CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE LAST.
In a dimly-lighted cell of a massive stone building not far from the palace of the Dey, sat Colonel Langley, Francisco Rimini and his two sons, Bacri the Jew, and the officers and men belonging to the Prometheus—all heavily ironed. The Padre Giovanni was also there, but not, like the others, a prisoner.
He was attending to his self-imposed duty of comforting the sick and dying. Among the other prisoners was an Italian slave, a nobleman, who had broken down on the ramparts and rebelled, and was sent to prison as being the most convenient hospital where he might be kept until the pirates should find leisure to flog him into submission or to death. But Death had a mind to do the work according to his own pleasure. The slave felt himself to be sinking, and, through the influence of Bacri with the jailer, he had been permitted to send for Giovanni. Other
