“Won’t you step this way and find out?” jeered Captain Blaise.

“What! only one man?”

The hedge lining the path was waist high, trimmed flat and wide, but I never suspected what was coming until I saw the flash and felt the ting of the bullet on my cheek.  “Drop!” warned Captain Blaise, but I had no mind to drop.  I held one of Mr. Cunningham’s duelling pistols ready for the next shot.  I saw it and fired, to the right of and just above the flash.  I had half seen how he had rested his elbow on the hedge and carried his head to one side when he fired that first shot.  There was the crash of a body through the hedge.  And then a silence.

“You got him, I think,” said Captain Blaise.

I had been spun half around by the shock of something or other, and now I was once more facing the path squarely, and a thought of those red and blue and gold uniforms jammed in there gave me an idea.  “Ready, men!” I called out.  “Steady!  Aim!—­and be sure you fire low.”  No more than that, when in the Governor’s guard there was the wildest scrambling and trampling to get to the rear.

And we left them falling rearward over each other and ran for the landing.  The men were waiting on their oars.  We leaped in, and Captain Blaise took the tiller ropes.  “Give way!” he ordered.

Mr. Cunningham was lying on cushions in the bottom of the boat.  I was still laughing, and he rolled his head, I thought, to look at me.

“Where did that skunk get you, Guy?” asked Captain Blaise.

“Why, I didn’t know that he got me at all.”

“Feel on your cheek.”

There was blood, not much, trickling down my right cheek.

“You’d better attend to it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Warm fingers met mine.  It was her silk scarf which she was pressing into my hand.  I thrust it in my left breast, then took my own handkerchief and held it to my cheek.

I was chuckling to myself as I fancied the Governor’s guards tumbling over each other in their retreat, when Captain Blaise broke in on me.  “Aren’t you laughing rather soon?  You’re not over your troubles yet.”

“Troubles, sir?  Troubles?” It was not at all like him, and his voice, too, was unwontedly harsh.  “Troubles?” I almost laughed aloud again.  He did not understand—­I had only to lean forward to gaze into her eyes.  I had only to reach out to clasp her hand.  Troubles?  Well, possibly so, but I smiled to myself in the dark.

IV

Ere we had fairly boarded the brig they were in chase of us.  We could see lights flitting along the lagoon bank and hear the hallooing of native runners—­the Governor’s, we knew.  And for every voice we heard and every light we saw, we knew that hidden back of the trees were a dozen or a score whom we could not hear or see.  And on the black surface of the lagoon, paddling between us and the bank, as we worked the ship out, were noiseless men in canoes.  We could not see them, but every few minutes a mysterious cry carried across the silent water, and the cry, we knew, was the word of our progress from the Governor’s canoe-men to the messengers on the bank.