ered. "The sk---captain desires to know why you are
firing, out here, and whether you require any assistance."

"Oh! is that Fortescue? All right. Just take my night glass, will you,
and sweep the face of the spit carefully at about two hundred yards
distance from here. Then tell me if you can see anything," answered
Nugent. "And, if it comes to that, why are the others firing, down by
the boats?"

"Can't say for certain," I answered, as I took the proffered night glass
and raised it to my eye, "but I believe some suspicious canoes or boats
have hove in sight, and they are just giving them a hint to keep their
distance."

"Ah! just so," returned Nugent. "Now _we_ are firing because, although
we can't be absolutely certain in this darkness, we think that there is
a body of men out there who would be not altogether disinclined to rush
the camp, if we gave them the opportunity; so we are just potting at
them--or what we fancy to be them--whenever we get a clear enough sight
of them, just as a hint that we are awake. But as to assistance--n-no,
I don't think we need any, at least not at present. Should we do so,
later on, I will blow a blast on this whistle of mine." And he produced
from his pocket a whistle possessing a particularly shrill and piercing
note, with which he had been wont to summon Cupid to the midshipmen's
berth aboard the _Psyche_, when that individual's presence had been
needed with especial urgency.

"Well, d'ye see anything?" he demanded, after I had been peering through
his glass for a full minute or more.

"I am really not at all certain whether I do, or not," I answered, still
working away with the glass. "I thought, a moment or two ago, that I
caught sight of something in motion for an instant, but it is so
abominably dark, as you say, that--but stay a moment, what is that dark
mass out there stretching across the ridge? I don't remember having
noticed anything there before nightfall."

"Dark mass?" reiterated Nugent; "what dark mass d'ye mean? There is
nothing out there, so far as I--"

"By Jingo! but there is, though, sir; I can see it myself now, wi' the
naked eye!" exclaimed a seaman who was crouching in a sand pit a yard or
so distant from where Nugent and I were standing. "There, don't ye see
it, Mr Nugent, stretchin' athwart the back of the spit? Why, I can
make it out quite distinctly."

"Give me the glass," demanded Nugent, snatching the instrument from me
and applyin