I had neither resisted nor protested.  I hugged this thought and meant, if die I must, to die hugging it.  I had challenged the girl, promising her to be patient.  To be sure protest or resistance would have been idle.  But I had kept my word.  I don’t doubt that from time to time a moan escaped me. . . .  I could not believe that Marc’antonio was near me, watching.  I heard no sound at all, no distant voice or bugle-call from the camp on the mountain.  The woods were silent . . . silent as Nat, yonder, in his grave.  Surely none but a fiend could sit and watch me without a word. . . .

Toward evening I broke off a crust of bread and ate it.  The water I husbanded.  I might need it worse by-and-by, if Marc’antonio delayed to come.

But what if no one should come?

I had been dozing—­or maybe was wandering in slight delirium—­when this question wrote itself across my dreams in letters of fire, so bright that it cleared and lit up my brain in a flash, chasing away all other terrors. . . .

Mercifully, it was soon answered.  Far up the glade a horn sounded—­ my swine-horn, blown no doubt by Marc’antonio.  The hogs were coming. . . .  Well, I must use my hands to keep them at their distance.

I listened with all my ears.  Yes, I caught the sound of their grunting; it came nearer and nearer, and—­was that a footstep, close at hand, behind the palisade?

Something dropped at my side—­dropped in the mire with a soft thud.  I stretched out my hand, felt for it, clutched it.

It was a file.

My heart gave a leap.  I had found a friend, then!—­but in whom?  Was it Marc’antonio?  No:  for I heard his voice now, fifty yards away, marshalling and cursing the hogs.  His footstep was near the gate.  As he opened it and the hogs rushed in, I slipped the file beneath me, under my shoulder blades.

The first of the hogs, as he ran by me, put a hoof into my pannikin and upset it; and while I struck out at him, to fend him aside, another brute gobbled up my last morsel of crust.  The clatter of the pannikin brought Marc’antonio to my side.  For a while he stood there looking down on me in the dusk; then walked off through the sty to the hut and returned with two hurdles which he rested over me, one against another, tentwise, driving their stakes an inch or two into the soil.  Slight as the fence was, it would protect me from the hogs; and I thanked him.  He growled ungraciously, and, picking up the pannikin, slouched off upon a second errand.  Again when he brought it replenished, and a fresh loaf of bread with it, I thanked him, and again his only answer was a growl.

I heard him latch the gate and walk away toward the hut.  Night was falling on the valley.  Through my roof of hurdles a star or two shone down palely.  Now was my time.  I slipped a hand beneath me and recovered my file—­my blessed file.

The chain about my neck was not very stout.  I had felt its links with my fingers a good score of times in efforts, some deliberate, others frantic, to loosen it even by a little.  Loosen it I could not; the Prince had done his work too cleverly:  but by my calculation an hour would suffice me to file it through.