he rain. Of course we were wetted to the skin in an instant, but that
did not very greatly matter, as our pistols and ammunition were carried
in waterproof cases; moreover, the rain afforded us an excellent curtain
under cover of which to advance; so at a word from me the men sprang to
their feet, and we pushed rapidly forward. The battery was but a
quarter of a mile from the spot where we had landed, and so accurately
had I taken my bearings that, in about five minutes after we began to
move, the structure loomed up, dark and grim, before us. Hoard had
informed me that its landward sides were protected by a deep moat,
connected with the sea, and spanned by a drawbridge; and it was for this
bridge that I was keeping a sharp look-out. I was so close aboard of it
before I saw it that three or four paces sufficed to carry me to the
sentry-box at its landward end; and just as I reached this box a vivid
flash of lightning revealed its interior, and there, bolt upright, stood
a tall Spanish grenadier, with his musket resting in a corner of the
hut, close to his hand. I realised instantly that the briefest period
of hesitation now meant our undoing; for as I had seen the soldier, he
had also undoubtedly seen me; so the man no sooner stood revealed before
me than, with one bound, I was in the sentry-box with him, one hand
grasping his throat to prevent him from crying out, while with the other
I seized his musket and passed it out to the man next behind me. The
soldier struggled manfully, and did his utmost to free his throat, but I
held him fast, and in so fierce a grip that ere many seconds were over I
felt him sink powerless to the ground. To lash him, hands and feet
together, like a trussed fowl, with his own cross-belts, and to gag him
with a good-sized stone, secured in his mouth by a strip slashed from
his own coat, was but the work of two or three minutes; and when at
length, satisfied that the fellow was secure and harmless, I emerged
from the box, I had the satisfaction of finding that Tom Hardy,--now
acting as the schooner's second mate,--had promptly followed my example
by securing the sentry at the far side of the drawbridge.

We were now consequently in possession of this structure, and that, too,
without the slightest alarm having been given to the garrison, and in
another minute all hands of us stood inside the battery, which was a
fine, solid earthwork, with casemates, very like the battery that we had
se