It was a great and beautiful panorama upon which he looked meditatively down. The broad bay lay proudly in the arms of an encircling wall of cliffs, whose terraced heights rose and spread with the dignity of some amphitheatre of the giants. At their base, the blue waters broke in a caressing ripple of cream-like foam; afar off, the sunshine crowned their purple heads with a golden haze. Through the center of this noble sweep of sheltering hills cleft the wooded gorge of a river, whose mouth kissed the strand in the screening shadow of a huge mound, reared precipitously above the sea-front, but linked by level stretches of sward to the mainland behind. On the summit of this mound, overlooking the bay, was one of those curious old martello towers with which England marked the low comedy stage of her panic about Bonaparte’s invasion. The tower--a squat, circular stone fort, with a basement for magazine purposes, and an upper story for defensive operations--kept its look-out for Corsican ghosts in solitude. Considerably to this side, on the edge of the cliff, was a white cluster of coast-guard houses, in the yard of which two or three elderly men in sailor attire could be seen sunning themselves. Away in the distance, on the farther bend of the bay, the roofs and walls of a cluster of cottages were visible, and above these, among the trees, scattered glimpses of wealthier residences. Of all this vast spectacle The O’Mahony saw nothing but the martello tower, and the several approaches to it past the coast-guard houses. He chose the best of these, and led the way, crouching low behind the line of hedges, until the whole party halted in the cover of a clump of young sycamores, upon the edge of the open space leading to the mound. A hundred feet away from them, at the base of a jagged bowlder of black slatish substance, stood a man, his face turned toward the tower and the sea. It was Linsky. After a time he lifted his hand, as if in signal to some one beyond. The O’Mahony, from his shelter behind, could see that the _Hen Hawk_ had rounded the point, and was lazily rocking her way along across the bay, shoreward toward the tower. For a moment he assumed that Linsky’s sign was intended for the vessel. Then some transitory movement on the surface of the tower itself caught his wandering glance, and in the instant he had mastered every detail of a most striking incident. A man in a red coat had suddenly appeared at the landward window of the martello tower, made a signal to Linskey, and vanished like a flash. The O’Mahony thoughtfully raised his rifle, and fastened his attention upon that portion of Linsky’s breast and torso which showed above the black, unshaken sight at the end of its barrel. CHAPTER XIII--THE RETREAT WITH THE PRISONERS