"Answer me, or----" I thundered, lifting the pistol a few inches.
"You will never breathe a word of this?" he implored.
"Answer me," I cried again, with implacable sternness.
"He gave me the privately agreed upon route of His Majesty's drive for to-morrow afternoon." He spoke in a voice low and hoarse, and the sentence was broken by three or four pauses, as if the effort to utter it was almost beyond his strength.
"I--I dare not," he answered, his voice no louder than a whisper.
"I--I can tell it you," he said, after a long pause.
"Give it me," I cried, sternly. "I shall not ask again."
He plunged a trembling hand into an inner pocket, and without withdrawing it gave me a glance of piteous entreaty.
"Anything but this!" he pleaded. "God have mercy on me; anything but this, senor, I beg you. I was to have destroyed it."
"As you will. Then our conference fails. I will call in our seconds and----"
But he did not let me finish, for with a groan of despair he brought the paper out and laid it on the table.
I picked it up, and a glance showed me what a prize it was. The writing was Quesada's, and it gave the route of the drive and actually suggested the place where the abduction could be made--a spot on the road to Buenavista, close to where the bridge crossed the Manzanares on the way to Aravaca, and specified the time, five o'clock; adding the significant note--"Only one aide in carriage, no escort; coachman and footman."
When I had read it he held out his hand for it, dreaming apparently that I should return it; and when I put it in my pocket he threw up his hands with a deep sigh of despair.
"Why was to-morrow chosen instead of the following day?"
"I don't know. There have been several changes."
I stopped to think. I had indeed made a splendid haul, and there was little else Livenza was likely to be able to tell me. There was one question I had yet to answer; but it was certain that he would not know any more than I. What was Sebastian's object in all this? I had thought of the probable solution when I was with Sarita--that he was playing for his own hand and meant to get rid of the young King and to crush the Carlists by one and the same stroke; and to pit myself against a man shrewd enough to conceive such a policy and daring enough to put it to the actual test, seemed like madness. But I had made up my mind to attempt it; and the document I now had in my pocket would be a powerful weapon if only I could see the means to use it shrewdly.