re all was
perfectly still now, for the sounds of the advance had ceased.

"Who wants Captain Reed?" shouted Poole.

"Ah, yes, I know you," came excitedly. "Tell your father Don Ramon is
here with his men."

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT.

STRANGE DOINGS.

All doubts as to the character of the new-comers were chased away by the
coming up of the skipper to welcome the Don, who had nothing but bad
news to communicate.

He had passed the night in full retreat with the remnant of his
followers before the forces of the rival President.

"Everything has gone wrong," he said. "I have lost heavily, and thought
that I should never have been able to join my friends. What about the
hacienda? Have you done anything for its defence?"

"The best we could," replied the skipper. "I suppose you know that the
enemy had been here, that there had been a fight, and that they had
wrecked the place."

"I? No!" cried the Don, in a voice full of despair. "I sent a party of
my friends here to meet you, and this was the _rendezvous_. Don't tell
me that they have been attacked and beaten."

"I have as good as told you that," said the skipper dryly.

"Ah-h-h!" panted the Don.

"We have put the place in as good a state of defence as there was time
for, but we have not seen a soul."

"It is terrible," groaned the Don. "My poor friends! prisoners, or
driven off! But you! You have your brave men."

"I have about half my crew here, sir," said the skipper sternly; "but we
haven't come to fight, only to bring what you know."

"Ah! The guns, the ammunition, the store of rifles!" cried the Don
joyously. "Magnificent! Oh, you brave Englishmen! And you have them
landed safe?"

"No," replied the skipper, as the middy's ears literally tingled at all
he heard. "How could I land guns up here? And what could you do with
them in these pathless tracts? Where are your horses and mules, even if
there were roads?"

"True, true, true!" groaned the Don. "Fortune is against me now. But,"
he added sharply, "the rifles--cartridges?"

"Ah, as many of them as you like," cried the skipper, and Fitz Burnett's
sense of duty began to awaken once again as he seemed in some undefined
way to be getting hopelessly mixed up with people against whom it was
his duty to war.

"Excellent; and you have them in the hacienda?"

"No, no; aboard my vessel."

"But where is this vessel? You could not get her up the river?"

"No; she is lying off the