BELEAGUERED
ST. JAGO’S DAY
THE FIGHT FOR THE FORTRESS
PROLOGUE.
THE LINE OF FATE
The morning of the Twentieth of October, in the Year of Grace Fifteen Hundred and Twenty-seven, broke, as many another morning had done, slowly and most drearily over a little desolate island, a mere tract of sand-fringed rock, sparsely sprinkled with a few dwarf shrubs and scattered trees, lying some five leagues from the Pacific coast of Northern South America, which in those days was called Tierra Firma, and about two degrees to the northward of the Line.