We gained the bank of the whirlpool of yesterday, and for a few minutes lay flat in the shadow of the great border of the rock which rises up above the gully. Behind us we could espy the lighted windows of the bedroom I had just left and the clear shape of the silent châlet. The gardens and the woods were so many patches of black against an azure sky of night. The water below us flowed, in colour a deep indigo, between walls of lightless rock, in a bed of polished stone. Not a breath of wind stirred the pines upon the hill side. We could no longer see the ocean without or the friendly lights it showed to us. We might have been fugitives upon a desert island; and this deception would have continued possible until the sound of a distant rifle-shot awoke a thousand echoes in the hills and shattered in a single instant the dream of security we had found so pleasing. Okyada sprang up at the sound and began to speak with an earnestness of which he was rarely guilty. “They have found the honourable Captain—quick, master, we must go to him,” he said. My answer was to point up to the sloping lawn of the garden we had left. There, in single file, the figures of seven men, crossing the grass boldly toward the châlet, were clearly to be discerned. I had scarcely observed them when a movement in the shrubbery immediately behind us betrayed the presence of others—three in all—who came out to the water’s edge at a place not ten yards from where we stood, and halting there a little while to inspect the gully, afterwards made off through the woods as though to join the others above. “Old Val gets such notions into his woolly cranium,” said one of them as he went. “If there’s any lousy Englishman going across there to-night, I’m derned if he ain’t a flip-flop mermaid.” A second ventured that the water was lower than he had ever seen it, while the third added the opinion that, low or high, it was hot enough to warm the grog of a Congo nigger, and a —— sight too hot for any police nark to try it. We listened to them, crouching low on the rock and with our revolvers ready to our hands. Had the most trifling accident occurred, a falling pebble or a clumsy movement betrayed us, that, I am convinced, would have been the whole story of the night. But we lay as men long practised in the arts of silence, and not until the trees hid the men from our sight did Okyada stand up again and prepare to cross the gully. “Go first, master,” he said. “Here is the rope. Our friends with the honourable Captain wait yonder above. Let us bring them the good news.”