airer, like an afterglow lingering among
tremendous peaks above immeasurable slopes of snow.

The prisoner had scarcely noticed Rodriguez or his servant, any more
than he noticed his captors; for there come an intensity to those who
walk near death that makes them a little alien from other men, life
flaring up in them at the last into so grand a flame that the lives of
the others seem a little cold and dim where they dwell remote from that
sunset that we call mortality. So he looked silently at the days that
were as they came dancing back again to him from where they had long
lain lost in chasms of time, to which they had slipped over dark edges
of years. Smiling they came, but all wistfully anxious, as though their
errand were paramount and their span short: he saw them cluster about
him, running now, bringing their tiny gifts, and scarcely heard the
heavy sigh of his guard as Rodriguez gagged him and Morano tied him up.

Had Rodriguez now released the prisoner they could have been three to
three, in the event of things going wrong with the sleep of la Garda;
but, since in the same time they could gag and bind another, the odds
would be the same at two to two, and Rodriguez preferred this to the
slight uncertainties that would be connected with the entry of another
partner. They accordingly gagged the next man and bound his wrists and
ankles. And that Spanish wine held good with the other two and bound
them far down among the deeps of dreams: and so it should, for it was
of a vine that grew in the vales of Spain and had ripened in one of the
years of the golden age.

They bound one as easily as they had bound the other two; and the last
Rodriguez watched while Morano cut the ropes off the prisoner, for he
had run out of bits of twine and all other improvisations. With these
ropes he ran back to his master, and they tied up the last prisoner but
did not gag him.

"Shall we gag him, master, like the rest?" said Morano.

"No," said Rodriguez. "He has nothing to say."

And though this remark turned out to be strictly untrue, it well enough
answered its purpose.

And then they saw standing before them the man they had freed. And he
bowed to Rodriguez like one that had never bowed before. I do not mean
that he bowed with awkwardness, like imitative men unused to
politeness, but he bowed as the oak bows to the woodman; he stood
straight, looking Rodriguez in the eyes, then he bowed as though he had
let his spirit brea