"Humph!" grunted the skipper. "Well, you must be disappointed. As for you, Mr Burnett, the sooner you are out of reach of bullets the better." "Well," cried Fitz, "I like that--coming from the skipper of a trading schooner! Do you know what I am?" "Of course," was the answer, with a smile. "It doesn't seem like it," cried Fitz. "I know I am almost a boy still--Don't laugh, Poole!" he added sharply, with a stamp of the foot--"Well, quite a boy; but young as I am, I am a naval officer, and I was never taught that it was my duty to run away if ever I came under fire." "It's the safest way," said the skipper mockingly. "`He who fights and runs away, will live to fight another day.' That's it, isn't it?" "I suppose so," said Fitz, getting on his stilts--"to be laughed at for a coward as long as he lives. Look here, Captain Reed, I am your prisoner, but you are not my captain, and I mean to stop and see this fight. Why, I must. I shall have to tell. Captain Glossop all about this some day, and I should look well if I owned that I had run away.-- But you don't mean it, sir. It's all nonsense to talk of being in danger up here, all this distance off. Yes, he is joking, isn't he, Poole?" "Well, there's not much joke about it, my lad," said the skipper gravely. "I must own that I don't want to go away myself. Seems to me that what we ought to do is to hurry back to where the women are, get a good supply of linen and bandages from them, and muster some bearers for--Yes, the firing is going on, and I don't suppose that it will be long before some poor fellows will be falling out and crawling back to the rear." "Yes," said Fitz eagerly; "I never thought of that. Come on, then, and let's make haste so as to get back in time." The skipper nodded, and they hurried away, but had very little distance to go, for the sound of the firing was bringing the curious from out of the town, and it was not long before they had been furnished with the material for binding up wounds, and better still, with a doctor, who joined hands with them at once in making the rough ambulance arrangements. Within half-an-hour they were back at the spot where the interview with Don Ramon had taken place, to find that which their ears had prepared them for, the rattle of musketry going steadily on as the enemy advanced, while they were just in time for the sharp dull thud and echoing roar of the first field-piece, whose shell was seen to burst and send up its puff of smoke far along the rugged valley. This checked the advance for some minutes, scattering the enemy in all directions, but it was plain to the lookers-on from their post of observation, that they were being rallied, and the speaking out of the second gun from the battery plainly told that this was the case.