"Yes. Captain Reed, my brave true friend, look at him. He is half-dead with hunger and exhaustion. Can you give him water and food?" "He shall share what we have, sir, and I am sorry that we cannot give him better fare than biscuit and water; but the rations we brought with us were small, and they are nearly at an end. Don Miguel, I ask your pardon for me and mine. You will forgive us our rough treatment? We were fighting for your friend." "I know," said the visitor faintly, and he took and grasped the captain's hand. A few minutes later he was sharing Don Ramon's shelter, and struggling hard to recoup nature with the broken biscuit he was soaking in a pannikin of water, while Fitz and his companions returned to their old station to resume the watch. They sat for some time thinking, for nobody seemed disposed to talk, even the carpenter, the most conversational of the trio, seeming to prefer the society of the piece of dirty-looking black tobacco which he kept within his teeth; but the silence became so irksome, for somehow the firing seemed to have driven every wild creature to a distance, that Fitz broke it at last. "I don't know when I felt so nervous," he whispered. "I felt sure that something that would have seemed far more horrible than the fight was about to occur." "What, my father ordering that poor fellow to be shot? Yes, it would have been horrible indeed." "But would the skipper have ordered him to be shot, Mr Poole, sir?" said Winks thoughtfully. "I'm afraid so, Chips." "Humph! Don't seem like him. He bullies us chaps pretty sharp sometimes, and threatens, and sometimes the words he says don't smell of violets, nor look like precious stones; but I can't see him having a chap shot because he was a spy. Why, it'd be like having an execution without a judge." "Yes, very horrible," said Fitz, "but it's time of war; as in the Duke of Wellington's time,--martial law." "Who's him, sir? You mean Blucher--him as got into trouble over the Army boots?" "No, no," said Poole. "Mr Burnett means the law that is used in fighting times when a Commander-in-chief acts as judge." "Oh! All right, sir. But it sounds a bit harbitrary, as they calls it in the newspapers. I should have thought a hundred dozen would have been punishment enough, without putting a stinguisher on a man right out. I suppose it's all right, but I wouldn't have given it to him so hot as that. Well, I'm glad he come, because now we know what we've got to expect to-morrow. Do you know what I should like if I could have three wishes same as you reads of in the little story-books?" "Camel to come up now with one of his hot steak-and-kidney puddings boiled in a basin?" "_Tlat_!" ejaculated the carpenter, with a smack of the lips. "And the inions a-smelling looshus a hundred yards away. Nay, it warn't that." "A carpenter's tools?" said Fitz.