"Lots!" she answered, with ready assent. "As I said just now, he's a very fascinating person."
"Ah!" said I, teasingly. "I had a suspicion last night that he was exciting your sympathetic interest."
"I'm much more sympathetic about your lack of boots and shoes," she retorted. "But as you seem to have rigged up some sort of satisfactory substitute, don't you think we might be making our way homewards? Is there any need to go through the woods? Why should we not follow the coast?"
"I'm doubtful about our ability to get round the south point of this cove," I answered. "I was looking at it yesterday afternoon from the deck of the yawl, and I saw that just there a sort of wall of rock runs right out into the sea. And if the tide's coming in—"
"Then, the woods," she interrupted. "Surely we can make our way through them, somehow. And it will begin to get light in another hour or so."
"If you like to try it," I answered. "But it's darker in there than you think for, and rougher going, too. However—"
Just then, and before she had made up her mind, we were both switched off that line of action by something that broke out on another. Across the three-quarters of a mile of water which separated us from our recent prison came the sound, clear and unmistakable, of a revolver shot, followed almost instantly by another. Miss Raven, who had risen to her feet, suddenly sat down again. A third shot rang out—a fourth—a fifth; we saw the flashes of each; they came, without doubt, from the deck of the yawl.
"Firing!" she murmured.
"Fighting!" said I. "That's just—listen to that!"
Half a dozen reports, sharp, insistent, rang out in quick succession; then two or three, all mingling together; the echoes followed from wood and cliff. Rapidly as the flashes pierced the gloom, the sounds died out—a heavy silence followed.