The Spanish officer stepped gingerly up to the prisoner, seized hold of the manacled wrist and reached for the other uplifted hand; but Manuello had had enough of their society and proceeded to rid himself of it by striking at the officer with his left wrist while he made a grab at the rifle of the Irishman with his right hand; the young Cuban was wiry and his muscles were like taut steel; the officer went down like an ox before the slaughterer but the Irishman discharged his gun regardless of the aim which had been destroyed by the action of the living target; the result was disastrous to all parties for Manuello felt a sharp, stinging pain in one of his legs, but, in spite of this, he clubbed the rifle and brought it down over the skull of the Spanish soldier, limping away, again a conqueror, but sorely wounded, for the bullet had passed clear through the injured limb, tearing through the flesh and bone as is the manner of the long and slender Mauser missile. In this emergency, the young fellow, knowing that he would be hunted after the last encounter, not only because of the crime of which he had tacitly been accused by the soldier but because he had struck down a Spanish officer, and realizing that, with the manacles still locked upon his wrist, he was a marked man, bethought him of a deserted hut far back among the palms that grew all over the Island in tropical profusion; if he could but reach this hut, he thought, and first apprise Tessa of his new mishap, he might hide there while he recovered from his wound which was beginning to give him great pain as it recovered from its first numbness. Walking as erectly as he could under the circumstances and keeping his left wrist well covered by the wide cuff of his jacket-sleeve, he was proceeding along the familiar street, when he met the girl he was in search of, strolling placidly along, little dreaming of the imminent peril in which he had just been placed, for the discharge of the Mauser rifle had been almost as silent as smokeless; telling her in a few hurried sentences of his great need and describing to her the location of the ruined hut he had in mind, Manuello retired from the scene. CHAPTER XI