ed to hold the discharged gun
in front of him as if he expected it to go off again of its own accord;
but Fatia Negra, catching hold of the end of the gun with one hand,
wrenched it out of the innkeeper's grasp and brought down the butt of it
so violently on the top of his head that he collapsed in a senseless
condition.

After that nobody knew what happened.

When Hatszegi and his servants arrived with the patched-up carriage,
Makkabesku was still lying on the ground unconscious, his wife was
thundering at the locked door, the door of the guest chamber was smashed
and the cupboard in the wall had been broken into and pillaged.
Curiously enough, while not one of the innkeeper's relics was missing,
Hatszegi's box with the 4,000 ducats had disappeared. A little later it
was found in the bed of the stream--empty of course.

Makkabesku was a very long time coming to, but he contrived at last, in
a very tremulous voice, to tell Hatszegi the somnambulistic case of the
double shots, nay he called Heaven to witness that Fatia Negra had
caught the bullets in his hands as if they were flies.

"You're a fool," cried Hatszegi angrily. "I suppose you fired above his
head on both occasions."

"But then you ought to see the marks of the bullets on the opposite
wall."

And it was a fact that, look as they might, they found no trace of a
bullet on the walls or anywhere else.

CHAPTER XV

WHO IT WAS THAT RECOGNIZED FATIA NEGRA

The events at the Mikalai _csarda_ considerably upset Hatszegi. He
returned home very sulky and was unusually ungracious towards Henrietta.
There were several violent scenes between them, in the course of which
the baron twitted his wife with having betrayed him and hinted that it
was all in consequence of her own and her brother's bad conduct that she
had been disinherited by her grandfather. He revealed to her that he
knew everything. He was well aware, he said, that in her girlhood she
had had a rascally young attorney as a lover and had thereby incurred
her grandfather's anger.

Henrietta, poor thing, had not the spirit to answer him back: "If you
knew this, why did you marry me? Why did you not leave me then to him
with whom I should have been happy if poor?" She could only reply with
tears. She trembled before him while she loathed him.

And yet how dependent she was on him.

She was well aware now of what her brother was accused, and never
doubted for a moment what she ought to do. S