The sun was now high overhead, and beat torridly upon the granite crags, which, as I clutched them, blistered my hands.  The girl and the two men (in spite of their burden) balanced themselves and sprang from foothold to foothold with an ease which shamed me.  For a while I supposed that we were making for the actual summit; but on the second terrace my captress bore away to the left and led us by a track that slanted across the northern shoulder of the ridge.  A sentry started to his feet and stepped from behind a clump of arid sage-coloured bushes, stood for a moment with the sun glinting on his gun-barrel, and at a sign from the girl dropped back upon his post.  Just then, or a moment later, my ears caught the jigging notes of a flute; whereby I knew Mr. Badcock to be close at hand, for it was discoursing the tune of “The Vicar of Bray”!

Sure enough, as we rounded the slope we came upon him, Mr. Fett, and Billy Priske, the trio seated within a semi-circle of admiring Corsicans, and above a scene so marvellous that I caught my breath.  The slope, breaking away to north and east, descended sheer upon a vast amphitheatre filled with green acres of pine forest and pent within walls of porphyry that rose in tower upon tower, pinnacle upon pinnacle, beyond and above the tree-tops; and these pillars, as they soared out of the gulf, seemed to shake off with difficulty the forest that climbed after them, holding by every nook and ledge in their riven sides—­here a dark-foliaged clump caught in a chasm, there a solitary trunk bleached and dead but still hanging by a last grip.

On the edge of this green cauldron the Corsicans and my comrades sat like so many witches, their figures magnified uncannily against the void; and far beyond, above the rose-coloured crags, deep-set in miles of transparent blue, shone the snow-covered central peaks of the island.

As I rounded the corner, Mr. Fett hailed me with a shout and a vocal imitation of a post-horn.

“Another,” he cried, and slapped his thigh triumphantly.  “Another blossom added to the posy!  Badcock, my flosculet, you owe me five shillings.  Permit me to explain, sir”—­he turned to me—­“that Mr. Badcock has been staking upon an anthology, I upon the full basket and the whole hog.  It is cut and come again with these Corsicans; and, talking of hogs—­”

His chatter tailed off in a pitiful exclamation as the litter-carriers came around the angle of the ridge with Nat’s body between them.

“Poor lad!  Ah, poor lad!” I heard Billy say.  Mr. Badcock nervously disjointed his flute.  “I warned him, sir.  Believe me, my last words were that, being in Rome, so to speak, he should do as the Romans did—­”

“There is one more,” announced the girl, to her Corsicans, “and I have sent for him.  He will come under conduct; and, meanwhile, I have to say that any man who offers to harm this prisoner, here, will be shot.”

“But why should we harm him, principessa?” they asked; and, indeed, I felt inclined to echo their question, seeing that she pointed at me.