"
There was a breathless pause. None had ever used such language to
Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa and lived to tell the tale. Nor was it to be so in
this case.
"You and yours have caused me too much trouble," he answered indifferently.
He made a sign to the executioner who had beheaded the soldier, and the
next moment the head of De Vargas was swept from his body.
The gallant Spaniard, it is to be hoped, came by his end in the way just
narrated; but the chroniclers disagree among themselves, and "El Senor Don
Diego de Haedo, Arcobispo de Palermo y Capitan General del Reyno de Sicilia
por El Rey Felipe nuestro senor," states that Barbarossa kept De Vargas in
confinement for three months and then had him beaten to death. One can only
sincerely hope that the first account is the true one; but Haedo was nearer
to the time of the occurrence, and, as he wrote in the reign of Philip II.,
is more likely to have known the facts. But however this may have been,
there was an end for all time of Spanish domination on the north coast of
Africa, and from this we may date the permanent establishment of those
piratical States in that part of the world.
The star of Kheyr-ed-Din was once more in the ascendant. Not only had he
crushed out the incipient mutiny of Venalcadi and taken his life, but he
had consolidated his power by the taking of the Penon d'Alger. He
celebrated this occasion in the most practical manner possible: a stop was
put to the indiscriminate massacre of the garrison, and five hundred of the
Spaniards were captured alive; it was their dreary fate to pull down
entirely the tower of Pedro Navarro, which they had defended so gallantly
and to utilise the material in making a causeway from the Penon to the
shore.
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