ted out the Governor to me,
and his son, and bade me notice also fifteen or twenty barefooted but
armed and uniformed negroes clustered between two rows of palms on the
farther side of the lawn.

"We'll wait here, with the hedge to protect us," said Captain Blaise,
and motioned to Ubbo. "Tell Miss Shiela that all's ready."

The negro slipped away. A short minute or so and Captain Blaise, who had
been peering like a man on watch on a bad night, gripped me nervously.
"Look, there she is!"

I looked. Never again would I have to be told to look. She was framed in
a low window off the veranda. The Governor's son was now close behind
her. Ubbo was standing on the lawn over near the musicians. We crept
nearer. Turning, as if accidentally, she saw him and called to him. "How
is your master, Ubbo, to-night?"

"Marster tell me to say he more happy to-night, Missy."

"Told you to say, Ubbo?"

"Yes, Missy, marster tell me to say."

"That's the signal, that sentence," whispered Captain Blaise.

"That's good. You can go, Ubbo." She smiled and chatted with the
Governor's son then.

"She can't have interpreted the message aright," I panted.

"Because she did not leap into the air? Trust her--she's Gadsden
Cunningham's, her own father's daughter."

In a few minutes she turned from the Governor's son to his father, from
him to her ladyship, and from her without haste to some less
distinguished member, and then in the most casual way in the world she
strolled inside and from our sight.

Hardly a minute later the signal came: a firefly's flash five times
together and three times repeated from the darkened upper story.

Ubbo was with us when the signal came. "Marster Carpt'n," he whispered,
and handed him a sabre and a pair of duelling pistols. "Missy send
um--an' dey loaded, both um, suh."

Captain Blaise, taking the sabre and passing me the pistols, ordered
Ubbo to show the way.

We skirted the grounds and entered by a rear gate a garden where were
all sorts of low-growing trees and high-growing shrubs to screen us as
we drew near the rear veranda. I saw the white gown with the dark blue
sash shining out from the shrubbery, and then the white and blue drew
back. I would have leaped out on the path to follow, but a restraining
hand was on my arm. "Wait, wait!" warned Captain Blaise.

It was the Governor and his son hurrying around the corner of the
veranda. "I do not believe it," the Governor was saying. "I cannot
cred