to run out again.”

“And you squeezed the poor devils all the harder for your weevily corn and shoddy boots?”

Jacqueline, who could not hear a word, told her companions with a child’s expectancy only to wait and they would see Fra Diavolo eat up the poor little crow.

The crow, meantime, was trying to oust the notion that had alighted in the brain of Fra Diavolo. “Of course I ought to ask the Confederates higher prices as the risks increase,” he said, then paused and shook his head and wig and hat like a mournful pendulum. “But how can I? The South hardly grows any more cotton. It cannot pay high, and––”

“And that’s not my affair, but––” Again the business of thumb and fingers–“but this is. Quick now!”

“Señor, I–Your Mercy knows that I always pay at–at the usual place–near the forest.”