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He had commanded the vessel ever since she left the stocks; he had conducted her safely to-and-fro over thousands of miles of ocean, through fair weather and foul; he had studied her until he had come to know every quality that she possessed, good or bad; had taken pride in the first, and found ample excuses for the last; he had grown to love her, almost as a man loves his wife or child, and now the moment had come when he must abandon her to the devouring flames that had already seared and destroyed her beauty, and were fast reducing her to a charred, shapeless shell of blazing timber.
He knew that in these things, and in these things alone, he would always possess Isobel. She would return to civilization, and the shifting scenes of life down there would soon make her forget him almost. But in his world there was no change. Ten years from now he might go over their old trail and still find the charred remains of the campfire he had built for her that night beside the Barren.
Coals from the bonfires are then taken back to the village and used to rekindle the fires on the domestic hearths. For several days no one may go near the charred and blackened remains of the bonfires at the cross-road. The reason is that the vampyre is lying there, having dropped from his seat between the cow's horns when the animals were driven between the two fires.
The Indian summer wrapped with a soft touch of mourning purple much of desolation, much of untilled earth, and charred roof-tree, and broken walls. The air was soft and gentle, lying balmy and warm on the road and ragged fields, and the haze so hid the distances that the column thought not so much of how the land was scarred as of the memories that thronged on either side of the Valley pike.
It was ajar; clouds of black smoke poured out as we opened it, and it was some time before we could see anything. We finally made out a heap of filthy rags in one corner near a sort of fire made of charred pieces of black peat. Two children, one a boy about twelve years old, was lying on the heap of rags, coughing his heart out. He hardly raised his head when we came in.
The morass was swept bare to the depth of many hundred yards, and the camp was a smoking ruin strewn with the dead. The walls of the Nest still stood, however, and here and there a charred post remained. Everything else was gone, except the magazine, which had escaped the flames, being built of brick and stone, and roofed with tin.
When he came to himself he was sitting on the ground leaning on his hands; the ammunition wagons he had been approaching no longer existed, only charred green boards and rags littered the scorched grass, and a horse, dangling fragments of its shaft behind it, galloped past, while another horse lay, like Pierre, on the ground, uttering prolonged and piercing cries.
There was formerly a small settlement at the crossing, but it had long since been destroyed, and now only presented the sight, so common in Cuba, of charred ruins devoid of human presence. There was neither bridge nor boat, but Lieutenant Navarro declared the river fordable at this point.
Up stream, the water threw back faint reflections, but its surface was dull and wrinkled where it narrowed at the top of the rapid, round which he had carried the canoes. Then it plunged down into gloom that was deepened by a cloud of spray and its hoarse turmoil echoed among the hills. A few charred rampikes rose behind the camp, and Jim sat beneath one, with his back against a stone.
Charred sticks about six feet long and curved at the handle. Equally simple are the other implements. The plough, which in Eastern Africa has passed the limits of Egypt, is still the crooked tree of all primitive people, drawn by oxen; and the hoe is a wooden blade inserted into a knobbed handle.
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