1880 Facts about Port and Madeira by Henry Vizetelly

100

In the P

During their absencethefeitor crawled fromrmderthefurther most tonel back to the one nearest the door, so that when the men returned and resumed their search they failed to discover him. Baulked of their prey they were ransacking the place of what food it contained when shots outside were heard,and the gang beat a hasty retreat. It seems that the sacristan, after escaping through the window, had hm-ried to a neighbouring village and aroused the inhabitants, a party of whom, armed with guns,advanced to within a few hundred yards of the farm house and then halted to fire a volley. Some of them pretended this was done to fiighten the robbers in case they might be murdering the feitor, but it is far more probable, as they had many friends among the villagers, that the object was to give them timely warning to escape. The feitor's wounds and broken bones having been attended to, he was sent by my friend down the Douro to Oporto, where he had to remain for several months in the hospital before he was completely right again. The poor sacristan kept very quiet, being in constant dread ofthe vengeance of the gang,the chief of whom was well known. Such,however, was the lawless state of the district that no one dared denounce, much less arrest him,and he openly boasted that the sacristan should never see another vintage. This threat rendered the sacristan desperate, and he got a couple of friends to lie in wait for the ruffian, and one evening as the latter was passing through a vineyard they shot him dead before he could level his own gun. The body remained where it fell for several days, as the village priest refused to bury it in consecrated ground, and no one would give themselves the trouble to inter' it elsewhere. A.t length a goatherd was induced, by the promise of a knife and a blanket, to bury the corpse afew inches deep in the loose slaty soil of the vineyard where the man met his death. No legal inquiry was held into the circumstances of the latter. The village was rid of one of its pests, and nobody thought it his business to apprise the authorities that this had been accomplished by violent means.