ground. Two of them seized his
legs. Two others tried to strangle him, while the fifth still kept him
covered with his empty pistol.

"Simon, save me! . . . Save me!" cried Dolores, whom Forsetta was
carrying off, wrapped in a blanket and bound with a rope.

He made a desperate effort, escaping his assailants for a few seconds,
and, before they had time to come to close quarters again, acting on a
sudden impulse he threw his pocket-book to them, shouting:

"Hands off, you blackguards! Share that between you! Thirty thousand!"

The bundles of notes fell out of the leather wallet and were
scattered over the ground. The tramps did not hesitate, but plumped
down on their hands and knees, leaving the field to Simon.

Fifty yards away, Forsetta was running along the river, with his prey
slung over his shoulder. Farther on, the two tramps posted on the
other bank were punting themselves across on a raft which they had
found. If Forsetta came up with them, it meant his safety.

"He won't get there," Simon said to himself, measuring the distance
with his eye.

With a quick movement, he snatched the knife of one of his aggressors
and set off at a run.

Forsetta, who believed him to be still struggling with the vagabonds,
did not hurry. He had, so to speak, rolled Dolores round his neck,
holding her legs, head and arms in front of him and crushing them to
his chest with his rifle and his brawny arms. He shouted to the two
men on the raft, to stimulate their ardour:

"Here's the girl! She's my share. . . . You shall have all her
jewels!"

The men warned him:

"Look out!"

He turned, saw Simon at twenty paces' distance and tried to throw
Dolores to the ground with a heave of the shoulder, like an irksome
burden. The girl fell, but she had so contrived matters, under cover
of the suffocating blanket, that at the moment of falling she had a
good grip on the barrel of the Indian's rifle; and in her fall she
dragged him down with her.

The few seconds which Forsetta needed to recover his weapon were his
undoing. Simon leapt upon him before he could take aim. He stumbled
once more, received a dagger-thrust in the hip and went down on his
knees, begging for mercy.

Simon released Dolores' bonds; then, addressing the two tramps who,
terror-stricken when on the point of touching ground, were now trying
to push off again:

"See to his wound," he ordered. "And there's the other Indian over
there: he's probably alive. Loo