Lapas rose and consulted his watch with nervous haste. "You will excuse
me?" he added. "I must be at my post. Are you satisfied?"
Blanco also rose, bowing as he drew back the heavy chair he had
occupied. "I am quite satisfied," he approved. His hands were gripping
the chairback and when Lapas had taken two paces to the front, and
Blanco had appraised the distance between, the chair left the floor.
With the same lightning swiftness of motion that had brought salvos of
applause from the bull-rings of Cadiz and Seville, he swung it above his
head and brought down its cumbersome weight in an arc.
Lapas, his eyes fixed on the door, had no hint. A picture of serene sky
and steady mountains was blotted from his brain. There was blackness
instead--and unconsciousness.
A bleeding scalp told the toreador that the blow had only cut and
stunned.
Rapidly he bound and gagged his captive. Dragging him back through the
narrow room he made certainty doubly sure by tying him to the base of
the neglected telescope in the abandoned observatory.
A hundred yards below the rock, tucked out of sight of the man at the
flag-pole, stretched a ledge-like strip of level ground, backed by the
thick tangle of growth which masked the slope. Beyond its edge of
roughly blocked and crevassed stone, the gorge fell away a dizzy
thousand feet. Out of the pines struggled the half-overgrown path where
once a road had led from the castle. This way the earlier Lords of
Galavia had come to look across the backbone of the peninsula, to the
east.
As Benton paced the ledge impatiently, awaiting the outcome of Blanco's
reconnoiter, he noticed with a nauseating sense of onrushing peril how
the purpled shadows of the mountains were lengthening across the valley
and beginning to creep up the other side.
Each time his pacing brought him to the edge of the clearing he paused
to look down at the sullen walls of Karyl's castle.
A woman, flushed and breathless from the climb, pushed through the scrub
pines at the path's end and stopped suddenly at the marge of the
clearing. Her slender girlish figure, clad in corduroy skirt and blue
jersey, was poised with lance-like straightness, and a grace as free as
a boy's. Her hands, cased in battered gauntlets, went suddenly to her
breast, as though she would muffle the palpitant heart beneath the
jersey. She stood for a moment looking at the man and the ultramarine of
her eyes clouded slowly into gray. The pink flush of exercise died
instantly to pallor in her cheeks.
Then the lips overcame an impulse to quiver and spoke slowly in an
undertone and with marked effort. "This is twice that I have seen you,"
she whispered, "although you are three thousand miles away."