He produced a big steel whistle, which he handed to Jack. "That’s well. If you don’t hear anything from me in the course of an hour after I leave you, you may conclude that I am captured. You had better then rush the sentries, who will no doubt be posted at the front gate. At the same time your men will scale the wall. One body should be sent to cut off egress from the stables, and another to enter by the back-door. I leave the rest to you." Half a mile farther on they came to the wooded hollow of which Jack had spoken. The horses were left there as arranged, and the guerrilleros, headed by Jack and Antonio, advanced cautiously up the hill to within three hundred yards of the house. By the light of the rising moon two sentinels could be seen standing at the front gate, between which and the house lay fifty feet of flower-garden. Jack wondered whether sentries had been placed on the other sides, but judged from the evident carelessness of the French that that precaution had not improbably been neglected. There was no cover for the attacking force beyond about two hundred and fifty yards from the gates, but at both sides the plantations would conceal them. The guerrilleros stole into the shade of the trees; the main body remained at the corner of the wall ready to attack in front; smaller parties worked round the sides, until the whole enclosure was practically surrounded. Jack accompanied the party which had gone to the wall facing the rear of the house. Under cover of the overhanging branches of a chestnut he climbed over the wall, which was about eight feet high. No sentry was posted at the back of the house. In a few minutes Jack had run up the garden and come to the back-door. Already he had heard sounds of merriment proceeding from the house. He placed his ear against the door, listening for footsteps within. Hearing nothing in the vicinity, he lifted the latch and slipped inside, finding himself in a large square stone-floored room, which had evidently been used as a storehouse for the gardener’s tools. At the far side of the room was a door leading, as he knew, to the corridor surrounding the patio. As he cautiously opened this door his ears were saluted by a deafening babel from a room on the right, opening on to the corridor. To judge by the sounds, a large party of French troopers were there enjoying their evening meal. Shouts of laughter were mingled with bursts of song and the clatter of knives and crockery. The patio was pitch dark save where a beam of light fell across it from a window of the room on the right, and another from the kitchen on the opposite side. Hugging the rear wall of the patio, Jack made his way cautiously across its tiled floor to the window of the kitchen. A door opened into the kitchen from the corridor, opposite to the middle one of the three arches in the colonnade of the patio. Keeping well in the shadow, Jack saw several