eventually been overpowered and forced to retire; and then
Singleton unfolded to Carlos his views upon the subject of how to deal
with the enemy, could the latter be induced to follow them to a certain
spot up among the hills which Jack described and Carlos remembered.

This spot they were now rapidly approaching. It consisted of a nearly
straight defile, about half a mile in length, with a bend in its middle
just sufficient to shut out the view of one end of it from the other.
This defile was simply a cleft in the stupendous mass of rock that
formed a great spur of the mountain on the left-hand side of the path,
and was undoubtedly the result of some terrific natural convulsion of
prehistoric times, which had rent the living rock asunder, leaving a
vertical wall on either side, the indentations in the one wall
accurately corresponding to the projections on the other. At the lower
extremity--that is to say, the extremity which the fugitives were now
approaching--access to the defile was gained by means of a sort of
portal, less than six feet wide, the space between the rock walls thence
narrowing gradually to about four feet, and thus forming a kind of
passage about fifty feet long; beyond which the rock walls gradually
receded from each other until, at the other extremity of it, the defile
was nearly a hundred feet wide. The walls were unscalable throughout
the entire length of the defile, which abruptly ended in a rough and
torn rock face some two hundred feet in height. This rock face could
scarcely be described as unscalable, because it was so rough that,
although practically vertical, the projections on it were so numerous
and pronounced that an active man could climb it without much
difficulty, if uninterfered with; but if the summit and flanks happened
to be held by even a small force of men armed with rifles, to climb it
would at once become an absolute impossibility. Outside the entrance
there was a small, open, grassy space, backed by dense scrub; and Jack's
plan was that Carlos, with about fifty men, should enter the defile,
pass through it to its upper extremity and scale the rock face there,
holding it against the Spaniards, and thus checking their further
advance, while Jack, and the remainder of the negroes, with the two
Maxims, should secrete themselves in the scrub and remain in hiding
until the entire Spanish force had passed into the defile, when they
would emerge and block the entrance with the t