Garda and, I fear also, my
reader, perhaps to disappoint you, of the hanging that they at least
had promised themselves.

"Think you," said Rodriguez, "that for so stout a knave this branch of
yours suffices?"

Now it was an excellent branch. But it was not so much Rodriguez' words
as the anxious way in which he looked at the branch that aroused the
anxieties of la Garda: and soon they were looking about to find a
better tree; and when four men start doing this in a wood time quickly
passes. Meanwhile Morano drew near, and Rodriguez went to meet him.

"Master," said Morano, all out of breath, "they had no bacon. But I got
these two bottles of wine. It is strong wine, which is a rare deluder
of the senses, which will need to be deluded if we are to go hungry."

Rodriguez was about to cut short Morano's chatter when he thought of a
use for the wine, and was silent a moment. And as he pondered Morano
looked up and saw la Garda and at the same time perceived the
situation, for he had as quick an eye for a bad business as any man.

"No one with the horses," was his comment; for they were tethered a
little apart. But Rodriguez' mind had already explored a surer method
than the one that Morano seemed to be contemplating. This method he
told Morano. And now, from little tugs that they were giving to the
doubled rope that hung over the branch of the oak-tree, it was clear
enough that the men of the law were returning to their confidence in
that very sufficient branch.

They looked up with questions ripe to drop from their lips when they
saw Rodriguez returning with Morano. But before one of them spoke
Morano flung to them from far off a little piece of his wisdom: for
cast a truth into an occasion and it will always trouble the waters,
usually stirring up contradiction, but always bringing something to the
surface.

"Senores," he said, "no man can enjoy a hanging with a dry throat."

Thus he turned their attention a while from the business in hand,
changing their thoughts from the stout neck of the prisoner to their
own throats, wondering were they dry; and you do not wonder long about
this in the south without finding that what you feared is true. And
then he let them see the two great bottles, all full of wine, for the
invention of the false bottom that gives to our champagne-bottles the
place they rightly hold among famous deceptions had not as yet been
discovered.

"It is true," said la Garda. And Rodriguez made M