“Oui, oui; zis way!” panted their guide, who nearly put the visitors out of patience by turning off two or three times at right angles and apparently taking them quite away from where they wished to go. “Zis way! Zis way!” he kept on crying, till at last the trio were alone, others who had been hurrying onward having taken different directions.
Bang went another gun from the fort, a report which seemed to be sent back instantly from the harbour walls, apparently close at hand.
“Yes, zis way; zis way!” shouted the man. “I show you before zey sink ze sheep.”
And now he suddenly turned into a narrow alley formed by two towering warehouses so close together that there was not room for two people to walk comfortably abreast; but “Zis way, zis way,” shouted the guide, “and you shall be zere upon ze field—sur le champ, sur le champ. Ah ha!” he cried directly after, as he suddenly issued from out of the darkness of the alley into the comparative light of a narrow wharf encumbered with casks, just beyond which was the dripping stone edge of the great harbour, and below them boats, barges, and lighters swinging from the great rusty iron rings and mooring posts of the quay.
“Vat you say to dat?” cried the waiter, turning round to face his companions, beginning loudly and ending in a choking whisper, for he had met a gust of wind face to face which stopped him for the moment from taking his breath and forced him to turn his back and make a snatch at the corner of one of the warehouses. “Faith of a good man!” he panted. “The vind blow me inside out! Aha! What did I say?”
“Capital!” panted Rodd, almost as breathlessly as the waiter, at whom upon any other occasion he would have burst out into a roar of laughter, so grotesque was his appearance with the white napkin tied under his chin. “Oh, this is a splendid place!”
“Here, you look out, Pickle,” cried Uncle Paul. “Lay hold of something, or we shall be blown right off.”
“All right, uncle. Why, if one of those gusts sent us into the harbour we should be drowned.”
“Come a little farther this way, then, and if the wind is too much for us, why we shall only go down into this barge.”
At that moment, as they looked across and downward towards the mouth of the harbour, there were the flashes of bright light to illumine the gloom of the evening, and the reports of a ragged volley of musketry coming from one of the two boats which they could now make out being rowed hard after the brig, as it glided rapidly along in the direction where the watchers now stood.