Blanco raised his voice again in casual conversation and beckoned to the
sentinel at the door. When the man approached the Spaniard pointed over
the wall. "Do you see that rock? Is that a figure crouching behind its
shelter?" he demanded. As the man leaned forward, Manuel suddenly struck
him heavily at the back of the neck with a loose stone caught up from
the masonry's coping. The soldier dropped without a sound.
"Now, Your Majesty, we must risk it down the rock," prompted the man
from Cadiz, in hurried, low-pitched words. "Moments are invaluable....
It is only while I command the guard that there is a chance of your
escape.... An officer may come at any instant on a round of
inspection--my discovery as the Duke's kidnapper is a matter of
minutes.... I have been watched and tested in a hundred ways; it was
only to-day that I convinced them of my fanatic zeal."
Blanco hurriedly gave his cap and cape to the King, donning himself the
blouse of Karyl's undress uniform. Then the two crept cautiously down
the rifted face of the cliff, holding the shadow of the crevices. One
sentry-box they passed safely, and finally they edged by the second
unnoticed. They had negotiated the hundred feet of descent and stood
pressed against the bottom, hugging the black shadow. They were waiting
an opportunity to slip across a narrow sliver of intervening moonlight
to the beach and the boat which lay at the water's edge.
Occasional lazy clouds drifted across the sky. The two refugees, goaded
by the realization that every wasted second cut their desperate hope
more and more to a vanishing point, watched the fleecy scraps of mist
skim by the moon afar off without veiling its face. Then for a short
moment a shred of silver-tipped cloud cut off the radiance. Blanco
seized the King's arm in a wordless signal. Karyl and the bull-fighter
raced across to the boat that lay at the water's edge. In a moment more
it was afloat and they were at the oars. The moon emerged and at the
same instant an outcry came from above. The musket of the man in the
lower sentry-box barked with a blatant reverberation. One of the figures
in the boat drooped forward and sagged limply over his oars. The other
only redoubled his efforts. And then again, like the curtain of a
theater, a cloud dropped downward and quenched the moon and the sea and
the rock in impartial obscurity.