the place to ashes. And what time
that suave and courtly commander was settling these details with the
apoplectic British Governor, the Spaniards were smashing and looting,
feasting, drinking, and ravaging after the hideous manner of their kind.

Mr. Blood, greatly daring, ventured down at dusk into the town. What
he saw there is recorded by Jeremy Pitt to whom he subsequently related
it--in that voluminous log from which the greater part of my narrative
is derived. I have no intention of repeating any of it here. It is
all too loathsome and nauseating, incredible, indeed, that men however
abandoned could ever descend such an abyss of bestial cruelty and lust.

What he saw was fetching him in haste and white-faced out of that hell
again, when in a narrow street a girl hurtled into him, wild-eyed, her
unbound hair streaming behind her as she ran. After her, laughing and
cursing in a breath, came a heavy-booted Spaniard. Almost he was upon
her, when suddenly Mr. Blood got in his way. The doctor had taken a
sword from a dead man's side some little time before and armed himself
with it against an emergency.

As the Spaniard checked in anger and surprise, he caught in the dusk the
livid gleam of that sword which Mr. Blood had quickly unsheathed.

"Ah, perro ingles!" he shouted, and flung forward to his death.

"It's hoping I am ye're in a fit state to meet your Maker," said Mr.
Blood, and ran him through the body. He did the thing skilfully: with
the combined skill of swordsman and surgeon. The man sank in a hideous
heap without so much as a groan.

Mr. Blood swung to the girl, who leaned panting and sobbing against a
wall. He caught her by the wrist.

"Come!" he said.

But she hung back, resisting him by her weight. "Who are you?" she
demanded wildly.

"Will ye wait to see my credentials?" he snapped. Steps were clattering
towards them from beyond the corner round which she had fled from
that Spanish ruffian. "Come," he urged again. And this time, reassured
perhaps by his clear English speech, she went without further questions.

They sped down an alley and then up another, by great good fortune
meeting no one, for already they were on the outskirts of the town. They
won out of it, and white-faced, physically sick, Mr. Blood dragged her
almost at a run up the hill towards Colonel Bishop's house. He told her
briefly who and what he was, and thereafter there was no conversation
between them until they reached the