A wreck of a tall, slender, handsome man, such a man he may have been in his prime as was Captain Blaise, but older.  A sporting, reckless sort he may have been, but a man of manner and blood.  Two of the crew bore him out, though one would have sufficed.  “Ubbo will show you where the strong-box is, Blaise,” he called on being borne off; and Ubbo led us through the thick jungle to where, under a rock over which a little water-fall played, a massive iron chest was buried.  It took two stout men of the crew to handle it.

We saw Mr. Cunningham and the strong-box safely to the long-boat and then, with Ubbo, took station behind a hedge which bordered the Governor’s grounds.  There was much going on there—­music and people strolling on the lawn.  Captain Blaise pointed out the Governor to me, and his son, and bade me notice also fifteen or twenty barefooted but armed and uniformed negroes clustered between two rows of palms on the farther side of the lawn.

“We’ll wait here, with the hedge to protect us,” said Captain Blaise, and motioned to Ubbo.  “Tell Miss Shiela that all’s ready.”

The negro slipped away.  A short minute or so and Captain Blaise, who had been peering like a man on watch on a bad night, gripped me nervously.  “Look, there she is!”

I looked.  Never again would I have to be told to look.  She was framed in a low window off the veranda.  The Governor’s son was now close behind her.  Ubbo was standing on the lawn over near the musicians.  We crept nearer.  Turning, as if accidentally, she saw him and called to him.  “How is your master, Ubbo, to-night?”

“Marster tell me to say he more happy to-night, Missy.”

“Told you to say, Ubbo?”

“Yes, Missy, marster tell me to say.”

“That’s the signal, that sentence,” whispered Captain Blaise.

“That’s good.  You can go, Ubbo.”  She smiled and chatted with the Governor’s son then.

“She can’t have interpreted the message aright,” I panted.

“Because she did not leap into the air?  Trust her—­she’s Gadsden Cunningham’s, her own father’s daughter.”

In a few minutes she turned from the Governor’s son to his father, from him to her ladyship, and from her without haste to some less distinguished member, and then in the most casual way in the world she strolled inside and from our sight.

Hardly a minute later the signal came:  a firefly’s flash five times together and three times repeated from the darkened upper story.

Ubbo was with us when the signal came.  “Marster Carpt’n,” he whispered, and handed him a sabre and a pair of duelling pistols.  “Missy send um—­an’ dey loaded, both um, suh.”

Captain Blaise, taking the sabre and passing me the pistols, ordered Ubbo to show the way.

We skirted the grounds and entered by a rear gate a garden where were all sorts of low-growing trees and high-growing shrubs to screen us as we drew near the rear veranda.  I saw the white gown with the dark blue sash shining out from the shrubbery, and then the white and blue drew back.  I would have leaped out on the path to follow, but a restraining hand was on my arm.  “Wait, wait!” warned Captain Blaise.