Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in the town gaol-yard.
One of a group of three idling on the promenade deck of the Assyrian, Lanyard turned sharply and stared through narrowed eyelids into the quarter whence the sounds reverberated.
The man at his side, a loose-jointed American of the commercial caste, paused momentarily in his task of masticating a fat dark cigar.
"This way out," he commented thoughtfully.
Lanyard nodded; but the third, a plumply ingratiative native of Geneva, known to the ship as Emil Dressier, frowned in puzzlement.
"Pardon, Monsieur Crane, but what is that you say—'this way out'?"
"Simply," Crane explained, "I take the firing to mean the execution of our nootral friends from Norway."
The Swiss shuddered. "It is most terrible!"
"Well, I don't know about that. They done their damnedest to fix it for us to drown somewhere out there in the nice, cold English Channel. I'm just as satisfied it's them, instead, with their backs to a stone wall in the warm sunlight, getting their needin's. That's only justice. Eh, Monsieur Duchemin?"
"It is war," said Lanyard with a shrug.