Blanco raised his voice again in casual conversation and beckoned to the sentinel at the door. When the man approached the Spaniard pointed over the wall. "Do you see that rock? Is that a figure crouching behind its shelter?" he demanded. As the man leaned forward, Manuel suddenly struck him heavily at the back of the neck with a loose stone caught up from the masonry's coping. The soldier dropped without a sound.
"Now, Your Majesty, we must risk it down the rock," prompted the man from Cadiz, in hurried, low-pitched words. "Moments are invaluable.... It is only while I command the guard that there is a chance of your escape.... An officer may come at any instant on a round of inspection—my discovery as the Duke's kidnapper is a matter of minutes.... I have been watched and tested in a hundred ways; it was only to-day that I convinced them of my fanatic zeal."
Blanco hurriedly gave his cap and cape to the King, donning himself the blouse of Karyl's undress uniform. Then the two crept cautiously down the rifted face of the cliff, holding the shadow of the crevices. One sentry-box they passed safely, and finally they edged by the second unnoticed. They had negotiated the hundred feet of descent and stood pressed against the bottom, hugging the black shadow. They were waiting an opportunity to slip across a narrow sliver of intervening moonlight to the beach and the boat which lay at the water's edge.
Occasional lazy clouds drifted across the sky. The two refugees, goaded by the realization that every wasted second cut their desperate hope more and more to a vanishing point, watched the fleecy scraps of mist skim by the moon afar off without veiling its face. Then for a short moment a shred of silver-tipped cloud cut off the radiance. Blanco seized the King's arm in a wordless signal. Karyl and the bull-fighter raced across to the boat that lay at the water's edge. In a moment more it was afloat and they were at the oars. The moon emerged and at the same instant an outcry came from above. The musket of the man in the lower sentry-box barked with a blatant reverberation. One of the figures in the boat drooped forward and sagged limply over his oars. The other only redoubled his efforts. And then again, like the curtain of a theater, a cloud dropped downward and quenched the moon and the sea and the rock in impartial obscurity.
CHAPTER XXIII
"SCARABS OF A DEAD DYNASTY"
Since the anchor had been weighed at Naples, the days had passed uneventfully for the indolently cruising Isis with no word from Galavia. But at last the operator caught his call and made ready to receive. The message consisted of one word, and the word was "Cairo."
Cara, with no suspicion of what was transpiring in Puntal, beguiled by the spell of smooth seas and dolce-far-niente softness of sky, was once more the frank and charming companion of the American days.