Felipe opened them one by one and asked me to take my choice.  All were empty and bare, and seemed to me pretty much alike.

“We have slept in worse, but that is not the point.  Be pleased to remember, Juanito, that we are kings now:  and as kings we are bound to find the reverend fathers’ notions of bedding inadequate.  Suppose you collect us half-a-dozen of these mattresses apiece, while I go on and explore.”

I chose three cells for Sister Marta, Felipe, and myself, and set about dragging beds and furniture from the others to make us really comfortable.  I dare say I spent twenty minutes over this, and, when all was done, perched myself on a stool before the little window of my own bed-room, for a look across the city.  It was a very little window indeed, and all I saw was a green patch beyond the northern suburbs, where the rich merchants’ gardens lay spread like offerings before a broken-down shrine.  Those trees no doubt hid trampled lawns and ruined verandahs:  but at such a distance no scar could be seen.  The suburbs looked just as they had always looked in early spring.

I was staring out of window, so, and just beginning to wonder why Felipe did not return as he had promised, when there came ringing up the staircase two sharp cries, followed by a long, shrill, blood-freezing scream.

My first thought (I cannot tell you why) was that Felipe must have tumbled downstairs:  and without any second thought I had jumped off my chair and was flying down to his help, three stairs at a bound, when another scream and a roar of laughter fetched me up short.  The laugh was not Felipe’s; nor could I believe it Brother Bartolome’s.  In fact it was the laugh of no one man, but of several.  The truth leapt on me with a knife, as you might say.  The buccaneers had returned.

I told you, a while back, of a small doorway in the inner wall of the staircase.  It was just opposite this door that I found myself cowering, trying to close my ears against the abhorrent screams which filled the stairway and the empty corridor above with their echoes.  To crawl out of sight—­had you lived through those three weeks in Panama you would understand why this was the only thought in my head, and why my knees shook so that I actually crawled on them to the little door, and finding that it opened easily, crept inside and shut it before looking about me.

But even in the act of shutting it I grew aware that the screams and laughter were louder than ever.  And a glance around told me that I was not in a room at all, but in the chapel, or rather in a gallery overlooking it, and faced with an open balustrade.

As I crouched there on my knees, they could not see me, nor could I see them; but their laughter and their infernal jabber—­for these buccaneers were the sweepings of half-a-dozen nations—­came to my ears as distinct as though I stood among them.  And under the grip of terror I crawled to the front of the gallery and peered down between its twisted balusters.