acle, truly, and a couple of doors to it," cried he, like
one thinking keenly. "Nevertheless, I make bold to say that if they
have a key to yonder hatch we are undone entirely, captain."

I sat upon a crag of the rock and tried to think of it all. Czerny's
men would return in an hour, or two at the most, and the truth would be
out. They would come--the seamen to the lesser gate, the others to this
door of steel by which we sat--and, finding that knocking did not open,
they would take such measures as they thought fit to blast the doors. A
gun well fired might do as much if gun could be trained upon the reef.
Once let them inside and it needed no clever tongue to say how it would
fare with us or with those we sought to protect. No man, I said, would
live to tell that story, or to carry the history of Edmond Czerny's
life to a distant city. All that lay between us and life was this door
of steel shutting like a port-hole in the solid rock. And could we hold
it against, it might be one, it might be three hundred men? That was a
question the night must answer.

"Regnarte," I said, upon an impulse, "you have guns in this house?"

He held up his fingers and opened them many times to express a great
number.

"One, two, three hundred guns," said he. "Excellency has them all; but
here one gun much bigger than that. You seamen, you shall know how to
fire him, captain. Excellency say that no man take the gate while that
gun there. Ah! the leg on the other boot now!"

Now he cracked his fingers all the time he said this, and shook his
keys and danced about the plateau like a madman. For a while I could
make neither head nor tail of what he meant; but presently he turned as
though he would go down to the cabins again, and, standing upon the
very threshold of the staircase, he showed me what I had never seen or
should have looked for in twenty years--the barrel of a quick-firing
gun and the steel turret which defended it.

"'Tis a pom-pom, or I'm a heathen nigger!" cries Peter Bligh, half mad
at the sight of it. "A pom-pom, and a shield about it. The glory to
Saint Patrick that shows me the wonder!"

And Dolly Venn, catching hold of my hand in like excitement, he says:

"Oh, Mr. Begg, oh, what luck, what luck at last!"

I crossed the plateau and saw the thing with my own eyes. It was a
modern Krupp quick-firing gun, well kept, well fitted, well placed
behind a shield of steel which might defend those who worked it against
a