"Oh, do not remain here to-night! listen, they are almost upon us! fly with me! I can place you in a hiding-place!" "If I lose my life to-night, it will be your fault, Renie." "My fault?" "Yes." "How so?" "Because you will not do as I say." "What shall I do?" "Go to your father's cabin, and deny any knowledge of me." "You demand that I shall leave you?" "Yes." "I go at your command!" The girl glided away. Meantime the detective heard loud voices and signs of intense excitement over at the boatman's cabin, which was not more than six hundred feet distant from where the detective and Renie stood, while the conversation which we have repeated was in progress. Strange feelings were raging in the detective's bosom at that moment. He had known the beautiful barefooted girl but a few hours, and he had come to feel more interest in her than he had ever cherished for any other human being since the day he had laid his widowed mother to rest in the church-yard. When he had first glanced at the girl under the exciting circumstances of that truly eventful night, he had considered her a rustic beauty, handsome, but ignorant; but alas! a better knowledge of her taught him that she was a refined and educated girl, despite the fact of the bare feet, her unkempt hair, and long residence among the fishermen and smugglers of the coast. She was a true child of romance, a wonderful prodigy of a strange and weird fate, and he could not but picture to himself what a ravishingly lovely creature she would be under different auspices; and he wondered not that the Cuban villain, Garcia, was anxious to secure possession of her. The detective quickly thought over the whole matter. He discerned the Cuban's purpose; the man meant to take the girl to Cuba, perchance, to make her his wife, and why not? She was beautiful, and there was a possibility that she might develop into a great heiress. The detective, however, did not have much time to meditate on his strange meeting with the girl and the stranger incidents that followed that meeting. He was warned that it was necessary for him to take measures for the safety of his life. Spencer Vane was a thoroughly experienced detective. He was no tyro at the business, and he was up to all the tricks and devices of the modern science of criminal detection. He was as good at the art of disguise as any in the profession, and it was his skill in the latter particular which make him so indifferent as to the approach of the gang of madly drunken smugglers. Our hero walked over behind a high sand drift, and in a few minutes had worked a most startling and extraordinary "transform;" no living man, unless posted as to his disguise, could ever have recognised in the dark-faced, rough-looking man who issued from behind the drift, the same light-haired, dashing-looking fellow who had a moment before disappeared behind it. CHAPTER X.