damn
your soul!" and then felt a sharp, stinging pang in the right
side--another--another! and earth and sky reeled as his grasp relaxed,
and with a moan of anguish he sank fainting on the dock.

CHAPTER IX.

Vinton's fleet had reached Manila. A third expedition had coaled at
Honolulu and gone on its way. More transports were coming, and still
there lingered in this lovely land of sun and flowers--lingered for a
time 'twixt life and death--Vinton's stricken aide-de-camp, Lieutenant
Stuyvesant.

Of his brutal antagonist no trace had been found. The shrill cries of
the Kanaka boat-boy, supplementing the young officer's stentorian shout
for the police, had brought two or three Hawaiian star-bearers and
club-wielders to the scene of that fierce and well-nigh fatal struggle.
All they found was the gallant victim writhing in pain upon the dock,
his hand pressed to his side and covered with the blood that poured from
his wounds.

It was half an hour before a surgeon reached them, rowed in with the
general from the Vanguard. By that time consciousness had fled and,
through loss of the vital fluid, Stuyvesant's pulse was well-nigh gone.
They bore him to the Royal Hawaiian, where a cool and comfortable room
could be had, and there, early on the following morning, and to the care
of local physicians, the general was compelled to leave him.

With the brakeman to aid them, the police searched every nook and corner
of the Miowera, and without result. Murray, _alias_ Spence, _alias_
Sackett, fugitive from justice, could not be aboard that ship unless he
had burrowed beneath the coal in the bunkers, in which event the stokers
promised he should be shovelled into the furnaces as soon as discovered.
Every sailor's lodging in the town was ransacked, but to no purpose:
Murray could not be found.

For a fortnight Stuyvesant's fate was in doubt. Officers of the third
expedition could carry with them to Manila only the hope that he might
recover. Not until the ships of the fourth flotilla were sighted was the
doctor able to say that the chances were now decidedly in his favor.

He was lifted into a reclining chair the day of the flag-raising--that
pathetic ceremony in which, through tear-dimmed eyes, the people saw
their old and much-loved emblem supplanted by the stars and stripes of
their new hope and aspirations. He was sitting up, languid, pallid, and
grievously thin, when the tidings reached him that the transport with
s