As she reached him, she realised that Juan was there first.

“Get him down a side street,” she heard him say to another gaucho and, lifting El Diablo, they ran across the pavement and into a dark alleyway nestling beside an ancient house.

Skye pulled off her dark glasses so that she could see better and threw them away.

El Diablo’s eyes were closed and the blood from the wound in his head was running in a crimson stream down one side of his face. There was blood too spreading over the shoulder of his coat.

The men paused for a moment as they reached the shelter of the alleyway.

“Is he dead?” Skye asked breathlessly.

Juan, who had carried El Diablo on his shoulders, shook his head.

“No, no, señora, but we must get him away from here. Those devils meant to murder him and may try again.”

“Take him to my yacht,” Skye cried. “He will be safe there. Perhaps it is the only place in Jācara where he can be safe.”

“As the señora says,” Juan agreed.

The two men started to move down the alley.

The fighting behind them was noisy and continuous. El Diablo’s men were not retreating, but retaliating.

Swiftly the gauchos carried El Diablo down a long flight of steps to the lower road. A grocer’s van, driven by a boy, pulled up beside them.

“Want any help?” he asked.

They all climbed into the van and directed the boy to drive them to the quay.

It was only a short distance and they drove in silence, Skye trying vainly to staunch the blood from El Diablo’s forehead.

“Take El Cabeza aboard,” she said to Juan, giving a handful of notes to the boy who had driven the van.

Then, as they stepped out into the sunshine and lifted El Diablo to carry him up the gangplank onto the deck of The Liberty, she saw the pallor of his face and felt that Juan was wrong and that he must be dead.

Chapter 13

Skye felt that she had never been so glad of anything as she was of the calm Scottish stolidness of Captain Maclean as he came from below when they stepped on deck.

“Good afternoon, Miss Standish,” he said in an unsurprised voice. “Is anyone hurt?”

There was the firing of bullets in the distance and panic-stricken crowds of women and children were hurrying down the roadway above the quay and Skye knew that her own appearance, dressed as a gaucho and standing beside an unconscious man dripping with blood, must be dramatic to say the least of it.

And yet Captain Maclean was as cool as if they were meeting uneventfully on the shores of his native Aberdeen.

“Put to sea at once, Captain Maclean,” Skye cried. “We must get away from here.”

“I have two men ashore,” he answered gravely.