On went the charmed words, each a lantern flashed on thought, grave, poetic, telling of triumph, yet far removed from gross optimism, not without that strange, melancholy note sounding now and again amongst the age’s crashing chords.  Abruptly his voice fell, but presently with a lighter note he broke the silence in which his listeners gazed upon the stately vision he had conjured up.  “Ah, we will talk to Frank Drake of this night!  Canst not hear Richard Hawkins laugh in the Triple Tun’s long-room?  The Queen, too, in her palace will laugh,—­like a man with the flash in her eye and her white hand clenched!  And they whom we love....  What is the word for to-night, John Nevil?  I may give it?  Then—­Dione!”

It was the red dawn after his vigil on the fortress hill:  in the great room of the stone house the leaders of the expedition had followed, line by line, his sword point as it drew upon the flagging a plan of attack, to which they gave instant adoption; Master Francis Sark had been dismissed, and to the Admiral’s grave hint of possible treachery Ferne had answered, “Ay, John Nevil, I also think him a false—­hearted craven, Spaniolated and perverse, a huckster, whose wares do go to the highest bidder!  Well, with our hand at his throat we do not bid the highest?”

Now as he raised his tankard to thirsty lips, suddenly from the square below, shattering all the languid stillness of the tropic dawn, brayed a trumpet, arose a noise of hurrying steps and hasty voices.  Baldry, at the window, wheeled, color in his cheeks, light in his deep eyes.

“War is my mistress!  Down the hillside come those to whom I can speak—­can speak as well as thou, Sir Mortimer Ferne!” The door was flung open, and Ambrose Wynch, a mighty man in a battered breastplate and morion, looked joyfully in upon them.

“The Dons supped so well last night, Sir John, that now they’re coming to breakfast!  ’Tis just a flourish—­no great sortie.  Shall a handful of us go out against them?”

That sally from the fortress was led by Mexia, who somewhat burned to wipe out the memory of his lost battery at the river’s mouth.  And as blind Fortune’s dearest favor flutters often to the lackey while the master snatches vainly, so it befell in this case, for Mexia’s chance raid, a piece of mere bravado to which De Guardiola had given grudging consent, was productive of results.  Bravado for bravado, interchange of chivalric folly, of magnificence that was not war,—­forth to meet the Spaniard and his company must go no greater force of Englishmen!  Luiz de Guardiola, Governor of Nueva Cordoba, kept his state in his fortress; therefore, Sir John Nevil, Admiral of the English and of no less worth than the Castilian, remained for this skirmish inactive.  On both sides their captains played the game.