"I hope I don't frighten you, but I am one of the survivors of a yacht that's been wrecked off here, and I'm looking for the nearest village or something civilised. I thought perhaps you might help me."
The girl heard him with luminous black eyes very wide open. When she answered, it was in good English, as good as his own, though just touched with an accent that gave to it a potent charm.
"I can speak your language," said she, "better than I can speak French. I was educated at Isleworth, near London. I remember you at Monaco; you were with the dark Englishman there. My mother is still in Italy, but the big house over there is ours, and we expect her back every day."
"We seem to be in luck!" cried Fisher. "Our yacht went ashore on the bar of the bay, and, so far as we know, there are only five of us left alive. We've had a hard time, and the three men we met on the shore were so glad to see us that they began to shoot when we landed. I was looking for some shelter when I met you, and perhaps some of your people can put us in the way of getting it."
The girl looked up at him timorously, stroking the great hound, but hesitating to speak. When she answered, it was with restrained voice, and shyly.
"I am afraid," said she, "that you will find little hospitality in the village of Espasante or anywhere here. There is a coast-guard station at Carnero, and the watchman would be the safest man to go to; or you might ask in the village for the priest, who is named Semello. Our own house is shut up; and even to-day a stranger is not quite safe alone in this wild place. Have you a boat with you?"
"Yes," said Fisher, "the yacht's longboat was washed up sound upon the sand, and if it hadn't been for the biscuit in it, we should have wanted a dinner to-day. I should have thought, though, that there would have been some house near where we could have got food and rest just for the day."
"That is because you don't know the coast," said she earnestly; "it's a dreadful place, though I say it, who have lived half my life here. If you would listen to me, you would not stay another day here—not another hour—when you can get away."
The girl seemed to speak so earnestly that Fisher, with her words in his ears, bethought him that there was something, at any rate, for Messenger to know, and to know without loss of time. The recollection made him a little abrupt in thanking her who had advised him, and, with a curt word, he turned upon his heel and re-entered the wood. But he had not gone many steps before he heard the Spanish girl's voice, and when he looked round, she was running after him with a light pannier of straw in her hands. This she offered to him without a word, though she spoke pity with her great eyes, and her cheeks flushed with the effort she made. Then she ran off again as she had come; and presently he found the basket to be full of fruit, and a bottle of wine with some fine oatmeal biscuits lay in the bottom of it. His first impulse of the gift was to sit upon the sward and slake his thirst with the luscious grapes; yet he remembered the others and their need, and went straight on toward the shore.
Scarce, however, was he in the dark place of the wood before he heard a crackling of the bushes ahead of him, and, as he stood a moment, a great Spaniard appeared upon the path and held up a cudgel as a signal for him to stop.
XIV. TO THE CREEK AGAIN
His first thought as he saw this man was one which sprang from his natural pugnacity. He was not altogether wanting the conviction that a Briton is more than the equal of three Frenchmen and a "Portugee," as the old rhyme goes; and the fellow who stood in his path, though a man of great stature, did not alarm him overmuch. Yet he remembered Messenger's injunction that he should not bring a brawl about him if it were to be avoided; and, with this in his mind, he stood looking at the Spaniard for a moment, and then jumped lightly from the path to the thickness of the undergrowth at the side of it.
Here was an abundance of long grass and shrubs, but principally of sharp-cutting thorns; while the ground was soft and boggy, and the weed clinging and tenacious. It seemed to him that a few paces in a marshy slough like this would put all danger behind him; but as he went on forcing his way through the thickness of the bramble there came the whip-like sound of shot about his ears; and he looked back, to see the heads of two other men showing between the trees upon his left hand, and he knew that the adventure had become serious.
A second loud report now echoed in the woods, and a great eagle-hawk that he could see stooping down from the infinitely blue sky stopped in his descent and winged away to the distant hills. This time two of the shots stung him upon the left arm, but he had no other hurt; and he fell upon his hands and knees, leaving the precious basket behind him, and wormed his way with wondrous quickness, though his flesh was cut and his clothes torn to ribbons by the briar through which he went. He could now hear the pursuers crashing through the bracken behind him, and their fierce shouts, answered again from two or three points in the wood, told him that they set some price upon his capture—indeed, that they meant the worst to him; and, while he was prompted to use his revolver, he hesitated because of Messenger's words and of his own hope of safety.
The way had now become more open, and there was grass in lieu of marsh; but the vociferations of the shoremen were louder; and it seemed to him that they had all come together and were crashing through the brushwood, which rose almost to their chests. They did not shoot any more, however; and when he came to the clearing, it was plain to him that he must either up and run for it, taking the risk of the shot, or remain to be knocked on the head for a certainty in the semi-darkness of the glade. He had but the vaguest notion whither the journey would carry him; but he judged that it must be in the way of coming at the creek again; and even as he started to run he remembered the importance of keeping hid the knowledge of the cave and of the men it sheltered. With this thought he rose up from the ground, and, hunching up his shoulders, he fled like a deer that is hunted, hearing the savage cries redouble as he showed himself, but no gun shot, which surprised him. Anon he found himself panting up a steep hill-side where firs grew thick, but not so as to hamper him; and as the Spaniards roared the louder and then fell to silence in the ardour of pursuit he longed for a sight of the sea with a longing he had never known before.
Now the place where all this happened was a mile or more from the lagoon in which the longboat had been made fast; and Fisher, who thought that he was running toward the neck of the bay, was, in truth, moving in a line parallel to it. His path, after it had carried him through the woods (the Spaniards being close upon his heels in the going), brought him at length to the ravine down which the river passed to the sea; and when, panting and breathless, he came out of the woodland, he found himself on the edge of a cañon, at he bottom of which the mountain stream ran swiftly. His position at this time was one of great hazard. His flight had been for the chief part upward, over heavy ground. One of the ragged shoremen following him was not then a hundred yards away; there was before him a precipice with a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more, and he knew that other Spaniards were coming up through the wood, and awaited momentarily to see them.
Driven by the need of the situation, he did then what he had before thought of doing, and fired one shot from his revolver. It was answered by a single shot from another pistol, but upon the other side of the ravine. A moment after Messenger appeared upon the rocky path which ran along the opposing precipice, and, observing the hazard at a glance, he shouted with echoing strength of voice—
"To the left, man! there's a bridge a hundred yards below you."
Fisher needed no other word than this. Although the bridle-track on which he stood presently inclined so steeply that it fell sheer against the face of an iron cliff, he began to run steadily, with one of his pursuers upon his very heels. A moment after another appeared on the summit of the rock which shot up on the right hand of his path, and took a heavy stone in his hand, waiting for the runner to pass beneath to hurl it down. Thus the situation stood that upon one side of the ravine there ran Messenger, and upon the other Fisher, who had a Spaniard at his heels, a second upon the cliff under which he was to pass,