Instinctively I felt that here were confined those French prisoners, the knowledge of whose exact whereabouts I sought amid such surroundings of personal peril, and my heart bounded from sudden excitement.  In simulated awkwardness, I unfortunately overdid my part.  Shuffling forward, more eager than ever to keep at the heels of my protector, yet with eyes wandering in search of any opening, my bare feet struck against a projecting ring-bolt in the deck, and over I went, striving vainly to regain my balance.  Before that human statue on guard could even lower his gun to repel boarders, my head struck him soundly in the stomach, sending him crashing back against one of those tightly closed doors.  Tangled up with the surprised soldier, who promptly clinched his unexpected antagonist, and, with shocking profanity, strove to throttle me, I yet chanced to take note of the number “18” painted upon the white wood just above us.  Then the door itself was hurled hastily open, and with fierce exclamation of rage a gray-hooded Capuchin monk bounded forth like a rubber ball, and instantly began kicking vigorously right and left at our struggling figures.  It gives me pleasure to record that the Spaniard, being on top, received by far the worst of it, yet I might also bear testimony to the vigor of the priest’s legs, while we shared equally in the volubility of his tongue.

“Sacre!” he screamed in French, punctuating each sentence with a fresh blow.  “Get away from here, you drunken, quarrelling brutes!  Has it come to this, that a respectable priest of Holy Church may not hold private converse with the condemned without a brawl at the very door?  Mother of God! what meaneth the fracas?  Where is the guard?  Why don’t some of them jab their steel in the blasphemous ragamuffins who thus make mock of the holy offices of religion?  Take that, you black, sprawling beast!”

He aimed a vicious stroke at my head, which I ducked in the nick of time to permit of its landing with full force in my companion’s ribs.  I heard him grunt in acknowledgment of its receipt.

“Where is the guard, I say!  If they come not I will strangle the dogs with my own consecrated hands to the glory of God.  By the sainted Benedine! was ever one of our Order so basely treated before?  Get away, I tell you!  ’Tis a disgrace to the true faith, and just as I was about to bring the Chevalier to his knees in confession of his sins!”

Gonzales was fairly doubled up with laughter at the ludicrous incident, choking so that speech had become an utter impossibility.  By this time the aroused guards began hurrying forward on a run down the passageway to rescue their imperilled comrade, yet, before the foremost succeeded in laying hands upon me, a newcomer, resplendent in glittering uniform, with an inflamed, almost purple face, leaped madly forth from the opposite side of the mast and began laying about him vigorously with an iron pin, making use meanwhile of a vocabulary of choice Spanish epithets such as I never heard equalled.