These two took an armed force and surrounded the lovers' rendezvous, thinking thus at last to capture their man.

But he cut his way through the soldiery, and, fleeing over the mountain, made straight for his cave in the Torda Gap, outstripping the pursuit of both horse and foot--with the single exception of the injured lover, Marczi, whom he could not shake off.

The young man clung to his heels and chased him to the very entrance of his retreat, where, just as the robber chief was slipping through the opening of his cave, his pursuer hurled his hatchet with such deadly aim that it cleft the fugitive's skull, and he sank dead on the spot.
"And that was how the last lord of the cave came to his end," concluded Aaron.
"But what about Marczi and Rosalie ?" asked Blanka.
The narrator proceeded to gratify her curiosity by making the young man fall into the hands of the Mongols, after which he was captured by a troop of Cossacks; and then, when Aaron was putting him through a similar experience with the dog-faced Tartars, his listener succumbed at last to the drowsiness against which she had been struggling, and the story was abruptly discontinued.
"I never heard that tale before, brother," said Manasseh, after assuring himself that Blanka was really asleep.
"Nor I, either," was Aaron's candid reply; "but in a tight pinch a man turns romancer sometimes.

I don't know, though, what fables we can invent to keep the young lady here over to-morrow.

You think up something, brother; don't let me go to perdition all alone for the lot of yarns I've been reeling off to your sweetheart." "Very well," assented the other; "I'll set my wits to work.