There was in the man’s tone a fervency which touched Desmond at the time, and which he had good cause afterwards to remember.

A quarter of an hour after Desmond quitted the deck of the Kent, he was put ashore at a sandy bay at the farther extremity of the isthmus, hidden from the fort by a small clump of mango trees.

“Now, Fuzl Khan,” he said, “you will wait here for a few minutes till it is quite dark, then you will row quickly along the shore till you come to within a short distance of the jetty.  I am going across the sand up toward the fort, and will come round to you.”

He stepped over the soft sand towards the trees and was lost to sight.  The bombardment had now ceased, and though he heard a confused noise from the direction of the fort, there was no sound from the town, and he concluded that the people had fled either into the fort or away into the country.  It appeared at present that the whole stretch of land between the town and the fort was deserted.

He had not walked far when he was startled by hearing, as he fancied, a stealthy footstep following him.  Gripping in his right hand the pistol he had brought as a precaution, and with the left loosening his sword in its scabbard, he faced round with his back to the wall of a shed in which Angria’s ropes were made, and waited, listening intently.  But the sound, slight as it was, had ceased.  Possibly it had been made by some animal, though that seemed scarcely likely:  the noise and the glare from the burning buildings must surely have scared away all the animals in the neighborhood.  Finding that the sound was not repeated, he went on again.  Some minutes later, his ears on the stretch, he fancied he caught the same soft furtive tread:  but when he stopped and listened and heard nothing, he believed that he must have been mistaken, and set it down as an echo of his own excitement.

Stepping warily, he picked his way through the darkness, faintly illuminated by the distant glow of the conflagration.  He skirted the dockyard, and drew nearer to the walls of the courtyard surrounding the fort, remembering how, nearly twelve months before, he had come almost the same way from the jetty with the decoy message from Captain Barker.  Then he had been a source of amusement to crowds of natives as he passed on his way to the palace; now the spot was deserted, and but for the noises that reached him from distant quarters he might have thought himself the sole living creature in that once populous settlement.

He had now reached the outer wall, which was separated from the fort only by the wide compound dotted here and there with palm trees.  It was clear that no force, whether of the Pirate’s men or of Ramaji Punt’s, held the ground between the shore and the fort.  All the fighting men had without doubt been withdrawn within the walls.  His mission was accomplished.

It had been his intention to make his way back by a shorter cut along the outer wall, by the west side of the dockyard, until he reached the shore near the jetty.  But standing for a moment under the shade of a palm tree, he hesitated to carry out his plan, for the path he meant to follow must be lit up along its whole course by a double glare:  from the blazing buildings inside the fort, and from the burning gallivats in the dockyard and harbor.