who were now far from his footsteps.  And, seen through the gloaming of that perilous day, how bright did those far days appear!  Did they not seem sunnier than they really were?  No, reader; for all the radiance that glittered so late in his mind was drawn from those very days; it was their own brightness that was shining now:  we are not done with the days that were as soon as their sunsets have faded, but a light remains from them and grows fairer and fairer, 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 break, which allowed him to bow to never a man before.  Thus, if my pen has been able dimly to tell of it, thus bowed the man in the old leathern jacket.  And Rodriguez bowed to him in answer with the elegance that they that had dwelt at Arguento Harez had slowly drawn from the ages.