He immediately seized her arm with his muscular hand and flung her back into the kitchen the door of which he locked upon her.
Mr.Makkabesku permitted all this to go on before his very eyes, but he had raised the gun and held it firmly pressed against his cheek, he wanted the robber to draw nearer still that he might make quite sure of him.
When there were only three yards between them he aimed right at the middle of the intruder, pressed the trigger of the gun and the right barrel also exploded.
Yet the report was followed by no death cry--and Fatia Negra still stood in front of him unscathed.
Paralyzed with terror Makkabesku continued to hold the discharged gun in front of him as if he expected it to go off again of its own accord; but Fatia Negra, catching hold of the end of the gun with one hand, wrenched it out of the innkeeper's grasp and brought down the butt of it so violently on the top of his head that he collapsed in a senseless condition.
After that nobody knew what happened.
When Hatszegi and his servants arrived with the patched-up carriage, Makkabesku was still lying on the ground unconscious, his wife was thundering at the locked door, the door of the guest chamber was smashed and the cupboard in the wall had been broken into and pillaged.
Curiously enough, while not one of the innkeeper's relics was missing, Hatszegi's box with the 4,000 ducats had disappeared.

A little later it was found in the bed of the stream--empty of course.
Makkabesku was a very long time coming to, but he contrived at last, in a very tremulous voice, to tell Hatszegi the somnambulistic case of the double shots, nay he called Heaven to witness that Fatia Negra had caught the bullets in his hands as if they were flies.
"You're a fool," cried Hatszegi angrily.

"I suppose you fired above his head on both occasions." "But then you ought to see the marks of the bullets on the opposite wall." And it was a fact that, look as they might, they found no trace of a bullet on the walls or anywhere else..