Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/302

Rh if you keep silent. Do you know how the leather can eat a man's flesh?"

He bent his head in assent; in Russia he had seen a serf die under the scourge.

"You do? Well, that grand frame of yours will not spare you; they will mash it to pulp. Will you not speak—now?" "I have answered."

"You are a fool and a madman!" swore the Calabrian. "You lose your life for a worthless woman."

A spasm that the bodily torture had never brought there passed over his captive's face. He kept silence still. The Italian shrugged his shoulders, and strolled away.

There was a momentos longer pause, then two soldiers came to their work; they bore the whips that they had made, with the heavy buckles at the end of the belts serving as the leaden points with which the lash is commonly weighted. The blows would fall from either side, as the strokes of the woodman's hatchet fall on a tree. The rest of the band closed round in a semicircle, their commandant slightly in advance.

Then—then only—as he saw the scourges in their