Now, Peter Bligh was the first to give up his star-gazing; and, shaking himself like a great dog, he turned to me with a word of that common sense which he can speak sometimes.
"'Tis a miracle, truly, and a couple of doors to it," cried he, like one thinking keenly. "Nevertheless, I make bold to say that if they have a key to yonder hatch we are undone entirely, captain."
I sat upon a crag of the rock and tried to think of it all. Czerny's men would return in an hour, or two at the most, and the truth would be out. They would come—the seamen to the lesser gate, the others to this door of steel by which we sat—and, finding that knocking did not open, they would take such measures as they thought fit to blast the doors. A gun well fired might do as much if gun could be trained upon the reef. Once let them inside and it needed no clever tongue to say how it would fare with us or with those we sought to protect. No man, I said, would live to tell that story, or to carry the history of Edmond Czerny's life to a distant city. All that lay between us and life was this door of steel shutting like a port-hole in the solid rock. And could we hold it against, it might be one, it might be three hundred men? That was a question the night must answer.
"Regnarte," I said, upon an impulse, "you have guns in this house?"
He held up his fingers and opened them many times to express a great number.
"One, two, three hundred guns," said he. "Excellency has them all; but here one gun much bigger than that. You seamen, you shall know how to fire him, captain. Excellency say that no man take the gate while that gun there. Ah! the leg on the other boot now!"
Now he cracked his fingers all the time he said this, and shook his keys and danced about the plateau like a madman. For a while I could make neither head nor tail of what he meant; but presently he turned as though he would go down to the cabins again, and, standing upon the very threshold of the staircase, he showed me what I had never seen or should have looked for in twenty years—the barrel of a quick-firing gun and the steel turret which defended it.
"'Tis a pom-pom, or I'm a heathen nigger!" cries Peter Bligh, half mad at the sight of it. "A pom-pom, and a shield about it. The glory to Saint Patrick that shows me the wonder!"
And Dolly Venn, catching hold of my hand in like excitement, he says:
"Oh, Mr. Begg, oh, what luck, what luck at last!"