strong man, but Pedro Mexia at the Bocca is so
easy-going that his sentinels nod their nights away. In the port ride
two caravels--eighty tons, no more--and their greatest gun a
demi-cannon. The town is a cowardly place of priests, women, and rich
men, but it holds every peso of this year's treasure gathered against
the coming of the plate-fleet. There is much silver with pearls from
Margarita, and crescents of gold from Guiana, and it all lies in a house
of white stone on the north side of the square. Mayhap De Guardiola up
in the fortress watches, but all else, from Mexia to the last muleteer,
think themselves as safe as in the lap of the Blessed Virgin. The
plate-fleet stays at Cartagena, because of the illness of its Admiral,
Don Juan de Maeda y Espinosa.... I show you, sirs, a bird's nest worth
the robbing."

"You are a galley-slave the most circumstantial I have ever met," said
Ferne. "If there are nets about this tree, I will wring your neck for
the false songster that you are."

"You shall go with us bird's-nesting," said the Admiral.

"That falls in with my humor," Master Sark made answer. "For, look you,
there are such things as a heavy score and an ancient grudge, to say
nothing of true service to a true Queen."

"Then," quoth the other, "you shall feed fat your grudge. But if what
you have told me is leasing and not truth, I will hang you from the
yard-arm of my ship!"

"It is God's truth," swore the other.

Thus it was that, having, like all English adventurers upon Spanish
seas, to trust to strange guides, the _Mere Honour_, the _Cygnet_, the
_Marigold_, and the _Phoenix_ shaped their course for the mainland and
Nueva Cordoba, where were bars of silver, pearls, and gold crescents,
and up in the castle that fierce hawk De Guardiola, who cared little for
the town that was young and weak, but much for gold, the fortress, and
his own grim will and pleasure.

V

Luiz De Guardiola, magnificent Castilian, proud as Lucifer, still as the
water above the reef offshore, and cruel as the black fangs beneath that
serenity, looked over the wall of the fortress of Nueva Cordoba. He
looked down into the moat well stocked with crocodiles, great fish his
mercenaries, paid with flesh, and he looked at the tunal which ringed
the moat as the moat ringed the squat white fortress. A deadly girdle
was the tunal, of cactus and other thorny things, thick, wide, dark, and
impenetrable, a forest of stilettoes, and for