red, with ready assent. "As I said just now, he's a
very fascinating person."

"Ah!" said I, teasingly. "I had a suspicion last night that he was
exciting your sympathetic interest."

"I'm much more sympathetic about your lack of boots and shoes," she
retorted. "But as you seem to have rigged up some sort of satisfactory
substitute, don't you think we might be making our way homewards? Is
there any need to go through the woods? Why should we not follow the
coast?"

"I'm doubtful about our ability to get round the south point of this
cove," I answered. "I was looking at it yesterday afternoon from the
deck of the yawl, and I saw that just there a sort of wall of rock
runs right out into the sea. And if the tide's coming in--"

"Then, the woods," she interrupted. "Surely we can make our way
through them, somehow. And it will begin to get light in another hour
or so."

"If you like to try it," I answered. "But it's darker in there than
you think for, and rougher going, too. However--"

Just then, and before she had made up her mind, we were both switched
off that line of action by something that broke out on another. Across
the three-quarters of a mile of water which separated us from our
recent prison came the sound, clear and unmistakable, of a revolver
shot, followed almost instantly by another. Miss Raven, who had risen
to her feet, suddenly sat down again. A third shot rang out--a
fourth--a fifth; we saw the flashes of each; they came, without doubt,
from the deck of the yawl.

"Firing!" she murmured.

"Fighting!" said I. "That's just--listen to that!"

Half a dozen reports, sharp, insistent, rang out in quick succession;
then two or three, all mingling together; the echoes followed from
wood and cliff. Rapidly as the flashes pierced the gloom, the sounds
died out--a heavy silence followed.

"That's just what?" asked Miss Raven--calmly.

"Well, if not just what I expected, it's at any rate partly what I
expected," I said. "It had already struck me that if--well, supposing
whatever it was that the Chinaman dropped into those glasses didn't
act quite as soporifically as he intended it to, and Baxter and his
companion woke up and found there was a conspiracy, a mutiny, going
on, there'd be--eh?"

"Fighting?" she suggested.

"You're not a squeamish girl," I answered. "There'd be bloody murder!
Their lives--or the others. And I should say that death's stalking
through that unholy craft just now."

She m