The Lighted Match

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."