"It's to ask after your health, Peter," said I, when we'd listened awhile, "what else should a man be firing after, unless he takes you for a rabbit? Will you run down and thank him kindly?" He hitched up his breeches and pulled out his briar-pipe. "If this is track-running, take down my number. I'm through with it, gentlemen, being not so young as I was." A gunshot, fired out at sea, cut short his talk. Old Clair-de-Lune, nipping up the ladder, bade us follow him, while to the girls he cried, "_Allez-vous en!_" All our quiet talk and content were gone in an instant. I never answered little Dolly Venn when he asked me, "Do you think there's danger, sir?" but, running up the hill after the Frenchman, I helped him to carry the ladder we'd dragged out of the pit, for I knew he'd need of it. "What is it, Clair-de-Lune? Why are they firing?" I asked him, as he ran. "Governor home," was his answer--"Governor home. Great danger, _capitaine_." CHAPTER X WE ARE SURELY CAGED ON KEN'S ISLAND We ran up the hill, I say, as men who raced for their lives. The little girls, snatching up their bags and baskets, exchanged a quick word with Clair-de-Lune and then hurried off towards the bungalow. Our own path lay over difficult rocks and steep slopes and chasms fearful to see. Of these our leader made nothing, and we went on, up and up, until at last the road carried us right round the highest peak, on whose very walls we walked like chamois on a mountain crag. It was here, on a narrow ledge high above the sea, that the Frenchman stopped for the first time. "Shipmates," said he, when he had got his breath, "journey done, all finish, you safe here, you rest. I go down to see Governor; but come back again, come back again, messieurs, with bread and meat." Well, I don't think one of us had the voice to answer him. The place itself--the ledge above the sea and the little low, cramped cave behind it--occupied all our thoughts. Here, in truth, a man might lie safely enough--yet in what a situation. The very door of the house opened upon an abyss a thousand feet above the rocks below. We had the sea before our eyes, the sea beneath us, the sea for our distant horizon. Day and night the breakers thundered on the sword-fish reef; the wind moaned in the mighty eaves of those tremendous crags. We were like men placed suddenly on a steeple's side and left there to live or fall, as fortune went.