y into their hands.
No, no, we will wait here to receive this attack. Whenever it comes, it
is themselves will be destroyed, and utterly. Have no doubt of that."

But by evening the Admiral's equanimity was not quite so perfect. By
then the piraguas had made a half-dozen journeys with their loads
of men, and they had landed also--as Don Miguel had clearly observed
through his telescope--at least a dozen guns.

His countenance no longer smiled; it was a little wrathful and a little
troubled now as he turned again to his officers.

"Who was the fool who told me that they number but three hundred men in
all? They have put at least twice that number ashore already."

Amazed as he was, his amazement would have been deeper had he been told
the truth: that there was not a single buccaneer or a single gun ashore
on Palomas. The deception had been complete. Don Miguel could not guess
that the men he had beheld in those piraguas were always the same; that
on the journeys to the shore they sat and stood upright in full view;
and that on the journeys back to the ships, they lay invisible at the
bottom of the boats, which were thus made to appear empty.

The growing fears of the Spanish soldiery at the prospect of a night
attack from the landward side by the entire buccaneer force--and a
force twice as strong as they had suspected the pestilent Blood to
command--began to be communicated to the Admiral.

In the last hours of fading daylight, the Spaniards did precisely what
Captain Blood so confidently counted that they would do--precisely what
they must do to meet the attack, preparations for which had been so
thoroughly simulated. They set themselves to labour like the damned at
those ponderous guns emplaced to command the narrow passage out to sea.

Groaning and sweating, urged on by the curses and even the whips of
their officers, they toiled in a frenzy of panic-stricken haste to shift
the greater number and the more powerful of their guns across to the
landward side, there to emplace them anew, so that they might be ready
to receive the attack which at any moment now might burst upon them from
the woods not half a mile away.

Thus, when night fell, although in mortal anxiety of the onslaught of
those wild devils whose reckless courage was a byword on the seas of the
Main, at least the Spaniards were tolerably prepared for it. Waiting,
they stood to their guns.

And whilst they waited thus, under cover of the darkness a