w, and retiring, so far as
they could judge by the sound, through the gateway by which the writer
of their message had disappeared.

"Ha!" said Harry; "someone has been below our window again. I wonder
what it is this time? And what was it that struck you, Roger; could you
tell?"

"No," answered Roger. "I know only that something hit me hard on the
cheek, and I thought for the moment that my eye was struck. No, I have
not the least idea what it could have been."

"Could it," suggested Harry, "have been that fellow whom we saw this
morning, come back again with another message; and was he trying to
attract our attention, think you?"

"That I cannot say," answered Roger; "but I certainly heard footsteps
disappearing just now. Did not you?"

"Yes, I did," answered Harry; "but I did not attach very much
significance to the matter until the individual had gone. Well, we do
not know what it was, and we have no time to waste; so let us give our
whole attention to the matter of that message. Have you got the paper?
Well, when we have finished with it, you had better hide it away
somewhere safely, or, better still, destroy it altogether; for we never
know when we may be searched. They may take it into their heads to do
so at any moment."

"Ay, we will do so," agreed Roger; "'twill, as you say, be safer. But
go on with what you were about to say before that interruption came."

"Well," resumed Harry, "as I was saying, it seems to stand like this:
Alvarez, it would appear, has doomed us to die at an auto-da-fe, five
days hence, in order to satisfy the demand of the people of this town
for revenge, their desire for which has been aroused by the capture by
Mr Cavendish of the plate fleet off Acapulco. This fact is known by
everybody in the town, and consequently has come to the ears of this
man, who says he is an English sailor.

"I should say that he is probably a man--one of the very few that the
Dons have ever taken--captured during some action, and tortured to make
him recant. He apparently did so in order to spare himself further
pain, as men have done on several occasions, and he is now possibly a
serving-man, or something of the kind, in the employ of some Spanish
grandee or another. But he has not forgotten the fact that he is an
Englishman, and, hearing that two of his fellow-countrymen are to be put
to a painful death at an auto-da-fe in the Plaza in five days' time, has
made up his mind to save our l