"Now follow me who
dares!" he exclaimed; and, with a fearful mocking laugh; flung himself
headlong down, ere the soldiers had recovered his first sudden
movement. Stanley alone retained presence of mind sufficient to dart
forward, regardless of his own imminent danger, in the vain hope of
arresting the leap; but quick as were his movements, he only reached
the brink in time to see the wretched man, one moment quivering in
air, and lost the next in a dark abyss of shade.
A cry of mingled disappointment, horror, and execration, burst from
all around; and several of the soldiers hastened from the battlements
to the base of the rock, determined on fighting the arch-fiend
himself, if, as many of them firmly believed, he had rendered Don Luis
invulnerable to air, and would wait there to receive him. But even
this heroic resolution was disappointed: the height was so tremendous,
and the velocity of the fall so frightful, that the action of the air
had not only deprived him of life, but actually loosed the limbs from
the trunk, and a fearfully mangled corpse was all that remained to
glut the vengeance of the infuriated soldiers.
The confusion and excitement attending this important event, spread
like wildfire; not only over Albania, but reaching to the Duke's camp
without the city.
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