"Garroted! What for?"

"Treason. There was discovered a compromising correspondence between him
and Bolivar. But why ask me? As a friend of Señor Ulloa, you surely know
all this?"

"I never was a friend of his--never even saw him! I had merely a letter to
him from a common friend. But how happened it that Señor Ulloa, who, I
believe, was a _correjidor_, entered into a correspondence with the
arch-traitor?"

"That made it all the worse. He richly deserved his fate. His eldest son,
who was privy to the affair, was strangled at the same time as his father;
his other children fled, and Señora Ulloa died of grief."

"Poor woman! No wonder the house is deserted. What a frightful state of
things!"

And then, feeling that I had said enough, and fearing that I might say
more, I turned on my heel, lighted a cigar, and, while I paced to and fro
in the _patio_, seriously considered my position, which, as I clearly
perceived, was beginning to be rather precarious.

As likely as not the innkeeper would denounce me, and then it would, of
course, be very absurd, for I was utterly ignorant, and Zamorra, a
Royalist to the bone, must have been equally ignorant that his friend
Ulloa had any hand in the rebellion. The mere fact of carrying a harmless
letter of introduction from a well-known loyalist to a friend whom he
believed to be still a loyalist, could surely not be construed as an