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72 the moon, and the lust of their vengeance on him, for two shots alone had touched him out of the five which had been fired at him. One ball had pierced his breast, and brought him down senseless, and, to all semblance, lifeless; it had been aimed by the leader of the band who had trifled with his ice, and mourned over the conserve of violets in Paris a few nights before. The other bullet, which had struck him in the chest, and would have cut its way straight through the lungs, had been turned aside by the solid silver of his meerschaum, in whose bowl the ball was bedded, though the force of its concussion would have stretched him insensible without a wound. He had fallen as one dead, and they had left him for such in the narrow defile, hastening themselves to leave the pine-forest far behind them, and put the range of the Carpathians between them and Moldavia, taking their own wounded with them, and plunging into the recesses of the woods, where all pursuit could be baffled, all detection defied. Whether they were mountain banditti, or masked nobles, or insurgent conspirators, those vast solitudes would never reveal, since the deed would tell no tales and bear no witness; his assassination, if ever known, would be traced, they deemed, to gipsies or charcoal-burners, while the odds were a million